Episode 3 Frank Waln

In this episode, Lakota music artist, public speaker, and educator Frank Waln joins ArtLab director Bree Edwards to explore the medicinal power of music in constructing futures from the rubble of colonial violence. Drawing on his formative relationship with music, Frank traces the lineage of hip-hop back to experiences of colonial displacement faced by communities of color in America. He discusses how this legacy opened space for him to celebrate and share his indigeneity through storytelling, ceremony, and music. Native artists, having already navigated their own apocalypses, are uniquely equipped with potent cultural tools for fostering renewal.

We delve into Frank’s multi-year artist residency at ArtLab, where he aimed to continue exploring his hip-hop practice—until he received unexpected news: the discovery of a hair sample belonging to his great-grandmother in the Woodbury Collection at the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography. This painful revelation marked a pivotal moment in his creative journey. In collaboration with Harvard’s Native American Program (HUNAP) and the Harvard Divinity School (HDS), Frank led a gathering inspired by the Lakota Wiping of the Tears ceremony, creating a healing space for himself and other native peoples at Harvard. Join us for an intimate conversation about Frank’s approach to hip-hop, heritage, and healing at ArtLab and beyond.

Frank’s ArtLab residency page: https://artlab.harvard.edu/directory/frank-waln/
Frank’s personal website: http://frankwaln.com/
Frank’s instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/

Works in Progress is recorded and produced in ArtLab’s Mead Production Lab, located on the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. The show is hosted by Bree Edwards, produced by Kat Nakaji, and edited by Luke Damrosch—theme music . Theme music is by Kicktracks.

For more information about the show, the ArtLab, and the artists featured, visit artlab.harvard.edu. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram by searching @ArtLabHarvard.

Transcript

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYING]


BREE EDWARDS:

Welcome, and thank you for joining me for Works in Progress, a podcast about artistic research, experimentation, and collaboration. My name is Bree Edwards, and I’m the director of the ArtLab, a multidisciplinary incubator for the arts at Harvard. 

The ArtLab supports creative research and development and is a special initiative of Harvard’s Office of the President and Provost. While we commission new work and support course-based workshops, the artist residency program is the foundation of the ArtLab.

In this podcast, we speak with the artists in residence at ArtLab and those that are working at Harvard about how they are grappling with contemporary issues and transforming ideas into art.

Frank Waln is one of these artists. He's an award-winning Native artist and music producer from the Lakota Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Frank uses his music and storytelling to speak about social injustices and issues affecting Native communities. Frank's residency at the ArtLab led to the commission of a new artwork by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts, also known as HUCA.
After several residencies over the past two years, Frank has joined us today in the Mead Production Lab on the eve of the performance of this commission entitled “We Gather in the Spring to Help in Our Healing.” This will be a public gathering based on a Lakota Wiping of the Tears Ceremony.

Frank Waln is the recipient of the Gates Millennium Scholarship. He attended Columbia College in Chicago, where he received his BA in Audio Arts and Acoustics. Frank has written for various publications and travels the world, telling stories through music and performance. It’s an honor to have Frank in the studio today. So, Frank, it's great to be back at the ArtLab with you.



FRANK WALN:

Yes, Bree. I'm really excited to be here. This place is really starting to feel like home, so it's good to be with the relatives again.



BREE:

By way of introduction, ten years ago, in 2013, your community held a ceremony in which you were given a Lakota name that means 'walks with the young' or 'new nation.' Can you tell us how to say that name and share a little bit about what it means to you?



FRANK:

Yes. So in my culture, your Lakota name, as we call it, is a very important thing that you can earn or get passed down through your family. And we believe it's the name that's attached to your spirit and also your life path. So my Lakota name, given to me by my community, is Oyate Teca Obmani. 'Oyate' means 'nation' or 'people,' 'Teca' means 'young' or 'new,' and 'Obmani' means 'walks with'. I was given that name once I started putting my music out as an artist and using that music to share our story from home



BREE:

Thank you. I also know that when you left the reservation and originally went to college, you studied medicine, and you found an interesting path of fusion between medicine and music. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about the relationship between music and healing?



FRANK:

Yes, for sure. So, as you stated, when I first started my higher education journey, I studied pre-med for two years. I always knew deep inside that I wanted to help people find healing because I felt like I was always searching for healing in my own life. Little did I know that the thing I had been using to help myself heal and process life since I was very young—music—is one of the strongest medicines, I think, in the universe from a non-Western perspective.

And I think once I shifted to becoming an artist and put all my efforts into music, I started to see the healing effects of music. I wrote the songs that helped me heal, and once I started releasing those songs, I found that people who were going through similar experiences as me turned to those songs for healing and to help them navigate the experiences they were having as young Native people. That was something I never even thought would happen. I felt very insular and alone in my experiences and in the songs I was writing. So I think, you know, the people who gravitated toward my work taught me that music can be medicine.

And I had a conversation with an elder on my reservation when I shifted from pre-med to artistry. That elder asked me what I was doing with my life, and I said I no longer wanted to be a doctor; I wanted to be a musician. This elder looked at me and said, 'Well, sometimes music is the best medicine.' That was, you know, years ago, so I think that also planted a seed that grew into what we see today.



BREE:

And it's a really powerful thing, that connection. I wanted to just talk about being a child of the hip hop generation and how hip hop influences both your activism, your critique, but also being part of a different lineage than the generation that came prior to hip hop.



FRANK:

Mm, yes, I love that question too, Bree, because you know, I get asked a lot about Native peoples—particularly Native youth’s—connection to hip hop. And once I learned about the history of hip hop and where it came from, you know, because hip hop is a fairly young genre and culture within our country.



BREE:

50 years.



FRANK:

Yep, yep. And if you look at the history of hip hop, you know, I'll just give one small example: hip hop was born out of the Bronx, and at the time, they were building the Bronx Expressway through the area, displacing the community. That’s colonization. 

Hip-hop emerged from a situation where a community of people was being colonized. I also connect hip hop to global indigeneity because, not just Black and Brown people, but white people too—if you go back in everyone’s family history, you will find that you came from an earth-based people who had a culture and lived in a way where they had ceremonies and practices connected to each other and the land they lived on. That’s Indigenous. There’s Indigenous history on every single continent on this planet, and I got to see that through my travels.

But if you look at hip-hop, there are so many elements about hip-hop that are indigenous. I feel like the Black and Brown people who created hip-hop culture were cut off from their indigeneity through colonization, but they were coming from their hearts. They were coming from the spirit. They were coming from the root of something. Whenever you do that, you know you're going to connect to your ancestors, whether you're aware of it or not. As a producer and engineer, I know that in hip-hop songs, the drums are usually the most important part of the music, and the drums need to be right. If you look at all indigenous music, it's centered around the drum. So there's that connection there, as well as the connection to story.

Telling you when I was young, a teenager, and I started falling in love with hip-hop music and different artists, I was so drawn to the stories. That was before I could see a Native artist on TV or hear a Native artist on the radio whose story I could relate to personally. At the time, the stories we were hearing in hip-hop resonated with me because I came from a poor community of color. My reservation, though rural, sits in one of the poorest places in the whole U.S., and now that I live on the South Side of Chicago, I can see those connections and experiences. Just being a poor person of color growing up in America, there are some parallels to those experiences.

A big part of hip-hop culture is the cipher—gathering in a circle where everyone shares a piece of their talent, whether that's beatboxing, dancing, rapping, or singing. If I took you to my home community and we had a ceremony, it would be a cipher. We gather in a circle through song, music, and dance, sharing energy and locking in on a prayer. There are so many elements of hip hop that I say are rooted in Indigeneity, and it also gave me a space to reclaim my indigeneity at the time when I first started reconnecting to my culture and ceremony when I was 18 and 19.

Outside of my music and ceremony, there were no real safe spaces for me to put on beads, rock my braids, or express my language. Hip hop, as an art form, is a very fluid creative medium where you can be any type of artist you want to be. If you look at hip-hop, there are MCs, B-boys, and rappers from every culture and every continent, and they bring their own flavor to it. I think that was another thing that drew me to hip hop: it allowed me to express my Indigeneity. It was a safe space to reclaim it and to negotiate with myself as an artist about what parts of my culture I wanted to share with the world and how I could do that. Hip-hop was a springboard for that, so I am forever grateful to the culture and to those who came before me.



BREE:

Thanks, Frank. So, I would like to talk about why you're back at Harvard and the project you've been working on with the ArtLab and the Harvard University Committee on the Arts. But to get us there, I'd like to start by discussing the relationships for you between ceremony and performance in music. Not everyone may know that only 40–45 years ago, Indigenous people in the United States were allowed to resume practicing their cultural and religious traditions with the passing of the Religious Freedom Act in 1978. 

You've said, and I quote, 'Every time I perform, there are people in the crowd who were alive when it was illegal for us to be Lakota and practice.' How does this relatively recent history, and the necessity of hiding ceremony, culture, and tradition, impact every time you gather people together for a ceremony or your work as a performer?



FRANK:

Yes, definitely. I think it has influenced, inspired, and shifted the trajectory of both my artistry and my home community's relationship with our culture and ceremony. I recently read a book by a medicine man from back home, whom I know deeply and have been in ceremony with. His life and the lives of his grandfathers really showed me how having ceremony be illegal and having to go underground—literally being outlawed under U.S. law—shifted the course of our culture and ceremony forever in ways we cannot do now. All we can do, I think, is look forward.

But I believe that the way our culture has adapted within that genocide and colonization has given me hope and a space to find healing as a young Lakota person. I am so grateful for the elders who came before me—those from whom I learned ceremony—who kept it alive when it was illegal, when they were doing something illegal just by gathering and praying. They had to find ways to keep it a secret to ensure it continued because they knew that in order for our people and tribe to survive, we must maintain a connection to our culture and our language, because our ceremony is culture too.

That's another thing: from a non-Western perspective, Lakota culture encompasses almost every aspect of our art. I could show you how it is ceremony—there's intention, prayer, and connection to history and our ancestors in everything we do. Sometimes, there's a lot of trauma involved in that conversation and perception for the past generations. As a 34-year-old Native person born after the Indian Religious Freedom Act, I have a different experience than even my mother, who was alive when it was illegal to perform ceremony back home.

I recognize that part of my generation's responsibility is to be the bridge between those who came before us, when it was illegal to practice ceremony, and this coming generation. I think it's beautiful and inspiring to see young Native people holding, expressing, and learning their culture and language, and sharing it with the world. At the root of all that is our ceremony, because our ceremony is the root of our culture. It grounds everything. For me, it inspires and influences everything I do, and it grounds me in a way that I wouldn't be here without ceremony. I think art and ceremony are the two things that saved my life, so if you look at my work, those two elements are very prominent in what I do.



BREE:

I'd like you to tell me a little bit about your great-grandmother. What is her name, and what role did she play in your life and your mother's life?



FRANK: 

Yes, yes, for sure. Thank you, Bree. My great-grandmother's name was Marie Waln, and we called her Grandma Shy; that was her nickname. My family is really big on nicknames—some appropriate, some not appropriate to share. But you know, we love giving nicknames. Grandma Shy’s generation had a lot of nicknames. One of her sisters we call Grandma Sing. Grandma Shy, she was a survivor of boarding schools.

What’s interesting is that I never really thought much about that piece of history because she never talked about it. Fortunately for us, she survived her boarding school experience and came home. She traveled around and lived in different parts of the country in her youth. But when she got older, she had Parkinson's disease and returned to the reservation so we could take care of her. My mom and her sisters—Shy's brother, in particular—took care of her during her final years.
Whenever I was younger, we would take care of Grandma Shy. She was very quiet, but she also wasn’t afraid to speak her mind if she felt something was wrong. If she was being wronged, she would let you know. So, she was a strong person—outspoken when she needed to be, but also quite reserved in her older age.

I think I never put too much thought into all of that, and at the time, I wasn’t aware that my family were survivors of colonization and genocide. No one talked about boarding schools in my family; no one discussed this ugly history that they all survived. Even still, to this day, if I take you to my home community, no one is really having these conversations because many of them have been trapped in survival mode since they were kids because of colonization.

I remember Grandma Shy as very strong, very stubborn, and very outspoken. It’s funny because I see all these traits in myself now, and they have allowed me to become the artist I am today.



BREE:

Thanks, Frank. I wanted to talk a little bit about the process by which we began and continue to work together. So, I’d like to back up to two years ago when you and I first met. We were introduced through the Harvard history professor Phil Deloria and the Harvard University Native American Program. The thing that I really recognized during that first performance you gave here at the ArtLab was how you connected with the students.

I made the offer for you to come back and consider what you might do in a residency at the ArtLab. At the time, we thought you might come into this recording studio, where we’re sitting right now, perhaps to record something different or do something unique. But in some ways, that first site visit, which was the following fall, happened like a lot of residencies do at the beginning of projects for us, where we kind of throw seeds out and set up a lot of different meetings. You met with people from the hip-hop archives, colleagues from the Peabody Museum, the Harvard Native American Program, and also the Divinity School, sort of thinking about what resources were available here at the university that might be helpful for your research and creative production. That first site visit took you in a really different place than we had anticipated, so I wanted to dive into what happened during that site visit and also the inspiration for this gathering that you’ve referenced, which you’re creating here at Harvard.

For a bit of context, a little bit of background on the Woodbury Collection: The Peabody Museum at Harvard stores a collection of hair samples from Indigenous people from around the world that were assembled by the anthropologist George Edward Woodbury in the 1930s and donated to the museum at Harvard University in 1935. The vast majority are from North America, including clippings of hair from approximately 700 Native American children who were in U.S. Indian boarding schools. Many of those hair samples have the names of the individuals whose hair was taken.

On this site visit, you met with some curators that you had worked with in the past at other museums and in Chicago. It was really a kind of meet-and-greet.



FRANK:

That moment when I met with the curators from the Peabody Museum is a moment I’m going to remember forever. I feel like it kind of put a pin in my life and shifted the trajectory of not just my ArtLab residency, but also my path as an artist. It has led me to songs and creative practices that I don’t think I would have thought about looking towards if it weren't for this experience.

When I met with the curators from the Peabody, I was very grateful that they took the time to share this information with me. They mentioned they were going through the collection of hair samples—they hadn’t even finished it yet—but they came across someone who had the same last name as me. They felt a responsibility, especially since some of them were Native themselves. I knew some of them personally because we had worked together on an exhibit I curated in Chicago at the Field Museum, so there was already a connection. They shared that they had this hair sample and told me the name, and I immediately recognized who it was.

Looking back, it’s really hard because it was very triggering and traumatizing. It feels like when they shared that news with me, everything just kind of went blurry and fuzzy for a while, almost for a couple of hours. I wanted to completely break down into tears. The thing about our history with boarding schools as Native people is that if I really got into it and shared the depths with you, it's one of the most painful and traumatic parts of our history. What they did to those Indigenous children is something you shouldn’t do to any human being, let alone to children. I know that the grandparents and ancestors I come from were survivors of that, but you don’t really want to think about it because it’s very heavy and makes you very sad.

So, I always kind of put it to the back; I knew it was there but never fully addressed it. That news, however, brought it right in front of my face in a way that I couldn’t subvert or put aside. I received that news and called home immediately to share it. My mom and her sisters knew who it was.

What I appreciated about the ArtLab and the community at Harvard that I was working with was that everyone gave me the space to process it however I needed at the time. I could tell that maybe some people didn’t know how I would process such heavy news. Fortunately, I had experience working with museums and collections; I had worked with the Field Museum for three or four years, so I was grateful to have that understanding of the laws and circumstances we would need to navigate in a situation like this. That grounded me, and ceremony and culture also grounded me, knowing I have a connection to my ancestors and to my culture, and this situation being just one of many threads and stories in my path. 
I feel like I was put in a place at a certain time to do a certain thing, and I know I was meant to help spread awareness about this history and also to help bring the spirits of these ancestors home. In our Lakota culture, we believe that when you die, your spirit goes to four places: to the spirit world, to all the places you’ve ever lived, to a third space that’s kind of like empty nothingness, and the fourth is, it goes into the minds and hearts of all your relatives who know your voice.

So I know that she’s in me, and I know she’s also here because her hair is here. It’s funny, because that day, before I even got the news, I was aware we were going to have this meeting. I had the thought, 'This is my fourth time coming to Harvard University for work.' I was curious why that kept happening, as I had never gone to any place that many times. I wondered why I kept coming back to Harvard as a Native artist from a reservation. Now I know why: my ancestor brought me here to connect with her and help call her spirit home.

Receiving that news was very heavy, but I was grateful for the space to process it. I didn’t even know if I could go forward with my residency because I didn’t know how that news would affect me. I got through the time here on campus, then had to do a string of shows a couple of weeks later. I remember speaking with Bree and telling her I needed some time to process. I appreciated that you gave me that time to process. I think we met again in January or February, maybe via Zoom.



BREE:

Maybe six months, at least.



FRANK:

And I took that time to process and pray about it. I knew that during that process and my time of prayer, I would be given an answer or an idea of how to move forward. Once the dust settled and the fuzziness from the trauma subsided, I saw a very clear path forward through this residency with the ArtLab.

The other thing I really appreciate about the ArtLab as a creative space for artists is that it's one of the few places that allows me to be fully the artist I am without having to compromise or shift my ideas based on what the place or the audience understands about my culture, my history, or where I'm coming from. Even if there was a lot of educating that needed to happen in this process, the ArtLab allowed me to be a full-on Lakota artist in the way I need to be during this residency.

These events we’ve been doing—and the event we’re going to have on Thursday—are perfect examples of that. They are something new and different, rooted in history and culture, and they address the painful, ugly history of colonization that we didn’t choose but that everyone sitting in this room has inherited. This residency exemplifies how we can choose to move forward and work together to find a path that creates space for healing, not just for Native people, but for everyone.



BREE:

One of the things that was really meaningful for me in this process is that you and I met with the entire staff of the Peabody Museum. You were very generous in your comments to them, saying that this gathering is also for them. Doing museum work and working at an institution like Harvard, that is imperfect, and we are all doing this hard work together.

You know, I think artists have a particular role to play because art reaches people on an emotional level. It works differently in our brains and with our emotions than policy or politics do. And that is in some ways because artists are storytellers—you referenced this directly with hip-hop and your work as a storyteller.

So, I want to close out with this question: how do artists do different work in telling these stories, changing hearts and minds, and reaching people at a different level to bring them together?



FRANK:

Yes, well, I’m a bit biased in this thought and sentiment because I am an artist, but I think art is so essential to the human experience and human growth—beyond politics, beyond race, beyond history, beyond genre. Because any art form, if you’re looking at how art exists in community, artists can imagine a different future. That’s not to say anyone else can’t do it, but, like you said, art brings emotion with it.

I feel like there are so many walls put between human beings—when it comes to politics, race, and culture—designed to divide and conquer. Art tears down those walls because it brings emotion and allows us to see each other as human beings.
For Native people and Native artists, the conversation that comes up a lot is that we’ve already survived our apocalypse. In a way, all Native artists are futurists because we can only look toward the future, but we’re connected to the past and that history so they influence the future we are imagining.

Art also helps us forego all the walls that are put between us—race, religion, politics—all designed to divide and conquer us as human beings. Art taps into our spirit and emotions, allowing us to recognize that most people are good at heart. Even if individuals aren’t aware of different histories or their complacency in them, I truly believe most people want to know the truth and find a better future for everyone.

I think art is a great way to have that conversation between communities. I have a song that I wrote for my mother, who raised me as a single parent. Every time I share that song, I explain how it connects to my people’s creation story and how that story survived genocide. But that single mother experience is universal, and everywhere I go, someone from every walk of life and every age comes up to me and says, 'I have a similar experience with my mom. I can relate to that.' So there’s empathy there.

So, I think art is a powerful tool to help build community, educate, and bypass all the walls that are intentionally put up to divide and conquer and keep us apart.



BREE:

Thanks, Frank. It's really been an honor to work with you over the past few years and to bring this commission to the public. I can't thank you enough. Obviously, at this time right now at Harvard, we all need healing. I think it's important to recognize that this is a challenging time, and however we can bring unity and healing is welcomed. It's even more powerful when we do it through the arts.

I also think it’s a wonderful thing for the Native students at Harvard to continue to have connections with you and to see you return over the years. I hope you will continue to come back even after this week's performance. So thank you so much.



FRANK:

Thank you, Bree. Like I said, this place has started to feel like home, and I definitely have roots here now. So I'll be coming back here for a while. Thanks.


[OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING]


BREE:

Thank you for listening to Works in Progress, a production of the ArtLab at Harvard University. It is located on the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. This podcast is recorded and produced in the Mead Production Lab and features artists who are working here.  

For more information about the show, the ArtLab, and the artist featured, please visit artlab.harvard.edu. You can also follow us on Instagram or Facebook by searching ArtLab at Harvard. Thank you.