Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The latest: Violinist scores new TV series, a two-volume book project puts a new spin on North America, and a new play recounts a devastating history
MUSIC: Composer tapped for ‘First Alaskans’ TV series
Artist, film composer, producer and violinist Genevieve Gros-Louis, Huron-Wendat Nation, has been in some high-flying company lately.
She premiered a collection of compositions from her CD featuring spoken word performances from Osage designer Dante Biss-Grayson to honor the Osage people during the Cannes Film Festival ahead of the premiere of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Now Gros-Louis Salamone has announced her role as composer for the new season of the National Geographic docuseries, “Life Below Zero: First Alaskans,” with Season 3 set to begin streaming Dec. 5 on National Geographic, Hulu and Disney channels.
“That is my big project that I’ve been working on for the last six months,” Gros-Louis told ICT. “After some performances around the world at Paris Fashion Week and seven shows in Santa Fe during Indian Market, I was then offered some really exciting opportunities that have led to me relocating to Los Angeles from Des Moines so I can be closer to the industry and pursue full-time film composition.”
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She continued, “I was able to connect with similar creative spirits, which is inspiring for me to work with people who are just passionate about creating. We kind of all find each other.”
Gros-Louis, from Wendake, Québec, has a degree in violin performance and Indigenous studies from Montréal’s McGill University.
In facing the aftermath of childhood trauma, Gros-Louis uses her platform to shed light on matters surrounding mental health, the plight of women enduring sexual violence, and the pressing challenges faced by Indigenous communities. Her lush compositions and dramatic visual style add to her multifaceted storytelling.
“I was a weird kid, honestly,” she said. “When I heard the sound of the violin, I was completely fascinated by it and it became an outlet for survival. It really was. I poured my heart and my soul into it.”
For the new TV series, she tapped Native Alaskans to infuse a local element into the compositions.
“I hired Indigenous people in Alaska to record sound samples to put in the score,” she said. “It’s been fun to bring that representation in because it’s so important to have the music reflect the story of what is on the screen. There’s so many beautiful teachings in the show.”
BOOKS: An artist’s version of history in two volumes
Artist Kent Monkman, Cree, and his longtime collaborator Gisèle Gordon have released two volumes of true stories and imagined history to remake his vision of North America.
A visual artist described by The New York Times as one of Canada’s best-known contemporary artists, Monkman has had global success with his dramatic paintings that use classical style with startling and provocative content. His paintings feature his alter ego, a shape-shifting, time-traveling being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
Now Monkman is telling the story in book form with, “The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island,” which he calls “a deeply Cree and gloriously queer understanding of our shared world, its past, its present, and its possibilities.”
Volume One covers the period from the creation of the universe to the confederation of Canada, where Miss Chief moves through time, balancing growing conflict and interconnectedness of beings and the world.
Volume Two takes readers from the moment of confederation to the present day, examining the tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries from colonial violence in the children’s residential school system to the Sixties Scoop, and on to the urban disconnection of contemporary life.
A member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory in Manitoba, Canada, Monkman has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada, among many.
Gordon is a media artist and writer based in Dish With One Spoon Territory in Toronto, Canada. Gordon and Monkman’s collaborative art practice spans three decades. Their work together includes the sound and light installation,”Iskootao,” (Nuit Blanche, 2010) and more than a dozen short films that have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival.
The book debut will be supported by a tour of readings, kicking off November 14 in Toronto at the Winter Garden Theater with more dates announced on the publisher website.
THEATER: Play explores tribal disconnection
A gripping journey from the fur trade of the 1600s to the stock trades of today, a new play, “Manahatta,” by Cherokee writer Mary Kathryn Nagle, tells the story of an ambitious young Lenape woman with a Stanford MBA who reconnects with her ancestral homelands.
The show was written as part of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, and is directed by Obie Award winner and The Public’s Director of Public Works, Laurie Woolery.
It will be performed at The Public Theater in New York City from Nov. 16-Dec. 17.
The story follows Jane Snake as she moves from Oklahoma City to New York for a banking job just before the 2008 financial meltdown.
She struggles to reconcile her new life with the expectations and traditions of her family and tribal nation with the heartbreaking history of the Delaware Nation’s expulsion from their land in what is now Manhattan.
The play is a lesson about the dangers of living in a society where there’s no such thing as enough.
“She’s trying to climb the corporate ladder,“ Nagle told ICT, “and she ends up getting a job at Lehman Brothers and does very well for herself, but then Lehman Brothers crashes. So she finds she has returned home to the land of her ancestors who were forcibly removed by the Dutch. It really just compares the building of the wall by the Dutch in 1654 to keep Lenape out of their homes with what the Wall Street institutions were doing in 2008, which resulted in many Americans losing their homes.”
There’s a mix of history with drama and a bit of humor, Nagle said.
“It’s showing history and what happens to Indigenous people throughout history, when history is ignored and allowed to repeat itself,” she said. “I hope that’s a message that rings true in the play as well. It’s seven actors that each play someone in the present and also someone in the past. It’s dramatic, but it does have humor in it. There’s conflict; there’s drama.”
Nagle said the play tapped Lenape cultural consultant Joe Baker, a citizen of the Delaware Tribe and a co-founder of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. The costumes were also designed with Lenape elements in mind.
“Our amazing costume designer has incorporated Lenape elements into the overall design of different characters’ costumes, such as the blue corn and that color that has had a comeback in Manhattan,” she said.
With such a complex story, can there be a happy ending?
“That’s a good question,” Nagle said. “It’s a pretty rough ending. It’s not exactly happy, but I can’t think that the characters are at the end. I’m not going to be devoid of any hope.”
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