By Jo Elliot ’28
By Jo Elliott ’28
“Loksi’ Shaali’,” the first-ever opera to be sung entirely in a Native American language, premiered on the East Coast in Mount Holyoke’s own Abbey Memorial Chapel on Friday, Feb. 28. The two-act opera is performed in Chickasaw and was created by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, a revolutionary figure for bringing Native American voices to opera.
The performance featured Mount Holyoke’s Symphony Orchestra, Glee Club and Chamber Singers and was conducted by Director of Orchestral Studies Tianhui Ng. The opera featured several distinguished singers, including Cristina Maria Castro, Charles Calotta, Kirsten C. Kunkle, Nicole Van Every, Mark Billy and Grant Youngblood.
The opera takes place approximately a thousand years ago on the ancestral land of the Chickasaw tribe. It opens with a young Chickasaw girl, Loksi' — meaning “Turtle” — who regains confidence in herself after gaining wisdom from her grandmother and Old Turtle. According to a press release on the Mount Holyoke College website, “the young girl learns she must leave home to find her purpose. She sets out on a long woodland journey, returning a cultural hero, enriched by the divine gift of the turtle shell shakers and knowledge of the Chickasaw people’s new homelands.”
The production of the opera started in 2021. Tianhui Ng and the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra received a Mellon Foundation Five College Native American Indigenous Studies Grant, in order to develop the world’s first opera sung entirely in a Native American language. The grant allowed for libretto, piano-vocal and orchestra workshops to occur. In addition, Tate had a semester-long residency with the students to allow for “critical conversations surrounding the performance practice of Native American work.”
Zoya Agboatwalla ’28 stated, “We have been preparing for the opera almost all semester, even having extra classes to make sure that it was sung in the way that the director and the composer intended. Our preparation extended beyond just learning the music. We studied the story and meaning behind the opera, which deepened our understanding and made the performance more powerful.”
Agboatwalla also mentioned that the main challenge they faced around producing the opera “stemmed from the length of the opera itself. Throughout rehearsals, sections were frequently cut or reintroduced, meaning no two performers had identical scores. This required us to rely heavily on our ears and one another rather than just reading and following a fixed score.”
According to Ainsley Morrison ’25, President of the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra and co-principal violist, “This was not our first time working directly with a composer. The music department and the orchestra frequently commission pieces from composers. However, this was the first time we have had an in-person interface with a composer since the pandemic.”
“The Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra works with the choral forces at least once a year at the Family and Friends performance, and working together is not unusual,” Morrison said. “The scale of this particular performance was unusual, as we were working not only with our fellow student ensembles, but with renowned Native American opera singers from all over the country, and with many local professional singers and instrumentalists.”
The Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra has plans to continue collaborating with the Chamber Singers and Glee Club. “The Mount Holyoke Symphony will be performing on April 18 with Han Chen, a professional pianist,” Morrison said. “The orchestra will have our usual collaboration with Glee Club, Chorale, and Chamber Singers at the Family and Friends Concert in the fall.”
Madeline Diesl ’28 contributed fact-checking.
