Collective Spirit Podcast

S2E22: Wakaya Wells (Choctaw Nation)

• First Peoples Fund • Season 2 • Episode 22

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When Wakaya Wells, a two-spirit poet from the Choctaw Nation, speaks of the sanctuary they found in writing, it's more than just words on a page—it's a testament to the power of self-expression in navigating one's identity. Our latest episode invites listeners into Wakaya's inspiring journey, revealing how education at Dartmouth and the Institute of American Indian Arts became the forge for their transformation into a fiction writer and a voice within their respective communities. Their narrative is a beacon for anyone who's wrestled with inner turmoil, demonstrating how one can channel the chaos of conflicting ideologies and mixed emotions into a wellspring of strength and enlightenment.

Speaker 1:

I think about living with a mental illness and that there's good and bad and there's gifts that it brings, and maybe sometimes you would call what the experience is like a curse as well. But I try to hold that up in that balance and think about how things can be both frightening and dangerous and yet also protective.

Speaker 2:

First Peoples Fund presents the Collective Spirit Podcast. The Collective Spirit moves each of us to stand up and make a difference, to pass on ancestral knowledge and simply extend a hand of generosity. The Collective Spirit Podcast features Native artists and culture bearers who discuss the power of Indigenous art and culture. We discuss the power of Indigenous art and culture.

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone, my name is Wakaya Wells. I'm a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and I currently live in Minneapolis, minnesota. But I was born and raised in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma in the 10 and a half counties, the reservation there right along the Texas border. I'm a poet, I'm a writer and then I'm a storyteller as well. When I was a kid probably around in middle school I grew up in the Bible Belt and growing up church was a big deal to me, to my family and my life and my younger years. I grew up in a family church and was surrounded by loved ones and uplifting and a lot of love. And then, when some of my family members my grandparents, passed away, we started going to the Southern Baptist Church, and I'm two-spirit. I didn't have those words when I was that young, but I do now. Growing up queer in a Southern Baptist Church was really challenging, and so there was a lot I was processing at the time and didn't really have anyone to talk to, and so I started writing and I think it was to process guilt and shame and things like sin, which I think is a Christian word or idea, and process that, and so I had this math notebook and used to sit and write and try and reconcile my relationship with my God at the time and that's how it started. I don't remember being in school or going to class or anything like that. It just came out of necessity and a desire to have some healing and so that was my introduction as a kid. And then over time different things were introduced to me, or through school or through. My sister told me about spoken word poetry once she had went off to college and learned about that, and so I got into that and In college it was taking some classes. Growing up in the Choctaw Nation in the town I was in it was, I think I've always been a person that learned just as much outside of the classroom as I did in it. And the town I grew up in was really diverse and had a lot of characters and there was a large freedman community of Choct Freedmen. There was a large circus population, so they called it Circus City, usa. So I think growing up there and being amongst different folks and going to public school and not always having resources, and so that's really had an effect on me and my outlook and how I understand the world, for better or worse.

Speaker 1:

And then I went to college at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. I feel like it was this opportunity to really learn and understand myself better and grow and figure out who I was. And then later I found myself at Institute of American Indian Arts getting creative writing. I had never really wrote fiction and I applied for fiction and poetry and I was like I've been writing poetry a long time, maybe I should learn something new and maybe my work deserves to be longer than a page or two. Maybe the stories I'm telling are longer and need more space. And so I was like I'll write fiction, I'll try to write fiction. And so that's what I did there and was surrounded by amazing native writers, talented, brilliant people and mentors and students alike. Just a lot of powerful conversations happen at that place and that part of the world, and so that's set me on this journey that I'm on now and how I found my way to First People's Fund as well.

Speaker 1:

My identities and who I am shape my work a lot and my experience growing up where I grew up, and so I always say it goes back to healing. I think I write to heal. I think that's why I sit with things and why I type them into my phone and why I need to get away sometimes and put words to what I'm feeling. I think it's to heal, so that I can look back on things and not say, oh, that was just trauma. That was trauma that I experienced. I can, I'm okay with saying that, but I would also like to learn from it and grow from it and heal from it and it not continue to cause harm to me, and so I think that's what inspires me to do what I do.

Speaker 1:

And then, obviously, I guess I would just say I'm crazy, like I have bipolar disorder, and I play a lot with this idea of madness and what we deem crazy. In the Choctaw language, the word for crazy is tasimbo, and what I've been told about it is that it can be good and bad. And so I think that idea of being good and bad really finds its way into what I write about and the experience of living with mental illness and how the Western world understands something like bipolar disorder, what the doctors tell me and then what I experienced for myself and the struggles and the suffering that I go through. And, interestingly enough, when I was in my program at IAIA, I was starting to write the novel that I'm working on now and it's very autobiographical, which I think probably a lot of first novels for writers are, and I had a mentor say I wonder what this character you're writing about, this young person who is deemed crazy by the world. I wonder what their role would have been 200 years ago. And that comment has really hung with me for a long time because Native people, we dream, we're dreamers and we're healers and we carry medicine with us and there's things that we did back then that I think we still do today.

Speaker 1:

And I think about that a lot when I think about living with a mental illness and that there's good and bad and there's gifts that it brings, and maybe sometimes you would call what the experience is like a curse as well.

Speaker 1:

The experience is like a curse as well, but I try to hold that up in that balance and think about how things can be both frightening and dangerous and yet also dangerous protective For me and my belief system. For Choctaws. We have the diamondback rattlesnake, who we revere, so it's on all of our clothing. All the diamonds is where it comes from, and so we revere this snake because it used to protect over our gardens and our livelihoods and would keep our crops safe, and I don't know. There's a balance to that and an understanding of you're meant to fear this thing and yet it's also protecting you and taking care of an extension of yourself, and we used it for other medicine as well. But I think the spiritual understanding of that for me has been the good and the bad and the balance of the two, and so that's something that also inspires my work the collective spirit podcast is produced by first people's fund, whose mission is to honor and support indigenous artists and culture bearers through grant making, initiatives, mentorship.

Speaker 2:

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