Desert Brigids EP

On Desert Brigids

Who is Brigid?

Brigid (also called Brigantia, Brid, Bríg, Bride, Briginda, Brigdu, and Brigit) is a goddess of the pre-Christian Celtic nations. As with any deity, her lore is layered and complex, but she is broadly considered a patron of poets, healers, women, smiths, fire, and livestock.

She is also the namesake of canonized Catholic saint, Brigid of Kildare. Born in the mid-5th century, this Brigid is known for her position as a powerful abbess in Kildare, Ireland. Saints--especially those beloved by indigenous nations under Catholic purview--often serve as palimpsests: the old mythologies remain subtly visible under the white gauze of Christian worship. So it is with the saint Brigid, who is similarly known as a patron of poets, healers, women, smiths, and livestock.

What is a Desert Brigid?

Often, the main characters in my work find themselves teetering between extremes: belonging and isolation, docility and ferocity, the magical and the mundane, and self-acceptance and self-denial. Because of Saint Brigid’s legacy as a bridge between pagan Ireland and Christian Ireland, I see her as a keeper of opposites. As such, the characters experiencing opposites in their own stories serve as analogs to the saint/goddess.

The project of this EP and of the forthcoming album is to re-plant my family’s European ancestral mythologies in the Utah landscape of my birth. I am interested in disrupting narratives of white settler nativism--or the purposeful obfuscation of settler violence via claims to symbolic or literal Indigenous heritage--while holding the reality of my family’s irrevocable tie of kinship and responsibility to this place. This threshold of here-ness and other-ness strikes me as particularly Brigidine.

I also look to the women who served as guides for my artistic process: Christine Christensen, who inspired the song “Orderville,” Mary Susannah Fowler, who inspired “October’s Daughter,” and the mentors and musical influences who ferried me through my complicated transition out of Mormonism. These, too, are Brigids.