Preface

Many of the Indigenous leaders I have come to know in working on this book have modeled the practice of introducing oneself as a respectful way to begin, so that you know where the person offering their voice is coming from, what informs them, and where they are—or are not—in relation to you. And that everything starts with respect.

I was born in Brooklyn, Lenape territory, and grew up in rural New England, mostly eastern Connecticut, on Mohegan land near Mashantucket Pequot land (before federal recognition, before Foxwoods Casino), and New Hampshire, Abenaki land, where my parents were raised and my grandparents lived. I am a third- to tenth-generation settler to this continent, with ancestors from Wales, England, Ireland, and—way back—France via French Canada. Stories go, my maternal great grandfather spoke the language (Welsh)—rare for his time—and was a beloved fixture in his community, kids trailing after him, always singing.1 I’ve traced my Irish ancestors to the tenant farm in Kilkenny from which they were likely evicted during the Great Famine. Other ancestors have been on this continent longer, for generations, mostly in what I was taught to call the Lake Champlain region of New York State and Vermont, some as an active part of the battles to colonize there.2 At my high school in rural eastern Connecticut, we were the “Sachems” (an Eastern Algonquian word for “chief”). Our yearbook showed the profile of a man’s head, wearing a headband, with feathers.3 Indians, we knew, used to be here: we sometimes found arrowheads in the farmers’ fields or in the acres of woods behind our home where I walked our dogs each afternoon, sometimes for hours, daydreaming, gathering hazelnuts, following the stream through seasons, careful not to kick the skunk cabbage in the spring. But any presence of Indigenous people on “our” land (we were told, or assumed, or at any rate never questioned) ended a long time ago.

I grew up, in other words, not with connection to Indigenous ancestry or Indigenous ties to the land where I lived or the woods I tromped through but on land steeped in an Indigenous “erasism”4 and white possession5 so pronounced that my ancestors’ roles as colonizing settlers on it didn’t even register. This erasism continued in the racist erasure of Native peoples perpetuated in the stereotypes at my high school, with its “Sachem” mascot, and in the pervasive, and inaccurate, presumptions of Indigenous absence circulating around me.

My connection to Indigenous studies came academically: through frustrations with the Eurocentric understandings of narrative structure presented to me in graduate schools. As I was struggling to articulate the issues I had with male-coded, violence-driven, and psychoanalytically based theories I was being taught, a newly hired assistant professor handed me a thick folder of articles on Native American literary theory. Reading it helped give structure to what I’d been sensing: there are ways of understanding story and meaning making that are grounded in relation, in connectivity, in the abundant and sustainable ongoingness of repetition—elements key to performance—even when written in words.6 I have been struggling for the three decades since to better feel the permeating presence and brilliance of these ways of knowing; to refuse the greed and myopic forgetting that enable a centering of Eurocentric presumptions in the learning (and local and Nation state) institutions I am part of; and to use the multiple privileges I have to actively register, address, and re-dress the structures that continue to violently enable these erasisms.

For more than twenty years, most of it as a critical dance studies scholar situated in the University of California, Riverside dance department on Íviatem (Cahuilla), Máara’yam (Serrano), Tóngva, and Payómkawichum (Luiseño) land, I have been witnessing the work of Indigenous dance artists whose lives and work defy erasism. I first met Daystar/Rosalie Jones at a Congress on Research in Dance conference in 1995. Later that decade and into the next, I spent time with the Aboriginal Dance Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada.7 In the years since, I have witnessed the work of dozens of dance artists who identify as Indigenous and who are making dance work in relation to their experiences of Indigeneity. I use “witness” intentionally, rather than seeing or watching—as a form of attending to the work that demands more than just seeing and extends well beyond watching in the ways it requires not just taking in but contributing something as well.8 This dancing and witnessing have taken me to multiple sites: to festivals, conferences, workshops, and performances across Canada; to Aotearoa (New Zealand), where I lived on a Fulbright scholarship for six months in 2009 (and met some of the dancers who are now deeply connected with this project); to different parts of a for-now-called United States that is (and has always been) an international space in which sovereign Native nations reside within the boundaries of larger settler nations in ways that refuse their presumed political and cultural centrality; and more recently, to Australia.

This witnessing has happened, over time, in relation with those who are dancing: in multiple locations; on various stages; in studios and galleries; at riversides and in other outdoor sites; over meals and drinks; across conference tables; in dance studios filled with our sweat and singing and silence, our speeches and blessings and prayers; on airplanes and in green rooms; in wrap parties; on hikes; over long Skype and Zoom and email discussions and Facebook messages. It has happened both joyfully and with struggle and discomfort, in ongoing relation.

This book is my attempt to grapple, as a settler dance scholar who has been thinking about the interrelations between Indigenous and modern dance histories for decades now, in relation with Indigenous dance artists I’ve come to know, with what I’ve felt Indigenous dance doing, saying, and enacting. It is my attempt to articulate as a witness, to them and now to you, some of what I’ve noticed in what I’ve experienced over this time—not to pinpoint or define or explain the dances’ meanings but as a description of what I’ve sensed as I’ve followed their shifts and moves. This grappling includes the understanding that what I’ve come to sense emerged from listening to and engaging with Indigenous dances, dance artists, and communities; the insights I register come from what and who I’ve engaged with and are not “my” insights per se. All the same, I of course do this registering as who I am, from the positions I’m in, and via the tools and perspectives I bring: as a literary studies–trained white settler dance scholar; a creative writer; a dancer; a cis-gendered female feminist; a mother; a supporter; an activator; an organizer; a pursuant, longtime Iyengar yoga practitioner and teacher; a longtime Jew-by-choice; a third-generation settler whose ancestors were colonized on other continents; a tenth-generation settler whose ancestors were active colonists to this continent; a teacher; a colleague; and a friend. My academic training, and its presumptions, in particular, I’ve come to realize more and more is at times in tension with the ways-of-being enacted in and around these dances. Negotiating that tension has become part of this project too. What is my role as witness to the articulations and enactments I’ve come to understand? What understandings am I—and am I not—in a position to share? And where what I’ve come to understand is appropriate for me to share, how do I do so in ways that acknowledge the collective thinking I’ve been witness to, the contributions I’ve made to collective thinking, and the specific individual voices and lines of thought I’ve followed? Can I hold the tensions between years of deep listening, sensing, and learning to what has been shared with me, what I’ve felt and pondered via that listening, and academic histories and habits (including those deeply ingrained in me) of white academics and artists being inspired by, and then absorbing and articulating, Indigenous ways of doing and being? Are academic modes of articulation and citation adequate tools for acknowledging and addressing these histories and habits? What ways of knowing do less “academic” modes of showing-as-saying, such as storytelling and first person narration, forward and reveal (and also perhaps conceal)?

This project is about relationality as a core way of being, and, however imperfect an approach this may be, its methodology includes not attempting to erase myself as part of the problems and possibilities it articulates in its storying. As I have been reminded again and again by the dance artist–scholar friends who circulate through, and with, this project, I am interconnected with it. The stories in and of this book thus include me, in personal relation with the dance artists I’ve come to know, and the work they do, and the work I do. The weaving of stories about these all into this book is part of its theorizing. We are mutually supportive professionals, critical interlocutors, coconspirators, coparticipants, with all the joys and challenges this entails.9 Rather than seeing this as a problematic ethnographic “over-rapport” with research “subjects,” as scholars of ethnography have suggested, I follow Indigenous scholars, including vogue scholar Cuauhtémoc Peranda, in reframing these close connections instead as an “ovah-rapport,” an over-the-top perfection of what Indigenous studies scholarship can be.10

In this book, I have also—while again noting the possibilities and problems in this approach—drawn on the perceptive capacities that dancing has offered me. I have spent years watching, listening, feeling, moving, waiting, witnessing, and sensing, in dance studios and theater seats and outside of them. Through years of practice, I have honed skills of physical and mental stamina and of sensory attentiveness.11 I have drawn on these skills throughout this project as I have tried to pay attention to what I’ve been witnessing as a dancer does, with heightened awareness of others’ bodily shifts and energies, with the input of my own energies and practiced skills. In writing out of these research practices, I follow all kinds of movements in the spaces around me and how I am in give-and-take relationships with them. What I am able to pay attention to is, of course, partial and dependent on the limits of what is available to and appropriate for me to see. As with all this project’s research practices, this approach is also filtered through my positionings, perspectives, perceptive capacities, and imbedded presumptions. Researching through dancing, like writing through storying, is not a pure or perfect tool. It is just one that I have tried to use as best I can.

I have intertwined these approaches with the skills I honed as a literary theorist and with standard “scholarship” practices of reading and discussing ideas, including all these practices’ flaws and presumptions.12 These ideas have included those put forth in Indigenous studies and Indigenous feminist scholarship, critical dance studies scholarship, cultural and performance studies, gender studies, critical race studies, and political economic theory. I have chosen to follow, and I think mostly succeeded in following, the primacy of dance and Indigenous studies thinkers throughout. My intention has been to engage how these thinkers’ approaches resonate with the dance making I’ve witnessed.

What I have sensed, via all these research methods and what they’ve illuminated, is how the dance making I’ve witnessed cultivates a foundational interrelational connectivity, feel, abundance, even in spaces where others see/wish to see only absence, loss, or scarcity, separation and isolation. The dance I discuss in what follows is not just about relationality but also enacts being in a relational, connective world of communities of care with responsibilities to one another, where you take as well as give, and give as well as take, and have to be willing to let what you give and take change you, and where it is sometimes difficult and tiring and not that fun to be responsible.

As I have engaged with these relational worlds, this book has itself become about shifting from the seat of a scholarship rooted in expertise and analytic assertion to a different way of working, one constituted in not-knowing and in trying out, seeing what impacts this has, and shifting in response. This involves responding as a dance maker might, even as this dance-centric way of witnessing, perceiving, and responding also necessarily draws on the histories, possibilities, and presumptions of one’s dance and other bodily practices.13 In the context of this project, this includes registering my own limits as a non-Indigenous scholar, as well as the limits, myopia, and hierarchies of domination that much of Western concert dance, and of settler dance scholarship, continues to enact.

This book thus tries out an academic storying of my attempts to pay attention, simply and with multiple layers of complexity, to this dance making and to some of the instances of relationality it enacts. My hope is that this narration will contribute to upholding the import of these relational ways of being and of the worlds they dance.