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Teach Me a Song is an installation work featuring Indigenous songs that have been translated, transcribed, reinterpreted and preserved as photos, scores, textiles, and recordings.
It is an ongoing collaborative project that invites Indigenous community members to share songs that hold personal, cultural, or familial significance. These songs and the process of teaching and learning them are then captured in a multiplicity of ways.
The project foregrounds the agency of song as a carrier of language, memory, and identity. By moving between oral tradition, notation, and visual form, Teach Me a Song challenges fixed ideas of authorship and composition, instead centering relational practices and collective knowledge.
Workshops are central to the project. Participants share songs and engage in conversation around language, meaning, and transmission. Each iteration is shaped by the local community, resulting in a growing, place-based archive.
The resulting installation includes printed scores, textiles, and audio components that reflect the voices and contributions of participants.
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Elisa Harkins
Performer Creator Musician
Elisa Harkins is a composer, artist, and citizen of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, also of Cherokee descent. She lives and works on the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation. Her work spans music, performance, video, and installation, centering Indigenous language, song, and sound as living cultural practices.
Since 2017, Harkins has been performing and releasing music that integrates Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee language with contemporary electronic production. Her work engages hymn traditions, translation, and the role of sound as a carrier of memory and identity.
She has presented work at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Remai Modern, and On the Boards, and has received support from Creative Capital, First Peoples Fund, and other organizations. Her recordings have been released through Bear Clan Records and Western Front.
Her ongoing projects include Teach Me a Song and Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ. She is currently developing new work combining ceremonial song, synthesizers, and experimental composition.
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Co-presented by Making Treaty 7 Cultural Society and Springboard Performance in partnership with The Confluence.
With Community Partners: The City of Calgary, The Nickel Foundation, and
the Calgary Institute for the Humanities
International Representation and Production: Norberg Management
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