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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Lakota Musician Frank Waln Performs (Get Lit)
00:21:35
Lakota multi-genre musician and public speaker Frank Waln joined us for a special performance at our April Get Lit with All Of It book club event with author Stephen Graham Jones.
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- [00:00]
Michaels Store Announcer
Attention party people. You're officially invited to the party Shop at Michael's where you'll find hundreds of new Items starting at 99 cents with an expanded selection of party wear, balloons with helium included on select styles, decorations and more. Michaels is your one stop shop for celebrating everything from birthdays to bachelorette parties and baby showers to golden anniversaries. Visit Michaels store or michaels.com today to supply your next party.
- [00:27]
Casual Male Speaker
I'm going to put you on nephew.
- [00:29]
Frank Waln
All right, unc.
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McDonald's Employee
Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?
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Casual Male Speaker
Been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
- [00:43]
Marshalls Store Announcer
Oh my gosh. Have you been to Marshall's lately? They have all the brand name and designer pieces you love, but without the jaw dropping price tags. Alright, so here's the truth. You should never have to compromise between quality and price. And at Marshall's, you don't have to. Marshalls believes everyone deserves access to the good stuff and that's why their buyers hustle around the clock to make it happen for you. Visit a Marshalls store near you or shop online@marshalls.com.
- [01:15]
Casual Male Speaker
Listener support WNYC Studios.
- [01:48]
Kate Hines
You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Kate Hines in for Alison Stewart. Our April Get Lit with all of It Author Stephen Graham Jones put Frank Waln's song Aboriginal and at the top of a playlist he made for My Heart is a Chainsaw. He described the song as the perfect way to start a hundred writing sessions. So we were thrilled that Frank himself was able to join us as the musical guest at our get lit event. Frank Waln is a Lakota songwriter, producer, rapper and public speaker. He's currently a visiting artist at the Art Lab at Harvard University. His latest release is his first ever compilation album titled Songs Against Colonialism. In just a moment you'll hear get lit producer Simon Close interview Frank about his career and his creative process. But first, here is Frank Waln with a special live performance from our April Get Lit with all of it book club event.
- [02:39]
Frank Waln
So I'm going to do a song that we have, I have titled 7 and I mashed it up with a popular song called Seven Nation Army. Because we when you mess with the Lakota nation, we have seven bands of Lakota. So you're literally messing with the Seven Nation Army.
- [03:09]
Frank Waln (performing)
Thousands of warriors will come rushing in Our ancestors waged war with the government in the spirit of spotted Tail and John Trudelle this is spiritual awakening they feed us lies but we won't take it in Let us ride on the lands where our ancestors died Breathing life into our cultures they said were petrified they tell a history that our peoples don't recognize the US Government should be charged with genocide Spitting rhymes in a time of blood quantum and suicide we survived staying strong all those times we should have died I confess I'm depressed sometimes I can't take the stress Living is a test Distressed up in the Wild West My fam suffers the land suffers I hate the silence I hate statistics I hate the prisons I hate the violence I hate these politics making the wrong decisions I hate these men that inflict this violence upon women they hate to see us rise we're on their TVs man remind the settlers that they're up on treaty land I did this with my music A CD in my hand A microphone in the other this is the sound of a nation rising A generation with a vision we're tired of our people dying Seventh generation, we have risen this is the sound of a nation rising A generation with a vision we hear Mother Earth crying Seventh generation, we have risen I'm gonna fight them all A seven nation army has got my back they're gonna rip us off Taking right behind our backs and I'm talking to myself at night Because I can't forget Back and forth through my mind Behind a cigarette and the feeling coming from my eyes says this is the sound of a nation rising A generation with a vision we're tired of our people dying Seventh generation, we have risen this is the sound of a nation rising A generation with a vision we hear Mother Earth crying Seventh generation, we have risen look it all around look around at the whole thing if you're black or brown Then you're down for the whole pain look it all around look around at the whole thing if you're black or brown then you're down for the old pain look at all around look around at the whole thing if you're black or brown then you're down for the old pain look it all around look around at the whole thing if you're black or brown then you're down.
- [06:03]
Frank Waln
Thank you. All right, now I'm gonna do a cover song, actually. And this song was inspired by my mother. So, you know, similar to Steven, I am. I'm a horror fan. Horror is my favorite genre. So I was really excited when they reached out and asked me to do this. I was raised by a single mother on The Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. And my mom wasn't a sit down and watch Sesame street mom. She just sit down and watch Silence of the Lambs with me type of mom. So I've been in love with horror ever since I was really little. And she's a big influence on me musically, too. She was a big fan of Fleetwood Mac, and now I am a big fan of Fleetwood Mac. So I'm gonna do a cover of a Fleetwood Mac song called Dre. Now, I can't sing like Stevie with my flute can, so I'm gonna do a cover. I say this cover is in the key of Lakota, because I'm also a music producer and audio engineer, and when I do a cover song, I completely reimagine it. And I was just really happy sitting back there, listening to Stephen talk about how he used my song to enter the world he was writing. Because in my mind, in my heart, my spirit, when I create songs, it's a whole world to me. So it was just really cool to hear him relate to that and resonate with that. And this is one of those songs. I took the original, and I was watching an interview where Stevie Nicks was talking about how she wrote the song and the band was tracking in the studio they were recording in, and she was hanging out in a bedroom in the studio with Sly Stones. Bedroom in a studio that he used, and he had a grand piano in there. And she wrote Dreams using two chords, and she. She would write songs that way. Then she'd give it to the band, and they'd flesh it out into what we know and hear now. But for this cover, I took it back to the original and used those two chords, and I slow it up a lot. I slowed it up a lot. I centered it on the drums, because it was said when you would go to war with the Lakota nation, you would hear our drums before you seen us coming.
- [09:46]
Audience Member
Sa it. Thank you.
- [11:04]
Simon Close
Hey, Frank.
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Frank Waln
Hello, Simon.
- [11:06]
Simon Close
Thank you so much for coming out here.
- [11:08]
Frank Waln
Thank you for having me.
- [11:09]
Simon Close
I want to start by asking a little more about. So we just heard Fleetwood Mac on the flute. Can you tell me about the instruments that you have tonight?
- [11:16]
Frank Waln
Yes. So I'm much like Stephen was talking about his brains, you know, wired to writing and certain particular way of looking at the world. I feel similarly with how my brain is wired to music. So I've been playing instruments since I was a child. I started at piano when I was 7 and 8. I taught myself every instrument. I'm playing acoustic bass tonight, and Native flute. But I've been told by some guitarists that I really admire, that I play the bass like it's a guitar, so I kind of do my own thing with it.
- [11:44]
Simon Close
Very cool. I also want to get back to that song we were talking about, Aboriginal, that is on Steven's playlist. So I think I have a quote from Stephen in an article he wrote about the playlist where he said, one of. It's one of those songs that keep playing in your head long after it's over. One of those that just last and last and make you walk into and against the world that much harder. So I want to know if that tracks with, like, what you were thinking when you put that song together or just in general, what was the context that went into that song?
- [12:15]
Frank Waln
Yeah, actually, I really loved what Stephen wrote about that song because he hit the nail on the head. I wrote that song when I was in college at the time, so I attended Columbia College in Chicago. I studied audio engineering. And the first week I was there, I moved there from the rural reservation I grew up on in South Dakota. And the first week I was living in a dorm building in downtown Chicago, I was going through all kinds of culture shock, being a country bumpkin in a big city. And I met a girl in my dorm building who we got on the elevator together, and it was just her and I. And she looked at me up and down, and she was like, you have really pretty hair. What are you? I said, thank you. I'm Lakota. She didn't know what Lakota meant, so I said, I'm Native American. And she looked at me confused, and she said, you guys are still alive.
- [12:57]
Frank Waln (performing)
You know, she thought we were extinct.
- [12:59]
Frank Waln
So her. And then I started meeting other people that thought Natives are extinct. I took a history class where I knew more about the native history the professor was teaching than he did. So it was a lot of frustration and kind of pushing back against the world. And those experiences really empowered me and I think drove me to write and release songs like Aboriginal, just releasing that frustration that I felt about all that.
- [13:20]
Simon Close
There are a couple lines. I'm going to quote the song. Sorry if I can't pull it off, but in Aboriginal, you say, it's 2013. Our chiefs were all shot. Digital blankets give spiritual smallpox certain reservations. Revelations arise and my path becomes as clear as reservation skies. And I could use a little hope sometimes because I was dead broke when I wrote this rhyme. So you released that in 2013. You just put out your first compilation album. That's a compilation of songs from the last decade plus that you've been making music. So, like, thinking back to that moment when you released that song, but also in the process of going back through your catalog, I wondered what stuff came up for you from the last decade you've been making music.
- [14:03]
Frank Waln
Yes, definitely. So when I was putting together this compilation album, I was just really reflecting on, you know, I've been doing this professionally for like 10 years. I graduated in 2014 from Columbia College and I kind of started doing it professionally that senior year. And looking back, you know, I was just really blessed because when I graduated, I did this documentary project with MTV called Rebel Music. And that allowed me to turn my music into a career. But I mean, and Steven could probably attest, it's hard being a native artist. And it's hard maintaining as a native artist in a country and system and world that was built on the genocide and erasure of your people. It's a full time job and it's harder than anyone knows. And I was just looking back at 10 years because I'm an independent artist. I produce and engineer all my music. I self publish my own music through my own label. You know, I do. I've had to be independent in every way just to even get to this stage, you know, and it wasn't a choice. It was because that's what I had to do if I wanted to be an artist, coming from the community I came from. So looking back at that compilation album, I was able to see my growth, you know, and I think just the growth of being a young native person in my early 20s, you know, being frustrated with the history I was dealing with when it came to my family in this country and how music gave me an outlet to express that. And at the time I was just raging, you know, I rage on the stage. I didn't realize that there was a lot of other native people of all ages that felt the same way and listened to those songs and resonated with them and, you know, would hear those songs and know that they're not alone. And I think for me, having those moments when I'm on the road where people come up and they say, you know, your song helped me get through a hard time. It helped me feel not alone as a native person in this world. To me, like, that's the medicine and making a living off, it's nice, but those are the things that keep me going.
- [15:48]
Simon Close
It's interesting. You identify as a native artist and that really comes through in your music. Do you ever find that that becomes A focus of your music and the rest of what you do in your art gets erased because of that.
- [16:02]
Frank Waln
Yes, definitely. I feel like being a Native artist from a reservation and I'm also a rapper, I, like. I get pigeonholed all sorts of ways. And it's rooted in the erasure and just perception, misconception, stereotypes of Native people. But I found that, you know, until you have breakthrough moments like Stephen and I think it's great, you know, when we can break through and create space for other Native artists to come through. But until those moments happen, people love to pigeonhole you and I think try to diminish Native art because the non. The colonial Western view of Native art has always been primitive. You know, it's like almost not human. It's something different than what we consider art. So I'm just always pushing back against that with my work.
- [16:44]
Simon Close
I saw on Instagram you were recently in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. You gave a talk there, I think, at Dickinson.
- [16:51]
Frank Waln
Right.
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Simon Close
And so Carlisle is the town for anyone not familiar where the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was and that operated from the 19th century into the early 20th century. It was in the government's first Indian boarding school, which was part of a project of forced assimilation. And 180 children died at that school.
- [17:13]
Frank Waln
And are buried around.
- [17:15]
Simon Close
Right, so. And this is also a personal history for you too, right? I was wondering. You talk in your song My People Come from the Land, about your great grandparents experience. So I was wondering if you're comfortable talking about that a little bit.
- [17:28]
Frank Waln
Yeah, definitely. Because I'm gonna do two more songs after we talk. And the last song I do was written about my great grandmother who was a survivor of Indian boarding schools. And I actually just came off of a kind of a heavy mini tour. I was able to bring my mother with me, but I was at Harvard University. Long story short, that's a whole other presentation too. But when I was there for the residency, it was brought to my attention and no one anticipated this was going to happen. But the Peabody Museum at Harvard came across this anthropological collection of hair samples taken from Native children while they were in boarding schools. And while I was there for the residency, I learned that they have my great grandmother's hair taken from her while she was in boarding school. So my residency became about that. I wrote songs about her. And then immediately after that, we went to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which, as you said, is ground zero for Indian boarding schools. And for those of you who are not aware, those of you who are aware, you know what I'm talking about. But those of you who are not aware that's the real horror story of this country. What they did to those children. I don't even want to repeat it. I'll just say this. I have a Danae sister. She's an artist, Lila June. She studied boarding schools for her Dissert. And so she would tell me some things that she'd come across in her research. And she told me that one of the things that was shocking, and this still haunts me, this is real horror, is that a lot of the children in those schools, even though they were being fed, the way they were being treated, it was like a military death camp. A lot of children starve themselves to death. Imagine what you got to be doing to a kid that even when you're feeding them, they starve themselves to death. So every native person's great grandparents, great, great grandparents in the US And Canada survived that. And, you know, connecting it to this event, I feel like my great grandmother who survived that. And I remember her. This history is not that long ago. She died when I was like, 11, 12. We took care of her, so she was alive. She came home. I feel like her surviving that horrible, horrible piece of our history in this country. She was the ultimate final girl, like you said. You know, they. Stephen said, we all got a final girl inside us. But definitely, if you study native history and what happened to our ancestors, it was beyond horror. It was beyond anything I could conceive as a human being. And the fact that they survived that, you know, was a testament to the resilience. But also when I came across that through my residency, it forced me to confront my own family's history and those horrors in a way that I never really did before. Because you don't want to think about that stuff. They never talked about it. You know, it's there. But that experience forced me to face it head on. And through my music and my art, find a way forward. And I'm going to do one of the songs I wrote for at the end.
- [19:58]
Simon Close
Well, I'll let you get to that, then. Thank you for coming.
- [20:00]
Frank Waln
Thanks, Simon.
- [20:19]
Frank Waln (performing)
Wild child of the plains Styled by the scars of shame Just like the seasons she's going through change I need the storms and I need the rain to wash away all our history's pain I'm taking her back from where we came. You brought me back to where history hid. Bodies may die but the spirits will live. I'm thinking of the things they took from you as kids. She survived and she came home alive. Kept her culture inside so that she wouldn't die she never taught us and she never would cry we took care of you whenever you came home I sat with you for hours so you weren't alone Now I'm singing these songs to bring your spirit home Wild child of the plants Styled by the scars of shame Just like the seasons she's going through change I need the storms and I need the rain to wash away all my family's pain I'm taking it back from where we came I.
- [22:13]
Kate Hines
Need the cloud that was rapper, producer and musician Frank Wallen with a special live performance from our April get lit with all of it book club event. It was so great to have him join alongside author Stephen Graham Jones for a truly special evening. And that's all of it for today. I'm Kate Hines. Thank you for listening. Have a great weekend and we'll meet you back here on Monday.
- [22:33]
Frank Waln (performing)
Bury it all out there in the dirt We've died so many times Every day is rebirth.
- [22:55]
Michaels Store Announcer
Attention, party people. You're officially invited to the party shop at Michael's where you'll find hundreds of new Items starting at 99 cents with an expanded selection of party wear, balloons with helium included on select styles, decorations and more. Michaels is your one stop shop for celebrating everything from birthdays to bachelorette parties and baby showers to golden anniversaries. Visit Michaels store or michaels.com today to supply your next party.
- [23:22]
Casual Male Speaker
I'mma put you on, nephew.
- [23:24]
Frank Waln
All right, unc.
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McDonald's Employee
Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?
- [23:27]
Casual Male Speaker
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.