Piece Comment

Review of "Suquamish Youth Keep Traditions Alive"


In an example of a perfect internship-age radio piece, Emily Barreca explores the present feelings of members of the Suquamish tribe located near Seattle, Washington. Her textbook-perfect setups act as excellent segues for interviews with members of two generations that have encountered the struggle for identity in a primarily Caucasian community.The interview with a young Suquamish tribe member helps to set the tone for the rest of the piece: the struggle for an everyday existence, to accomplish commonly held dreams such as cultural identity and education. It is also a wonderful setup for the interview with Benny Armstrong, a former chairman for the tribe. There is no solid setting established in the interviews; the feeling is that Barreca is speaking as a representative of the entire city of Seattle. The pacing is reminiscent of "Planet Money", in that it flows quickly but regularly, so that it isn't too hard for the audience to catch up.

Things to notice: Barreca has a unique gift for spacing between her sentences, whether this can be accredited to editing or raw speaking. She has a gift for patching interview segments together in order to make people still sound like themselves. The sound quality of her interview with Armstrong clearly displays good technical skills. My only suggestions for Barreca would be to further emphasize the time and location of her piece, to better establish the setting of the issue. Not everyone listening to her piece is familiar with Voxpod, after all. The second would be for Barreca to focus not so much on technical virtuosity (which she clearly has), but more so the issue itself. There is very little emotional investment felt from Barreca, which makes the piece feel closer to a report on an ongoing phenomenon than an issue the audience can and should take seriously.