Blue Flamez are Hot

Welcome home, Scott Kalama & Blue Flamez

About REZ LIFE: He had been on a high. His rap album, “Rez Life,” had just won the Native American Music Award for best music video. He’d come home to the Warm Springs Reservation driving a 2013 silver drop-top Camaro, a sign he’d made it in a community where pickups and sedans tended to be a decade old and caked in red dirt.

The rez, Kalama thought, had done him wrong all his life. He was 31 and had already buried three siblings. His dad was a drunk. Kalama had spent most of his life too broke to afford a fast food hamburger. He left for college and returned to find his business degree useless in a place too poor to support a new enterprise.

Still, Kalama had stayed. He launched his rap career there, even though the Central Oregon reservation lacked a professional recording studio or performance space. He did it all for the tribe, he thought. That national award was supposed to put Warm Springs on the map.