Lyz Jaakola (Fond du Lac Anishinaabe) has a love-hate relationship with opera. She remembers singing along while watching it on PBS as a child living on the reservation. At 12, she started voice lessons, thinking “I could do that!” “And then I was told by the people who were supposed to be teaching me that I was maybe the wrong kind of person to be doing this,” she says.

But the Cloquet-based musician, civic leader, and educator has developed her voice. She performs often as Nitaa-Nagamokwe (The Lady who knows how to sing well) in venues from Minnesota to the Kennedy Center, and is working on a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. Jaakola founded and performs with the Nammy (Native American Music Awards) award-winning hand-drum group, Oshkii Giizhik Singers, which is taking part in The Current’s 2022 Emerging Artists Showcase.

Now Jaakola has helped create a new narrative for opera, by raising up the story of Zitkála-Šá, a singer and opera composer who used the artform to restore outlawed powerful Indigenous religious practices. A Dakota woman born in 1876 on the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, Zitkála-Šá went on to create activist organizations that fought for Indigenous peoples, practices, and lands at a time when everything was at risk.

Translated as “my spirit sings” from the Dakota language, Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá Opera is an Indigenous project that brought together people across generations and artforms. After premiering in Minneapolis earlier this year, the film will be screened at AICHO (American Indian Community Housing Organization), in Duluth on Saturday, Nov. 26, and Sunday, Nov. 27.

So, who was Zitkála-Šá? Zitkála-Šá (pronounced: Zeet-KA-la-sha) was well-known during her lifetime as an artist, writer, and activist. She attended a boarding school in Indiana where, as she later wrote, she “was treated like an animal.” There, however, she discovered violin and piano, which she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. She took a job at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, hoping to improve conditions there.

Her writings on Native American life appeared in Harper’s magazine, and in 1913 she wrote and composed The Sun Dance Opera — in part because the Sun Dance, one of the most sacred Dakota ceremonies, had been outlawed. Writing an opera incorporating it allowed it be performed onstage — where it was safe from prosecution.

Zitkála-Šá co-founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926 to lobby for increased political power for American Indians and the preservation of American Indian heritage and traditions. She served as president of the council until her death in 1938. 

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ originated in conversations between Kelly Turpin, executive director/producer of An Opera Theatre (AOT), and director/artistic producer Sequoia Hauck (Anishinaabe, Hupa). Their shared interest in the Indigenous writer, musician, educator, and political activist resulted in a filmed multimedia opera, to honor Zitkála-Šá’s life and legacy using her chosen art form. To decolonize the process, they assembled an Indigenous production team and cast.

“The question always is why this project, why now?” writes Sequoia Hauck (Anishinaabe, Hupa), the director/ artistic producer of this work. “We created this, and we picked Zitkála-Šá because people knew who she was; … Native people are still here, will always be here, and will continue to be here. We just hope to celebrate Indigenous people and Indigeneity from now until the end of time.”

Kelly and Sequoia originally contacted Lyz Jaakola about composing the work two years ago. “I wasn’t too keen, until I heard it would be Indigenized—not only the content, but the team—singers, musicians, are Indigenous,” Jaakola says. “That sold me on it.” She had known the bare bones of Zitkála-Šá’s story for years, but “now I feel really like a kindred spirit to her, doing the work I do as a teacher, and an activist, and in politics.”

The collaboration, Jaakola says, enlarged the project’s reach. “If I had done it myself, the way I function, like an island—and it wouldn’t have been as good. There were things that weren’t my idea, that came from the other creators, and vice versa, we all intentionally tried to bring out the best in each other.”

Jaakola composed the music for this work, working with librettist Hannah Johnson, a young Anishinaabe writer. “[Hannah] captured Zitkála-Šá’s poetic style, borrowed some of the writings that we had read about her life,” says Jaakola. “She’s a dreamer.”

The team had intended the work to be in Dakota, but when the libretto was translated Jaakola had to rewrite, because “it doesn’t sing like English! … Some of the music is like you’d expect from the Indigenous palette, but some is more classic, I even quote some Mozart in there.”

Jaakola’s knowledge of opera is deep, and she has passed her appreciation along to her daughter, who is one of the vocalists in Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ. She explains that Baroque opera was collaborative and had space for singers who were composing as they were performing. “At the outset of this genre that we think of as rigid and elite, it wasn’t like that. We are decolonizing opera!”

Her interpretation of the relationship of traditional Anishinaabe musical forms and opera is complex and resonant. “Our most traditional music forms are sacred songs, and they’re all about storytelling—participating in ceremonies,” Jaakola says. “There’s music, music, music, and some talking, and yet we don’t call it ‘music’ but songs. … We use music to carry stories and history, to be the transmitter, to open peoples’ hearts to vibrate, to make way for growth and healing. That’s what we do. With this contemporary expression, I think this work is on the continuum.”

Animations and transitions inside the film were created by Duluth artist Moira (pronounced “Miri”) Villiard, a Fond du Lac direct descendant whose paintings and murals are located throughout Duluth. In 2021, her masterful projection work Madweyaashkaa: Waves Can Be Heard was shown, accompanied by music composed by Jaakola, at the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam next to downtown Minneapolis.

“There’s a part [in the opera], where lyrically the music references a quote about dandelions and being a child,” says Villiard, who as a child had dreamed of being an opera singer. She hired Dakota elder Millie Richard to draw a dandelion in her beadwork style, which became the basis for her animations. “We pulled in the dandelion imagery, and more experimental vignettes, beautiful closeups of the different ages of Zitkála-Šá, following her at points of her life … The dandelion fluff, blown seeds, serve as transitions to other parts of the opera.”

“One thing that this project is testimony to—Native people are everywhere and we do everything, we have been doing everything for a long time,” Villiard says. “That idea of syncretism, that Native fashions transformed in meeting with western culture—that anything that comes into our hands can be transformed by us. We fold things in, making culture out of it.”

What should people bring to this performance? “I’m thinking people should expect something they’ve never seen before,” says Jaakola. “We have done something unique. Come with an open heart and an open mind! If we arrive ready, we can always walk away with a lot.”

Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: a Zitkála-Šá Opera. Featuring a short film by Moira Villiard. Screenings: 7 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 26, and 2 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 27, at AICHO (American Indian Community Housing Organization), 202 W 2nd St., Duluth. Performances will be in English and Dakota with open captioning and translations. Tickets

ARTISTIC TEAM:

• Sequoia Hauck (Anishinaabe, Hupa), creative producer & director

• Lyz Jaakola (Fond du Lac Anishinaabe), composer

• Hannah Johnson (Anishinaabe-Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe), librettist

• Moira Villiard (Fond du Lac direct descendent), visual artist

CAST:

• Adrienne Zimiga-January (Oglala Lakota)

• Emmy Her Many Horses (Sicangu and Oglala Lakota, Citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe)

• Jagger Ripley-Jaakola (Arikara/Anishinaabe/Santee descendant)

• Jaysalynn Western Boy (Bdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ k’a Thíthuŋwaŋ/Thíŋta wíta oyáŋke)