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Elisa Harkins: Ancestral Knowledge as Radical Futurity

By Laura Paige Kyber

On Stage: Lineages opens with a relational approach to Indigenous music preservation in collaboration with the Center for Native Futures.

This spring, Elisa Harkins opens the MCA’s performance season with her project Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ. Singing in a combination of languages and styles, Harkins invites audiences to question their expectations of what Indigenous music sounds like today. From one track to the next, her performance oscillates between disco-inspired electronic beats, as in her hit single Deadly, and pared-back a cappella vocals like in Espoketis Omes Kerreskos, which she sings with musical guest Dannie Wesley. Referring to the belts or beads used by Indigenous peoples to mark agreements and make trade, Harkins’s title, Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ, conveys her intentions for the work as a metaphorical opportunity for intercultural exchange.

Elisa Harkins, Teach Me a Song, 2021–ongoing. Song preservation, video; 32 minutes, 30 seconds.

At the heart of Harkins’s practice is the preservation of Indigenous language and music through activation and performance. However, that is only one aspect of her relational approach to ethnomusicology. She has also cultivated a broader, socially engaged art practice by working directly with communities to teach, support, and archive Native artists’ music. In contrast to the history of ethnomusicology, which has often centered a settler perspective, Harkins’s work focuses on relationships between Indigenous people and offers a path toward greater sovereignty.

In tandem with her performance at the MCA, a portion of Harkins’s Teach Me a Song project is on view at the Center for Native Futures. The series documents her meetings with Indigenous elders and counterparts across North America, learning from them and documenting their musical heritage. With each filmed encounter, Harkins creates a corresponding group of objects including a notation of a musical score, a photograph from the recording session, and a custom-made shawl reflecting the themes and ideas from the song and performer, becoming a material translation of the music being shared.

An example of one such encounter is documented in her 2024 essay about the AIM Song, an anthem for the American Indian Movement, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Here, she recollects learning about the song from an Osage elder, Louis Gray; traces its connections within her own family; and recounts numerous occasions at which the song was used to protest, and at times de-escalate, tumultuous political situations. By documenting more than its notational sequence and melody, Harkins reveals the song to be “like a spiderweb . . . a constellation where [she] can start to see intergenerational connections.”

While in Chicago, Harkins will lead a drum-making workshop for native women and femmes at the Center for Native Futures, further sharing her intertribal knowledge and expanding her network. Workshop participants will also be invited to join her on stage at the MCA with an invitation for the public to join them in this embodied form of transculturalism.

Elisa Harkins’s Teach Me a Song is on view at the Center for Native Futures (located at 56 W. Adams Street, Chicago, IL), January 8–February 14, 2025.

Her performance, Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ , runs January 31–February 1 in the MCA’s  Edlis Neeson Theater.

Many thanks to our friends and collaborators, Debra Yepa-Pappan and Monica Rickert-Bolter, at the Center for Native Futures for their enthusiasm and support of this project.