Frybread, flutes, stories kick off 4th annual First Voices Festival
Blackberry lemonade and pillowy pockets of golden fried dough were served to a long line of patrons winding around the 7 Stages Theatre lobby in Little Five Points on Friday night to kick off the fourth annual First Voices Festival.
The dough, known as frybread in Indigenous cultures, was prepared by Rez Juice’s Apache chef Tina Reyes and served either savory, with deer chili, or sweet, with sweet potato pudding or cooked apples.
The food was a tasty start to the annual festival, which celebrates Indigenous people through a series of events from Nov. 14-28, starting with Friday night’s “Art of Activism” storytelling event, followed by a two-day powwow Saturday and Sunday, a theater performance Nov. 21 and a documentary film screening Nov. 28.
Friday night, William Harjo, a Muscogee (Creek) elder, wore green regalia as he took the stage with his sidekick puppy to tell stories passed down by his ancestors and play songs on several flutes he made by hand from river cane, a native North American bamboo long used by his Nation to make arrow shafts, blowguns, instruments and weaving material for baskets.
Before he even knew how to play one, he started making flutes to sell at powwows. The flutes were a way to survive a financially trying time after Harjo suffered a heart attack that interrupted his career in the steel fabrication business.
While selling his handmade flutes from vendor booths, he was often asked to demonstrate how to play them, which pushed him to learn. Inadvertently he stumbled into an art form he would learn later from an uncle that his great-great-great grandfather had performed as a healer in the Muscogee Nation. That ancestor had learned to play the flute during hardship too, at a time when he permanently lost his voice from illness.
“He couldn’t speak, but to go on continuing with his healing, he still had the power,” Harjo said. “He fastened himself a flute and used it as his voice and kept singing his songs.”
Harjo feels spiritually connected now to playing the flute. Friday night he interspersed songs with stories, mostly about animals and how they attained their attributes: how the woodpecker became a pecker, how the turtle got its shell and how the alligator attained its tough skin.
Some of the stories Harjo made up, but most, he said, were passed down. Some of them were comical, some political, others heartfelt. He also shared about the injustice his ancestors endured in Georgia.
The Muscogee Nation originated in Georgia before they were forcibly removed and marched on the Creek Trail of Tears to Oklahoma in the 1830s and 1840s under the Indian Removal Act. On the trail, thousands of Muscogee people died from disease, violence and starvation. While traversing the country, they ate only small portions of sofkee, a corn porridge seasoned with water boiled with wood ash.
Harjo made a crockpot full of the smoky-smelling sofkee and served it in small paper cups to the audience at the end of his storytelling.
Offering a stage for Harjo and collaborating on the First Voices Festival has been a way to acknowledge the history of the land on which 7 Stages Theatre has resided for nearly half a century, said 7 Stages Artistic Director Heidi S. Howard.
The festival is a creative way to “explore what reparations might look like,” she said.
The theater’s name, she pointed out, comes from a series of teachings in the Chinese divination text “I Ching” about bringing light into the dark. The theater was founded in 1978 on the principle that theater can be a powerful form of social, political and spiritual activism. In that vein, First Voices Festival shines light on the undertold histories of Georgia’s Indigenous people.
The festival was born in 2022 out of a partnership between 7 Stages, the L5P Historic Cultural District and Business Association and Turtle Island Trading Co., an Indigenous-owned store in Little Five Points that sells jewelry, art and crafts made by Native American people from across the globe.
Just down the street from 7 Stages, on Moreland Avenue, Turtle Island features wares made of turquoise by Navajo artists in Arizona, silver by the Zuni in New Mexico, llama wool by the Kichwa in the Ecuadorian Andes and footwear by the Guna in Colombia.
Carmen Halagahu, Turtle Island’s co-owner, curates the store and the roster of vendors for the First Voices Festival Powwow. Her co-owner and partner, the artist Yellowbird, and Yellowbird’s brother, Buffalo, largely spearheaded the festival.
Buffalo curates and emcees the Powwow, which takes place outdoors on Austin Avenue and welcomes members from a wide range of tribal nations from across the country — including Cherokee, Lakota, Seminole and Choctaw — to dance, sing, drum and tell stories.
Yellowbird and Buffalo are citizens of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota. Buffalo has curated powwows for years under the brand Zintkala Zi Powwow in Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia. Harjo participates on his flute.
After this weekend’s powwow,, First Voices Festival will present a performance on Nov. 21 at 7 Stages Theatre in partnership with Out of Hand Theater called “Say Their Names.”
Written by Marcie Rendon, a citizen of the white Earth Nation, the performance uses spoken word, film clips and live performance to address the nearly 5,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across the United States and Canada. A community conversation follows.
The following Friday, Nov. 28, the Plaza Theatre will screen “She Cried That Day,” a documentary by Georgia State graduate and director Amanda Erickson. The film also explores the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls crisis through the story of Christine Means, the sister of Dione Thomas, an Indigenous woman who was murdered in 2015. Means and her family have spent years questioning the circumstances of Thomas’ death and advocating for justice for Indigenous women.
First Voices Festival, Buffalo emphasized, is as much about education as it is celebration.
IF YOU GO
Powwow (presented by Zintkala Zi Powwow). Through Sunday. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Outdoors. 1136 Austin Ave. NE, Atlanta. Free.
“Say Their Names.” Nov. 21. 7:30 p.m. 7 Stages Theatre. 1105 Euclid Ave. NE, Atlanta. Free. RSVP encouraged. 7stages.org/shows/first-voices-festival-2025/
“She Cried That Day.” Nov. 28. 7 p.m. Plaza Theatre. 1049 Ponce De Leon Ave. NE, Atlanta. $16. plazaatlanta.com/movie/first-voices-fest-she-cried-that-day/
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