First Voices Festival in Little Five Points celebrates 4 years

Carmen Halagahu has co-owned the Turtle Island Trading Company with her business partner, Yellowbird, for four years. Originally founded in 1988 as Coyote Trading, Halagahu and Yellowbird rebranded the storefront to Turtle Island Trading in 2021 when they bought the business from its original owner. Following the purchase, Turtle Island became one of the few businesses in Metro Atlanta with a Native American owner whose mission is showcasing authentic Native-made jewelry, clothes, arts and crafts from its colorful storefront on Moreland Avenue.

“We thought, well, most of all the cultural powwows that happened around Atlanta are not run by indigenous people,” said Halagahu as she reflected on the origins of the First Voices Festival. “We always felt like we wanted to have our own seat at the table, so to speak — do things where indigenous people are centered and involved in producing cultural events.”

Halagahu’s business partner Yellowbird is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota. He makes some of the items for sale at Turtle Island Trading. “Once you do arts by hand, you kind of understand what the other artists do, and we try to promote them too,” said Yellowbird. “So we give it to the public. And they wear it as a living history, as a cloak of education.”

“We wanted a celebration of indigenous cultures, plural,” added Halagahu. “There’s no such thing as a [single] Native American culture, just like there’s no such thing as a [single] European culture.” 

In 2022, the Turtle Island Trading Company teamed up with the L5P Historic Cultural District & Business Association and the neighborhood’s local professional theater, 7 Stages. Together, the three entities planned the inaugural First Voices Festival with Halagahu as the vendor coordinator and Yellowbird’s brother Buffalo as the powwow creative director.

“There was this gorgeous flow of relationship and sharing in that leadership and ensuring that indigenous people [were] at the table, designing what it looks like,” said Heidi S. Howard, 7 Stages artistic director and main producer for the festival.

Before European colonization, the Muscogee (also known as Mvskoke) people lived throughout much of Georgia and the Southeast, with their cultural center located at Ocmulgee in Macon. In the 1820s and ’30s, federal and state governments ethnically cleansed most Muscogee from their lands during what became known as the Trail of Tears. “7 Stages has resided on the Muscogee land for 47 years. What are we doing to honor these people?” mused Howard.

Now in its fourth year, the First Voices Festival has become a signature event in Little 5 Points, and it is the first to bring indigenous cultures and a powwow within Atlanta’s city limits. This year, the Festival commences on November 14 with the Art of Activism — a night of storytelling, music and education about traditional foods. Attendees will learn firsthand about how the pumpkin, a staple of Native diets, took the place of the turnip for Halloween from native Muscogee speaker William Harjo. One of only about 500 native Muscogee speakers in the country, Harjo will also play flute, tell stories and serve sofkey, a sour corn mixture that his ancestors ate while they were forced to march along the Trail of Tears.

The following two days, Saturday and Sunday November 15 and November 16, programming will include an outdoor powwow at the soccer field on Austin Avenue. The dance will be presented by Zintkala Zi Pow Wow, led by Buffalo, and will include traditional drumming and dancing. Visitors can enjoy traditional Native food such as fried bread and buffalo burgers, plus plenty of indigenous vendors and demonstrations. “It’s a great opportunity for everybody to soak up the heritage, the culture, the songs and dance and drums, the vibratory world,” said Yellowbird, whose brother Buffalo has been on the powwow trail since the ’90s.

For the last two events of this year’s program, the First Voices will change tone to spotlight the increasing murders and kidnappings of indigenous women, which has become a crisis in many Native communities. On Friday, November 21, a staged presentation will include filmed and live performances titled Say Their Names, written by Marcie Rendon, a multidisciplinarian writer and member of the White Earth Nation in Minnesota. Along that same theme, on the evening of Friday, November 28, First Voices will close with a screening at the Plaza Theatre of the documentary She Cried That Day, which investigates indigenous femicides. This screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker Amanda Erickson, a San Carlos Apache of the White Water Clan.

Through this comprehensive offering and extensive slate of events, First Voices is leaning into the plurality and complexity of Native cultures and experiences. The Festival’s goal is to patronize First Nations vendors as well as pay dancers, designers and artists. Although this Festival is mostly free (adult tickets for the screening at the Plaza cost $16.49 each), 7 Stages also charges a $1 “land use fee” for all of its events year-round. 

“We started [this] about five years ago,” said Howard. “There was all this popularity around land acknowledgements, but it felt like talk and production. So we began charging a ‘land-use fee,’ a one-dollar charge for every ticket.” The proceeds go to help native individuals and organizations alike, from providing funds to a Mvskoke language program in Oklahoma to paying for repairs of William Harjo’s home when it was flooded.

Like many arts and culture organizations coping with cuts in grants and federal funding from the Trump administration, it’s been a difficult year to find funds for such an ambitious undertaking. And yet, the coalition of Turtle Island Trading Company, 7 Stages Theatre and the L5P Historic Cultural District have successfully pulled it off, presenting just as many happenings as in previous years.

“7 Stages always gave voice to marginalized and underrepresented people and communities,” said Halagahu. “They’ve always recognized that they’re on Muscogee land. That there were people here before.”

And those people are still here.

For more information about the fourth annual First Voices Festival, head over to the 7 Stages Website.

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Jeff Dingler is an Atlanta-based author and entertainer. A graduate of Skidmore College with an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University, he’s written for New York Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tiny Love, Newsweek, WIRED, Salmagundi and Flash Fiction Magazine. More information at jeffdingler.org.