Produced by Brad Pace

[Narrator] Flutes are fascinating instruments. The music created by the player is certainly a fine art, but the instrument itself can also be a work of art in its own right. Recently we met an Omaha artist who makes the flute and makes the music.
[Steve Stacy] The flutes, they were used for courting a long time ago, and the sound of them, you could hear them for a long ways.This is red cedar. It's a traditional wood. It's for -- they say that when we make a flute out of these, this red cedar that it's red and that represents the blood and stuff. When I make a flute, I take and put my heart into this flute, into the heart of the tree that it came from.
The Elk Dreamers they would make the flutes and a lot of times the -- I guess you could say somebody that was a flute maker, a medicine man, Elk Dreamer, they would make a flute, and then they would sell a song to a young man, and he would go use that song to go court with.
Each flute has its own sound. It's just like a person. No two flutes are ever the same. No two people are ever the same. All of them have their different sounds, their different look. They tell you kind of -- the wood tells you how the flute wants to look.