In this episode we speak with Portland based multicultural Kānaka Maoli singer songwriter, Isabeau Waia'u Walker.

Originally from Wailuku, Maui, Isabeau is a firm believer in the power of stories shared through song and aims to address the mind and heart in everything she creates. Her voice, her lyrics, her melodies and harmonies are both raw and refined, intimate yet relatable, memorable and haunting.

In this conversation Isabeau shares her relationship to place—how growing up on Maui surrounded by music through family, school and extended community impacted her own style of songwriting and shed light onto her originality and different way of approaching the craft. She shares about moving off island to Portland Oregon and her experiences of balancing being a teacher and a recording artist. We talk about the various themes in her two albums to date, her first full length album, Body, and her most recent record, Heavyweight, which was released in October of 2025. We end the chat with some solid tips for the creative toolkit and she shares with us the phrase “con placer” or “with pleasure”, a sentiment imparted to her by one of her musician friends and a reminder to always enjoy the process of creativity. Isabeau reminds us that success is subjective, and urges artists to always follow your own map of what success means for you.

Featured song: Wahine by Isabeau Waia'u Walker from the album Heavyweight


More about the latest album, Heavyweight:

Heavyweight is personal; the soundtrack for a heavy heart shored up with gratitude and tenderness. It is a gentle hand over yours, a head resting lightly on your shoulder, a mutual scream into the abyss. Isabeau writes to satisfy an internal tension. Her music is Bright Gloom, joy adjacent songs and stories from The Land of Broken and Demented Toys. Recorded by Ryan Oxford at The Center for Sound, Light, and Color in Portland, Oregon, Heavyweight owns up to flaws, admits to confusion and confesses failure but it is not a surrender. In contrast to her previous LP, Body, these songs are her individual bout with love, sacrifice and loss.  It is the wily smile and bruised cheekbone still standing in the next round; the bottoming out and a heartfelt, heartfull return. Heavyweight marks the first time Isabeau has recorded a project with a band, with her band of weird and talented brothers. Having the whole gang present throughout the process made room for real time collaboration. Her songs found their most mature form in her band community. Ryan and Isabeau have carved out a new groove in their artistic alliance and their friendship hosts a safe space to orchestrate songs as they mean to be. She is a lyric forward songwriter with stories reminding that while the worst has happened it didn’t take you out…if anything, it emboldened your heart, your love, your resolve. You are now sharper while more tender. Heavyweight is personal, but for all who have met grief. Heavyweight is hers, but also yours. These songs can hold your weight. “Take your heaviness / and give it back to the earth’s own weight / the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

In honor of the opening weekend of Movements at SITE SANTA FE, exhibiting artist Cassils engages in a wide-ranging conversation with cultural critic Gayatri Gopinath on how their exhibition represents a departure from their earlier work, what it means to create trans* representation at this particularly fraught political moment, and the specificity of the New Mexico landscape in relation to the questions of time, space, historical memory, and embodiment that are central to their practice. This conversation was introduced by SITE SANTA FE curator Brandee Caoba and coordinated by Matthew Contos. 

About the Presenters: 

Cassils is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils's work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment. Cassils exhibits internationally and is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Integrated Practices in the Fine Arts Department at PRATT INSTITUTE.

Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published widely on queer visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.

Movements exhibition at SITE SANTA FE:

Movements transposes the live choreography of Cassils’s debut contemporary dance piece, Human Measure (2022), reconceiving that performance as three new immersive installations that are distinct yet interconnected. Drawing upon the structure of a musical score, the exhibition weaves layered auditory experiences into a sweeping soundscape that spans the galleries’ architecture.

Movements is now on view at SITE SANTA FE through February 3, 2025

This program was recorded live on Saturday, November 16, 2024 at SITE SANTA FE in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Many thanks to the incredible teams at both SITE SANTA FE and Albuquerque Museum for your support and collaboration between spaces. 

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century. This is the seventh episode of this series, recorded live in person in Tulsa, Oklahoma in October 2024.

For this episode of the Long Con, Cannupa visits Tulsa, Oklahoma for 48 hours for an artist talk and the two artists take advantage of the opportunity to have a recording session for the Long Con series. They begin the convo on a car drive out to Sterlin’s property. In the true nature of this series we dip into UFO’s, Deadman’s thumbprints, Tarantula’s and coffee shop etiquette, among other random stories.
They discuss the nuance of the city of Tulsa, the current state of Native Art, the economics and precarious nature of popularity and how that may impact a larger community when culture is trending in a market. They touch on land acknowledgements, question and answer: who decides what Native Art is and how that demographic has shifted through the generations. There’s mention of Oscar Howe and his infamous letter to the Philbrook Museum, the legendary artist Bob Houzous and others who have bent an arc between generations of artists pushing boundaries for decades. We arrive at Sterlin’s house and the second segment of the conversation features tales from the real ‘Uncle Brownie’, Sterlin’s dad. Brownie shares stories about his upbringing in Sasakwa, Oklahoma, his experiences as a self taught karate instructor and about the character ‘Uncle Brownie, from Reservation Dogs. Rounding out this long con(versation), Brownie imparts some advice to us in the younger generations to remember to be accountable— that there is an obligation to past and future generations to set a good example. As the artists head back into the city, we get a wave from Sterlin’s mom and tune into one of Sterlin’s favorite tracks “Hometown Hero” from local Oklahoma singer/ songwriter, J.R. Carroll.

About the artists:

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Sterlin is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on FX.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota.

In this episode of Broken Boxes we hear a conversation with Saya Woolfalk, a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. Saya’s work builds new narratives and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. 

I first met up with artist Saya in the summer of 2023 at her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York to chat about her practice. We walked around the bustling industrial warehouses along the river with her dog, Mr. Mochi, and amid a cacophony of forklifts and semi-trucks, we had an incredibly generative conversation about her practice. Unfortunately I was not able to publish the audio of this conversion on the podcast due to noise interference, but sections of this interview are archived within the new Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue publication available now through UNM Press. 

Recently Saya and I reconvened for a second conversation where we focus in on her origin story of becoming an artist and her decades-long investigation into speculative fiction within her practice. Saya shares about her 2006 work Ethnography of No Place—an installation which invites viewers into the immersive environments of “the Empathics,” a fictional race of women able to alter their genetic makeup and fuse with plants. Saya relates how for years she has utilized fantasy to understand our present reality and to dream of multiple futures. She shared how her present work has expanded far beyond No Place into envisioning the possibility of humanity existing beyond linear time and space. 

Saya communicates her ideas through sculpture, installation, performance and video art and has been at the forefront of conceptualizing ideas around speculative fiction, fantasizing and world building as an agent of change. We end the conversation with some practical advice on how Saya has learned to survive as an artist and she imparts some great tips on ways to utilize the systems in place to work in your favor and do more with less when you have to. Saya continues to show us that to truly enact radical change, we must create spaces for empathy and ease, and that we must continually reflect on how we practice compassion and connection with one another.

This episode is hosted by Ginger Dunnill 

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

This is the sixth episode of the Long Con series and was recorded live in person on Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill’s back porch in Glorieta, NM in the Fall of 2023.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on FX.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger’s bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview.

Music featured: Snotty Nose Rez Kids - I Can't Remember My Name ft. Shanks Sioux Broken Boxes intro track by India Sky