Rap artist, musician, poet, performer, and visual artist, born in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1972.
Aisa Warden (previously known as Allison Akootchook Warden, or occasionally Allison Warden) was born in 1972 in Fairbanks, Alaska. Aisa Warden is Iñupiaq and a tribal member of the Native Village of Kaktovik, with family roots in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska. She was raised in the Presbyterian faith by her mother, a pastor. In the documentary WE UP: Indigenous Hip-Hop of the Circumpolar North (2018), she recounted living with her mother in a trailer park after her parents’ divorce when she was two years old. There, she experienced poverty and racism. Seeking a creative outlet first through theatre, then through hip-hop and poetry, allowed her to make sense of these experiences.
In 2003, Aisa Warden completed a certificate in audio engineering at the Institute of Audio Research in New York City. Between 2008 and 2016, she was guided in her artistic practice between by her mentor and collaborator, James Luna (1950–2016), a Mexican-American artist of Indigenous Puyukitchum and Ipai origin. Committed to the revitalization of traditional Inuit marking (tattooing), she trained with Marjorie Tahbone in 2016. She was also guided in her learning of the Iñupiaq language by Edna Ahgeak in 2018. Between 2009 and 2018, she worked as a teacher and artist-in-residence in the context of school programs and workshops, where she taught art to people of all ages.
Aisa Warden has been active as a poet, rapper, and interdisciplinary artist since 2003. She has performed and exhibited her works in Canada, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and the USA. Her practice transcends disciplinary boundaries to include performance, installations, audiovisual creations, music, rap, and poetry. She explores cultural and identity-related themes linked to the safeguarding and revitalization of Iñupiaq language and culture. The environment and the impact of climate change in the Arctic are also recurring themes in her work.
She began learning to rap at 22, in the mid-1990s, but only started producing her own songs from 2003 onwards. She took the stage name AKU-MATU, which combines the name of her amau (great-grandfather), Akootchook, with the name of her attata (great-uncle), Matumeak, a well-known composer and director of an Inupiat choir. In 2010, she began collaborating with Waylon Dungan, also known as WD4D. Aisa Warden uses hip-hop as a tool to revitalize the Iñupiaq language, gearing it particularly towards younger audiences and often incorporating words and sentences in Iñupiaq into her songs. She portrays various characters in her songs, such as animals or ancestors, as in Ancestor From the Future (2017). She is also a member of the music group Yada Di along with trumpeter Yngvil Vatn Guttu and composer and violinist Elena Lukina. In 2013, Katie Medred, a journalist at the Anchorage Press, described this group as an anomaly due to its varied musical influences, its experimental nature which eludes any particular genre, and its integration of performance art elements. In 2016, Aisa Warden cofounded the traditional Inupiat dance group Kisaġvigmiut with her cousin Isaiah Patkutaq McKenzie.
In the 2010s, Aisa Warden brought her musical activity to the big screen, promoting Indigenous American rap to a wider public. She played the role of a rap artist in the short film Feels Good (2016), directed by Andrew Okpeaha McLean and presented at the ImagiNative film festival. A few years earlier, she had also starred in a feature film by the same director, On the Ice (2011). In 2018, she appeared in the documentary WE UP: Indigenous Hip-Hop of the circumpolar North, produced by the Anchorage Museum (Alaska).
Aisa Warden’s work as a rapper is also nourished by her work as a poet. In 2013, she began publishing “twitter poems,” poems composed of 140 characters or less, on the social network Twitter (now X). Her poems were then presented as an installation at the exhibition Unsettled, curated by JoAnn Northrup and Ed Ruscha for the Nevada Museum of Art in 2017. From 2018 to 2023, the twitter poems were exhibited at the Anchorage Museum. The museum also published a collection of these poems, written between November 24, 2013, and March 3, 2017, in a small, limited-edition book, titled Taimanisaaq/Akkupak. (Long Long Time Ago / Right Now). Twitter Poems (2017). In 2018, Aisa Warden took part in the multimedia project Insidious Rising, produced in collaboration with Google Arts and Culture, which explored both present and future consequences of melting glaciers.
Since then, Aisa Warden has drifted away from rap and turned toward poetry. She has published poems in several magazines and journals, in which she tackles themes such as the environment, the transmission of knowledge, language, and land acknowledgement. Her poem “we acknowledge ourselves” was published in Poetry in 2022 for a special issue on land acknowledgement. Her poem “let’s try it this way for the last ones” was published in Anomaly magazine in 2023.
Since 2008, Aisa Warden has presented several performances and installations as an interdisciplinary artist. In 2008, she developed the performance Ode to the Polar Bear for the Out North Theatre (Anchorage). The show was subsequently presented in Alaska, Greenland, Finland, and London. This first performance led to a new creation, All Polar Bears, which premiered in 2011 at Pangea World Theater (USA). These two performances, both focusing on the figure of the polar bear, looked critically at the ecological crisis and its impact on Alaska’s Indigenous peoples from an ecofeminist, decolonial perspective. In 2016, Aisa Warden presented her first solo exhibition, Unipkaaġusiksuġuvik (the place of the future/ancient) at the Anchorage Museum; she described it as a “performative social practice installation.” Unipkaaġusiksuġuvik adopted the spatial organization and function of a qargi, an Inupiat community space and place of learning and celebration. The installation combined archives, artifacts, technological objects and artistic creation, exploring the links between past, present and future from an Inupiat point of view. The two-month exhibition was also punctuated by performances, workshops and conferences by Aisa Warden and other Indigenous artists and activists. In 2017, Aisa Warden developed the performance siku/siku, which explores the trauma of colonization by focusing on the issue of addiction. Siku is the Iñupiaq word for ice, but can also be used to refer to methamphetamines. In this performance, Aisa Warden played two different versions of the same character: first a meth user; then a person in traditional clothing engaged in the revitalization of the Iñupiaq language. First presented at the Arctic Arts Summit (Norway) in 2018, the performance has since been staged several more times. In 2022, Aisa Warden presented the performance Taigruaq, created in collaboration with Greenlandic artist Aqqalu Berthelsen, at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Written entirely in Iñupiaq, this piece dealt with oil and its impact on the environment.
In 2012, Aisa Warden received the Rasmuson Foundation Award for an individual artist, in the performance category. She was then awarded the Alaska Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities in 2015. In 2016, she appeared on the annual list of fifty climate leaders to watch complied by independent media outlet Grist. She is also the recipient of several grants in music, interdisciplinary, and performance arts.
Aisa Warden lived in Anchorage for many years, but has since 2024 been living in Texas (USA).
Alaska Inupiaq artist Aisa Warden. Interview with Daniel Chartier
“We acknowledge ourselves” read by Iñupiaq artist Aisa Warden
“Let's try it this way for the last ones” read by Iñupiaq artist Aisa Warden