Carving a Path: Mike Knight on Qajaqs and Native American Flutes

Andrew and Dubside kick off with BIG NEWS: plans to assemble an American team for the 2026 Greenland National Kayaking Championships in Nuuk. From travel tips to team jackets, they lay the groundwork for a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, participating in one of the most unique paddling events in the world.  Then Dubside interviews Florida paddler and flute-maker Mike Knight, who shares his journey into kayaking and Greenland-style paddles. He performs hauntingly beautiful melodies on the Native American flutes he handcrafts. A one-of-a-kind episode that blends tradition, craft, and the spirit of exploration.

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Transcript

ANDREW:
Hello everyone and welcome back to The Dubcast with Dubside. Before we start with today's episode, we got a lot to cover. Dubside has just come back from his Midwest tours, had a really busy summer.

DUBSIDE:
Oh yes, I've done all kinds of stuff. So I did Greenland, which you heard about in #71 and #72. And then I went to the Michigan Training Camp, which now they call Qajaq Training Camp.

And then I went to the Minnesota Gathering, which now they're calling Traditional Paddlers Gathering. It was a Labor Day weekend in between there. And just a few days ago, I came back from New York with Javier, who was a special guest on the podcast.

Him and his friend Mario hooked me up with going up there to paddle around Manhattan. And we had incredible weather for that. Had a really good time.

We had 14 kayaks and we paddled around there. Yes, very nice time.

ANDREW:
Wow, sounds great. How long does that take to paddle around Manhattan?

DUBSIDE:
Oh, it's about eight hours, seven or eight hours, depending. See, you can stop certain places and wait for like an hour or so, because if you rush, you're just going to be fighting the current when you come around the end where the current shifts. So although Javier was telling me that the record for swimming around Manhattan is like five and a half hours.

But I think that was, I think there was a lot of planning that went into that one. They had to find just the right tide range and just the right current and just time it all perfectly. But if you could swim it in five and a half, that's pretty good.

Paddling takes six or seven or eight, depending.

ANDREW:
Do they choose a day when the current's particularly strong?

DUBSIDE:
Well, you choose a day that when you're not going to be coming back after dark or leaving at 4 a.m. We had to get on the water about eight o'clock, a little before eight o'clock. I think we got back about five because we were making good time. There's some tricky stuff in there with the ferries coming through and they're on the radios talking to the ferry captains and it's just like down at Battery Point, the Staten Island ferries come through there and there's some other smaller ferries around and you got to watch what you're doing.

The water gets pretty choppy. We did have one capsize and we put them back in the kayak.

ANDREW:
Cool. Do people paddle out to the Statue of Liberty?

DUBSIDE:
You can do that. If you're paddling around Manhattan, I don't think you generally have time to go all the way over there and do that. There are a number of kayak clubs and we saw a lot of people on the water paddling as well.

ANDREW:
Wow, sounds like an amazing experience.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, it was very cool.

So Iin Michigan and in Minnesota, I gave presentations and I am hyping up. My big pitch is next year in Greenland, we want to take a good, strong Qajaq USA team.

I am looking for people who want to go to Greenland or are thinking about going to Greenland and my list is growing all the time. I'm hoping we'll have at least maybe six, maybe a dozen people going to Greenland to be a team. I'm also hyping up and I think I've got Qajaq USA convinced to make team jackets, which we've never had before, so we can look as sharp as the other teams in Greenland do.

ANDREW:
Yes, this is going to be a big deal.

DUBSIDE:
This is made possible by the fact that for the first time ever, you'll be able to fly directly from New York to the competition city. It's that New York to Nuuk flight. We're talking about July of 2026.

ANDREW:
When do you think the competition is going to be, your best guess?

DUBSIDE:
That's always the trouble of finding exact dates. It's hard to get the information. They maybe haven't said it yet.

I've been telling people July 4th comes on a Saturday next year. If you took the two weeks after that, that's a good bet, but I can't guarantee that you wouldn't miss the last couple of days. If you took the week after that, that's the second or third week of July, you might miss the first couple of days.

The best I can say is just stay tuned. Don't buy your plane tickets yet. If you've got to put in for vacation time, you've got to take a guess on those and hope for the best.

It's Greenland, so everything's kind of fluid and variable. You just go with it when it happens.

ANDREW:
You know, if you've been listening to this podcast, that traveling to Greenland can be very challenging in terms of connecting flights.

DUBSIDE:
It might not go according to plan.

ANDREW:
You need to give yourself plenty of time. And the competition itself lasts for at least two weeks?

DUBSIDE:
One week. It's seven days.

ANDREW:
Okay. That's always been the challenge is trying to find out exactly when it's going to happen and getting that time off far in advance in order to organize your travel. Tell us about how this is going to help people in terms of travel and discounts and housing.

DUBSIDE:
Well, we're talking already about package deals. We can get reduced rates on flight. We can get fine lodging and things like that.

And it's all sort of in the nebulous stages. But there's the possibility that there'll be a whole group package thing going on. We're trying to pull Maligaq in to it.

He may be leading a trip and we've got a bunch of things in the works. So you gotta stay tuned for all this.

ANDREW:
So you mean by leading a trip?

DUBSIDE:
Well, like this was done in 2017. I've talked about in the podcast before about say five days on a paddling trip. And then after that, then the competition starts or he did the one year that was a group before and a group after the competition.

So as part of your package, you would be paddling for five days with Maligaq and then you would also see the whole competition.

ANDREW:
Wow. That would be an amazing experience.

DUBSIDE:
Yes, indeed. 

So this leads into our new team member of The Dubcast with Dubside. We have an Instagram expert.

ANDREW:
Yeah, we would like to announce that Derry Walsh, who's been very active in the Florida Paddling Trails Association, is now our Social Media Director. He has been involved in our Instagram account. He basically runs the Instagram account.

And we're talking about finally having a presence on other platforms such as Facebook and even TikTok. That's where we'll have other content, including a lot of the photographs and video that Dubside has been collecting on his travels.

DUBSIDE:
So you don't have to wait two weeks for the next episode to come out to get a little bit of update on things.

ANDREW:
Yeah. Links to those will be in the show notes. We also have a LinktTree that will list all of our social media accounts so you won't miss anything.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. And if you're interested in going to Greenland next year, even just possibly thinking about it, I'm still learning how hashtags work, but we've made the hashtag #QUSANUUK2026. Nuue is N-U-U-K.

And that I'm hoping we'll have various postings about going to Greenland next year and updates and things through that hashtag.

ANDREW:
So this is going to be an amazing experience. If you've ever thought about going to Greenland and participating in the Greenland National Kayaking Championships, this is your chance to do it with an American team, with Dubside as the coach.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

ANDREW:
And he as your personal guide to the competition, with Maligiaq. We have other plans too. We're hoping to get some kayaks that our team can use.

I mean, that's going to be the biggest challenge.

DUBSIDE:
Save you the trouble of getting your own kayak to Greenland, which is the big hassle.

ANDREW:
Yeah. And even if you just want to go and watch the competition, this is a great way to do it.

DUBSIDE:
As I've said in my presentations in Michigan and Minnesota, and I'm on, Delmarva is coming up in two weeks, the Delmarva Paddler’s Retreat. And I will definitely be there as I've been for the last 20 years. And I'm scheduled on there one of the afternoons to give a talk about for people who want to go to Greenland and give all the updated information and details.

But one of the first points I make, if you're going to want to go to Greenland is attitude is far more important than ability. You don't have to be good enough. You don't have to know certain rolls.

You don't have to do it. You don't have to do anything. You can just go there and support the team. That's a big part of the whole effort. There are other teams in Greenland. There are people that never get in the water. They're helping the kids get their gear ready. They're cheering on the competitors all the way through. And they're just as much a part of the team and just as worthy wearing the team jacket as everybody else.

So you do not have to compete, or you can do one race or throw one harpoon or whatever you want.

ANDREW:
So the plans are still a little nebulous. We're still going to figure this out. And if there are people out there that can help us figure this out, we'd really appreciate your participation.

But we are going to do this. In fact, I've already reserved a house right on the water, right next to where the competition is going to be for people to stay at.

DUBSIDE:
Qajaq USA Dubcast with Dubside Base of Operations. 

All right. Well, before we use up all our time, we have a Special Guest to get to, and we'll have more information as things go.

But this special guest is Mike Knight, who lives in Florida. When I met him and have talked to him on the phone since then, he is very interested in going to Greenland next year. So you can meet somebody who may be with you if you go.

Here he is.


DUBSIDE:
Welcome to The Dubcast with Dubside. This is a Special Guest edition of the Dubcast. I'll be talking to Mike Knight, who currently lives in Florida, where I visited him in the spring of 2025.

We talked about how he got started in kayaking, which was back in the 1980s, how he discovered the Greenland paddle, and then we got into a long discussion of Native American flutes, which he has made and plays a little bit to show you what they sound like. I know that's a bit far removed from kayaking, but you might find it interesting. This runs about 40 minutes.

Well, here we are in Florida, outside of, where we at? 

MIKE:
Cocoa, Florida. 

DUBSIDE:
Cocoa, Florida.

That's on the East Coast, right near Cape Canaveral. And I'm talking to Mike Knight. How's it going, Mike?

MIKE:
Very good. 

DUBSIDE:
Welcome to The Dubcast with Dubside.

MIKE:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

DUBSIDE:
So, we just were at the TRAQS event, the Traditional Qajaqers of the South, Qajaq USA event, and I had a very nice time there, and you were t here. And now, I've been staying at your house, and thank you very much for a wonderful time here. And you were hosting Abel Jacobsen and his wife, Sophia, that last year, for the TRAQS event.

So, tell me how you got involved in kayaking.

MIKE:
Well, I grew up in Vermont, and went to school in Maine, and during that time, I did a lot of, mostly canoeing, I guess, at that time. Canoe tripping along the Connecticut River, between Vermont and New Hampshire. And then, in college, I took a whitewater canoe instructor training class, and got introduced to a little bit of whitewater kayaking.

And I think it was in ’87, I probably bought my first kayak, which was a whitewater kayak, Perception Dagger, I think.

DUBSIDE:
’87, that takes you back a ways.

MIKE:
Yeah. And then, I did a little bit of whitewater, but I found it scared me. I didn't like the feeling of not having full control over what I was doing, and I had sort of a, you know, I didn't really have a good bomb-proof roll.

I had a little bit of a roll, but, and I think I, at some point, I don't know exactly how, but I started to feel like I really wanted to get into more sea kayaking, you know, than whitewater.

DUBSIDE:
So, this is still the late ‘80s, or into the ‘90s?

MIKE:
This was probably getting into the ‘90s, well, this was probably late ‘80s. And then, a friend of mine, by that time, I had moved down to Ohio after I graduated college, and a buddy of mine had bought, he wanted to get into sea kayaking, so he went out and bought two Valley, really nice Valley sea kayaks. I think at the time, it was an Expedition and a Solstice, I believe.

And so, we did some paddling together. It was great, because I didn't have to buy my own kayak, right? So, I really enjoyed that, but I just didn't have the financial resources to get into, you know.

DUBSIDE:
And this is still where? 

MIKE:
This was in Ohio, Cincinnati, Ohio, is where I was at that time. And mostly paddling around the Ohio River. Things like that.

And then, eventually, I moved away from there, ended up, eventually ended up here in Florida, and then I really started doing more paddling. But most of my paddling here was in that Perception Dagger, whitewater boat. So, I got really good at learning how to paddle that straight, very squirrely whitewater boat.

And so, I paddled that all over this area for many years.

DUBSIDE:
Is that with other paddlers as well?

MIKE:
Yeah, yeah. But that was my, my primary kayak was just a whitewater. 

DUBSIDE:
What kind of kayaks were they using?

MIKE: 
Mostly just, you know, rec-type boats, sit-on-top kayaks, things like that. Yeah, most of the people I knew around here.

DUBSIDE:
So, back then, were Greenland traditional paddles a rarity?

MIKE:
I had never seen one. Yeah, I had definitely never seen one. And so, I guess it was probably around 2000, probably around 2012 or so. I ended up buying, it's still a roto-molded Necky Eliza sea kayak.

And, in fact, I still have that today. So, I paddled that a lot more. And, let's see what happened after that.

I guess I had that for quite a while. And then, when I finally moved to where I live now, I had, well, I guess it was probably around that same time. Actually, no, it was way back in probably 1998, ’99.

I had got, I did a short stint of work with Outward Bound, and I was able to get a Aleut C2 Tandem Valley kayak on a pro deal from them. And so, I paddled that some, but I didn't paddle as much as I would have liked, just because, you know, it was a very big kayak, 26 and a half feet long and, or 22 and a half feet long, and it was 90 pounds. So, I found it difficult to find people to paddle with me.

DUBSIDE:
So, what kind of conditions were you going in then? 

MIKE:
Primarily, just around here in the Indian River Lagoon, primarily.

DUBSIDE:
Do anything at night at that point?

MIKE:
Not so, no, not so much at that point, yeah.

DUBSIDE:
So, not out into the actual ocean, but staying in the lagoon?

MIKE:
Correct, yeah, just in the shelter of the lagoon area.

DUBSIDE:
And no surfing or anything?

MIKE:
No, no. I did a little bit of surfing with that Perception Dagger, played around a little bit, but not a whole lot, enough to get myself into trouble. 

So then, when I moved to this current location, here in Cocoa, I had, I still have the Necky, I sold the Aleut C2, and somehow, I got, became aware of Greenland style kayaking, and I don't remember exactly how I became aware of that. I had some knowledge…

DUBSIDE:
From back then, I know that Greg Stamer has lived in Florida all this time, and he was out there advocating the Greenland paddle, so maybe somewhere you noticed him or some influence.

MIKE:
It could be, it could be for sure, yeah, but I had some knowledge of it, and the people that bought the Aleut C2 from me were from Minnesota, so you may know, it was Mark and Becky Statham, I believe.

DUBSIDE:
Okay, I don't know if I know them.

MIKE:
Hopefully, I've got their names right, they'd kill me if I get that wrong, but they're involved in one of the events up there, and they, yeah, one of the Qajaq USA events. Oh, okay, and they're from like, I think, Brainerd.

DUBSIDE:
Oh, Mark and, oh, oh, I know Mark and Becky. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some cool folks. Yeah, I'll be seeing them again this summer.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They sold you? They bought, they bought it?

MIKE:
They bought it sight unseen.

DUBSIDE:
I'll have to mention that next time I see them.

MIKE:
And so they, they came all the way down here, they have a relative that's in just south of here a little ways, and so they bought it, and then I held on to it for them for quite a while. It might have been less than a year, probably, just until they could come down and get it, and so they took that back with them, and when they were here, at that time, I had started, I believe, well, the first time I met them, I, they had told me about TRAQS. 

So, so I knew a little bit about Greenland stuff that I'd seen online, and kind of knew that that seemed like a very interesting aspect to sea kayaking.

DUBSIDE:
So this, this had to be what, after what, 2010 or something, because TRAQS hasn't been going on that long.

MIKE:
Yeah, this, I think TRAQS is in its 10th year, 9th or 10th year now. So this would have been, we moved into this house in ’17.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

MIKE:
So it must have been around ’19 or ’20 when they were here. And so they encouraged me to go to TRAQS, and then, then I think COVID sprung up, and then I eventually got a sea kayak, and a real sea kayak, and, and geez, the timeline, trying to remember the timeline on this.

I think it was, it was the first thing I did when I got a, I got a, a, a Current Designs Extreme kayak that I bought from a friend who was selling it, and I took that on a trip down the St. Johns River here in Florida, and I did that whole trip with a Greenland paddle.

DUBSIDE:
So when you first got a Greenland paddle in your hands, do you remember like how, what your impression of it was? How, did you take to it right away, or did you…?

MIKE:
Oh yeah, to me it was just, it just made so much sense.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

MIKE:
I mean, it was surprising. So I made, my first paddle I made. I carved it, and didn't really know what I was doing, and I remember when Mark and Becky came down, I think they looked at it, and they're like, oh yeah, it's just pretty, pretty good, but you know, you need a little more here, a little more there.

DUBSIDE:
They were being nice.

MIKE:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so then once I paddled that, used that paddle a few times, I realized that I wanted to maybe invest in one, so I ended up buying a Lars Gram carbon paddle. 

DUBSIDE:
Gram Kajak from Denmark.

MIKE:
Yeah, yeah, so I bought that, and I used that one to, to do the St. Johns River trip with, and, but yeah, and so I remember feeling very comfortable with it. I felt like it was a lot easier to paddle and it was surprisingly efficient, you know, but yeah, I paddled that, that trip was about 300 miles, and I used that the entire time.

DUBSIDE:
So you have some woodworking skills, correct? 

MIKE:
I try. 

DUBSIDE:
And those came from, from where? What were you first building out of wood? I mean, I see you got a whole workshop with all kinds of tools in it.

MIKE:
Yeah, so I, I, I dabbled with a lot of just random projects, you know, I didn't really have an aim, but most, most of it evolved from an interest in Native American flutes.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, so that's, that's what I want to know more about. Yeah, you have here in front of us on this table a couple of examples of your Native American flutes. So, so the basic, basically Native American flute introduction would say that they're not like the, the metal flutes we see that people play in bands and things, because you don't blow across the end, you blow into a hole in the very end.

MIKE:
Yeah, they're like, more like a recorder.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, okay, and there's a whole history going back centuries of these in the hands of Native Americans.

MIKE:
Yeah, so, so the, the basic story is that a, so they're called Native American flutes or love flutes or courting flutes. So a young Native American male would, would, when he was courting a young woman, he would, he would court her with a song. So he would usually very quickly create a flute, which was basically in some ways similar to how, how skin-on-frame kayaks are built, right?

He would use the length of his arm as the overall length of the flute, and the, the, the spacing of the holes would be the width of his fingers and the spacing from the sound where the, where the lip, where the sound is produced to the first hole was the width of the hand and so on.

But he would make this flute, and he would…

DUBSIDE:
And that all developed like with kayaks over centuries of folklore. Here's how you build them and improvements over time.

MIKE:
 So they would, they would make the instrument, and there were usually several men making flutes and often competing for the same woman, but they would each have you create a unique melody with their flute, and that was their love song. And if they were successful in courting her and, and having children and so on, then the woman would learn to vocalize the melody that he played for her while they were courting into a lullaby for their children.

DUBSIDE:
Singing it.

MIKE:
But yeah, they're similar to a recorder, except that a native flutes have what's called a wind block or often referred to as a bird that so you, you blow into the end of the flute and it goes into a chamber and then the air flows out of the flute under this block through a little space under the block and then it flows across the lip which produces the sound.

And so it's, it's like a, it'd be like similar to a metal flute, a transverse flute, but the block is instead of you doing, you know, making your lips perfect to make the sound across the lip, the block is sort of doing that for you.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

Well, can we hear one? 

MIKE:
Sure. Yeah.

So they're made in, depending on the size, you know, the bigger you make the flute, the deeper it is, of course. This particular flute is made out of Alaskan yellow cedar and it's in the, it's in the key of D. So the cool thing about the native flute is you don't have to be musically inclined.

Like I told you, I can't even play Mary Had a Little Lamb on a recorder, but this follows a simple basic rule. There's, there's basically five holes. I mean, there's, there's six holes, but you keep one covered all the time for, for a particular scale.

So you, you, you basically always, whenever you uncover a hole, you have to make sure that you've already uncovered all the holes above it. And then you never cover a hole unless you've covered all the holes above that.

So you work your way up from the bottom and back down to the top. So the basic, it's a basic pentatonic scale. It sounds like this.

[MUSIC]

So as long as you're following that basic scale, you can follow that same rule. You can make up a melody pretty easily.

[MUSIC]

DUBSIDE:
That’s got a really nice tone. So that particular one is made out of what kind of wood?

MIKE:
This is Alaskan yellow cedar. And I think some cherry wood, but the main, the main body is made out of that.

DUBSIDE:
And now, so this is a tube with holes in it, but to make all the internal chambers and things, you, you, you split the whole thing in half and then you rout… you don't try to drill a hole all the way down the end of a, of a dowel kind of a thing.

MIKE:
Right. Yeah. Some people do. They use a like gun boring machines. They can bore a hole all the way down or use lathes to bore those holes.

And I, I'm not that advanced. I, she basically started out with a square piece of wood that I know this one's probably about, I don't know, approximately two feet long or so. And yeah, you cut it in half with a bandsaw and then you rout out half of the interior on a router table and then glue it back together.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

MIKE:
A little bit of shaping you have to do on the inside before you glue it back together. And then I turn, put that on a lathe and turn it down round.

And then, and then you put the holes in and then you, you tune it. Basically the tuning is based on the placement and the approximate size of the holes and depth.

DUBSIDE:
So that, that's, it seems very interesting. So you, if you drill them and they're not quite in the right place, like if they're not quite on the right pitch, you can shape the size a little bit and the thickness and, and get the tuning adjusted just, just right?

MIKE:
Yeah, you can enlarge the, enlarge the hole up to a certain point.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

MIKE:
So it'll still work with your finger. And then once you get to a certain point where you can't make it any wider or any bigger, you can use like a Dremel tool to reach inside and you carve out the underside of the hole so that where the hole is, the wall of the flute becomes a little thinner. So it's a little less thick and that will raise the pitch as well.

And if you mess it up, well, it's either firewood or you...

DUBSIDE:
Well, I can see that the danger of messing it up, I would be quite nervous about that. But I guess with experience you get more confident.

MIKE:
Yeah, it takes a little practice.

DUBSIDE:
Now you've got, that's like a leather tie around it that holds the, what would you call that?

MIKE:
The wind block.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

MIKE:
Yeah, wind block or “bird”. Yeah, it's just held on place with a leather tie and then if you play it a lot, they can get damp so they're made to come off so that you can dry it out.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

MIKE:
Yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Is it, have the same issues like guitars have? If they get really, really dry, they'll start to crack and it ruins it? Or not as bad as a guitar?

MIKE:
Yeah, these are finished with, like, oils. I don't know exactly what, I think I use like a bio shield oil on this. But people use a variety of different things.

But yeah, I haven't had any problems with cracking. Like this particular flute was made in 2003 and I've never never had any cracking, but it could happen. I use Gorilla Glue. Because it's waterproof glue. But I think as long, you know, as long as you take care of it and, you know, dry it out in between playing, it does pretty good.

DUBSIDE:
So we've described the basic structure of the instrument, but the aesthetic embellishments on yours are very nice. You've got patterns, leaves on that one and things you've carved into the surface with.

MIKE:
Yeah, this particular one has a relief carving of a squash blossom. Yeah, and the vines. And then on the block is a Cocopelli, who was the, I guess it was the Hopi God of Fertility. And he would, I guess the main story there is he would march around with a his little hunchback, was actually a backpack of seeds. And he would bring those around for people to plant.

DUBSIDE:
So you've got a little three-dimensionally carved figure in, that's what, walnut or?

MIKE:
This is, I think, I think that's cherry.

DUBSIDE:
Okay, and that's about two and a half, three inches tall. Yeah. On the edge of the flute. Wow.

MIKE:
Yeah, and then it's got a mouthpiece made of, I'm not sure what that is. I think it's it's some kind of hardwood, probably cherry. And then I have some malachite stone inlay rings around near the mouthpiece and near the base.

DUBSIDE:
So I bet you could make a pretty fancy norsaq with those kind of skills.

MIKE:
Yeah. Yeah, I've tried that a little bit, but I don't think it would be very good at throwing anything.

DUBSIDE:
Before you made a kayak paddle, a traditional paddle, you had had all this experience making these flutes with woodworking and tools and everything.

MIKE:
Yeah, I felt I felt pretty comfortable, you know, shaping things. And the first flutes I made, I shaped all by hand because I didn't have a lathe. So that certainly helped, I think.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. And there are, in the books you have here, there are various, a number of the different Indian groups had different varieties of flutes, but these the Comanches had flutes and the Lakotas had flutes, the Pueblos had these flutes.

MIKE:
Yeah, I think there were quite a few. I don't know a lot about how the different tribes, you know, what they had. Most of these I think were Lakota Sioux. Or based on Lakota Sioux flutes.

DUBSIDE:
Mm-hmm. So tell me about this other one you have here that looks like it's wider and a little more complicated.

MIKE:
Yeah, so this is sort of a more novelty version of the flute. I don't think there's there's much real history about having multi-chambered flutes. At least in Native American history. But this is what would be called a drone flute. 

So it's it's a two flutes.

Basically, it's one single piece of wood, but it has two chambers. So it looks like two flutes side by side. And only one side has the finger holes.

DUBSIDE:
So you get the bagpipe effect going on.

MIKE:
Yeah, and then the mouthpiece has two mouth holes. So one for each chamber. So when you blow into it, you can either play one side or the other or you can split your air between the two holes.

DUBSIDE:
Play them both.

MIKE:
So you get that this sort of bagpipe drone effect. So you get on the right side, you can play the holes. It's very similar.

I think this is the same key as this other flute I played. And if you split the air, then you get this drone low fundamental note, same fundamental note as the other side playing at the same time. And then you can overblow that side to an octave note higher to get a higher note out of it.

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But played together, they're interesting. This is just one side alone. So if I split the air between the two, that's what it sounds like.

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Some people will make flutes like this, but they'll have each side be a different key, so they play in harmony with each other. They're called harmonic drone flutes. And there's different tuning styles.

This is a what's most typically known as a Native American scale, which actually originated as a Japanese scale that was applied to these flutes. Originally, these flutes were very even-toned instruments and later they were sort of shakuhachi Japanese scale was sort of added to them to make them a little more melodious.

DUBSIDE:
So I can imagine that originally, if the flute was in tune with itself, that's all you needed. But if you started playing it with other people or if you tried to adapt this to other instruments in modern music, that the tuning the accurate tuning to concert pitch becomes an issue and then you've got all those considerations coming into play.

MIKE:
Yeah, so that's why when you tune these, you have to tune them at I guess it's 72 degrees. 

DUBSIDE:
Oh so it's changes with temperature. That's right.

MIKE:
Yeah, so as long as you're tuning concert, it's my understanding concert tuning is done at 72 degrees. So if you do that, then this should work with most other instruments that are at 72 degrees. But at least if the temperature does change, then all those instruments are changing together at the same rate.

So it usually works pretty well.

DUBSIDE:
And so people have taken these flutes and made very ornate special ones that people collect and sell for lots of money. And then you've showed me, you had some, you'll do like a theme flute. The figures that you carve and the designs you put into it have some theme going on?

MIKE:
Yeah, so I found that I got more enjoyment out of you know, putting a lot of artistic effort into the flutes rather than just producing you know, a basic flute to sell. There's lots of people that do that, but I really like the artistic value of it. I really liked telling or sharing the stories, Native American myths and things like that. I was fascinated with that. 

So this, the first flute with a squash blossom just sort of tells the basic story of Kokopelli, you know, the god of fertility. And you know, the blossoming of the squash seeds and squash blossoms.

And this drone flute tells sort of the basic story of the love flute. So you have two, the block is two men both playing flutes made out of different wood. One is Purple Heart and the other is Osage Orange.

And then there's butterflies flowing down the flute body that are inlaid with crushed turquoise and malachite and blue lapis. And at the end of the flute is a woman kneeling down listening to the two flute players. So I just found that I enjoyed that.

I have one that, it's not finished yet. It's been work, I've been working on it for years, but it tells the story of Crazy Horse and his vision that he had. And and then I have another one that I've been working on that tells the story of the transition of the native people from using dogs as their primary pack animals to the introduction of the horse by the Spaniards and how they evolved into using horses as their primary mode of transport.

DUBSIDE:
So when you were more actively making these on a regular basis, you were selling them and you had, you had a name for these? You had a company name?

MIKE:
Yeah, I was, I went under the name Old Turtle Flutes.

DUBSIDE:
And the third one you have on the table here is a very small one.

MIKE:
Yep, it's a really small one. It's, this is, I believe this is also Alaskan Yellow Cedar. It's about the size of a pencil, maybe a little bit bigger than a larger diameter than a pencil.

And the same concept, it's just a very small, very high-pitched, very small finger holes. Let's see if I can play it. It's a little hard to play, but...

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DUBSIDE:
So, so you can, you can, you can bend some of those, slide them up a little bit with moving your hands off.

MIKE:
Yes, you can, you can leak some air out of a hole, so you can flutter, you can flutter your tongue. 

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You also have an alternate scale you can play on this by keeping, so the six holes, depending on which one of the six holes you keep covered when you play the scale, you can get a slightly different scale.

So the first scale, as I mentioned, is... 

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And if you keep this hole covered... 

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So you can build a whole song around that scale.

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DUBSIDE:
So they have get-togethers of people very enthusiastic about these things?

MIKE:
Yeah, there's several flute festivals around the country. Similar in some ways to, you know, the Greenland gatherings, people who are very interested in this particular thing. And so there's quite a number of flute makers around the country, and there's two significant flute festivals here in Florida.

One is the Musical Echoes Festival up in the Panhandle, and then one called Native Rhythms Festival here in this area. And then there's several festivals. I don't know exactly where they're all located now, but some…mostly out west. I don't know where they all are these days. I'm not as connected with it as I once was.

But it's an opportunity for all the flute vendors to come together and sell their flutes, and then for performers from all around the world to come together who are really focused on native flute music. That's a really nice time, because it is... It's not just the flute.

I mean, the flute is somewhat limited in its abilities, but when you start mixing it with other instruments and drums and vocals, it can be very interesting.

DUBSIDE:
All right. So you've started building a kayak out there in your wood shop.

MIKE:
I've started, yeah. It's my next adventure, I think. 


DUBSIDE:
That’s your first attempt to build a kayak?

MIKE:
First attempt, yeah.

DUBSIDE:
How's it going?

MIKE:
Well, it's probably a little early to tell, but I have some forms, and I have the rough gunwales and forms, and I'm limited here on the length of wood that I can get, so I had to use some scarf joints to bring some pieces of wood together. So I'm learning a lot about wood density and wood flexibility and what's important for a kayak to be straight, right?

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

MIKE:
So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

DUBSIDE:
You haven't got any steam bending yet?

MIKE:
No, no, not yet. I will have to build a steam box and go through all that process, but there's lots of great resources out there, and I'm definitely looking forward to that.

DUBSIDE:
All right. Well, play me something for the outro.

MIKE:
Okay. I will... Let's see if I can remember.

You can play some certain songs on this. Amazing Grace is one of them that I used to know pretty well. I don't remember how to play that.

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MIKE:
It's a fun instrument. Easy to play. Accessible to anyone.

DUBSIDE:
All right. So you're not actively selling any of yours anymore? 

MIKE:
No.

DUBSIDE:
Put that aside for now.

MIKE:
It's aside for now. Like I said, I have a few that I eventually want to finish. I'm a few years away from retirement, and I hope to pick those up and finish them off at the time. What I do with them, I have no idea.

DUBSIDE:
Well, I'm sure anybody could go on and probably find YouTube videos all about Native American flutes, but that's...

MIKE:
Absolutely. There are a lot of good resources.
DUBSIDE:
That's pretty much the designation, Native American flute.

MIKE:
That's right.

DUBSIDE:
Tells you all about it. Okay, Mike. Well, thank you for being on The Dubcast with Dubside.

MIKE:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.


DUBSIDE:

And that is Mike Knight.

K-N-I-G-H-T. Recorded May 11th, 2025. 

And now I would like to show you what can be done with the wonders of digital audio editing.

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