Preview – Overflow Radio: Šakotayišol Nunuš Constellation

Many years before it was called “Houston,” this land was named “Šakotayišol Nunuš”—loosely translated as “Bear creek town.” The Atakapa Ishak Nation lived across the southern Texas and Louisiana coasts, naming this region of their homeland well before they came in contact with European colonizers. Today, the Nation’s people help make up Houston’s urban Indigenous population and continue to preserve their history. 

Overflow Radio: Šakotayišol Nunuš Constellation is Emily Johnson / Catalyst’s newest project, which spotlights First Nations and Indigenous thinkers and artists. Johnson, a member of the Yup’ik Nation, utilizes her award-winning experience as a large-scale, social choreographer to weave together a multi-elemental work. Overflow Radio includes “performance, skill-share, planting of 1000 trees, and radio transmission from across territories.” The project is hosted by DiverseWorks—a Houston-based arts organization committed to developing “decolonial frameworks that support land-back efforts, increase knowledge of Indigenous and Native history/cultural memory, and imagine Indigenous futures.”

Johnson, a Bessie Award-winner and Guggenheim Fellow, grew up on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and is now based in New York City (Lenapehoking). “Since 1998, Emily’s large-scale performance gatherings insist thrivance, radical reworlding, and just futures. Her gatherings function as portals and care processions, engaging audienceship within and through space, time, environment—interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, histories and role in building futures (catalystdance.com).”

Johnson/Catalyst’s “Overflow Radio is organized around four themes: land, body, making, and protection,” explains Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, DiverseWork’s Curator and Xandra Eden, Executive Director. As part of the expansive artwork, Johnson invites audiences to gather upon a large quilt where they listen to live radio broadcasts. The transmitted radio waves will connect listeners to real-time stories, poems, and contemplations narrated by celebrated First Nations and Indigenous scholars, authors, and theorists broadcasting live from their home territories. “We’ll traverse together, transcending colonial borders, languages and time,” says Johnson.

The quilt in the exhibit holds a distinct purpose: food justice. Titled Our Future, Our Food: Community Quilt, conceived by Johnson and designed by textile artist Korina Emmerich, this element of Overflow Radio is a “shared canvas where knowledge, experiences, and ideas for a more just food system are literally and symbolically woven together,” says Emmerich. Participates will congregate to share skills, collaborate, learn, and commune around the quilt’s beehive-inspired hexagons—an apropos symbol of collective action leading to flourishment. 

Overflow Radio’s connection to and reverence for nature doesn’t end there. The work organizes local partners to plant 1,000 native trees and orchestrates their care. “Mapping and living archive methods including zines, a living map, app, and social media, document each tree’s location, name, voice, growing/fruiting cycles, care needs, and teaches connection in relation to Indigenous lands, waters, place names (catalystdance.com).” With much hope, after the performance elements of Overflow Radio conclude, these trees will continue on—growing, housing, shading, and nourishing the land.

Also in this work, Johnson uses her extensive knowledge of choreography not in the traditional sense, but more so as an understanding of moving parts. She connects people, ideas, and modalities throughout this composition. Johnson’s ability to sew together these components like a quilter goes beyond the events taking place here in Houston from October 3-26. Also in October, Overflow Radio will premiere in Minneapolis (Mni Sóta Makoce). “Simultaneous with the live performances…and synchronized with [the] live radio broadcast, audiences and partners in further geographic regions are offered a toolkit to guide a constellation of listening gatherings at theaters, public spaces or private homes…(catalystdance.com).”

“Houston is home to a thriving urban Native American population comprising citizens from different tribal nations and traditions across the Americas… [this city’s] Indigenous histories have been obscured through displacement, shifting borders, warfare, and ongoing systems of land development and destruction,” explains DeHoyos Sauder and Eden. They continue: “We hope the public-facing aspect of this work will serve as a living model for how arts organizations can highlight community centered cultural work.”

See Overflow Radio: Šakotayišol Nunuš Constellation. October 3-24, 2026. DiverseWorks Gallery @ MATCH. Gallery Hours: 12pm – 6pm, Thursday – Saturday. For more information, visit diverseworks.org.