Choreographing Resurgence . . . and Resurge-instances

I see these dance work(ings) as powerful articulations and enactments of an Indigenous way of being grounded in radical (i.e., deeply rooted) relationality and as part of a widespread transformative Indigenous creative resurgence. This mobilizing of Indigenous knowledge “resurgence,” as seeded alternatives of transformed possibility often framed as Indigenous futurity, is at the core of many current sites of Indigenous scholarly and creative work, particularly that stemming from Indigenous scholars in Canada countering calls for “recognition.”26 Coulthard describes resurgence as a “self-reflective revitalization” of values and culture that “draws critically on the past with an eye to radically transform the colonial power relations that have come to dominate our present.”27 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson provides a gendered intervention into “resurgent” discourse via a focus on “queer resurgence” that challenges the perpetuation of heteropatriarchy in Indigenous activism as well as colonial structures.28 These, and many other Indigenous scholars and artists, point to how Indigenous resurgence enacts transformation of coloniality and its structures.29

And yet, writing about resurgence in the context of Indigenous dance artists, I also hesitate. To me, resurgence connotes something big, like a massive groundswell building into something large and prominent, something that was strong, then inactive, and now is becoming strong again. I sense that Indigenous dance is crucial Indigenous resurgence; it is rising again, and powerful. But what I’m also seeing activated is smaller than the term resurgence connotes. It happens in momentary instances that occur and recede, in experiences of perception and understanding that exist during the time of a performance or a gathering—and that resonate, but also shift and become quiet again, even as their resonance echoes outward; it lives in bits and pieces of ongoing knowledge. The radically resurgent relationality I am seeing as choreographed in these dance work(ing)s, in other words, is a registering of power in what flashes bright and then returns to smolder. It exists in the accumulation of these in time and over time, including during their dormancy. It reexists in experiences that perhaps only last an hour or two, or that only a small group of audience witnesses have felt or seen, but that nonetheless ripple.30 It reexists in the breathing back into a vibrant life of parts and pieces of cultural practices that nearly died through colonizations.31

A focus on the potency of the small and partial and momentary—on dance instances—seems particularly necessary given its potential to counter prevalent discourses around Indigeneity as partial. This includes familiar “blood,” “half-breed,” and not enough “blood quantum” legal and other rhetoric that has attempted to disappear Native people as “not Indian enough.” Likewise, it counters state political and economic force that registers import only in numbers that scale—in audience numbers, statistical significance, multiple registers of largeness. Kahnawà:ke Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson has called this a “disappearance through quantification” that she notes is particularly insidious in the United States, where “only” 1.7 percent of the population is quantified as Native. Simpson talks of “how deeply insignificant, in statistical terms, Indigenous peoples are in the States,” noting how “in regimes of governance, this is a way of legitimizing not paying attention.”32

In focusing in this book on what I call “resurge-instances,” I register the import, politically, of small movements, whatever their scale—and of paying attention to them. This includes work by a few dance artists within a much larger field of contemporary dance—work seen by “only” a handful of people, whose lives it affects. “Resurge-instances” include the work that happens between people in and around a dance class or performance—the talking and laughing and eating and caring for—that is not seen by anyone else.33 They also include the political force of the so-called partial: of the bits and fragments that hold and regenerate teachings, language, and knowledge.34 Focusing on “resurge-instances” thus registers how Indigenous dance works carry force even as they are momentary and small, and come forward and recede, and acknowledge not only continuities but also ruptures, as Cree scholar Karyn Recollet has powerfully voiced.35 A focus on “resurge-instances” calls for witnessing what may seem “statistically insignificant” but are part of an ongoing arc of Indigenous enactments functioning beyond settler-colonial structures. “Resurge-instances” are resonant flashes of relational ways of being that may or may not be all that prominent but are potent, and resound, and recur, and have the capacity to reset the whole system—including its destructive requirement for “growth” and larger and larger scales.

The Indigenous dance work I’ve witnessed, some of which I discuss in this project, thus activates both continuities and “resurge-instances” of relationality that are enacted through sensorial “dancescape” ways of knowing, and sometimes performed on stages.36 These stage-danced iterations of engaged relationality instantiate in multiple modes. They sometimes come to form through the embodied stories they tell: of people in relation with ancestral generations,37 of humans in relation with other-than-human relatives,38 or of humans in relation to elemental enactments of layers of time and space.39 Sometimes the dance works come to form as articulations of a deep interconnected relationship to a specific land and place, enacting—through iterating—Indigenous connection, relation, and (again following Moreton-Robinson) “ontological belonging” to ancestral “land,” as well as the trauma wrought through the violence of ongoing coloniality and dispossession around it. (As scholar Tiffany Lethabo King notes, “land” registers a “genocide and a dispossession so profound” that the term “cannot adequately speak to the loss.”40) Sometimes the dancing—as it shifts—enacts relation to others’ territories as it travels and visits and shifts in form, with the understanding that the land being visited is Indigenous territory (even when it is called “New York City” and not “Lenapehoking”).41 Unlike other everyday Indigenous practices—say, surfing or maple sugaring or biking around town—these dances are intended for others to experience as audience witnesses.42 Unlike other Indigenous art forms—say, writing or painting—these dances activate through bodies coming together and sensing each other, and they articulate knowledge via people’s bodies in relation to other people’s bodies.43

Although this relationality is iterated in instances on stages, it is activated continually in practice, including in the embodied ways the dance making brings beings, including people, together in shifting communities of relational exchanges and keeps senses, minds, and bodies sharpened, responsive, and questioning.44 This relationality sometimes manifests practically in how dance artists engage community support, the sharing of resources, and exchanges of expertise that function—often by necessity—outside of economies of capitalism, patronage, and the structures of “white possession” that constitute them. Sometimes it manifests in relational engagements with “objects” like rocks (as discussed widely, including in chapter 1’s engagements with the nonhuman being of Jack Gray’s rock, Te Puna o te Ao Marama), or exhibited bags and parkas (as Tanya Lukin Linklater discusses), or masks (as Mique’l Askren [now Dangeli] writes), or exchanges with plants (as María Regina Firmino-Castillo narrates).45 Sometimes this relationality is engaged through sensory practices that strengthen dancers’ (and witnesses’) capacities to know what’s there even in seeing what’s not, such that what would be dismissed as statistical insignificance, or seen as precarious and small, or not seen at all, become forces of abundance, sources of courage and strength, felt sources of understanding, and thus visionary survival tactics. The dancing I’ve followed activates this multilayered relationality facing Indigenous peoples. The works discussed in this project are, by and large, not seeking to satisfy Eurocentric scopophilic drives to see and to “get”—both to understand and to have—or primarily intended for non-Indigenous inspiration and self-betterment, or to garner recognition from settler-colonial governments, or to stabilize the world in its current geopolitical structures so that those of us who have been steeped in settler-colonial erasism can continue to thrive as our survival becomes more precarious.46 Its intention is not to further settler understanding of what “Indigenous dance” is and how it fits into Eurocentric aesthetic/political frameworks or how it can save all of humanity on a planet in crisis (even if it can). Its iterations do not “teach settlers to be indigenous, as something admirable, worthwhile, something wholesome” as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (among others) have called out as problematic.47 If settlers who are not Indigenous are present, and experience and learn something from them, most of the time, that’s fine (though there are also times when it’s not, as I discuss in chapter 4). But helping those of us who aren’t Indigenous is not the focus or point.

In this book, from the on-the-side perspectives I see from and the experiences I’ve had (and haven’t had), and the understandings that engaging with many Indigenous peoples, knowledges, dances, and practices has generated (and hasn’t generated), I articulate what I’ve come to see as the crucial work that this dance work is doing. This includes asserting—and enacting embodied experiences of—Indigenous worldviews grounded in relationality, facing Indigenous peoples, beyond a modernity constituted in white supremacy based in binary separations that has led to and justified ongoing coloniality. I also register how the relationality in and of this dance making recalibrates the “dualisms and hyperseparations” that have enabled the extractivist grids that colonization violently imposes on Indigenous (and all) peoples, and that coloniality labors to maintain. For a powerful resurge-instance or two. With force.

I write about these as resurge-instances alongside the knowing, and with the acknowledgment, that they are instances, because at the moment, much of the time, heteropatriarchal capitalist nationalist extractive individualist academic and other constraining containing political ideological structures are still imposing ways of being with force widely impacting this earth and the beings on it. Many of us human persons aren’t immersed in and continually experiencing an expansive relational world, where everything is connected, where everyone is valued, where our flawed and evolving connectivities are in service of a container larger than just us, holding the well-being of us all.48 This, from my experience at least, is an aspiration, more felt in some spaces and communities than in others—and likely stronger in spaces and communities I am not part of. But generally, “relationality” is not the reality circulating in most of the institutions I see operating around me, and is hard to stay grounded in, and requires ongoing practice. Capitalist colonization has done a pretty good job of rending its fabric.

Which is why the resurge-instances of relationality this dance work instantiates are so crucial.

It’s About Creating Relationship

I began thinking through the shape of this book in the midst of an intense controversy at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) involving the staging of a play called Ishi: The Last of the Yahi, written by a white playwright on faculty at UCB. Things were heightened and tense after northern California Native students and community members, including Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk (then) graduate student Cutcha Risling Baldy and Winnemem Wintu chief Caleen Sisk, spoke out about the play’s depiction of Ishi—the name given to a Native California man who was an object of study in the early twentieth century by white anthropologist Alfred Kroeber—as a batterer and incestuous murderer.49 While the playwright’s stated intent was to depict and condemn the physical and discursive violence Kroeber and others directed at California Indians, the play itself, students and community members pointed out, actually reinscribed this violence in its “artistic” depiction of Ishi, which blatantly deviated from Ishi’s story as understood by California Native peoples and reflected in his words. It also enacted discursive violence in its playwright’s presumption of his right to speak for California Native people and his failure to consult any (reinscribing the very absence he was lamenting). At the core, all of these missed connections signaled a deep-rooted failure to grasp or respect an Indigenous worldview in which Ishi’s story, much like his physical remains (fragmented in the name of scientific study, reunited and ceremonially repatriated in 200050), are not dead, inanimate “material” available for anyone to make use of for “scientific” or “artistic” agendas (however well intentioned) but instead “remain” in connective relation to a living community in which being in ongoing respectful, responsible, reciprocal relationship, including with ancestors and entities seen as objects, is core to who and how one is.

Toward the end of a charged discussion of these issues the week after the play closed, at which Native graduate students spoke about the trauma they experienced watching the play, a non-Native student spoke out about her confusion regarding this controversy. “It’s art,” she said of the playwright’s depiction of Ishi’s story. She wants to be able to make art as she sees fit, she said. “I don’t want to have to ask permission.” The group of students around her clapped and cheered their approval.

At the core of this controversy lie vastly different understandings woven into Indigenous and non-Indigenous performance making and storytelling practices: around individual artists’ “rights” and “artistic freedom”—and artistic creation in relation to ongoing community relation and responsibility; around issues of ownership, stewardship, and the practice of “seizing the seemingly available and making the most of it” and “doing anything because you can” that DeFrantz notes defines white privilege; around fragments and remains (of bodies, of stories, of knowledge) and how they activate and enliven and remain (or are dead material there for the taking, or “incomplete,” or inaccurate).51

Five and a half years after the Ishi controversy, back in the same space where the Ishi discussion happened, the UCB department that produced the Ishi play hosted a welcoming reception for new faculty, students, and visitors. The new chair asked Ohlone leader Corrina Gould, tribal spokesperson for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, on whose ancestral land UCB is situated, to enact a welcoming protocol as part of the department’s opening events.

“For me, it’s a wonderful time to be alive,” Gould began. She noted how Native languages are coming back, how ceremony is coming back, how Ohlone and other local Native people are stepping forward (after lying low for generations, given California’s brutal history of targeted genocide of California Indian people). She mentioned activism she has been leading to protect the West Berkeley Shellmound.52 To contextualize her welcome onto Ohlone territory, she talked about historical Ohlone welcoming practices, describing how, if people wanted to come onto Ohlone land, they would come to the edge of the territory, send up smoke, and wait for someone to come greet them. Seeing the smoke, those in the village would prepare: make food, gather, get ready for conversation, and send out a delegation to escort those who were coming and bring them to the village. When they arrived, first they would be fed. They would bring gifts and be received. Only then, after sharing food and giving gifts and spending time together, would they explain their purpose in asking to be on the land, whatever that purpose was: to hunt, to visit relatives, to find a spouse, to have fun, whatever.53 Gould noted that most people in the room came from other places and that we all travel to other places. She urged us to be attentive to what it is to enter into other people’s spaces. Welcoming protocol, she said, is an act of “creating the relationship that you’re supposed to have in coming to other people’s land.”

“Stop treating us as if we’re some kind of science project,” she said. “It’s about creating relationship. It’s not just about me welcoming you to our land.” Gould continued, “How do we continue to work? How do you go back to where you live and have these conversations?”

Gould’s welcoming, she let us know, was not a tick-the-box one-off but rather was about being in ongoing, respectful relationship so that more work can be done to dismantle the colonizing structures of the university and the world.

Terminologies

Calling the work that is the focus of this project “choreography,” made by “Indigenous” dance artists working in a field of “contemporary” “dance,” raises so many issues that addressing them could take over the project. To start with, Indigenous as a term is mired in complications. I follow Native and Indigenous scholars (as I return to later) in employing Indigenous as a powerful linguistic holder and analytic. As such, the term allows an addressing of the many ways of being and knowing that ongoing coloniality continually attempts to kill; it also names the ongoing force of those worlds beyond those coloniality attempts to impose. I thus use the term Indigenous with awareness of the troublesome separations and conflations it enacts and not as an adequate or accurate definition of peoples or dances. Rather, following each dance artist’s lead, and in conversation with them, I engage the term as a way of addressing what these particular dance artists, and the dancing they are doing, are doing.

The term choreography is also vexed, with its own racial history and discursive functions based in European classical dance and in colonizing histories, as dance scholars including Susan Leigh Foster, Anthea Kraut, and Ananya Chatterjea have astutely traced.54 Others have critiqued the “choreocentricity” of dance studies, noting how, as Naomi Bragin writes, “the priority of a theoretics of choreography cannot be dissociated from a historical privileging of single author, proscenium, concert stage works that follow elite and avant-garde Eurocentric tradition.”55 Choreography names a practice with a racist colonizing history, as well as practices deployed to resist these, including by Indigenous peoples. I use the term choreography deliberately, with awareness of the weight and authority it affords and because it is a term the artists I follow also use to describe the work they are asserting. I have, however, with thanks to Tsimshian scholar and dance leader Mique’l Dangeli for discussions around this, chosen to use dance artists to connote a broader range of dance makers who are doing this creative innovation through intentional movement practices.

Contemporary as applied to dance is also a term with its own complications and limitations, as I and other dance scholars have vigorously argued, particularly in how it is often articulated as a binary to “traditional.” Both terms are deeply imbricated in understandings (of temporality, of either/or instead of and/and) authorizing colonizing histories. Dance scholar SanSan Kwan, writing on the different valences of contemporary when applied to concert, commercial, and world dance, discusses how yoking “that which is contemporaneous to a stylistic definition of what is contemporary” poses multiple issues, noting that, “of course, there is a racial and ethnic dimension to this problem.”56 Chatterjea compellingly teases out some of the complexities of these dimensions, focusing on “contemporary choreography” in Asian dance as it “gathers momentum across Asia” and as it circulates globally.57 She describes how the “aesthetic category of ‘contemporary dance’ (really meaning Euro-American modern/contemporary dance)” may “seem to gesture toward a broad inclusivity” but in fact remains culturally specific, requiring that anything outside of its “particular look” and signifiers “translate into those terms.”58 Chatterjea next discusses “contemporary dance” in Asia in relation to “legacies of colonialism, displacement, Western/Northern dominance in several forms, and postcolonial jockeying for power.”59 Dance scholar Anusha Kedhar further notes the implicit and explicit Eurocentricity of the kinds of creative “innovation” required of “contemporary dance” (discussed more fully later).

Slowing Scholarship/Decolonial Accomplicity

“What is ethically sound work?” asked Seminole, Mucogee, and Diné scholar-artist-photographer Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, describing it as “knowing when it is the right time to photograph, and when it’s time to put the camera down”—as well as how to apologize and make corrections when you mess up, don’t hear what was said, do something you shouldn’t, or make the wrong call (because we all mess up and sometimes make wrong calls).60 In Indigenous studies, decades of scholarship has addressed issues of ethical scholarship practices, including Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s generative Decolonizing Methodologies, Shawn Wilson’s Research as Ceremony, and Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style.61 None are rule books.62 A starting point for each of these discussions is the understanding that there have been centuries of unethical, extractivist scholarship in which non-Indigenous writers’ ideas about Indigenous peoples have led to writings that impose Eurocentric ways of thinking, and that this is a continuation of colonialist structures. The “academy,” as Soren C. Larsen and Jay T. Johnson write, is “the worldwide system of educational institutions of higher learning descended from European models”;63 the university, write Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, “is a colonial collector of knowledge as another form of territory.”64 In Indigenous (and many other) contexts, any institutional educational space is inescapably vexed and violent, given histories, in particular, of enforced learning in boarding and residential schools.

The university’s relationship to dance has also been acrimonious. Dance’s grounding in corporeal connectivity and physical enactment is still often connected with the disempowered half of supremacist binaries and seen as feminized, racialized, sexual, pleasurable, intuitive, irrational—and thus marginalized within the political and academic mainstream. It challenges ideas around individual authorship, as any dance, even those “choreographed” by named artists within Eurocentric frameworks that require individual exceptionalism, is actually never singly authored. Dance requires working with others in the present and in lineage: even a “solo” is in relationship with other peoples and bodies across time and space. (And most choreographers do acknowledge how what is billed as their output has emerged in relational, embodied connection with their dancers and teachers.) Dance scholars, in various ways, have worked to address this in our ways of writing, disrupting linear text with multiple fonts and voices, cowriting history with “fictional” characters that emerge from the archives, engaging our bodies as sites of research about movements engaged by dancers past and as articulations of collective identity.65 Dance, as decades of critical dance studies scholarship has shown, theorizes worldviews that articulate (historical, scientific, spiritual, philosophical) knowledge—and ways of knowing—developed and maintained outside of established academic registers of history, science, religion, and philosophy. At the same time, as dance has entered the academy, it has generally foregrounded and been rooted in Eurocentric understandings about which dance forms (i.e., ballet and modern dance) are core. Dance studies scholarship, like most academic scholarship, has generally proceeded from, to again cite DeFrantz, white-privileged assumptions about the value of distanced and single-authored scholarly engagement with whatever one comes across.

In writing this book in relation with both Indigenous and dance studies, I have tried to work within networks of ongoing, intertwined relationships, with a focused intention that is also a questioning, requiring sharp attention to what answers are coming and a willingness to stop, apologize, and shift in response when I misstep. These Indigenous and dance-honed practices have often been in resonance, particularly in how both insist on tuning and trusting one’s perceptive capacities. What these attunements have been attuned to, however, have been sometimes in tension, particularly in how contemporary-dance-honed somatic practices sometimes proceed as if separate from colonizing and settler-colonial political histories, contexts, locations, and genealogies, while in Indigenous practices, the embedding of these is a foregrounded given. Researching and writing in relation to these practices of attunement and what they bring forward, foregrounding an ethics of relation, slow down the publishing process. These approaches to scholarship take time, patience, stamina, humility, courage, and openness, requiring a willingness to listen, learn, reconsider, and revise—or to let one’s errors show in resonant ways. This allows for the possibility of course corrections and deepening awareness.66 It allows for the possibility of a reciprocal exchange of ideas, of support, and of resources, from relationships that build through this process.67 Slowing research so that it is not settler-time-bound or rushed, but can take the time it needs, involves various forms of collaboration: interweaving writing by multiple writers, cowriting/coauthoring, circulating one’s writing to those whose work is being discussed for review, further discussing, and reworking among them.68 Researching and writing this way is not an answer or solution. It might even consolidate problems; in an invited discussion of Robinson’s Hungry Listening, ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong wonders whether “elevating collaboration as the ideal terms for encounter isn’t another kind of hunger.”69 As Robinson notes (and as dance scholar Marta Savigliano’s discussion of tango underscores), “resurgences and decolonization do not exist as completed work but instead as ongoing processes in flux.”70 Working collaboratively, in a relationally informed practice, with reciprocal exchanges of critique and support, in the hope of traveling a more ethical academic path toward writing in relation with Indigenous people (or any people) when one is not a longtime trusted member of their community (or even when one is), is perhaps only a “best practice” for this moment. It is likely to shift. It may not lead to immediate or “juridical” change or be what is needed a few years from now.71

At the moment, traveling this more ethical path includes asking oneself and posing the question to others (including you now as well), how might every one of us use our gifts, privileges, and energies to support the urgent and resurgent shifts that Indigenous peoples and dances are speaking? How might each of us, as Gould asks, bring these conversations back to where we live? Ojibwe/Swampy Cree and English/Irish theater artist Lisa Cooke Ravensbergen names this “being called to be an embodiment of transformation”:

You are educators, you are thinkers, you are leaders in your circles, and in the same way that I am being asked to sit in a space, in the lineage that I occupy, you are too. . . . We all have that responsibility—even though we might think we are just this, we are just that—we actually all occupy a lineage and the potential for transformation that is literally embodied in our breath.72

Ravensbergen, noting that she may not be the best person to be speaking to the issues at hand, describes how she nonetheless is trying “to do the best that I can in this moment.”73 For those of us who are not Indigenous, it’s our work, I have heard again and again, to attend, and to struggle, and to learn, and to change ourselves: to do the work. Indigenous leaders have said repeatedly that expanding settler awareness about Indigenous understandings is way low on the triage chart of all they have to do. Without asking to be taught, how can each of us, Indigenous and not Indigenous, take on the responsibility of learning, and of putting our bodies/minds/spirits, energies, capacities, voices, and resources toward whatever support is needed, to do the best we can at the moment? As I stress how the dance works in this project are not geared toward the benefit of non-Indigenous settlers and settler-colonial scholars, I also feel deeply how everyone is “part of the fabric of colonization, and ha[s] a role in its undoing.”74 This book’s storying is thus also a provocation for those readers who are not Indigenous and/or who are new to Indigenous ways of knowing to struggle to learn, and to step back, even as they bring whatever they can to the table as an offering—as an invited guest might do—for the potentially helpful work it can do.75 This means not just taking Indigenous ideas up for personal (or artistic, or academic) enrichment but rather seeing how—as we start to follow or even just see paths beyond supremacy–separationist dualisms and hyperseparations and the colonialist extractions they have led to—our practices change.76 It means making decolonizing, and thus antiracism (given how extractive colonizing requires racism, as I turn to later), and the dismantling of heteropatriarchy central to whatever we do. It means being beholden to the lands where we reside, even as those who are settlers (or “arrivants”) to those lands work—in whatever big or small ways possible—to undo the vampiric terms of our ongoing residence.77

Did I mention that this is hard? This is frickin’ hard. It can also, at times—it must—include acts of fun, play, pleasure, and “embodied joy amid disavowal.”78

I hope this book’s storying nudges readers to pay attention, to listen—deeply—and to hone abilities to shift, as skills in listening build and layers of understanding unpeel. Please note: this can take a while, sometimes years or many pages. Awareness may come in flashes. My hope is that readers will be OK with this, and patient, and trusting. I imagine that some of you may come to this project with strong familiarity in dance studies but little in Indigenous studies, and vice versa. Others may have primary expertise in dance making, arts administration, or Native arts and activism rather than academic scholarship. Because of this, I have tried to write at multiple registers, so that whichever point a reader enters from, they will find points of value and connection. Accompanying this is my recognition that readers might likely also find other parts to be too obvious, or too confusing, or just of little value to them. Just as those at a dance might connect with some aspects of the event and need to let other aspects of it wash over them, I hope you will skim over parts of this book that aren’t speaking to you—and sit and connect with and respond back to parts that do. The theorizing in this project lies in part in this book’s own process of narration.

Bodies and Signs

A central tension in both dance and Indigenous studies has to do with the relationship between physical beings in/as bodies and the abstracted ways these bodies are discussed, named, defined, and represented by those watching and speaking/writing about them. An issue that permeates both fields is the imbalance between the authority accorded to meaning made in words that describe or define bodies (and to those writing or speaking those words) and the lack of authority ascribed to meaning made by physical embodied beings and to how bodies articulate it. Bodies’ intelligent physicality, and dance’s base in relationality, is sidestepped or replaced such that dance figures as a representation for something outside itself, made into a metaphor, sign, or definition for serving others’ purposes.

Both fields have decried and outlined issues with (fairly common) critical turns toward metaphor to address grounded, physical experiences that hold meaning in themselves, not as sign for something else. In their influential “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Tuck and Yang have articulated against “metaphorizing decolonization” and the distancing from actual repatriation of land that it allows. “The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or ‘settler moves to innocence,’ that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity,” they write.139 This skepticism around viewing things metaphorically continues in other contexts as well. Numerous Native scholars discuss transformation between humans and other-than-human beings as enactment, not metaphor, directly and indirectly refusing a view of it as “symbolic” or “representational” rather than actual. There is a long history, particularly in anthropological approaches to Native peoples (and dance), of imposing symbolic understandings that fail to acknowledge the actualities being enacted. Relatedly, scholars impose readings of Indigenous objects/entities as “analogous to” something they find more familiar, deflecting from that entity’s own intrinsic meaning-making capacities.140

In Indigenous studies, one place this tension between physical beings and the way they are discussed and abstracted as sign plays out is around discussions of the term Indigenous itself. What Indigenous (or Native, or First Nation, or Indian) means has long been a topic of discussion, often compelled not so much by Indigenous people (who generally know who they are and how to understand themselves) as (again) by coloniality. Debate around this issue remains live and complex in Native studies—because how a term (e.g., Native American) does and doesn’t accurately name who someone is can have high stakes. Briefly, and particularly for dance studies readers who may not be familiar with this history, as a related aside to this question of bodies and signs, I sketch (and this is indeed a sketch) some (and only some) of the contours of this issue here.

The tension between bodies, and the words scholars use to talk about them symbolically or metaphorically, has some similar strains in dance studies. As I’ve noted, dance as it circulates outside of critical dance studies often appears not as attention to actual physical movement in space and time but as a sign or metaphor that enables scholars to discuss some other idea. In the mid-1990s, when writing about “the body” was a trendy thing in the humanities, foundational dance studies scholar Susan Leigh Foster wrote of her delight at this focus on the body—and of her dismay at “the tendency to treat it as a symbol for desire or sexuality, for a utopia, for that which is unique to women or for the elusive nature of the text.” She discussed how, in these approaches, “the body remains mysterious and ephemeral, a convenient receptacle for their new theoretical positions.”171 Contrary to these uses, Foster added, “the daily practical participation of a body in any of these disciplines makes it a body-of-ideas.”172 Foster’s 1995 “Choreographing History” begins, “A body, whether sitting writing or standing thinking or walking talking or running screaming, is a bodily writing.” As it continues, it does not draw a stark line between dancing and writing, flesh and sign, body and idea, dismissing one by heralding the “truth” of the other, but addresses how they mutually (and continually) constitute what they name: “Each body establishes this relation between physicality and meaning in concert with the physical actions and verbal descriptions of bodies that move alongside it. Not only is this relation between the physical and the conceptual non-natural, it is also impermanent. It mutates, transforms, reinstantiates with each new encounter.”173 Part of Foster’s move here is to see verbal descriptions of bodies (i.e., words, terms, writing) and “bodies” (flesh, bones, motion) moving alongside these words, and vice versa, as partners in meaning making, developing and supporting the “meat and bones approach to the body” that she called for a quarter century ago.174 Her 2003 “Choreographies of Protest” further articulates how the distinction between symbolic and physical (she is using dance studies approaches to discuss specific protests) is troubled because of how the body is capable of simultaneously carrying out both symbolic and physical actions.

Much as Indigenous functions so as to articulate an enacted understanding whose use one can trace and analyze, rather than a definitive sign for some stable referent, so, too, do these “bodies-of-ideas” articulate a way of understanding bodily-ly that in turn constitutes “bodies” and “ideas” themselves. “A body is the how of its emergence, not the what of its form,” writes Erin Manning.175 Other dance studies scholars early in the field similarly engage bodies as bodies-of-ideas that manifest, and serve as, locations of history and sites of its articulation and negotiation. Dixon Gottschild, writing on the influence of African American aesthetics on George Balanchine’s American ballet, reads the human body—its hips, its alignment, the relation between its limbs and its center—as a location of racial history. Dance scholars, in other words, engage with dance and dancing not as a metaphor (i.e., “the waltz of time”) but as an act of attending to the meaning that human bodies, moving in and across time and place, in relation to multiple others, negotiate and produce. Dance scholars thus register the generative possibilities in attending to dance not (only) as a sign or figure for something else or even—following Marxist lenses—only to dance’s material effects, for example, its sweat and labor or its political effect.176 Rather, as dance scholars reiterate as a core concept and method of the field, dance studies scholarship recognizes and attends to how “bodies” “dancing” (both expansive terms themselves) intelligently theorize, producing discourse, political action, history, and meaning—including of “bodies” and “dance” themselves.

These fields respond to different histories of marginalization and categorization and have different relations to coloniality. Dance studies has secured, and been secured by, whiteness’s presumptive centrality and supremacy in Europe since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a tool securing white settler access to Indigenous land in “the Americas.”177 Yet the two fields also address parallel tensions, and both call for attention to what terms (Indigenous and the “bodies-of-ideas” called dance) are doing as theoretical analytics and articulations.

Living Archives: Artifacts, Objects, Beings

Another related point of interconnection lies in how both fields engage with ideas about archives and “artifacts” and forward dancing as a “living archive” of history and knowledge. Each field contests how museums, library collections, and other archives assign authority only to what they contain (or see themselves containing) in preserved “objects” and written documents. Implicitly and explicitly, both fields register how the “archive”—as epitomized in the library or museum—is a product of Western imperialism and colonialism and enacts its thefts.178 Both fields forward alternative archives as source and site of memory.

In dance studies, lively debate has ensued around dance and archives. Much scholarship addressing dance has argued for how dance and other forms of live performance, rather than being a topic of archival documentation, is itself a location of memory, an act of archiving, and an enacted articulation of knowledges. This has included discussion of what bodies dancing in archives do to those “holdings.” Articles in The Sentient Archive, for example, “illustrate how the body serves as a repository for knowledge.”179 Historian Sterling Stuckey, addressing how dancing both retained and articulated suppressed knowledge in slave culture, writes that “dance was the most difficult of all art forms to erase from the slave’s memory, in part because it could be initiated with enough speed to seem autonomous. In that lightning-fast process, the body very nearly was memory.”180 Others address how dance holds memory and enacts knowledge: DeFrantz, in a discussion of the “black beat made visible,” forwards the term actionable assertions to describe ways that Black social dance, through its many reiterations, makes performative assertions to “incite action.”181 Imani Kai Johnson, focusing on the often invisible Africanist aesthetics in breaking (aka B-boying), addresses cyphers’ enactments of ways of knowing and embedding of ways of being in and moving through the world.182 Others have discussed connections between knowledge collected in archival boxes and knowledge registered in acts of dancing, both of which inform the other, as Srinivasan’s work with the “bodily archive” shows.183 Others expand discussion of how dance archives by focusing on the “archives of watching,” as Kate Elswit forwards in her discussion of spectatorial exchange within Weimar culture.184 Foster directly addresses historical links between archiving and colonizing (as discussed further later), a topic Prarthana Purkayastha enacts in addressing the limits of “archival fake news” by herself dancing in the attire worn by nautch dancers in the failed Liberty’s 1885 exhibition in London to address what is left out of the library and museum archive.185 Others address dance’s capacities to shift what and how it is archiving as political landscapes shift: Jens Richard Giersdorf’s work on East German dance since 1945 in relation to the East German state’s project, for example, discusses “embodiment as an archival practice.”186 Attending similarly to dance’s capacities to transform the knowledge it archives, dance dramaturge Katherine Profeta, drawing on Andre Lepecki’s discussion of the “body as archive” as “a system or zone where works do not rest but are formed and transformed, endlessly,” engages with what she calls the “active archive” as that “which serves the future as much as the past.”187 Profeta writes, “In the active archive, materials assembled are not inert artifacts, of interest only to historians wishing to uncover the past, but rather active tools to potentially fold and refold back into current process, unlocking future potential.”188 These discussions—and there are many more—assert the validity of dance as a form and act of creating meaning, of negotiating state assertions of history, and as a way of tracing presence through time, pressing up against the notion that the written word is a more “valid” site of historical truth than a bodied one. As dance scholar Mark Franko has noted, “this blurring of the distinction between embodied memory and archival documentation” is a key issue in the field and “one of the moments of dance studies now that we need to seize, and obviously, develop.”189

Foster explicitly links this kind of paper-based archival documenting to European colonizing. She connects Feuillet notation (an eighteenth-century French notation system for documenting dances on paper, as music is) and its erasure of “the locality of steps in order to place all dancing on the plane of pure geometry” to a “kind of conceptualization of a pure space, capable of being organized only according to abstract and geometric principles.”190 Foster notes how “the notation bound the dancing to the ground on which it occurred, not to its indigenous location, but rather to an abstract and unmarked ground.”191 She then directly links this to “the colonial expansion from Europe and England into the rest of the world. The fact that dance’s ephemerality had been conquered by notation intimated success in all kinds of colonizing projects.”192 Foster outlines some differences between this on-paper notation system and Algonquian systems for documenting that “the earliest British colonists encountered.” She writes, “Algonquians, for example, typically archived negotiations and treaties through the beading of wampum belts and the decorating of hides,” and she describes a colonist’s account of Wampanoag practices for “preserving a memory of events” through “commemorating these events by marking the site where they occurred, and transmitting a verbal account at the site to those who passed by so that the entire community became a repository and maintenance system for knowledge.”193 She notes that in this Algonquian archival system, “events deemed of historical worth could not be separated from the land on which they were enacted. Knowledge was passed along generationally through the labor of all the individuals who assisted in witnessing the telling of the past.”194 Foster further registers both the imposition of European dances outside the communities in which they had been practiced and the collection and extraction of dances from other places into European dance—and how this archiving of dance served as a model of larger colonizing possibilities. “By the time Feuillet notation recorded dances on paper, native lands and practices of historical preservation had been disrupted or eradicated by colonial expansion. In the way that it was constructed, the notation made evident how this colonization could be so successful,” she writes.195 By “confirming the existence of standards for comportment and exchange,” notation “took the dancing out of the body, and away from body-to-body contact, and placed it in circulation as a codified symbolic system.”196 She traces paths from this to how, in eighteenth-century ballets, “Gypsy, Native American, Caribbean as well as Scottish, Hungarian, Italian and Russian dances, all assimilated into the vocabulary and style of classical ballet, imbued each ballet with local color while simultaneously displaying the ballet’s mastery over all forms.” Nineteenth-century productions, she notes, then “balleticized actual phrases of movement. What had begun in notation as a rubric for collecting dances had now evolved into a system for assimilating them back into the dancing body.”197 The rest of Foster’s book project delineates how these ideas and politics have continued as undergirdings of choreographic endeavors and assumptions into the twentieth century (long after Feuillet notation fell out of use), as well as how some recent choreographic endeavors (including by Tanya Lukin Linklater) refuse them.

Indigenous studies scholars have also described and theorized the way performance is a “living archive,” manifesting knowledge and identity. Carla Taunton writes about how this has functioned historically and also traces contemporary Indigenous women’s performance art of countermimicry, commemoration, and protest. She notes how these works show “how performance functions as a living archive of Indigenous nations,” as well as how they function as “a work of testimony,” “another form of history writing or archiving.”198 Laura Harjo discusses how “the body indeed operates as an archive. It experiences and keeps felt knowledge, embodied and practiced,” and she notes the role of dance specifically, referencing the “knowledge produced through music and movement.” Harjo writes, “Mvskoke songs and dance are acts of performance that trigger memories. They are performance cartographies that hold memories, invoking knowledge and relationality and operating to open a range of kin-space-time envelopes to dancers and listeners.”199 Daniel Heath Justice’s discussion addresses Indigenous literatures as the “storied archives—embodied, inscribed, digitized, vocalized—that articulate our sense of belonging and wonder, the ways of meaning-making in the world and in our time.”200

Indigenous discussions of “living archives” and of music and dance as “performance cartographies” not only understand bodies, performance practices, and stories to hold memory and history—an understanding shared with dance studies. They also often understand what is held in “archives” to be sentient. What historians or museum staff may consider an archival “object” or artifact—to be sealed off and protected as an authentic sign of an Indigenous past—is, in multiple Indigenous contexts, understood to be a living entity or ancestor, to be visited with, listened to, engaged with respectfully and according to specific terms. The way entities seen as “objects” are in sentient relationship (outside of a Western alive–dead dichotomy) is articulated frequently and abundantly by Indigenous artists and scholars and addressed regularly in Indigenous studies scholarship.201 Some examples include Tsimshian scholar Miqu’el Askren’s (now Dangeli’s) discussion of the “tangible manifestations” of “supernatural power that are known as nax nox and halaayt” in Tsimshian epistemology—which are “commonly referred to as ‘objects’ or ‘artifacts’ in museum terminology.” She writes, “Because of my experiences making, wearing, and caring for such manifestations, I do not refer to them as ‘objects.’ Instead, I feel that the term ‘Ceremonial Beings’ pays homage to their breath, life, name, and in some cases the nax nox or halaayt they are imbued with.”202 Alutiiq artist and writer Tanya Lukin Linklater, discussing visiting with cultural belongings from Kodiak Island and the Aleutian Chain of Alaska that have been “incarcerated or not allowed to rest” in university and museum holdings, writes how even if they “are no longer nourished within their life in their homelands, this does not negate their capacity for awareness, sentience, and agency.” She cautions against ignoring this “ongoing energetic exertion,” noting instead how, in traveling far distances to honor, visit, and be in relation to these cultural belongings, she chooses “to look with compassion, kindness, and reverence,” noting how “these visits nourish them and reciprocal exchange takes place.”203 George “Tink” Tinker similarly discusses understandings of consciousness in all beings, including rocks. “‘We are all related’ is not just a nifty idea. . . . It is a very real baseline of respect for all of our relatives, including—especially including—those grandparents we call rocks,” he writes.204 TallBear, too, remarks, “My people have long recognized the agential roles of rocks and stars in our human lives.”205 Elizabeth Povinelli, drawing on decades of work with the Aboriginal Australian Karrabing Film Collective, engages with the challenges that Indigenous ways of understanding the existence of a sacred entity—described by the legal system as a “geological feature” but understood by Indigenous groups as sentient—pose to “the discourse and strategy of geopower.”206 Rachael Swain discusses how “the intersubjective in Indigenous contexts is also between places and things, such as water holes, animals, birds, and minerals.”207 Firmino-Castillo argues how “the animacy and agency of matter in a living world” and “the personhood of humans and non-human others who are part of this living material world” are “at the core of an ontological relationality” enacted in an Ixil Maya community.208 These and other discussions foreground understandings in which “objects”—including those housed in archives—are agential entities.

At the same time, Indigenous artists also address the particular import of what is archived in one’s body—and not outside it. Pomo singer and leader Ras K’dee (of the music group Audiopharmacy) has remarked that there are many reasons why sometimes photographing and recording songs and dances is not permitted in Native Californian (and many other Indigenous peoples’) practices. One of the reasons “you don’t document those things,” he noted, is that “you’re supposed to be present.” It’s about the doing together, and the learning through doing—not through photographs or recording separated from the experience itself. The knowledge, he explained, is in the experience and held by those who are there experiencing.209

Both fields, in complementary ways, thus press against the notion of a “thing” as preservative of history and of archive as only on paper or “objects.” Knowledge is located in “treasures” understood as agentive beings and in physical bodies as “living archives” of memory and knowing.

Embodied Knowing

This idea of dance as archive, and of ancestors and “objects” as beings with whom one maintains ongoing engagement, relates to how both fields respect the centrality of sensory knowledge: the idea that your body is a source of vital knowledge and that what you feel, sense, or perceive through it is an act of knowing recurs readily in both fields.

In Indigenous studies, discussions noting how Indigenous bodies know what colonizing has attempted to erase and murder are frequent refrains. Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen writer Deborah Miranda concludes her memoir, “Our bodies, like compasses, still know the way.”210 Kanaka Maoli writer Manulani Aluli Meyer, in her discussion of Native Hawaiian epistemology, writes, “Body is the central space in which knowing is embedded.”211 These bodied understandings are accessed through attentive observation and thus linked with the value of experiential learning. Tinker writes,

Respect for the sacredness of the lives of trees, rocks, corn, and buffalo is not just a theological, religious, or mythological cognitional perspective on the part of Indian peoples. Rather, it stems from our observed experiential knowledge, over countless generations, of the world around us. . . . Much of American Indian knowledge comes from careful observation of the world, always done out of an attitude of relational respect and reciprocity.212

Experiential embodied practices—for example, planting taro fields, gathering plants for basket weaving, listening with full emotion to story, song, and testimony, and activities like surfing and dancing—and the sensory attentiveness (including what Harjo refers to as “felt knowledge” and “smell as knowledge”) these require, strengthen and assert what Robinson calls “sensate sovereignty” and what Rifkin calls “Indigenous modes of peoplehood.”213 Yet, in the university, what is registered bodily is generally disregarded, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson notes. “The knowledge our bodies and our practices generate, that our theories and methodologies produce, has never been considered valid knowledge within the academy and therefore often exists on the margins,” she writes.214

Dance studies has articulated how the academy has disregarded the knowledges that bodies generate since the field’s beginnings as an academic discipline in a university system built on and steeped in understandings of bodies as either irrelevant or disruptive to it. “Embodied knowledge” and “embodied scholarship” are key words and concepts that have infused the field and today are specifically articulated and applied methodologies. While there are many dance studies approaches to what “embodied knowledge” means and how to approach “embodied scholarship,” they share a focus on how “bodies” (or “the body”) are/is a source of knowing. Sometimes “embodied scholarship” as a research method involves using one’s own moving body, as a scholar, as a way of investigating and understanding the dancing one is writing about. This can include something similar to “participant observation,” or paying attention to one’s own embodied experience dancing and watching dancing, and using understandings gained from this as tools for analysis. Cindy Garcia’s engagements with Los Angeles’s salsa scenes, for example, focus not only on what is happening on the dance floor but also on the contours of her visit to the women’s restroom.215 “Embodied scholarship” can also involve using one’s own dancing and dance making as a tool for investigating a specific research question. Rossen, in her work on Jewish dance, after noting that “embodied scholarship is certainly not one thing,” explains that it can mean “using one’s performance training to fill in gaps in the archive and give flesh to dancing bodies of the past, or drawing upon one’s experiences in the studio and onstage to expand our understanding of choreography, history, and meaning.”216 Rossen cites historical research by dance scholars Ann Cooper Albright (on early modern dance icon Loie Fuller), Vida Midgelow (on ballet), and Srinivasan (on Bharata Natyam), who all turned to their own dancing as an investigative tool in the archival research they undertook in their projects.217 All of these approaches are themselves grounded in understandings that bodies—including those of dancer-researchers—can both hold and serve as a tool to research knowledge and that, through attention to them, specific knowledge can be accessed.218 In these studies, “embodied scholarship” provides one among many sources for understanding dance. It is not the only or most “truthful”; neither is video or other forms of documentation more accurate.219

Some of the dance tools that some dance practitioner-scholars use to do this embodied research, however, are deeply embedded with a Eurocentric myopia and its racisms. This is true of those tools, many of which could be housed under the broad term somatics, engaged by many Indigenous dance artists. Common features of somatic practice, according to dancer-scholar Hilary Bryan, “include slowing down, attending to awareness and perception, and valuing perception and internal awareness. Attending to the breath is another common feature, as is considering the body and mind as interrelated and as making up a whole, inseparable.” Bryan adds that “somatic inquiries usually lead to open-ended questions, point to many roads, and are not dogmatic about their own approach. They value personal interpretation, and experiential learning.”220 Yet, as Bryan argues, and as dance scholar Doran George’s The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training traces, the many strands of “somatics” are interwoven with dogmas and ideologies. George attends to how a foundational “somatics spectrum of primitive to civilized”221 includes racist stratifications (e.g., in the development of the Alexander technique). “With romanticized and idealized visions of other cultures, species, and stages in human development, cultures that were represented as Eastern or primitive, along with children and animals, served as an undifferentiated counterpoint to Western ideologies and morals,” they write.222 “Somatics,” Bryan suggests, is based in European entrancement with “going back” to (actual or imagined) “exotic,” “spiritual,” or “primitive others”—and the incorporation of practices from, or associated with, these “others.”223 Many experiential practices for accessing “embodied knowledge” that have come to be called “somatic” thus came into dance making, at least in part, through (mostly white) practitioners being inspired by, and taking from, specific physicalized (often spiritual and religious) practices of those from (mostly nonwhite) “Eastern” cultures (and/or from these Euro-American dance artists’ fantasized ideas about them).224

Though gleaned from specific cultures and contexts, and even as somatic practitioners “explicitly referenced Eastern philosophies,” the bodily practices of kinesthetic and proprioceptive awareness have been seen as applying to a universalized human “mind” and “body” outside of history and culture, which then have become incorporated, as George describes, into a “seemingly new universal contemporary body of Somatics.”225 Anna Halprin and Mary Starks Whitehouse (who developed Authentic Movement), for example, “erased the cultural origin of their ideas by making contemporary innovation the purview of the west,” George notes. “The specificity of the context disappeared.”226 This universalizing tendency in engagements with “embodied knowledge” is not unremarked in dance studies: a number of scholars have questioned somatics practitioners’ presumptions that there is something called “the body” that holds and shares knowledge, outside of a specific context.227 Nonetheless, most often, discussions of “embodied knowledge” and “somatics” continue to discuss these as stemming from—and pertaining to—a “body” understood as universally/biologically human. George notes how, even in the 1980s, when “the whiteness of Somatics-informed choreography became more and more evident,” still “the idea of a natural body at the center of the training went largely unchallenged.”228

George, Bryan, and others have readily remarked the appropriation into universalization of “Eastern” contributions to somatic training; George also notes the impact of how these appropriations of Eastern contributions and erasures of the influence of African traditions “rendered the staging of Black American traditions culturally conspicuous and therefore outdated.”229 Yet this focus on “Eastern” cultures, and even George’s important attention to African traditions, continues to obscure how Indigenous knowledge systems and practices are deeply embedded in somatic training. For one, a focus on how Eastern philosophies and relations influenced somatic “pioneers” like Anna Halprin invisibilizes the simultaneous (and acknowledged) influence of Native American practices on her and others.230 Seneca choreographer Rosy Simas has noted how practitioners’ language around kinesthetic and proprioceptive self-awareness presents these practices as individually generated (what a dance artist has uncovered and developed using their own body)—rather than out of (mostly) white dancers’ and movement practitioners’ engagements with Indigenous (including Indigenous Asian and African) practices worldwide. Simas suggests that these somatic practices presented as “human” (embryology, breath, slowness, attention to cellular knowledge) likely have roots in practices that were brought into practice through Western presumptions of the right to explore others’ material, intellectual, and cultural resources; extract and export them from those lands and contexts into European ones; and develop them on one’s “own” in ways that erase this genealogy and present them as universal.231 (Sound familiar?) Initially, these practices of attuned embodiment were absorbed into what scholar Ramsey Burt calls “common-pool resources,”232 available to all. Simas notes that these practices have frequently been made the province of one name or trademarked (e.g., the Feldenkrais Method®, Body-Mind Centering®, Hannah Somatic Education & Training®) and primarily associated with an individual white “innovator,” who builds wealth by refining and trademarking this knowledge in a capitalist system.233

It seems clear that, while dance studies has long and deeply valued “embodied knowledge,” the somatic dance training practices for honing access to it are linked to ongoing structures of Euro-American coloniality.234 At the risk of reinscribing somatics’ generalizing of the influence of “Eastern” philosophies and practices, what might come of considering the invisibilized presence of what might be called, with a nod to Dixon Gottschild’s important calling out of the erasure of “Africanist aesthetics” in American performance, a deep presence in somatics of “Indigenist aesthetics”—understood as a way of seeing what has been seen, or not seen—as (cuckoo-like) taken up and absorbed?235

This is not to say that somatic practices are “Indigenous practices” per se or that seeing these as human, and part of a common good freely shared, is not. Generous sharing of resources for a common good (rather than taking resources for individual financial or cultural wealth accumulation) and universalism are (or have been, at different political–historical junctures) core to many Indigenous practices. Instead, it registers the likelihood that many contemporary dance practitioners’ “somatic tools” have unacknowledged roots in global Indigenous practices. Indigenous-based bodily-attentive sensory somatic approaches are enveloped into many “modern dance” technique classes and approaches and are in accessible circulation and available (at least to those with the “pay-to-play” means and privilege to take these classes and workshops).236 Many non-Indigenous contemporary dance makers have taken up, worked with, nuanced, and directed these kinds of sensory approaches for decades (and especially in the past half century). The way these (largely, though not entirely, white237) dance artists have held and honed these somatic approaches—often with passion, insight, and brilliance—also provides tools that Indigenous choreographers interested in accessing and strengthening knowledge and ways of knowing from their particular histories are now drawing on. Many Indigenous scholars and artists have drawn on anthropological recordings problematically collected and held in museums—stories, Indigenous language words, songs, “objects”—as tools in gathering and strengthening knowledges violently muted through colonization, but remaining active, in pieces and remnants. Somatic dance practices, as engaged and nuanced by practitioners like Deborah Hay, Halprin, and many others, likewise hold active nodes of Indigenous epistemologies and provide sites where contemporary Indigenous dance makers are locating tools for their own Indigenous generativity and vitalization.238 They have “appropriated the regimens away from their exclusionary roots . . . extracting the value they found while discarding other information,” as George argues that “black and other nonwhite artists, and dancers with sexual identities that seemed to contravene the aim of bodily purity” have done.239

Thus, rather than seeing somatic practices as rooted in a largely Euro-American “contemporary dance” approach whose “Western” dance-making tools Indigenous dance makers are using, I suggest the reverse: that Indigenous dance artists are finding in somatic practices resonance with Indigenous tools and epistemologies embedded in them. Using these tools, Indigenous dancers reground them in a practice of relationality. This then shifts understandings of what “embodied knowing” is from one’s singular perception and its relation to a universal human physiology to being about accessing an embodied knowledge relationally, specifically intertwined with one’s family, ancestral, and cultural knowledge. This use presses against and recalibrates the individualizing and universalizing of somatics. By themselves taking up tools taken from Indigenous knowledge systems and engaging with them for their own purposes—refusing the position of being extracted from in a one-way exchange—they further activate contemporary dance as a relational, reciprocal practice. This dance making thus enacts anticoloniality, recalibrating the terms of the genealogy-of-modern-dance’s construction in coloniality’s practices of extraction in ways that have the capacity to transform it. This is not “stealing fire” from an established practice or institution; it is an insistence on being (again and already) in reciprocal relation with it.

The dance artists I’ve followed, in related but specific ways, forward relational practices of sensory connection, exploration, and feeling-through-others as ways of knowing. As just one example, in her movement workshops, Simas has asked those of us participating to attend to sensation, through the body—blood, skin, lymph system, intercostal fluids, fascia—and also beyond the body.240 We practice ways to sense, and listen, and notice, what we may not have been attuned to. She tells us that when she performs, she pays attention to who shows up (sometimes her uncle or another ancestor); she suggests we might also pay attention to who shows up. These somatic exercises are skills Simas honed through her work with Global Somatics®, Body-Mind Centering®, Klein Technique®, zero balancing, and various other somatic “tools of the trade.” But, Simas tells me, Midewiwin, Longhouse, and intertribal pipe ceremonies are where she learned early how to sit still for hours, and listen, and notice; she grew up in Ojibwe culture and has also been going to ceremonies in the Longhouse her whole life.241 When she engages with the sensory tools of somatics, in other words, she is practicing what she also learned growing up in relationship with Native community. She has engaged with these both—somatic approaches to dance making and ways of being attentive that she learned in ceremonies—such that each strengthens the other.242

Storying

Related to this shared attention to embodied and experiential knowledge is how both fields have propelled narrative creativity in scholarship, particularly by attending to the embodied positioning of the scholar writing, both as storyteller and as story listener.243 The idea that lived experience—felt bodily engagement—is a crucial core of research and its writing has been central in both dance and Indigenous studies. In this, both fields are in deeply interwoven connection with feminist and gender studies, particularly by women of color, which has long played with narrative form/performative writing as a way of articulating otherwise within the limits of “phallogocentrism” and white feminism.244 Dance studies, from its emergences as an academic field, has worked with positioning of the scholar and their body as part of the story and with storytelling and mixed narrative forms as ways of writing dancing. Foster’s writings have long worked with narrative form, as her scholarly presentations have long engaged with dancing.245 Other examples (there are many more) include Savigliano’s writing on tango, which includes a written “tango” between a “choreocritic” and a chorus; Garcia’s study of salsa in Los Angeles; and Melissa Blanco Borelli’s “genealogy of the Mulata body,” which weaves memoir and historical fictionalizing into the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with the hips.246 Dance scholars have also addressed their own narrative self-reflexivity, as in how Wong positions her study on Vietnamese performance ensemble Club O’Noodles as “performative autoethnography,” noting, and naming as “doubled ethnography,” both her own and the ensemble’s work to be “self-reflexive about its own self-reflexive artistic processes.”247

In Indigenous studies, storytelling and narrative interweaving are likewise integral. Royal articulates compellingly how storytelling—including in dance and performance—is about connecting with and experiencing “kinship-based relationship” with “ancestors/energies/qualities who are brought alive time and again through story, ritual and the wielding of sacred objects, and who exist in the natural world.”248 Tuhiwai Smith identifies how Indigenous writers’ blurring “the boundaries of poetry, plays, song writing, fiction and non fiction” so as “to use language in ways that capture the messages, nuances, and flavour of indigenous lives” is part of the “decolonizing methodologies” her influential work outlines.249 Jo-Ann Archibald forwards and engages what she calls “Indigenous storywork” in and as a culturally appropriate Indigenous research methodology.250 Many Native writers and scholars—Leslie Marmon Silko, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Lee Maracle, Mishuana Goeman, Beth Piatote, Lisa Brooks, and Deborah Miranda among them—have likewise long discussed and demonstrated how stories and storying are core to Indigenous ways of knowing and being, a way of locating who you are and where you’re from and of attending to lived experiences as theory. Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million writes, “Stories, unlike data, contain the affective legacy of experience. They are a felt knowledge.”251 Miranda writes on legacies of land loss for Native peoples in California and the felt sense of continuing connection to those places, noting how “the stories still exist, and testify that our connections to the land live on beneath the surfaces of our lives, like underground rivers that never see the light of day, but run alive and singing nonetheless. The stories call us back.”252 Stories, here, are not fiction but coordinates in space-time that facilitate participants’ understanding and placement in the world and their ability to envision futures.253

Queer Foundationality

Another deep linkage between these academic fields, and intertwined with their understanding of bodies as sites of knowing, lies in how “queer theorizing,” and the understandings and perspectives of queer and nonbinary ways of understanding, are foundational to both. This grounding in “queer normativity” (to paraphrase Leanne Betasamosake Simpson) is important not just as a genealogy to note and name but for the incisive clarities, insights, and resonances that building a discourse foundationally based in and expressing understandings of a vibrant diversity of experiences of bodies, sexualities, and socialities brings (while noting, too, that “normativity” is itself a troublesome benchmark to herald).254 In both dance studies and Native studies, queer theorizing, and the knowledges developing in and from perspectives that register a multiplicity of gender identities and sexualities, has been so central to the fields as to be almost unremarkable.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes of the “Indigenous queer normativity” that was ingrained in many Indigenous nations before European “explorers” came—where gender variance and, say, two women living together were not really remarked upon as if it were a big deal, or called “queer,” but rather treated “as if it were a normal inconsequential part of life.”255 Two Spirit and queer (2SQ) Indigenous bodies, she notes, held and hold “knowledge, relationships, and responsibilities. Queer Indigenous bodies are political orders,” she writes,256 drawing on scholarship by Audra Simpson and noting how this makes these bodies a threat to settler sovereignty. This is why these bodies, she continues, “house and generate a wealth of theory and critical analysis regarding settler colonialism that straight bodies cannot.” Scholarship in Indigenous studies has developed from 2SQ perspectives and the wealth of knowledge they house, both as they have been foregrounded—see work by Rifkin (who asks “When Did Indians Become Straight?”), Scott Lauria Morgensen (on “queer settler colonialism”), Kim TallBear (on “Making Love and Relations beyond Settler Sex and Family”), and Quo-Li Driskoll, to name a few recent examples—and also as they have been part of the story and its scholarly impulse, but not named on its cover (permeating Native critical theorizing from Paula Gunn Allen through Deborah Miranda and beyond).

In dance studies, the danced and written theorizing of artists and scholars presuming and/or enacting a centrality of queer understandings is foundational as well. Croft’s Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings and the dances and articles in it articulate how “queer dance,” named and not named as such, has challenged social norms.257 Croft writes, “Dance, as it is taken up by artists, teachers, administrators, and scholars, produces a field for discussing and imagining how bodies in motion offer alternative meanings and ways of being.”258 She notes how “some dance makers, audiences, and thinkers have long embraced queer possibilities of coalition, anti-normative critique, and social disruption.”259 An infusion of queerness in dance studies stems in part, Croft’s and others’ remarks suggest, from the relative acceptance of queer dancers in a multitude of dance spaces. As DeFrantz notes, “the largest cohort of dancers in the context of the United States—including liturgical dancers, hip hop dancers, video, commercial and concert stage dancers, folk dancers—embrace queer people in their midsts, even when those same queer people might be rejected outside the context of their dancing.”260 Elsewhere, DeFrantz focuses specifically on Black social dance, arguing that “queer presence and queer gesture are foundational to the Black expressive arts”;261 he writes further about Black social dance’s “queer ancestral hauntings,”262 discussing the “haunting presence of queers-of-color aesthetic imperatives within political mobilizations of black social dance.”263 He notes how “these fugitive placeholders of queer dance haunt heteronormative mainstream performances, referencing hidden, forgotten, ancestral, and discarded histories of queer Black social dance.”264

Queer possibilities thus circulate widely in dance, where they have been generating theorizing beyond the hyperseparations of gender duality and hetero-patriarchy since the field began.265 As with Indigenous studies, the perspectives of bodies named today “queer” are so much a part of dance and of dance studies that it is part of the field—haunting it, to follow DeFrantz—even when not necessarily foregrounded. This includes attention to how bodies, in multiple dance spaces infused with gender pluralities, circulate ways of meaning and being outside of straightness. “As a practice, dance highlights assumptions about the relationship between one’s body and one’s gender expressions,” Croft notes.266 “Dance, with its poetic porosity and generative failure to convey direct meaning, engages productively and provocatively with queer’s slippery, shapeshifting sensibility,” she continues.267 “Queer holds space for multiple meanings, clashing and unstable, always in motion, much like a dance.”268 “Queer,” in other words, is not just analogous to dance but also part of what constitutes it. In central ways, the very turn to bodies’ circulations and theorizations as useful (to follow Sara Ahmed) political, theoretical, enactment articulations is, in an academy developed and still mired in a white-Christian-based colonializing modernity built on a separation of body and mind and body and soul that demands control and denial of bodies, deeply “queer.”269 This has been a part of dance studies’ “queer normativity”—what Foster, referring to modern dance, calls its “closets full of dances”—even in scholarship not addressing dance’s queerness directly.270 All the same, as Croft notes, there is still much to be done to develop this theorizing, particularly outside of ballet and modern dance and the whiteness associated with these “as though those are the only norms to queer.”271

Queer/2SQ embodied insights, then, in deeply foundational as well as recent and ever-insightful ways, have infused both fields with embodied understandings that exceed the dualisms and hyperseparations that enable, and are enabled by, ongoing coloniality.272

Time Frames

Both fields, likewise, have had long, intense, sometimes fraught discussions around ideas of time, particularly around what is seen as lasting, and what is seen as disappearing, and how these allow (and don’t allow) access to resources (of the state, of “history,” of what the academy sees as valuable). Both dance and Indigenous studies have forwarded understandings of temporalities in which not-being-visibly-present-at–the-moment doesn’t mean erasure or disappearance (even as dance and Indigenous peoples both have also been read as such). Scholars in both fields have unpacked how danced and Indigenous ways of being and knowing inhabit time in ways that exceed the temporal frameworks into which the academy—and, indeed, labor extraction and capitalist productivity writ large—has inserted them.

In dance and performance studies, descriptions of dance as “fleeting” and “ephemeral” have been vigorously asserted, and vigorously contested.273 As Giersdorf writes, “the discipline of dance studies has been forced to problematize disappearance and nontangibility repeatedly.”274 Early discussions of U.S. white postmodern dance theorized dance as not existing beyond the moment of its performance. For example, in 1973, dance critic Marcia Siegel asserted that “dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point. . . . It is an event that disappears in the very act of materializing.”275 This has remained an ongoing strain of thought in the field. Dance scholar Franko has argued for a rethinking of dance through the terms presence and disappearance, with the capacity to be performed again. As Giersdorf glosses it, “the movement and performance would be able to produce not only the past and a present but also a future. Therefore, not only does the sociocultural system produce certain bodies and movement; bodies and embodiment themselves produce far more than just memory.”276 These include hints of the temporal complexity of dance, even as this system continues to frame dance inside Western past–present–future successive temporal frames. Alongside this discussion, African American dance theory has long and compellingly registered the import of multiple temporalities, theorizing repetitions and “breaks” not as disappearances but as continuities. Perspectives akin to these have permeated recent theorizing on non–African American performance as well. Lepecki, writing primarily about white European dance, both reiterates the understanding of dance as ephemeral and also layers it to recognize “the coexistence of multiple temporalities within the temporality of dance,” which include “multiple presents in the dancing performance.”277 In the field of dance studies, then, various perspectives around time, permanence, continuities, and disappearances have been and continue to be sites of productive discourse with capacities to create social systems and have been tied to the racial and cultural perspectives from which scholars work.

In Indigenous studies, ideas around time as layered and multiple—and tensions between these ideas and those most frequently forwarded in ostensibly neutral academic understandings of time as universal and sequential—are equally core. Many scholars have addressed the pervasive production of Native peoples as of the past and taxidermically primitive: once existing in a now-unchanging-because-bygone era against which a changing settler modernity defines itself, or what Jean O’Brien calls “firsting and lasting.”278 In Indigenous Australian contexts, discussions of what is glossed in English as the “Dreaming” (which, as Swain notes, is an overly generalized term “applied across diverse Aboriginal ontologies” with different terms for this) address its understanding of nonlinear time.279

Taking up the topic of “Indigenous temporalities” at length, Mark Rifkin discusses how “other-than-chronological forms of experience” and “Native peoples’ varied experiences of duration” are out of sync with “settler time.”280 As he notes, an association of Native peoples with a “past” understood as part of a “post-Enlightenment notion of linear causality, progress, or succession” has been a central tool of ongoing colonization.281 It has enabled Native peoples to be seen as “authentic” only when in the past—or in nonbroken connection to a past understood along such a timeline “with its clear inheritances and uninterrupted modes of generational succession.” Alternatively, neoliberal drives for Indigenous and settler reconciliation have driven calls for a shared time and space without attending to the “settler epistemological privilege” that defines the “present” as one in which the settler state is a historical given.282 Drawing on (as well as critiquing) queer discussions of temporality, Rifkin describes “the temporal robustness of Indigenous modes of self-understanding” and “modes of continuity.”283 Approaching “Indigenous forms of persistence, adaptation, and innovation,”284 he suggests, requires an understanding of time not as one thing (i.e., “linear” or “circular”) but as “a set of interpretive possibilities—as a hermeneutic.”285 His discussion gestures toward some of how dancing enacts experiences of temporalities as “rhythmic, multidimensional,” thus exceeding the frameworks of “settler time.”286

Harjo, in her compelling discussion of Mvskoke epistemologies of time, describes ways that “time is not modulated by productivity nor by life; it is modulated by relationality.”287 While “the settler colonial notion of time divides it into segments to support a bigger capitalist machine,” in a Mvskoke way of knowing time, Harjo continues, “relationality is prioritized over all else.” Describing a workshop she led in which “casually visiting with one another” precluded what the clock said, Harjo explains, “making kinship connections came first—establishing and cultivating relationality took primacy over starting on time.”288 Harjo discusses how these relationality-prioritizing epistemologies of time include the prioritizing of relationality with relatives and ancestors.289 Royal’s discussion resonates similarly: he articulates how the purpose of Māori storytelling “is not to explain the past—because there is no past. Rather, existence represents an ongoing opportunity to bring alive in our experience, to continually awaken in our consciousness the ancestors and related events referred to in the stories.”290

Both dance and Indigenous studies thus theorize with and through temporalities beyond the continuous, sequential, unbroken timelines of what settler academic history sees as given, engaging what in those time frames is seen as fragmented, ephemeral, discontinuous, lost, ruptured, passed on, as also active and whole and repeating and remaining in relation, including as “remains” in fragments, flashes, and slivers and “momentary” performances.

Creation and Creativity

An engagement with creativity also links the fields of dance studies and Indigenous studies, though they travel to it along different paths.

In discussions of contemporary dance, the idea that dance making is a “creative” act, and that the dance stage is a space for inventing something, is a truism. “Contemporary dance” is considered an art form in which experimentation and newness are not only acceptable but required: doing something someone did before is derivative, while dance that follows a white Eurocentric modernist dictate to “make it new” garners high acclaim.291 This differs in discussions of what are seen as “social,” “folkloric,” or “traditional” dances, which bear some of the weight of the timelines, discussed earlier, that require continuity along an unbroken timeline, not creative invention, to be “authentic.”292 It differs as well, as discussed, in many discussions emanating from engagements with African American dance, where relation to ancestral connection, and rhythmic repetition, and accessing realms understood as previous or past (or at least not new) circulate in some tension with artistic requirements for newness and invention.293 Kedhar teases apart how South Asian dancers have negotiated these requirements, noting how “Eurocentric notions of innovation have fundamentally shaped the direction of South Asian dance in Britain.”294 In concert dance history, including that marked as African American or South Asian, seeing performed stage dance as “creative” and inventive is not new or threatening but rather required and constitutive of the space.

Creativity in Native studies and spaces has been more fraught. Inventing something new goes against settler-colonial legal requirements, based (following the preceding) in settler conceptions of time, for Native peoples to have unbroken connection to an unchanging past. In the United States, what is required for a Native Nation to receive “federal recognition” from the federal government (which comes with multiple high economic and political stakes and impacts) involves proving one has not changed too much: that what is practiced today is not creative “invention” but rather traceable along an unbroken timeline to a precolonized past (in essence, to prove one has not been colonized too much; the paradoxes of this have been well remarked). As Native peoples have negotiated this terrain in attempts to survive and thrive, no wonder “creative” enactments—including dancing that is visibly different from what was practiced before and that signals creative invention—have been risky to embrace.

Indigenous studies scholarship, however, has not only claimed but insisted on the generative import of creativity. This has been actively engaged, for example, in work with Indigenous languages. Native languages with few or no current speakers are no longer referred to as dead or lost but rather are considered dormant or sleeping and are being awoken and revitalized through active, creative engagement with the words, sounds, and fragments of language that are available.295 In Indigenous performance studies, Royal’s work has been instrumental in articulating the core import of creativity and of “creative potential.” Royal’s influential dissertation on the whare tapere developed a theory upon which these pre-European iwi-community “houses”/spaces for storytelling, dance, music, puppets, and games could be renewed.296 First laying out research he’d done on these whare tapere, Royal then worked to bring these sites of entertainment to form. To do this, he created an organization designed to foster and reclaim whare tapere performance practices by drawing on what he called “the open-hearted investigation of identity through the creative act.”297 Through this organization, he hired Māori dance artists (and Māori artists in other performance forms). Between 2010 and 2015, he brought them to his family land in the summers, where they used their training in dance—their creative potential—to physically investigate the fragments of “historical” knowledge Royal had found through his research, to experiment with what their investigations brought forward, and, from this, to create anew. This included creation of a dance work choreographed by Māori (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, and Waitaha) dance artist Louise Pōtiki-Bryant in collaboration with Royal, Te Kārohirohi: The Light Dances.298 This land-based physical process thus brought to form a new enactment of the whare tapere, constructed via the performers’ acts of performing.299 Royal’s later written work directly discusses a new movement of “creative potential” and theorizes creativity “within the tradition and body of knowledge called ‘mātauranga Māori.”300 These later writings articulating, parsing, and directing Māori language terms propose multiple examples of how performance creatively enacts Māori epistemologies beyond colonization. As just one example of this, he forwards a “new wānanga” (“a creative process as well as the spirit, ethics, and ethos of that creativity”) not as “some kind of reaction or response to forces from ‘without’ (i.e. colonization)” but rather as a way to work from “within” Māori epistemologies and thus engage creative potential in a “mana inspired approach” to enact “beyond our colonial history.”301 Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman and many others engaging with Indigenous futurities in Indigenous arts write similarly of the import of “creating new possibilities through imaginative modes—precisely because the ‘real’ of settler colonial society is built on the violent erasures of alternative modes.”302 Goeman continues, “The imaginative possibilities and creations offered in the play of a poem, imagery of a novel, or complex relationships set up in a short story . . . provide imaginative modes to unsettle settler space.”303 Miranda articulates beautifully the import of a shift from recreating what has been lost in Indigenous cultures to imaginatively creating, from fragments, Indigenous beauty and possibility. “Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed,” she writes. “We must think of ourselves as a mosaic, human beings constructed of multiple sources of beauty, pieces that alone are merely incomplete but which, when set into a new design together, complement the shards around us, bring wholeness to the world and ourselves.”304

I include these disciplinary discussions because they inform and circulate through the rest of this project. Many more would be possible. This brief and incomplete glossing of these few topics serves, I hope, to alert readers to some of the complexity of these issues and to suggest places to turn for deeper engagement. In what follows, I sometimes return to these topics directly, and sometimes they are interwoven into the narratives, discussions, and stories this project tells. As you read on and skip across or follow through these chapters, I hope the preceding introduction has extended your antennae so that you can sense some of the many layers of knowing, and of debate, that every discussion and narration necessarily taps.

I hope this introduction has also underscored the vibrancy of this growing field. When I began work in this area in 1995, very few dance studies scholars were engaging specifically with Native American or Indigenous dance; many of those who were approached it from anthropological perspectives, doing important work, though not always in relation with dance studies.305 Many scholars were then and have since been addressing ways dance and performance challenge colonial legacy and unsettle/reconfigure the (legal, metaphysical, ideological, political) structures of imposed European colonization in various global locations, with Savigliano’s, Cruz Bank’s, Chatterjea’s, and Srinivasan’s works as important early examples.306 Some of this work, in addition to my own, has addressed these issues in relation to Indigenous dance for many years. Much of Ojeya Cruz Banks’s work about dance in Aotearea, for example, which builds off that of Royal and focuses also on the work of Atarmira Dance Collective (as does chapter 1 here), engages “dance epistemologies grounded in indigenous perspectives and a decolonizing politics.” Cruz Banks discusses how “conceiving dance as knowledge is a challenge to Eurocentric, Western, epistemic assumptions,” linking this to how decolonizing thinking “involves considering the narratives that originate from indigenous concepts and understanding” and to how “decolonizing our dance epistemologies recovers stories and practices that link us to people, our own spiritualities, and to the landscapes we live and travel through.”307 Mique’l Dangeli’s early work discusses how a stone mask her partner carved and the dance she created alongside it attest to “the dynamic ways in which our ancient epistemologies survived colonialism”308 and “[speak] to our effort to reclaim our nax nox” (“used to refer to supernatural powers, spirits, masks, dances, and songs” with “the ability to bring change into the world”).309

The past decade in particular has seen a burgeoning of exciting dance studies scholarship developed by those engaging specifically with movement practices and dance making by Indigenous dance artists/collectives, arguing for its grounding in Indigenous ontologies and for ways this interrupts or reconfigures imposed structures of coloniality as it forwards and strengthens Indigenous ways of being and knowing. This is a central thread of dramaturg Rachael Swain’s recent book Dancing on Contested Land, on the intercultural dance company Marrugeku’s “choreopolitical processes” in relation with the unceded lands of the Yawuru and Bunaba in the northwest of Australia. Developed via Swain’s longtime work as co–artistic director of Marrugeku with Yawuru/Bardi dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, this discussion carefully and specifically narrates multiple ways the dance company’s grounding in Indigenous ontologies underlies its practice-led research. Swain discusses how these “highlight how early nineteenth-century Western monological constructs sought violently to subjugate such ways of being in the world which acknowledge culture and nature and also mind and body as intertwined”;310 she describes how Marrugeku’s performance-making process is instead in relation with “an ontology that understands that land, atmospheres, minerals, waters, the living and the dead, non-human species and Ancestral forces all have presence and agency and are responsive and responding to human lifeworlds.”311 “Indigenous dance is located and relational,” Swain writes,312 arguing for how Marrugeku’s dance works counter Western values and ontologies to “reassert ethical relationships with the land, and other beings, communities and histories.”313 Swain thus addresses Indigenous dance making as a way of countering seeming decimation by “colonial invasion and acts of cultural genocide,”314 with a focus on “all that has occurred there, including its colonial history of violent dispossession and, for those who follow Yawuru customary law, the co-presence across time of sentient beings.”315

Other exciting recent work, deeply grounded in specific geopolitical, linguistic, and ontological contexts, includes that by Tria Blu Wakpa, Mique’l Dangeli, María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Evangelina Macias, Sam Aros Mitchell, and Karyn Recollet (to name just a few—and those I know directly—who are actively writing and publishing in these areas). Dangeli discusses Squamish Nation composer, choreographer, and dance group leader S7aplek’s collaborative dance-making practices that insist upon Chiax, or Squamish protocol, and refuse colonial policing. Chiax, she argues, “is an artistic lens through which [S7aplek] creates performances affirming Squamish land rights, epistemology, and hereditary privileges.”316 Blu Wakpa argues for the “interconnected individualism” that a Dancing Earth piece danced by Apache dancer Anne Pesata enacts. Noting how, in the dance, “the reeds are living beings, as alive and embodied as Pesata herself,”317 Blu Wakpa articulates how “Pesata’s conception of interdependence transcends human-to-human interactions and presents an alternative to Western epistemologies, which hierarchize humans above plants.”318 Closely analyzing the work the piece does as “embodied praxis,” including how it involves Pesata “embodying her ancestors,” Blu Wakpa argues that it works to “unsettle settler colonial cartographies” and “encourages a reexamination of the socially constructed dichotomies and hierarchies integral to colonization.”319 Recollet and dance artist Emily Johnson, writing collaboratively, describe what they name as “kinstillatory gatherings,” with a focus on monthly fireside gatherings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and on what “fire as a more-than-human being” teaches,320 as “a choreography of relationality with land, ancestors (including future ancestors and more-than-human kin),” and a “technology to spatially orient a collective to think, dream, and activate community futures through forms of dance, song, feasting and witnessing.”321 Firmino-Castillo engages in particularly developed ways with how dance and performance unsettle colonialist impositions and regenerate ways of being that coloniality attempts to annihilate. Her theorizing stems from her engagements with an Ixil Maya town “targeted for genocide at the height of Guatemala’s thirty-six year war (1960–1996),” arguing for how the genocidal violence “directed towards Indigenous Guatemalans” extends beyond the murder of human persons to include the attempted destruction of Ixil Maya ways of being.322 She draws on performance studies scholar Diana Taylor’s writings on embodied forms of agency and on decolonial scholar Mario Blaser’s definition of “ontology” to situate her approach to how “performance was used by Indigenous peoples . . . to regenerate ontological relationships.”323 Among its contributions, Firmino-Castillo’s work compellingly contests colonial notions of what a body is and offers the generative term telluric to extend Taylor’s notion of embodiment to include that “of the earth.”324

The preceding discussion briefly references only a fraction of these scholars’ work, which is itself just part of the vibrant, growing body of work that has been and is being published in this arena of research. It barely touches on the complexities of its arguments. All of our works are engaging the theorizing that Indigenous dance is enacting. All share commonalities in how we register and engage with ways Indigenous movement practices and performances hold ways of understanding, and enact ways of being, that supersede those colonization has brutally and violently attempted to assert as superior and to impose. Our works also differ, given our various positionalities and academic trainings and groundings; the specificities of the dancing with which we are engaging, including its geo-politico-historical location; and how our own perspectives, interests, strengths, and theorizings engage with it. Additional compelling, resonant projects are emerging as more artists and scholars turn toward Indigenous dance to discuss and engage with the worlds it enacts and then complete dissertations, make dances, write articles, gather, talk, exchange, and otherwise contribute, formally and informally, to growing global dialogue in this field. Please look up the works mentioned herein—and many others works, including those referenced throughout this book—because they are compelling and brilliant and necessary in how they are both resonant with what others are perceiving and also specific to the contexts in which they are engaged. The contribution I offer here—narrating how the dance making I’ve witnessed works to unsettle ongoing histories, structures, and practices of colonization, while engaging with dance practices stemming from modern dance genealogies and in relation to the histories and structures of modern dance itself—is just one small part of what needs to be said.

The Indigenous dance artists I’ve seen, felt, followed, and witnessed—and many others I haven’t—also continue to brilliantly theorize in their dances and dance-making practices. From what I’ve come to understand, they continue not to take the existence of the settler state as given. They continue to locate Indigenous knowledge in the “incomplete” or fragmentary that remains despite colonizing attempts at eradication. They continue to use these “remains”—Native language terms, parts of dance songs or movements or ritual practices, treasured “objects” kept in museums, relatives’ memories, elders’ knowledge, youth’s energies, photographs of ancestors, sounds of land and water, and bits of information gleaned from family albums or the internet or the library—in their dance-making processes to create and enact anew.325 They continue to locate ways of knowing in the creative practice of dance making. They continue to do so by engaging training tools that include those familiar to many contemporary dancers, such as focusing attention on the impulses, images, and stories accessed kinetically in their and their dancers’ bodies, activating stamina and exhaustion, and using gravity and improvisation to generate physical responsiveness. They continue to pay attention to things not necessarily part of many contemporary dance-making processes, such as knowledge that comes in dreams and signs; processes for entering and leaving, opening and closing; processes for asking permission to use particular stories; recognizing and naming relation to land and location; focusing and directing energy toward a particular purpose; ensuring everyone has a place and purpose; and enacting multiple other levels of caretaking and caregiving.326 They continue to see those who are young and able to use the strength and intelligence of their highly tuned bodies to investigate, as well as elders, mature artists, and differently abled artists, as crucial to this work.327 They continue, in ways I’ve witnessed and have just listed and in many more I have not, to activate and generate a vibrant, temporally layered, Indigenous present futurity. They continue to dance Indigenous worlds.

In my previous scholarship, I’ve looked at how “The People Have Never Stopped Dancing,” arguing for the ongoing practice of Indigenous dancing despite colonizing attempts at eradication. Here I shift that focus slightly to address not only the “never stopped” but also the dancing that recurs even with stoppages.328 What follows looks at Indigenous continuity in what, in settler time, is seen as ruptured, ephemeral, or noncontinuous.

While informed by the work of the many Indigenous dance artists I’ve had the honor of engaging with over the past two decades, the rest of this project engages deeply with just a few. This gives space to carefully describe the relationality each enacts, in ways that, I hope, through their/our/my narrations, contribute to that enactment. Each chapter of the book is organized around the work of one dance artist with whom I have been in long-term relation. The chapters describe how these Indigenous dance makers envision and enact deep relationality—including, at times, redirections and refusals—as artistically and politically generative. In this, they demonstrate how the dance works discussed enact, as Audra Simpson writes in a different context, “how to imagine themselves outside of the interstices of Empire while operating within it.”329 They register “colonialism’s ongoing life” even as they enact its “simultaneous failure.”330

The first section of chapter 1, “Choreographies of Relational Reciprocity,” “Hosts and Visitors, Aotearoa, 2009,” focuses on specific instances involving Māori land, protocol, dance, and dance artists. It sets the scene for the rest of the chapter’s focus on systems of maanakitanga—reciprocal kindness, respect, and care—inside and alongside extractivist conditions that seek to override these ways of being. The next two parts of the chapter weave around a dance piece of Māori choreographer Jack Gray’s, called Mitimiti, that also enacts these systems. The second section of chapter 1, “Manaakitanga in Motion: Choreographies of Possibility,” cowritten with Gray, layers description of an early version of Mitimiti with discussion of our travels and interactions connecting with one another across supposed spatial and temporal borders (as the dance work Mitimiti also enacts). The third section, “Hashtag Mitimiti: Where You At?,” discusses a staged version of the full dance work, which the Atamira Dance Company premiered in Auckland in October 2015, as a resurge-instance of a world grounded in Indigenous ways of being that extend beyond the time and space of the stage work itself, including in the unerased traces and ongoing practices of the reciprocal exchanges that constituted it. These include a #mitimiti project Gray initiated and the #MITIMITI T-shirts Gray’s community in Mitimiti had made for themselves and wore to the performance, as well as in postperformance Instagram photo taking and sharing of energies and images.

Chapter 2, “Choreographies of Perspectival Relationality,” is a creatively written chapter that weaves through and around work by Dancing Earth: Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations (DE) between 2004 and 2019, focusing mostly on Of Bodies of Elements (2010). Through the voice of a “dance-scholar-in-sweat-tights” character who participates in one of DE artistic director Rulan Tangen’s workshops, it narrates aspects of Tangen’s work with mostly young Native and Indigenous dancers who have varying levels of connection to their communities. Interspersed through this narration are first-person contributions written by Tangen. The chapter unpacks how DE enacts a present “Indigenous” via the company’s activations of the traces of presence in what company members bring. It also argues for how DE enacts relationality: prioritizing the collective care of company members over that of audience numbers; engaging Indigenous food knowledges, languages, and practices of reciprocal exchange in the company’s dance training; drawing on specific family and tribal stories, practices, entities, and words brought in by contributors; cultivating connection with Indigenous land and peoples where the company tours, including connecting with local communities and offering workshops to Indigenous youths; seeking out and following the guidance of Indigenous elders; honing dancers’ capacities for attention to the multisensory, unseen, other-than-human beings, such as water, seeds, and other nonhuman actors; choreographing to direct energy rather than focus on presentational display; and, in multiple other ways, decentering some contemporary dance aesthetic values and a “single-author” genius model toward a vision that is attentive to what everyone brings—including dancers, musicians, production members, and seeds—and geared toward making a place for what all those beings offer. Chapter 2 also addresses the charged tensions and complexities around Native and Indigenous “identity” claims: around knowing and naming, and not-knowing and not-naming, one’s ancestries—including those of Tangen herself, which have shifted and been called out—and around identity enacted through kin making, caregiving, reciprocity, and accountability. As it does so, and via its creative, story-based, “choreographed” narrative structure, it registers awareness of multiple perspectival positionalities in these discussions.

“Refuge Rock: Otonabee River, Ontario, 2010,” with an “Interruption” by Tanya Lukin Linklater, an “Interlude/Pause/Provocation” in the center of the project’s four chapters, focuses on a site-specific work that Alutiiq choreographer Lukin Linklater performed in June 2010 by the Otonabee River in Peterborough, Canada. It brings forward both possibilities and tensions around the work Lukin Linklater is doing as an Indigenous feminist artist and the writing of this project by me, a white, non-Indigenous feminist scholar. The interlude, drawing on scholarship by Indigenous feminists, addresses Lukin Linklater’s work as an embodied response to the bloody murder and erasure of Alutiiq women in the Refuge Rock massacre and to Indigenous women weathering onslaughts of whiteness since. This discussion is followed by a response Lukin Linklater wrote after I circulated my writing to her, in which she points to the complexities of the feminisms that we both occupy differently. The interlude functions as a stop-and-think moment in the project’s momentum, reminding readers that “relationality” is racially situated and that my perspectives are grounded in, and limited by, my lived experience as a white woman. It ends with a poem Lukin Linklater wrote about Refuge Rock and included in the program to this performance, reprinted with her permission.

Chapter 3, “Choreographies of Relational Abun-dance,” focuses around the work of Yu’pik choreographer Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance’s SHORE as it materializes, and shifts, in four locations, over several years. It traces how the work becomes increasingly readable in relation to its Indigenous groundings, linking this to a discussion of Indigenous relationality as abundance percolating within a focus on Euro-precarity. The first section, “Precarity,” discusses how the dissolution of stable state support, not being able to rely on the status quo, the threat to “our survival” is, from Indigenous perspectives, not new but constitutive of the state’s relation to Indigenous peoples and lands. For Indigenous peoples in the now-called United States, this time is not newly precarious but one of hope and possibility. The second section, “Abundance and Abun-dance,” looks at how this recent focus on Euro-precarity brings into relief how dance as a way of knowing is grounded in the generative possibilities of durational, ongoing, physical, relational practice: the ability to respond in the moment, to shift, regroup, and regenerate in felt and ongoing relation with one other in relation to change. In such dance-based ways of knowing, “precarity” also becomes a site of possibility: what dance scholar Randy Martin terms “abun-dance.” After touching briefly on how two dance works (Women and Water by Tanya Lukin Linklater and Kaha:wi by Santee Smith) enact instances of expansive relational abundance, the third part of the chapter follows the abun-dance in reiterations of Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance’s multifaceted work SHORE in four locations over several years: Minneapolis in June 2014, where it had a largely muted Native context; Lenapehoking, that is, New York City, in 2015, where, despite how “Lenapehoking” points to Native frameworks, the work’s relation to Indigenous context remained unregistered by most witnesses; Yelamu, that is, San Francisco, in August 2015, where local Native engagement was more deeply and clearly intertwined with the work, though still generally not part of how SHORE was billed; and Narrm, that is, Melbourne, Australia, where SHORE was ensconced within and billed as part of the Yirramboi First Nations Arts Festival, a twelve-day festival of First Nations art, and thus clearly framed in its Indigenous context. The chapter shows how SHORE engages, sometimes more and sometimes less directly, with Johnson’s Yup’ik background, family, history, and cultural stories and traces how the work’s deep grounding in an expansive, abundant, Indigenous relationality—at first almost imperceptible—becomes increasingly palpable. It discusses this not-always-seen-but-always-there Indigenous grounding and its enactments of being(s) in relation across time and space, showing how the work forwards Indigenous presence—and the deep relationalities that are part of it—as abundance, countering an ongoing capitalist coloniality that seeks to impose on Indigenous peoples and lands a rhetoric of smallness, absence, scarcity, statistical irrelevance, and precarity. The chapter ends by noting how SHORE’s register of connections across time frames, realms, and being-entities functions to forward, and support, the ongoing abundance of permeating Indigenous presence.

The first part of chapter 4, “Choreographies of Relational Refusings,” “Yirramboi, Melbourne, Australia, 2017,” is a narrative discussion about that festival, including its invitations, and its refusals, as my invitation to participate included instructions for non-Indigenous delegates not to attend a Closed Cultural Protocol Ceremony that opened the festival. This discussion of being invited and also not invited sets up the rest of the chapter’s discussions around generative Indigenous refusals. Numerous Indigenous writers have discussed how Indigenous people—including themselves—refuse legibility and white/settler/ethnographic desires with defiance and enjoyment. The chapter’s second section, “Facing Refusal,” addresses hearing and heeding Indigenous refusal. As part of this, the third section, “Teachings in Listening,” addresses stepping back from the position of “expert.” I recount, and narrate, some of how—despite academia’s desires for singular authority—the ideas in this book have been cultivated relationally: in discussions and conversations with many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and dance artists over many years, including at numerous Indigenous-led conferences, workshops, and events. I also address dialoguing with Indigenous leaders about how non-Indigenous people can do work with Indigenous peoples in respectful, responsible, reciprocal ways. The fourth section, “Indigenous Dance Works/Indigenous Dance Making/Indigenous Writing,” comprises units on specific pieces. It focuses on three dance works, with video links, discussion questions, short descriptions of the works by the dance artists, commentary on the works by other Indigenous scholars and artists, and additional online links. Rather than describing and interpreting each dance work myself, following teaching from Simas in particular (whose provocations to me propelled this approach), this section forwards Indigenous voices, perspectives, and writings on Indigenous work. This last chapter thus addresses the respect, responsibilities, and reciprocities that relationality requires, including hearing and heeding refusal as an Indigenous assertion of self-determination and not only asking permission but also listening to answers, including when the answer is no.

“Conclusion: Closing and Opening” returns to the lie of hyperseparation and isolation, addressing the struggles of relationality as well as its kinships and friendships. It touches on how giving and taking in respectful, reciprocal, relational, ever-shifting attuned connection to one another register but recalibrate dance’s relation to colonizing genealogies of one-way extraction, directing dance (and dance studies) otherwise.

The book continues beyond this print volume with a turn to the danced practice of Indigenous relationality as articulated by Indigenous dance artists. In a companion essay by Tr’ondëk Hwëch’ on First Nation choreographer Michelle Olson, available on the online Manifold platform, Olson discusses her dance-making process. The book’s online platform will continue to forward writings by other Indigenous dance artists.