Artist and composer Elisa Harkins created “Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ” as an act of Indigenous Futurism, blending disco and native languages to preserve and celebrate her culture. Featured in Spoleto Festival USA, the performance and accompanying exhibition highlight the continued existence of Indigenous cultures worldwide.
Co-presented with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the performance features Harkins singing in Cherokee, English, and Muscogee (Creek) to electronic dance tracks inspired by Indigenous music, seamlessly merging the traditional with the contemporary.
Harkins’s artistic fusion parallels her life: She is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist and composer who grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Raised by adoptive parents, Harkins reconnected with her Cherokee and Muscogee language and heritage only as an adult. That reality intimately shapes her practice.
Overlapping Harkins’s Spoleto performance is an exhibit at the Halsey entitled “Teach Me A Song.” The exhibition is a joint collaboration by the College of Charleston’s Halsey, Flagler College’s Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, and Austin Peay State University’s New Gallery in Clarksville, Tennessee. The exhibit offers a teaser of Harkins’s performance through a multimedia projection of the singers whose shawls adorn the space.
Shawls, portraiture and sheet music are also featured, connecting the Indigenous performers to objects and music in a tangible way.
Halsey curator Katie Hirsch said bringing this point of view to Charleston was long overdue.
“I really wanted to bring her work here to Charleston because we have not had a lot of work by Indigenous artists, especially Indigenous artists who are working today,” Hirsch said. “I love work that kind of pushes the boundaries of what you think you’re going to see in a contemporary art space — on all levels her work does that.”
The exhibit serves as the physical manifestation of performance through shawls adorned to tell the story of those singing and the cultures from which they come.
“Shawls are what Native American women wear during ceremony or during powwow,” Harkins said in a 2023 interview. “These are visual representations of the songs but also the performers.”
The use of shawls illustrates the culture more holistically while providing a real entry point for all audiences to learn about Indigenous culture and tradition, Hirsch said.
“We all know a shawl,” Hirsch said. “We’ve all wrapped them around our body or we’ve seen them on the bodies of people we love; and they’re just kind of another way to come to a language that maybe you’ve never heard before, a language that maybe you didn’t know was still alive and thriving.”
For visitors what struck them about the exhibit was the subject matter and the multidisciplinary approach of the Halsey. Lowcountry locals Sarah Gill and Patty Toussaint noted after walking through the space that they loved that this wasn’t “just paintings on the wall.”
“All of our students should come see this,” Gill said. “The exhibitions always touch on social issues and admission is free to the public – a lot of people don’t know about that.”
Where “Teach Me A Song” is grounded in the physical object, “Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ” emphasizes Indigenous language and culture through music and performance.
“The music notation is also really important,” Hirsch said. “This is the first time that these songs have been transcribed using Western notation. I hope visitors will see, recognize, learn, and remember that Indigenous people have a present and a future and not just a past.”
For Harkins, “Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ” recenters Indigenous language in popular culture.
“I’m really trying to preserve the languages through making pop songs,” Harkins said in the 2023 interview at the Halsey. “A major goal of mine is to have songs in Cherokee and Muscogee on the radio so that it’s just as well known as English.
“It’s really important for me to preserve Indigenous culture because there’s been so many efforts to erase it, to have it be seen as dead,” she said.“Yes, our languages have been sleeping, but now there’s so many efforts for revitalization.”
“Teach Me A Song” is currently on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art through July 20 — and there will be an artist talk with Harkins on June 1 at 2 p.m.
“Wampum / ᎠᏕᎳ ᏗᎦᎫᏗ” is set to premier as part of the Spoleto Festival on June 3 at 6 p.m. at the Charleston Music Hall with a second performance on June 4 at 6 p.m. Tickets start at $30 and can be purchased at spoletousa.org.
Brandon Wallace is an arts journalism graduate student at Syracuse University.
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