The Evening Star came to Juneau during Celebration on her Indigequeer tour. She says she wants her shows to be a space for people who often don’t feel like they can be themselves elsewhere. The Evening Star performs at the Crystal Saloon in Juneau on June 11, 2024. (Ḵaachgóon Rochelle Smallwood/Raven’s Tail Studio)
This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
The Evening Star is a Pawnee and adopted Athabascan performer who’s known for storytelling, comedy, making music, and DJing. She came to Juneau during Celebration on her Indigequeer tour.
She says she wants her shows to be a space for people who often don’t feel like they can be themselves elsewhere.
A warning: this story contains mentions of violence against transgender people.
Listen:
https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/TV_EveningStar.mp3
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
The Evening Star:
Hi everybody. My name is the Evening Star. If you’re at home, you can say, “Hello, Evening Star.” I hope that you did it. Also known as Howie Echo-Hawk. I’m on the Indigequeer Tour. It’s this thing that I’m doing where I’m going all over the place and just having as good a time as I possibly can with all the people that I like.
Being Native means that at one point, my identity wasn’t put in a little box and separated and kept in a neat little container over here. Before I knew I was Native, I just was. And before I knew I was queer, I just was. And before oppression, that’s what we were.
Nex Benedict was a young trans Choctaw person in Oklahoma who died because of bullying and not being able to be trans. You know, well, being trans and having the world say that that was not okay.
The Evening Star performs at the Crystal Saloon in Juneau on June 11, 2024. (Ḵaachgóon Rochelle Smallwood/Raven’s Tail Studio)
I am from the interior of Alaska. It was a really — and continues to be — a very racist place for Native people. And I left when I was 17, in large part due to being so closeted and had to go somewhere else to find my find out who I was, which was sad, but also a blessing, that I was able to do it. Because people like Nex Benedict — and many, many, many others who we will never know the names of also — don’t get a chance to leave. They don’t make it.
It’s hard to explain, because it’s not — I could say, like, “Yeah, I DJ, I play live music.” I have guest performers. There’s drag. There’s like, burlesque moments, there’s a lot. But I think at the core of it, it’s community. It’s like being able to let go.
It became very clear to me that it wasn’t just a dance party, because people would just often come to me crying, after dancing really hard to Bad Bunny.
Young people of many different ethnicities would come to me and just say, like, “Oh, this is so amazing. This is a place where I feel very normal.”
And that meant a lot. But I also had a boarding school survivor come to all my events and tell me that he literally never thought it’d be possible to be in a room like that. And, you know, this always gets me, because it’s just such an honor, and it still is such an honor to be able to provide something for people who feel like they don’t ever get that chance.
Because I am that person. You know, I grew up extremely conservative in Alaska and didn’t dream that I could ever come back and do anything like this. This was not even close to my wildest dreams. Like my wildest dreams was like, “I hope I get a good job and I don’t die when I’m 30.”
And that’s why when I say, “Go make your own version.” I mean it like, go, do, have fun. Go enjoy yourself. Go play some music. Why are we out here doing anything? But that every moment that we are talking and worrying about whatever we could be making music. Why do any of this? What is this all for? If we can’t hang out, you know?