Kelsey Van Elt

The artist Ikwe (Kelsey Van Elt) visited an abandoned school on Fond du Lac to record ambient sounds and to use those to tell the story of former student of the school, her great grandma Harriet Smith.

Image: Kelsey Van Elt  [credit: First Nations Fund website]
Audio: AANIKOOBIJIGAN GIKINOO’ AMAADIIWIGAMIG. Great Grandmother’s School: That’s How Some Things Go…, featuring:
   - Marjorie Ellison (Kelsey’s Grandmother)

   - Kino Galbraith (Videographer)

   - Ikwe (Sound artist)
AND
"Cranes in the Sky” by Kelsey Van Elt, aka Kelsey Pyro

Creators and Guests

BA

Producer

Britt Aamodt

What is Fond du Lac Arts?

Fond du Lac Arts is a series exploring the stories, creative expression, and craftsmanship of Fond du Lac artists from a range of disciplines.

This project is produced by AMPERS, Diverse Radio for Minnesota’s Communities in partnership with WGZS, the Radio Voice of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

INTRO: You are listening to Fond du Lac Arts: Community through the Creative Arts.

KELSEY: To me sound art is a way of using different sounds in order to tell a story.

HOST: Kelsey Van Elt, a Fond du Lac descendantt of the Fond du Lac Band, is a music producer, vocalist, songwriter, storyteller and sound artist who also goes by Ikwe.

KELSEY: So it could be through traditional music composition and song writing.

HOST: But in the past few years, she’s taken her sound art into the field, doing recordings of spaces and bringing them back to her home studio to manipulate and layer it with music, spoken word, noise. That quest brought her to the Fond du Lac Reservation to do some recording and dig into family history.

KELSEY: I was fortunate to grow up very closely with my great grandmother Harriet Smith, who was the last Native speaker of our language in our family. There's an abandoned schoolhouse buried in the woods on Fond du Lac, and it's where my great grandmother used to go to school.

HOST: She and her partner, a film artist and photographer, found this piece of her ancestor’s history during a winter thaw.

KELSEY: And the snow was melting. So there's all these sounds of water dripping and ice falling away.

HOST: She paired the film and the soundtrack of a real space with a phone call to her grandmother, Harriet’s daughter.

KELSEY: Her name is Marge, and she's talking about how she was not taught our language by her mother and her aunts and about losing the language. So you put the sound of my grandmother's storytelling with the audio of this melting snow and this falling apart abandoned school house, and it becomes a story about just this assimilation, how Indigenous youth were forced to speak English.

HOST: Kelsey Van Elt called the film and sound art story Great Grandmother’s School: That’s How Some Things Go….

OUTRO: Fond du Lac Arts is produced by AMPERS and WGZS, the radio voice of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, with support from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.