Frank Waln
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Affiliation: Sicangu Lakota Sioux
At 25-years-old, hip hop artist Frank Waln has made quite a
name for himself as the youngest person ever to win a Native American Music
Award, just one of the many accolades Frank has earned. Waln hails from the
Rosebud Sioux Reservation, a 1,400 square mile plot of land located about 100
miles southeast of the Badlands National Park. The Rosebud reservation is home
to roughly 20,000 Sicangu (meaning “Burnt Thing”) Lakota people and was
established in 1889 as part of the Great Sioux Settlement. Waln, like so many
others, was raised in a single-parent household by his mother after she found
Frank’s dad cheating on her.
As the story goes, one day while
Frank and his mother were on a long walk, Frank spotted a reflective object in
a ditch. The object turned out to be a CD, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP. Waln had only ever been exposed to country
songs and traditional Native music so when the terribly scratched CD worked and
Waln heard rap for the first time, he was awe-struck. “Oh my god, it blew my
mind,” Waln remembers, “He was telling my story. He was poor, having trouble
with his parents… He was using music to get out the frustration and anger
inside him.”
Although hip hop became an outlet
of catharsis for Waln, he still prioritized academics because “everyone around
me was saying be a doctor or a lawyer, so you can come back and help the
community.” Waln graduated valedictorian but still was denied at Ivy League
schools, some which he ironically has now been asked to perform at. But Waln
did receive a Gates Millennium Scholarship which allowed him to get off the
reservation for school. First Waln attended Creighton University in Omaha but realized
he could make a difference with his music and transferred to Columbia College
in Chicago.
In the time between Creighton and
Columbia Waln recalls a memorable encounter: “I was in the gas station [on the
reservation] and ran into an elder from back home. He asked what I was doing
and I said: ‘Yeah, I left Creighton. I don’t want to be a doctor anymore. I
want to do music.’ And he said, way back then: ‘Sometimes, music is the best
medicine.’”
Frank knows firsthand the salvation
music can offer, having had suicidal thoughts growing up and especially when
moving away from his support system on the reservation. “I hit rock bottom my
sophomore year at Creighton and I thought, ‘Why am I even here?’ Two things
saved me: Pouring myself into music and turning back to ceremony.” Waln
testifies that had he not been invested in thousand-year-old Lakota traditions,
such as the Sundance tradition, he’d certainly have committed suicide. The same
goes for music: “I was introverted and depressed,” Waln admits, “and music gave
me a way to work through all of that.”
In 2010, Frank formed the hip hop
group Nake Nula Waun with Andre Easter, Thomas Schmidt and Kodi DeNoyer. The
group name is a traditional Lakota phrase “I am always ready, at all times, for
anything” that embodies a broader ‘warrior’ philosophy of evolution and
progress. Waln produced and released their subsequent album, Scars and Bars, without any record
company or middle man. It was important for Waln to keep his creative control,
to tell the Native story accurately for the first time.
Regarding his music, Waln cannot be
pigeonholed as only an ‘Indian-rapper’ but rather Waln is a rapper that is
telling his personal story. Waln’s personal fstruggles may be indicative or
representative of his broader community, but his words are always his own. “I
like to tell stories,” Waln explains, “I’m telling my story; I’m telling my
life.”
A major theme that has haunted Waln
is the feeling of being invisible, a feeling that was amplified when he left
the reservation for school. When Waln polled classmates on the number of
federally recognized tribes, their answer was 5 to 20 (actual number is 566).
“There are people who aren’t even aware that we exist in real life,” Waln says,
“They go to museums and see exhibits about Native Americans and think we’re a
people of the past. But we’re a people with a past, not of a past.” This has
lead to what Waln calls “symbolic annihilation,” a misrepresentation of modern
Native Americans. In “Hear Me Cry” Waln details this phenomenon: “I was born
red, stained with the blood of genocide/ Now all mascots the only way that I'm
identified/ Blackhawk, Red Skin, the image of our dead men/ Dressed in the
headdress, my people it's depressing.”
Not only
does the general public shun the notion of modern Native peoples, but so too
does the government try to politically undermine Native communities. Waln’s
vehement opposition to the Keystone Pipeline initiative stems from the United
States government’s oppression. “For me, and I think for a lot of Indigenous
folks, resisting this natural energy extraction on our treaty lands is just to
get [the U.S. and Canada] to honor the original treaties,” Waln explains. “How
can American call itself the great country in the world if it’s guilty of
genocide and it doesn’t even honor the documents that built the country?”
In his song “Oil 4 Blood,” Waln
envisions the cultural tables turned: “Give youth an outlet, disadvantaged
prodigies/ Feed these Republicans all our commodities/ Put them on the rez from
the day they’re born/ They won’t survive ‘cause their cancer is airborne/ Put
them in our schools, put them in our shoes/ Take away their money and give them
our blues/ Make everything red.” These actions may seem extreme, but they are
parallel to the mistreatment the government and dominant-culture Americans have
bestowed upon Native peoples. Waln seeks to take back his freedom and his
autonomy, asserting “To my home and my ancestors I am loyal/ Build that
pipeline and I’m burning down your oil.”
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