Notes
Preface
For discussion of language suppression, as part of colonization, in Wales, see https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/wales-first-final-colony---2070487.
This includes unconfirmed family stories of ancestral connections to the Allen family (i.e., Ira Allen, founder of the University of Vermont, and Ethan Allen).
RHAM High School (Regional District Number 8), Hebron, Connecticut. As many have argued, stereotypes like these have detrimental material consequences for Native people. In 2020, the RHAM students and principal began the process of changing this mascot.
For use of this term, I thank my daughter Rickie, who, while I was drafting this book on fellowship in Berlin, came home from her school (she was seven at the time, in second grade at a public German–American school there) excited to report to me what she had noticed in the drama club’s production of Peter Pan. “Mom, they were dressed up as Indians, wearing feathers! Saying dumb things like ‘ugga wugga’! It was erasist!”
Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive.
Thanks again to Hertha Sweet Wong; for further discussion, see Shea Murphy, People Have Never Stopped Dancing, 6.
See Shea Murphy, 4–7, 217–64.
Thanks to Julie Burelle for noting and articulating my role as witness. For a compelling discussion of witnessing as Indigenous research methodology, see Dangeli, “Dancing Sovereignty,” 39. Dangeli describes how the witnessing methodology she uses in her research is specifically based on her “lifelong training as a witness to feasts, potlatches, and other First Nations ceremonies along the Pacific Northwest” (39). She also notes that witnesses are selected and then expected to describe, restate, and reflect on the significance of, and reaffirm and validate through sharing, what is allowed to be shared. “Witnessing requires attentive listening and observing with the objective of remembering in great detail and responding in ways that recall the most important aspects of what occurred” (39). Whereas Dangeli’s approach is grounded specifically in her upbringing as a Tsimshian, mine is based in my experience as a settler scholar. From this positioning, to the best of my ability as I’ve learned throughout this process, I have taken seriously and honored the responsibility that Dangeli describes as coming with witnessing. Dangeli relates how, in her experience, a witness responds first to the hosts and other witnesses before speaking more broadly. Like Dangeli, I have “shared my writing with the dance artists who are the focus of my work” (39) before circulating it further. Through this and other practices of relationship building that have been part of this work, I hope that this project serves as an offering back, not just to academics, but also to those whose work I’ve followed.
Like Hupa/Yurok/Karuk feminist scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy, “I am proud to acknowledge my close, personal relationships with each of my research participants.” Risling Baldy cites writer Renya Ramirez, “who engages with her research participants as participants and not ‘informants.’” Risling Baldy, We Are Dancing for You, 23. Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 17, likewise challenge the reader to think with (and not simply about) the peoples, subjects, struggles, knowledges, and thought present here.
For discussion of “over-rapport,” describing “going native” as a “common danger in ethnographic research,” see Hammersley, Ethnography, 87–88. Peranda first reframed “over-rapport” as “Ovahness” during a 2019 graduate seminar discussion of these issues. Later, they elaborated how, rather than seeing “over-relationship or over-sensitivity or over-involvement as a negative methodological rut . . . we instead choose to use the optic of Ovahness, or ovah sensitivity, or ovah involvement, then what occurs is space to reflexively consider our practices and . . . to follow our impulses towards ovahness.” “Ovahness” in the ball scene, Peranda continued, is “the ultimate form of impression or expression a person can give or offer.” They added, “Ovahness is not simply beauty, but an acknowledgement of an affect sensed that an ending is coming, with the comfort that some better is ready and present.” Peranda, pers. comm., January 29, 2020. For settler-colonial scholars like me, the politics of close relationship or “ovah-rapport” with Indigenous “research participants” of course differs hugely from that of Indigenous artists and scholars (like Risling Baldy and Peranda) relating to and supporting one another in “Ovahness” acknowledgment. For one among many differences, settler “ovah-rapport” must include an honoring of times of distance, separation, and refusal (as I discuss in chapter 4)—even while (and as part of) following this invitation to consider ways an “optic of Ovahness” opens space to reflexively consider our practices and “follow our impulses towards ovahness” in our research approaches.
This includes many years of biweekly modern dance classes; a quarter century as a student of Iyengar yoga; a lifetime of biking, hiking, river lolling, and cold-lake swimming and paddling; several years of hip-hop dance practice; and many movement workshops, including with Daystar/Rosalie Jones, Charles Koroneho, Jack Gray, Rulan Tangen, Emily Johnson, Rosy Simas, Santee Smith, Louise Potiki Bryant, Yvonne Chartrand, Vicki Van Hout, and Thomas Kelly.
For a resonant and powerful discussion of research and writing about Indigenous dance as a non-Indigenous scholar, see Swain, Dance in Contested Land. She notes how “Western academic terms” include an “appetite for acquiring knowledge and constructing meaning” and her own “turning away from attempting to know in detail” in relation to some of the Yawuru, Bunuba, Kunwinjku, and Tolngu cultural conceptions that the dance company Marrugeku’s practice engages. Her project thus involves “a way of acknowledging and positioning the experience of ‘not knowing’ for non-Indigenous artists and scholars” and asks “the reader to make space for ways of knowing differently that may engage partial and incomplete understanding” (20–21).
For a definition of “dance-centric” scholarship, see Sahin, “Core Connections.”
Introduction
This term more-than-human entities circulates widely in scholarship engaging Indigenous contexts (including recent work by Tria Blu Wakpa and Cutcha Risling Baldy, to name only a couple). Other terminologies addressing this concept include otherthanhuman (de la Cadena, Earth Beings, 2015); other-than-human (David Shorter, https://anthro.ucla.edu/person/david-shorter/), and nonhuman beings (Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” 57). For compelling discussion of the idea in Indigenous studies (particularly Dakota thought, including that of Deloria, “American Indian Metaphysics,” and Charles Eastman), see Kim TallBear, “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints,” Fieldsights, November 18, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints. Her discussion is part of the “The Human Is More than Human” series hosted by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2011, and a response to Dorion Sagan, “The Human Is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New ‘Facts of Life,’” Fieldsights, November 18, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-human-is-more-than-human-interspecies-communities-and-the-new-facts-of-life.
Robinson, Hungry Listening, 24; De Sousa Santos, “The Deep Experience of the Senses,” in End of the Cognitive Empire, 166–83.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 24. Thanks to Karyn Recollet for bringing Harjo’s work to my attention.
For an overview and discussion of “relationality” as an Indigenous concept, including responsibilities as kin, and a discussion of “relational ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing” as practice, see Trawlwulwuy researcher Lauren Tynan’s “What Is Relationality?”
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 21, 101.
From Moreton-Robinson’s description of how Indigenous relationality informs an Indigenous research practice. Moreton-Robinson, “Relationality,” 71.
Coulthard, “Place against Empire,” 81.
Tynan, “What Is Relationality?,” 600.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 21.
Coulthard, “Place against Empire,” 79.
Firmino-Castillo, “What Mach Lach’s Bones Tell Us,” 39; Firmino-Castillo, “Destruction and Regeneration,” iv.
The Natives Are Restless premiered November 15, 1996. For a description and discussion of this work, see Hale, Natives Are Restless. In discussing the work, dance scholar Angeline Shaka, in “Hula for the Future,” also addresses the “powerful Native critique of US colonization that the show produced” (488) and argues for how it “produced a strident tone of Kū Kanaka, trumpeting Indigenous presence in spite of colonial logics of elimination” (491). She writes, “Indigenous performance is the enactment of agentive bodies. As agentive and knowledgeable bodies, they are therefore capable of revisioning and re-membering hula, doing so in a meaningful way” (490). Shaka links this revisioning of hula to the way the dance enacts relation, particularly how, in the practice of hula, “genealogical relationships themselves constitute a primary means of transmitting the kuleana (privileged responsibility) associated with particular categories of identification available to specific individuals” (492). She notes how “genealogies establish relationships of ancestral connectivity across time and space” (491).
Chatterjea, Butting Out, 33.
Shea Murphy, People Have Never Stopped Dancing, 10, 12.
Shea Murphy, 241.
Royal, “Te Whare Tapere”; see also Royal, Let the World Speak, and Royal, Wānaga.
For one example of the influence of Betasamosake Simpson’s work on discussions of “an unmistakable decolonial gesture grounded in a particular genealogy of being, sensing, believing, and knowing,” see Mignolo, “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture.’”
See Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love, citing Diaz.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, working with ideas from Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and Walter D. Mignolo, defines coloniality as “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration.” Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 241. These concepts and historical framings stem from the work of these and other scholars from Latin America (cited in what follows) working on coloniality, decoloniality, the “coloniality of power,” and the “colonial matrix of power.” For more on the institute mentioned, see https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/interweaving-performance-cultures/index.html.
Firmino-Castillo, “What Mach Lach’s Bones Tell Us,” 55, 70; Rodriques performance, https://www.artrabbit.com/events/projeto-brasil-the-sky-is-already-falling. Thanks to Firmino-Castillo, as well as Cristina Rosa and Jessica Friedman, for exposure to discussion around these discourses in dance and performance studies. See Rosa, Brazilian Bodies, as well as public presentations (https://www.cristinafernandesrosa.com/lectures).
Writings situated in Australian Indigenous contexts that reverberate through this book include those by Paul Carter, Patrick Wolfe, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Deborah Bird Rose, as well as those focused on Indigenous dance by Rachael Swain.
Thanks to Arabella Stanger for discussions around this.
Thomas DeFrantz, “Dancing around Race: Public Gathering #3,” Facebook, February 28, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/events/518-valencia-the-eric-quezada-center-for-culture-and-politics/dancing-around-race-public-gathering-3/250596898944867/.
For discussion of “otherwise worlds of possibility,” see Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath. For related discussion of reciprocity as part of Indigenous dance making (though with land/place/beings, not with modern dance per se), see also Swain, “Burning Daylight,” and Firmino-Castillo, “Destruction and Regeneration.”
See Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming, 12. Thanks to Marcelo Felipe Garzo Montalvo for pointing me toward this work. Thanks also to Taj James for multiple discussions around these dualisms.
See Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 153. Soren Larsen and Jay Johnson explain, “The discourse of recognition is insidious because it seeks to ‘settle’ Indigenous resurgence within the institutions of the settler state through (among other things) constitutional recognition, treaty settlement (in British Columbia) and formal apologies.” Larsen and Johnson, Being Together in Place, 43.
Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 156–57.
Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back.
For discussions of Indigenous artistic resurgence, see also Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s writing on “radical decolonial love” between those broken-by-coloniality and Goeman’s scholarship on Native women writers. Artistic examples include the video games of Elizabeth LaPensée and the painting Deerdancer by Diné artist Craig George, featuring a man in deer dance regalia hunched forward riding a bicycle alongside a graffitied wall, refusing static images of noble Native men in headdresses looking out at the sunset and figured as the waning of an era. This dancer is mobilized, young, vibrant, going somewhere. George’s painting was featured in the exhibit Neo Native: Toward New Mythologies. For related discussion of how performance regenerates ontological worlds, see Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” and Firmino-Castillo, “Destruction and Regeneration.”
“Re-existence” is a term from Adolfo Albán, cited in Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 18.
Thanks to Miqu’el Dangeli for commentary pointing to this last articulation. This focus on activating force of the momentary and small is in resonance with formulations by many others working in Indigenous contexts, including Laura Harjo’s discussions of how “futurity moves across and plays out on many potential scales” in Spiral to the Stars, 32; Rachael Swain’s discussions of “moments, however fleeting, that privilege particular cultural configurations and embodiments, knowledges and vernaculars” and that “revivify and reveal cultures operating with agency, within structural inequities” in Dance in Contested Land, 13; María Regina Firmino-Castillo’s discussions of small gestures enacting ontological regeneration in “What Mach Lach’s Bones Tell Us”; and choreographer Lukin Linklater’s forwarding of “short form” works, describing how “short form might manifest as a small text, a performance, an installation or video, a moment in relation to the ongoing, durational, persistent practice of insistence by Indigenous peoples and other folks,” in “Indigenous Objects and Performance,” 3. In performance studies, see also Dolan’s theorizing of utopia in performance as that which takes place “in glancing moments of possibly better ways to be together as human beings” in “Performance, Utopia,” 457, and Rivera-Servera’s theorizing of the queer Latino dance club’s “geography of the dance floor” in “Choreographies of Resistance,” 271–72. As Robinson and Martin write, “while focusing on small actions puts us in danger of feeling we have ‘done enough’ (thereby discounting the larger decolonizing actions that need to take place), discounting them not only risks creating a sense of powerlessness and despair, but also misses the potential of micro-actions to ripple, to erode, and to subtly shift.” Robinson and Martin, introduction to Arts of Engagement, 2. In a different (but related) context, that of “shaping change, changing worlds,” social justice facilitator Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy, similarly notes how “emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies” (3) and how “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system” (53).
Simpson, public lecture University of Toronto, 2017, emphasis added. Simpson links “statisticalization,” such as that of the census, to “the assent of minoritization and of Indigenous peoples as racial minorities” and thus to “the regimes of legibility that then reign supreme in the States.” In a similar vein, Fred Moten describes as leftist approaches that see import only if you do things “at the level of scale” like that which a state or state apparatus can do and imply that otherwise, “you’re just being silly and all you care about is these four people that you’re talking to right now.” Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 145.
For a description of the talking and laughing and eating and caring for of everyday relational practices as part of performance, see Shea Murphy and Gray, “Manaakitanga in Motion” (excerpted in chapter 1).
Rebecca Schneider discusses “access to partiality” and “to value partiality” as something dance studies “can help us with.” See Clayton et al., “Inside/Beside Dance Studies.” Thanks also to choreographer Wendy Rogers for many discussions around choreographic practices involving the “discipline of fragments.”
See Recollet, “Gesturing Indigenous Futurities”; Recollet and Johnson, “Why Do You Need to Know That?”; and Recollet’s comments in chapter 4. See also Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, 185 and 187. He writes how “in both its noun and verb forms, rupture speaks of violence, violation, fragmentation, pain.” He notes, “I’ve come to recognize just how formative these ruptures have been to who we are and how we abide in the world,” adding how “ruptures, too, can be read. The absences tell stories of their own” (185).
With the term dancescape, I borrow and translate what Kanaka scholar-surfer Karin Amimoto Ingersoll describes as “seascape epistemology,” requiring ongoing, attentive, always moving, balanced exchanges between bodies (including bodies of water). Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing.
Michelle Olson’s Evening in Paris (2006) tells an embodied story of Olson’s relationship with her grandmother and with Penobscot cabaret dancer Molly Spotted Elke; Santee Smith’s Kaha:wi (2004) tells a life cycle story deeply rooted in Smith’s lived genealogy and embodies life cycles of birth and death in relation to the tree of life and to cyclical celestial creation. Māori (Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, and Waitaha) choreographer Louise Potiki-Bryant’s Ngāi Tahu 32 (2004), whose title references a file where her ancestor’s documentation, leading to land loss under the Waitangi treaty, is held, engages with family, Ngāi Tahu, and broader Māori trauma from land dispossession. Daystar’s work has long drawn on Native stories to unfold and offer teachings about what it is to be in relationship with others, including those based in her life stories. These include No Home but the Heart (2004) (see Shea Murphy, People Have Never Stopped Dancing) and Allegory of the Cranes (2011), as well as those based in various tribal stories and teachings.
Daystar’s Wolf: A Transformation (1994), Olson’s Salmon Girl, and the tree and the whale Johnson becomes in SHORE: Performance (see chapter 3), to name just a few.
Santee Smith’s NeoIndigena in a sixty-minute embodiment of this; Simas’s We Wait in the Darkness (2014), with its reverberating soundscape, creates a world of sensory somatic attunement that taps open and enables crossings from these other dimensions; Gray’s Mitimiti (2015) stages portals to realms sensed but unseen.
Lethabo King, Black Shoals, xiii. See also Swain’s discussion of land in Dance in Contested Land, esp. 4–11.
Simas’s We Wait in the Darkness includes relation to the Kinzua Dam; Olson’s Ta’wan dances connection between water and land and enacts ways of negotiating and relating to space, place, and animal-beings in the urban space of Vancouver. Bundjalung/Yaegl choreographer Mariaa Randall’s Divercity (2016) maps and demaps urban space through Aboriginal women’s revealing of lines trampled on the ground.
See Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 145, for discussion of harvesting sap as an act of “Land as Pedagogy.”
As dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster writes, “dancing summons people and places people in specific locales and configurations in ways that are distinct to dancing itself because of its focus on bodily movement and on the capacity of that movement to articulate relationality.” She adds, “Dancing combines, segregates, bonds, and excludes, but in any of these it brings people together.” Foster, Valuing Dance, 33.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, discussing decolonial aesthetics, notes how “decolonial artistic creation and decolonial spirituality aim to keep the body and mind open as well as to keep the senses sharpened in ways that can best respond to anything that aims to produce ontological separation.” Thanks to Jessica Friedman for this connection between Maldonado-Torres’s thesis and “resurge-instances.” Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” 27, https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/.
For discussion around masks, see Askren (Dangeli), “Dancing Our Stone Mask.” For discussion of visiting with Alutiiq/Sugpiaq sewing bags and parkas held in museums and anthropological collection, “belongings that may be perceived as objects by a viewing public,” see Lukin Linklater, “Indigenous Objects and Performance,” 4. For discussion around plants, including “ontological equivalence between people and maize” (36) and “relational ontology developed through performative gestures such as name exchange” (41) with “a wild edible plant important to survival during wartime famine” (33), see Firmino-Castillo, “What Mach Lach’s Bones Tell Us.”
For more on the rejection of recognition politics, see Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire”; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus. For discussion of colonial scopophilia, see Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces.”
Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 8.
Thanks to Jack Gray for discussions around this.
See https://www.cutcharislingbaldy.com/blog/i-went-to-see-the-ishi-last-of-the-yahi-at-uc-berkeley-and-all-i-got-was-this-blog-entry-review and a review by Tria Andrews, “Ishi: The Last of the Yahi: A UC Berkeley Production That Perpetuates Gross Violences against Native Peoples,” Native Appropriations (blog), March 7, 2012, http://nativeappropriations.com/2012/03/ishi-the-last-of-the-yahi-a-uc-berkeley-production-that-perpetuates-gross-violences-against-native-peoples.html.
For background on Ishi, see https://history.library.ucsf.edu/ishi.html. See also Kenny et al., “Ishi’s Brain, Ishi’s Ashes.”
Thomas DeFrantz, “White Privilege,” lecture performance, UC Riverside, February 28, 2018; see also Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style. For discussion of artistic freedom and “reasoned dialogue” as inextricable from the types of entitlements sustaining settler-colonial claims to Indigenous lands, see Cornellier, “Extracting Inuit.” For discussion of “remains,” see Schneider, “Performing Remains.”
This description echoes what I’ve heard elsewhere, including by Karahkwine Catherine Brant, Turtle Clan of the Mohawk Nation, in Ravensbergen, “Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement,” 23.
Foster, “Choreography”; Kraut, Choreographing the Folk; Chatterjea, “On the Value of Mistranslations and Contaminations.” For discussion of “choreography” within the structures of Western philosophy and dance making, see also Manning, Always More than One, 74, and Cvejić, Choreographing Problems, 7–8.
For a discussion of issues with “choreocentrity” as “a racialized logic that sustains a Eurocentric discourse of choreography as the standard by which to evaluate peoples and cultures that are non-Western, not completely Western, or antagonistic to Western modes of thinking and being,” see Bragin, “Shot and Captured,” 102.
Kwan, “When Is Contemporary Dance?,” 39.
Chatterjea, “On the Value of Mistranslations and Contaminations,” 6.
Chatterjea, 10.
Chatterjea, 14. Noting that Asian modernities “have often refigured the models of modernity thrust upon them,” Chatterjea further asks of herself and other South Asian dance artists, “Can we reimagine our encounters in ways that disaggregate the encrustations of power that have continuously dogged our meetings with the global North?” (17).
Tsinhnahjinnie recounted how, at a recent Indigenous People’s day gathering, she didn’t hear the announcement not to photograph part of the dancing, so someone had to tap her on the shoulder to tell her: no pictures. At this point, she apologized and quickly deleted the shots she’d taken, glad that people there knew her (otherwise, who knows what would have happened to her camera?). On Alcatraz Island, Indigenous Peoples Day, October 9, 2017. Comment from Neo-Native symposium; cited with permission.
Indigenous research ethics and methodologies differ in different places, though they also share commonalities. See Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 57; Wilson, Research Is Ceremony; Fixico, “Ethics and Responsibilities,” 29–39; Battiste, “Research Ethics,” 497–510. See also downloadable guidelines referenced in chapter 4. See also Moreton-Robinson, “Relationality,” and Tynan, “What Is Relationality?”
Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style, explains: “Showing respect does not come from following rules. This chapter won’t tell you ‘what to do’ so you can jump through hoops and check the ‘did it’ box,” he writes. “Finding your way through requires thought, care, attention, and dialogue. It requires working with people” (30). Similarly, Simpson, As We Have Always Done, explains that “ethical intelligence” “is not a series of teachings or laws or protocols; it is a series of practices that are adaptable and to some degree fluid. I don’t know it so much as an ‘ethical framework’ but as a series of complex, interconnected cycling processes that make up a nonlinear, overlapping emergent and responsive network of relationships of deep reciprocity, intimate and global interconnection and interdependence, that spirals across time and space” (24, emphasis added).
Larsen and Johnson, Being Together in Place, 14.
Tuck and Yang, “Unbecoming Claims,” 816.
See Savigliano’s “Choreocritic” in “Fragments for a Story of Tango Bodies,” Foster’s Choreographing History, and Blanco Borelli’s She Is Cuba as just a few examples. For one example of danced engagement with the archive, see Purkayastha, “Decolonising Human Exhibits.” For discussion of dancing bodies as articulations of collective identity, see Rossen, Dancing Jewish, 12.
Slowing research so that it is relationally informed is not without its own hegemony within the academic–industrial complex. In most academic contexts, it is a privilege to be able to publish in a way that is not time based, making this approach largely unsustainable for the many scholars in contingent faculty positions and for those on tenure clocks. Even after tenure, “advancement” committees measuring the amount of publishing one has done—not its depth, ethics, or impact—determine promotion such that “taking the necessary time” to research and write has substantial consequence. Enabling relationally informed research to flourish will thus require deep shifts within entrenched university structures for measuring value. A relationally informed approach is also potentially troublesome in how it can burden Indigenous people being asked, again, for their time and expertise for the benefit of an author who will be credited with a publication that draws on Indigenous peoples’ contributions. It thus also needs to allow for nonresponse—and scholars’ willingness to read refusal (and to realize that things need to be rethought, reframed, or removed without additional input) or their capacity to trust in one’s understandings, without further validation. It requires scholars to themselves practice deep reciprocity, where benefiting from others’ knowledge offerings comes with an awareness that what one receives is in reciprocal balance with what one, at one point or another, offers back.
“Allow the process of collaboration to include a large circle of Indigenous contributors,” Younging writes in Elements of Indigenous Style. “That takes time. Take the necessary time” (31). Battiste similarly proposes “prolonged discussion” in “Research Ethics,” 7.
A number of published writings on Indigenous dance have taken up these approaches, and these approaches are all integral to this one. For examples of collaborative writing about Indigenous dance, see the Kino-nda-niimi Collective, Winter We Danced; Burelle and Mitchell, “Dee(a)r Spine”; Shea Murphy and Gray, “Manaakitanga in Motion.” See also Firmino-Castillo et al., “Beyond the Border.”
For more on the dance studies practice of sharing interviews and findings with participants and seeking their guidance throughout, see Suarez, “Spectres of the Dark.” Some of those who have contributed writing to this book are listed in the table of contents for the sections they wrote, sometimes separately from and sometimes in collaboration with me. Others, named throughout and in footnotes and acknowledgments, have been longtime contributors to the ideas in here, through ongoing conversations and the theorizing their dances do themselves.
See Wong, cited in Robinson, Hungry Listening, 246.
Robinson, 237. Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion engages tango as a spectacle of sex, race, and class (50) in relation to Argentina’s “complicated coloniality” (46) and to the colonizing gaze (93). Savigliano’s playful engagements with tango’s self-eroticism unpack tango as a trench where she “can shelter and resist the colonial invitations to ‘universalism’” (xiv)—though not as a way or place to “win” against colonialism or neocolonialism, given how “there is always another tango with new dangerous embraces and infinite rebellions” (220).
For discussion of “juridical change,” see Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 179–92.
Ravensbergen, in Robinson et al., “Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land Acknowledgement,” 23.
Ravensbergen, 23.
As Starn and De la Cadena write in their introduction to Indigenous Experience Today, “reckoning with indigeneity demands recognizing it as a relational field of governance, subjectivities, and knowledges that involves us all—indigenous and nonindigenous—in the making and remaking of its structure of power and imagination” (3).
One of the course corrections I made in the research of this project was realizing, a few years in, that writing about Indigenous dance artists from my professor seat was in tension with the reciprocal practices of engaged exchange I was seeing. Part of this project’s methodology has since involved using the resources to which I have access (“stealing fire” from the university, to paraphrase Moten) to generate regular “Indigenous Choreographers at Riverside” gatherings, which all the dance artists I focus on in this book (and many others) have been part of (see http://icr.ucr.edu/). These have involved contributing my skills, stamina, time, energies, and resources toward organizing workshops, showcases, residencies, and productions, which has included negotiating institutional possibilities and limits and multiple course corrections on its own stumbling and transformative journey. See Shea Murphy, “Editor’s Note,” 1–8.
Thanks to Jack Gray for insightful discussion around this. Skype with the author, August 22, 2018. Another of the course corrections I’ve undertaken has been, in revising this project, as accurately to my experience as possible, to more fully recall, sit with, and register in the text, and in these notes and in citations, where the threads of thinking I’ve been following came from. This of course isn’t fully possible, as I address more in chapter 4, nor does it fully redress the issues around extraction just outlined. I hope, though, that it contributes toward a recalibration of these economies and the circulations of knowledge they build. It is, to again cite Ravensbergen, my attempt “to do the best that I can in this moment.”
For discussion of settler and arrivant colonialisms, see Byrd, Transit of Empire, xix. Byrd is borrowing the term arrivants from African Caribbean poet Kamau Braithwaite “to signify those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe.”
DeFrantz, “Dancing around Race.” Many others have spoken of the import of joy: Gould reminded those of us gathered for a ceremony at the West Berkeley Shellmound, after a group offered a bopping dance as a prayer, that “ceremony is not always a somber time. It is a time of joy, and rejoicing” (September 9, 2018); Māori choreographer Louise Potiki Bryant has spoken about (and taught games as a way of enabling her audience to experience) the importance of fun and joyful enjoyment as an Indigenous methodology (University of California, Riverside, spring 2018); Jack Gray leads ongoing Movement for Joy dance classes as “a good reminder that we need to keep filling our cup with joy and being kind with others and ourselves” https://www.facebook.com/movementforjoy/. Stefan Harney and Fred Moten, in Undercommons, 26, note how, while universities hold spaces of trauma, they have at times been inhabited, at least from the undercommons, with love, wily moves and occasional flashes of joy. Thanks, too, to Blu Wakpa for discussions around how joy is also tied to race and class privilege.
This project does not focus on dance made by Native dance groups drawing from specific tribal dance histories and practices, for the social, ceremonial, and spiritual benefits of that community (as Risling Baldy’s work does), as well as its local and international audiences. That dance work is crucial and inspiring and doing powerful theoretical work in its investigations—and when invited, I follow it with interest. Margaret Grenier’s comments on the Dancers of Damelahmid and Miqu’el and Mike Dangeli’s comments on the Git Hayetsk dancers, http://www.githayetsk.com/, and the dancing I’ve seen by these groups have brilliantly articulated and deeply informed issues that this project takes up, to name just two examples. My focus is also not directly on B-boying and other forms of hip-hop, through which Native dance artists are also articulating and embodying ways of being—though I have been following scholarship by Johnson on the B-boy cypher and Recollet on hip-hop and spatial tagging, as well as the theorizing Indigenous hip-hop dancers are themselves doing. I am also not primarily looking at dance as it has engaged with sites of direct resistance, such as those of Idle No More, at Standing Rock, on Mauna Kea, though again, those are crucial acts, and I’m excited that others are addressing them. Powwow, too, is not a practice I focus on directly, although exciting work is happening in powwow arenas and in powwow scholarship.
Following Lethabo King’s repeated naming of what is often just called “colonization” as genocide, I have tried in this writing also to name colonization as genocidal, so as to counter the evacuation of brutal and intentional murder from colonization as a buzzword. Lethabo King, Black Shoals. At the same time, I also can see how via this repetition, genocide used as a term broadly naming one of the structures through which coloniality/colonization is constituted (as many have argued) could itself evacuate the term of some of its force when engaged in direct relation to recent brutal histories, as Firmino-Castillo does in her work on the physical and ontological genocide directed against an Ixil Maya community. Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” for example, referencing work by Oliveira Filho, discusses this targeted genocide alongside “the ‘soft’ genocide resulting from state policies of assimilation and deterritorialization” (65). See also Swain, “Burning Daylight,” for discussion of how “genocidal policies” in Australia, including assimilation, the forced removal of Indigenous children, and the loss of 98 percent of song traditions and associated dances, affected Indigenous dance knowledge and is in relation to the knowledge contemporary Indigenous art generates as a “lifeline to the future” (103, 108).
See Harney and Moten’s powerful discussion, in Undercommons, of “the debt that cannot be repaid” (61) and its crisis of unforgiveable accumulation. “We saw it in a step yesterday, some hips, a smile, the way a hand moved,” they write (62).
Thanks to Robyn Kamira for discussion of this. For one helpful discussion of the European modes and histories of aesthetic analysis in relation to modern dance choreography, see Tomko, “Teaching Dance History,” 93.
Manning, “Reggie Wilson,” 15.
DeFrantz and González, Black Performance Theory.
DeFrantz and González, 1. Discursively, this visibility of Black dance may be tied to legal histories of race in the United States: how African American physical presence (i.e., the “one-drop rule,” whereby one drop of African “blood” made one enslavable) and Indigenous invisibility (where not having enough quantifiable Native “blood” justifies legalized denial of Indigenous identity), as well as to a persistent Western focus on racial visibility (i.e., skin color, hair style, and phenotype as marker of racial identity). See Wolfe, Traces of History, 173.
There is a large and growing discourse on intersections between Indigenous and Black studies, including Lethabo King’s Black Shoals and Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness.” Exceptions specific to dance include Anita González, Afro-Mexico, and González, Jarocho’s Soul, and Dancing Earth dancer Deollo Johnson’s perspectives, mentioned in chapter 2.
Srinivasan, Sweating Saris.
Shea Murphy, People Have Never Stopped Dancing.
Wong, Choreographing Asian America.
Chatterjea, Butting Out, 2.
Rossen, Dancing Jewish.
Foster, Dances That Describe Themselves.
“Towards a Critical Globalized Humanities: Dance Research in Mexico City at the CENIDID” in Manning et al., Futures of Dance Studies, 523–40.
Kraut, Choreographing Copyright.
Walter D. Mignolo, “Enacting the Archive, Decentering the Muses,” Ibraaz: Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, November 2013, 465, https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/77; Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 482.
Lethabo King, Black Shoals, 16. Mignolo, too, notes how in these systems, “some identities depict superiority over others. . . . The ‘lighter’ one’s skin is, the closer to full humanity one is, and vice versa.” Mignolo, “Enacting the Archive,” 244.
See Wilderson, Red, White, and Black.
Wolfe, Traces of History, 10.
Wolfe, 4.
Wolfe, 15.
Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 244.
Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” 57, citing Mario Blaser. Firmino-Castillo’s approach complexifies the idea of colonization as “dehumanizing” by noting how the genocidal violence and destruction are also ecocidal, targeting nonhuman others.
Mignolo, “Enacting the Archive,” 244.
Mignolo, 476. Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” offers compelling discussion of how central tenets of Enlightenment philosophy are rooted in colonization and ongoing coloniality, arguing that the Cartesian cogito ergo sum—an ideal self-defined through its differentiation from those who don’t think and therefore aren’t—has to be understood against “a widespread and general attitude regarding the humanity of colonized and enslaved subjects in the Americas and Africa in the sixteenth century” (244). The certainty of the self as a conqueror based on attitudes about degrees of humanity, he argues, “preceded Descartes’s certainty about the self as a thinking substance (res cognitas) and provided a way to interpret it” (245).
These are part of what Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, calls the “settler structure of feelings” and what Moreton-Robinson, “Relationality,” calls the white possessive; thanks to Julie Burelle for discussion around these. See also Maile Arvin’s engagements with Moreton-Robinson via discussion of “possessive whiteness” in Arvin, Possessing Polynesians, and Lethabo King’s discussion, drawing on work by Sylvia Winter, of liberal humanism in Black Shoals, 14–15.
See Srinivasan, Sweating Saris.
See Kraut, Choreographing Copyright.
Arabella Stanger’s newly published work about “the violent ground from which utopian choreographic projects emerge,” looking at “how the corporeal forms of harmony and freedom promised in Euro-American theater dance depend on and conceal material conditions of imperial, colonial, and racial subjection” (3), has exciting overlaps and resonance with what I argue here, with a focus on non-Indigenous dance works and contexts. Stanger, Dancing on Violent Ground. For related discussion, see also Forbes, “Corpus Australis and Settler Colonialism.”
See Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, for discussion of how “Negro dance” and modern dance were mutually constitutive.
For compelling discussion of “aesthetics as politics” as part of Katherine Dunham’s “black feminist political stance” (4), see Das, Katherine Dunham.
My first book, for example, recognizes the agency that Native dancers performing in Wild West shows had and exercised, as their impresarios and audiences saw them as safely circumscribed in the theatrical arena.
Raheja notes how, in narratives of inclusion, “an Indigenous presence, when it is marked at all, appears somewhere on the timeline of a settler/colonial history originating in 1492 that always privileges a white perspective as the point of entry.” Raheja, Reservation Reelism, 29.
Russo, Feminist Accountability. See also Ahmed, On Being Included, for discussion of “inclusion,” as well as Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.
Lethabo King, Black Shoals, 21.
See Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, for a formulation of “affirmation and forgetting.” For discussion of how, following Sylvia Wynter, “the European Christian can rise to the apex of humanity only through the invention and subjugation of the Native and Black as the heathen Other and then, eventually, the irrational, sensual abject muck in which the last link of the great chain of being hangs,” see Lethabo King, Black Shoals, 52.
For example, Anna Halprin’s dance-making practices have long been in relation to the earth, caring for one another, myth, and ritual—which she has articulated in relation to her Jewish family history and enacted in relation to Miwok land and the sacred mountain Tamalpais near to her home, with its famous Tamalpa Institute “dance deck.” In discussing them, she has clearly articulated how “the history of Western culture is largely one of the exploitation and destruction of indigenous cultures,” writing in relation to “ancient indigenous rites and rituals,” “we cannot borrow or imitate them.” Myth and Rituals for the Millenium, booklet, edited by Rachel Kaplan, 1995, 7 (in author’s personal collection). And she has enacted the rituals she created with the participation of Native (though not Miwok) spiritual leaders (see https://www.context.org/iclib/ic05/halprin/). She has been an important teacher for several dance artists working with their Indigenous histories (Sam Mitchell writes of his work with Halprin’s Planetary Dance in Burelle and Mitchell, “Dee(a)r Spine”; Dohee Lee has worked closely with Halprin). But Halprin’s work itself, born of her cultural positioning and presumptions around universal experience, is not (nor would she say it is) itself “Indigenous dance.”
Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 84.
Doyle, Hold It Against Me, 92. See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, and Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art. Theater scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte’s work on director Max Reinhardt, as one example of relational aesthetics in European performance, focuses on how Reinhardt’s practice of multisensory activation as “felt physicality,” and of creating community via “common sensual experience” in the theater, was part of 1910s–1920s theater circles in Germany (with interesting links to his Jewish background and to Jewish ritual celebration). Fischer-Lichte notes how Reinhardt’s theater brought people into a temporary, “fleeting,” “common sensual experience” in the theater through a theatrical atmosphere “felt physically as a result of the lighting, music, sounds, rhythms, and even scents (released from burning torches)” they were brought into that helped facilitate the establishment of “a theatrical community during the course of the production” (321). Fischer-Lichte, “Policies of Spatial Appropriation,” 219–38.
Doyle, Hold It Against Me, 92.
Manning, Always More than One, 33.
Erin Manning’s detailed discussion of William Forsythe’s work in Relationscapes, for example. Doyle’s comments on the conversations being staged around “forms of relationality” in art criticism are relevant here; she notes how these discussions mirror the hierarchical logics “in which the feelings of some communities . . . outweigh those of others” and where some work “is valued as more complex, as having more integrity and intelligence than the emotional register of the work of other artists (invariably, women artists and artists of color).” Doyle, Hold It Against Me, 93.
Kōtātara, the Newsletter of Ōrotokare: Art, Story, Motion, Trust, no. 9 (October 2008).
Teves, Defiant Indigeneity, 11–13.
Teves, 11.
Thanks to dancer-choreographer Eddie Elliot (of Māori descent from Tainui, New Zealand), whose comments helped focus this line of thinking. Atamira Dance Company Zoom discussion, April 30, 2020.
Teves, Defiant Indigeneity, 13.
As dance scholar Clare 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.” See Croft, Queer Dance, 2.
There are notable exceptions, including work by Joann Keali’inohomoku, Randy Martin, Ojeya Cruz Banks, and me.
Important recent contributions include Shorter, We Will Dance Our Truth, and Mendoza, Shaping Society through Dance; Sklar, Dancing with the Virgin.
For more on the Idle No More movement, see the Kino-nda-niimi Collective, Winter We Danced. For more on the Haudenosaunee lacrosse team’s refusal, see Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, and Lyons, “Nationalism.” For more on the rejection of recognition politics, see Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.
See Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence.
Coulthard mentions only in passing that Idle No More included “a combination of ‘flash-mob’ round-dancing and drumming in public spaces like shopping malls, street intersections, and legislative grounds” (161) and “the now regular display of marches, flash-mob round-dances, drumming and prayer circles” (614). Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.
For example, Simpson attends to embodied experience in Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back but does not address dancing.
Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 129–78. For additional discussion of how non–dance studies scholarship has sidestepped the body, see Chatterjea, Butting Out, 75–76.
Risling Baldy, We Are Dancing for You; Jacob, Yakama Rising.
In As We Have Always Done, Simpson addresses dance works by Santee Smith and Tanya Lukin Linklater; Cree writer Billy Ray Belcourt writes about a dance film of Lukin Linklater’s.
For discussion of dance at Standing Rock, see Wakiya, “Dance and Indigenous Resistance,” in “The Indian on the Moon.” Discussion of hula in relation to Mauna Kea is in article drafts by Angeline Shaka.
It is also engaged with feminist, gender, and sexuality studies and has been deeply informed by scholarship in African American studies, both in the ways Black dance has been an integral (though inadequately recognized) core of dance studies and in ways African American and Indigenous studies are increasingly informing each other. As Lethabo King has compellingly unpacked, Black studies and Native studies have interwoven and shifting connections and disjunctions, with potential to create new lines of inquiry and creative practice. Croft writes, “In the United States, dance studies arose as a field deeply enmeshed in feminism and Black dance studies, which helped it emerge as an area with different methodologies than more text-based humanities, and as a place where scholars and artists might work together.” Croft, Queer Dance, 16. At the same time, as Iyko Day discusses helpfully, strands of Black studies (especially Afropessimism) have been in contested relationships with strands of Indigenous studies. Day, “Being or Nothingness.”
Decolonization as metaphor, they add, “turns decolonization into an empty signifier to be filled by any track towards liberation” (7). They continue, “In our view, decolonization in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically.” Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 7. For discussion of the analytics of metaphor that argues for ways “metaphor is decolonial,” see Firmino-Castillo et al., “Beyond the Border,” 34.
See Povinelli, Geontologies. Povinelli discusses how Two Women Sitting Down, in the far north of Australia, is seen by an anthropological report and legal judgment as “a geological formation represented by a human narrative,” while Indigenous groups “testified that they believe that specific features of the landscape such as Old Man Rock and Two Women Sitting Down are sentient, and equally importantly, that, as human descendants of these still sentient sites, they are obligated to act on this belief” (35). For discussion of analogization, see Robinson, Hungry Listening, 64–65.
Pratt, “Afterword,” 398. Others have addressed this similarly. Indigenous, Wolfe writes in Traces of History, 16, can be defined most simply as the peoples there who have not come from somewhere else. Maldonado-Torres’s discussion of the “coloniality of power” refers to Indigenous not only in terms of temporality (who was there) and arrival (who came later) but also by the political imbalance, as understood by those arriving, and how it came into play (i.e., how European colonization created identities such that “the relation between the subjects is not horizontal but vertical in character. That is, some identities depict superiority over others”). Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 244, drawing on ideas from Anibal Quijano. Others question the term having meaning: Brendan Hokowhitu has suggested that “Indigenous studies” is an amorphous concept and one that, “as a canonical field . . . does not exist.” Hokowhitu, “Indigenous Existentialism,” 102.
All citations from interview with Shea Murphy, University of Auckland, June 1, 2009.
Discussions around instead using more localized names (i.e., Lisjan or Huichin for the territory where what is called Oakland/Berkeley is today) began circulating publicly in fall 2017.
“We became infected with the Cchumashian identity virus—a complex scheme funded by folks like John Johnson, Mike Glassow, Richard Applegate, John Peabody Harrington, and others,” Weighill writes. “In short, WE KNOW WHO WE ARE AND WHERE WE CAME FROM!” Weighill, “Two-Step Tales,” 10.
Thanks to Tria Blu Wakpa for discussion around this.
For further discussion, see Wolfe, Traces of History, 5–6.
Lyons, X-Marks, 49. “Indian identity is in crisis,” Lyons explains, noting, “By ‘crisis,’ I mean no more than a state of instability and a turning point, both a danger and an opportunity” (49). See also Lyons, “Nationalism.”
TallBear, “Genomic Articulations,” 137. See also TallBear’s (and others’) comments in “Sorry, That DNA Test Doesn’t Make You Indigenous,” CBC Radio, November 4, 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/the180/least-important-election-the-case-to-stop-changing-the-clocks-and-the-problem-of-dna-as-proof-of-culture-1.3834912/sorry-that-dna-test-doesn-t-make-you-indigenous-1.3835210.
Goldstein, “Toward a Genealogy of the U.S. Colonial Present,” 5.
Shea Murphy, People Have Never Stopped Dancing, 158–60.
Lyons, X-Marks, outlines the frequent controversies, particularly in the 1990s, over writers, scholars, and actors who “faked” their Native identities; he also touches on contemporary controversies involving tribal “disenrollments” and “banishments,” including those involving Cherokee Freedmen and those linked to casino wealth. Raheja, too, outlines scholarly literature around the prevalent “vexing and liberatory issues” regarding Native American identity that are “at the heart of Native American studies.” See Raheja, Reservation Reelism, 110–11.
TallBear notes how “there is so much claiming of Indigenous ancestors and history by non-Indigenous people as their history, as anchoring their right to represent and identify Indigeneity in their own bodies and lives while they very often do not have actual relations with living Indigenous communities.” TallBear, “Caretaking Relations,” 28. See also Leroux, Distorted Descent.
Others include the privilege imposters have to reenter worlds of white privilege they have left only temporarily and the way claims often stem from individuals’ less-than-stable psychological drives for a sense of belonging, uniqueness, and purpose.
Raheja, Reservation Reelism, 143. Raheja’s discussion of “economies of redfacing,” focused on Iron Eyes Cody, the Sicilian American actor featured in the 1970s “Keep America Beautiful” ad campaign, in braids and with a tear trickling down his cheek, is particularly insightful in teasing out some complexities around this. Raheja addresses and concludes with the harmful representational violence Cody’s performance enacted by fixing Native Americans in the distant past and in a space of mourning (144). Along the way, though, she also calls for complexity in thinking through “Indian identity” questions, noting the “endurance, in a multitude of forms, of the ways that Native American forms of identifying, which are off the available grid of options offered up by European American culture, have survived” (128). Raheja registers the meaningful relationships Cody seems to have had with the Native community in Los Angeles and cites a Cherokee mental health counselor who extols his generosity in contributing much of his income to helping Native American individuals. While acts of community connection and “giving back” do not negate the harm of his assuming a false identity, Raheja’s discussion nuances discussions around identifying and belonging that exceed the boxes imposed by, and enacted in response to, colonization.
He outlines eight “varionative” “theaters of identities,” arguing for how, given how “any sense of native presence must contend with the ambiguities of the absence of natives,” these each “tease the hyperreal.” Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 73.
Vizenor, 90.
Vizenor, 76.
Vizenor, 76.
E.g., see Blu Wakpa, “A Glint of Decolonial Love.”
For discussion of “kin-making,” see TallBear, “Caretaking Relations.”
Lyons, X-Marks, 65. Alyosha Goldstein, in a related vein, outlines how there is also no one colonialism or even one such thing as “U.S. colonialism,” given multiplicities and variabilities over time and space. Goldstein, “Toward a Genealogy of the U.S. Colonial Present,” 1–2.
Lisa Brooks, http://www.southernspaces.org/2011/cosmopolitanism-and-nationalism-native-american-literature-panel-discussion, 2.46.
Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 49.
Mignolo, “Enacting the Archive,” 492.
Arvin, Possessing Polynesians.
Teves, Defiant Indigeneity, 12–13.
Lyons, X-Marks, 50. Lyons first outlines discourses on Indian identity as being about having some amount of Native “blood” (showing how this requirement for “bloodline” of any amount, which is the predominant marker of accepted Indigenous identity today, is historically situated); on “kinship” (linking it to the development of anthropology, not to Native peoples); on behavior (outlining how Indians who behave badly don’t become not Indian, with attention to disenrollment and banishment and how they’re being wielded by tribes today); and on “tradition” (using Ojibwemowin language/terms to support his arguments complicating what “traditional” ideas are) (48–49). “The historical challenge before us now,” he argues, “is to speak responsible new answers to the perennial question, what is an Indian?” (50). See also Lyons, “Nationalism.”
Ramirez, Native Hubs.
Thanks again to Tria Blu Wakpa for discussions around this.
Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” 3.
Foster, 236.
Foster, 235.
Foster, 235.
Manning, Relationscapes, 17.
Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 12.
For discussion of “white” as invention in 1600s Virginia, see Battalora, Birth of a White Nation. See also Battalora’s video lecture at https://youtu.be/riVAuC0dnP4.
Mignolo discusses “the tyranny of the historical western accumulation of meaning through the theft of memories contained in the form of archival artefacts” in “Enacting the Archive,” 12.
These include discussion of “Bodied Knowing,” “the Body in the Archive,” “Performing the Archive,” and “Memory, History, and Retrieval” by twenty-eight writers, including notable dance scholars and practitioners (including Yup’ik dance artist Emily Johnson). Bissell and Haviland, Sentient Archive.
Stuckey, “Christian Conversion,” 55. Stuckey cites description of the Ring Shout as a “subtle form of inscribing in space, through dance, one’s religious values” (60). “The Ring Shout entered as an ideology embedded in artistic experience, a form of dance ceremony in which a religious vision of profound significance was projected even as it underwent transformation in the face of the pressing challenge of slavery” (56).
DeFrantz, “Black Beat Made Visible.” Elsewhere, DeFrantz discusses “beauty” as located, not in the visible, including the appearance of a dancer’s body (i.e., the symmetry and vertical line of classical ballet), but in the sensorial release of “the flash of immaterial spirit.” He writes, “Beauty exists as a contingent possibility for African-Americans that may be accessed through dance performance.” DeFrantz, “Donald Byrd,” 226.
Johnson, Dark Matter.
Srinivasan describes how the “bodily archive” leaves its traces within the written record of the “historical archive”—which can then be uncovered—as well as in live bodily interactions that can also be found “in muscle memory and through bodily labor and kinesthetic contact.” Srinivasan, Sweating Saris, 17.
Elswit, Watching Weimar Dance, xviii.
Foster, Choreographing Empathy; Purkayastha, “Decolonising Human Exhibits,” 232.
Giersdorf, Body of the People, 27. Giersdorf reads the archive of his own walking across the Berlin wall on November 10, 1989, as well as that of East German stage dance pieces that archived different functions as they traveled across national borders over time, shifting, for example, from serving as “an embodiment of a decisively ideological utopia when first performed in East Germany” to functioning “as a living archive in contemporary Chile” (170). A focus on folk, and “folk’s emphasis on corporeality as a knowledge resource,” he argues, “extends notions of archival practice into corporeality and movement” (27). The archive, in this formulation, is both embodied and transformed in relation to the state system.
Profeta, “Research,” in Dramaturgy in Motion, 80; Lepecki, “Body as Archive.”
Profeta, “Research,” 80. At the same time, Profeta discusses “the limits of the embodied archive” (72), particularly when held to be “more sacrosanct than other archives” (73), instead forwarding embodied knowledge as part of a rich archival function “dispersed among the collective” (86).
Franko, cited in Clayton et al., “Inside/Beside Dance Studies,” 12.
Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 26. Foster traces how, through the development and use of this notation system, “what had been a region’s indigenous production was transformed into stylistic features of a single repertoire that set one dance apart from another. Cultural and historical specificities of particular dances were homogenized by a system that implemented absolute conceptions of space and time. Perhaps for the first time, dance was asserted to be a universal language” (25).
She relates this to “a profound reorganization of corporeality” around centrality and periphery that “reinforced a bodily experience of having a center that extends into and moves through an unmarked space” (26). She also connects this notation system to the empowering of “choreographers,” noting that “dances became authored for the first time,” and to masculinity: “notation hardened dance, giving it a masculine status and securing its equal rank within the arts” (31).
Foster, 26.
Foster, 31.
Foster, 32. “They make a round hole in the ground, about a foot deep, and as much over, which when others passing by behold, they inquire the cause and occasion of the same,” Foster cites Edward Winslow of Plymouth writing.
Foster, 33
Foster, 33.
Foster, 33.
Foster, 42.
Taunton, “Embodying Sovereignty,” 326, 354.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 84.
Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, 186.
Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, for example, articulates how “ancestors are not just human. They are also all the elements of the natural world,” adding that “the people who have passed away have become stars in the sky. So when you walk in the landscape, you’re walking through the traces, and the energies and the qualities—the mana—of those ancestors.” He adds, “We look to these ancestors for guidance.” Royal, “Ārai-te-uru: ‘Through the Veil’—Traditional Māori Storytelling and Transformation,” keynote lecture at 2016 IFTR/FIRT conference, Stockholm, Sweden, June 16, 2016. See also TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary”; TallBear, “Caretaking Relations”; Henare, “Taonga Māori.”
Askren, “Dancing Our Stone Mask,” 37–47.
Lukin Linklater, “Indigenous Objects and Performance,” 20, cited with permission.
Tinker, “Stones Shall Cry Out,” 105–25. Thanks to Mark Minch DeLeon for sharing Tinker’s work.
TallBear, “Dear Indigenous Studies,” 80. See also Silko, Turquoise Ledge.
Povinelli, Geontologies, 35, 55. These are just a few of the many discussions around this issue. See also Deloria, “Kinship with the World.”
Swain, Dance in Contested Land, 48.
Firmino-Castillo, “What Mach Lach’s Bones Tell Us,” 45.
Groundworks: A Workshop about First Nations Cultural Protocols, Dance Mission Theater, San Francisco, California, October 26, 2017. At the end of the workshop at which this discussion occurred, dance artist Rulan Tangen instructed us all to “take a minute to touch your body, to integrate this knowledge,” leading us in a gentle flat-palmed self-tapping all over before we left the event.
Miranda, Bad Indians, 208.
Meyer, “Indigenous and Authentic,” 223.
Tinker, “Stones Shall Cry Out,” 118–19, emphasis added.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 85; Robinson, Hungry Listening, regarding “sensate sovereignty,” 24, 67–68; Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 189; see also 27, regarding physicalizing sensations.
Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 31.
Garcia, “Don’t Leave Me, Celia!” See also George-Graves, Urban Bush Women, xi. For discussion of interrelations between performance scholarship and performance practice, see also Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography,” and Madison, “Dialogic Performative.”
Rossen, Dancing Jewish, 13.
Though the topic is too big to get into here, the field of practice-as-research, or PAR, which (in different ways) is institutionalized in various doctoral programs in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and (to a lesser degree) the United States, is grounded in this approach.
See Davida’s anthology Fields in Motion for examples of dancer-as-researcher and researcher-as-dancer methodologies that demonstrate how dancer-researchers engage a heightened sense of kinesthetic awareness and empathy while viewing dance.
See Martin, “Agency and History.” Martin engages with one of his own performances through his own kinesthetic memory and through video, disrupting the idea that video is a more accurate historical source than bodily archiving.
Bryan, “Embodying the Rite[s],” 16. Definitions of somatics include “the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception. . . . Somatics, then, is a field of study dealing with somatic phenomena: i.e., the human being as experienced by himself from the inside.” Hanna, “What Is Somatics?” Thanks to Jen Hong for this reference and for discussions of somatics. Bryan writes, “For the 2009 inaugural issue of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Martha Eddy carefully traced, ‘A brief history of somatic practices and dance’ in an article by that title. Her discussion of somatic inquiry included any and all forms of experiential learning and sensory research that have evolved throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in response to psychological and bodily constraints of the Victorian era.” See also Ginot, “From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics,” and George and Foster, Natural Body.
Bryan, “Embodying the Rite[s],” 33, George and Foster, Natural Body, 33.
Bryan, “Embodying the Rite[s],” 33; George and Foster, Natural Body, 57.
As she traces the emergence of what would come to be called “somatics” in European dance from Russian choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 Sacre du Printemps, Bryan notes the pervasiveness of this urge toward a past, outlining how “primitivist yearnings for nature” and interest in staging a “prehistoric” and “pagan” Slavic rite describe this early twentieth-century stage dance’s approach. Bryan argues that Nijinsky “thought about embodiment as an alternative source of knowledge” and describes a link between this somatic approach and Nijinsky’s (and other artists’ and intelligentsia’s of the era) attractions to “primitivist yearnings for nature,” as well as to “Buddhism, yoga, Indian esoteric philosophy, vegetarianism, eurythmic dancing, sectarian ritual and sorcery” and, among other movements, the Khlysty movement associated with Slavic paganism. Bryan, “Embodying the Rite[s],” 57, citing Bowlt.
George and Foster, Natural Body, 6. George suggests that this has also included erasing the influence of African traditions.
George and Foster, 37.
George and Foster, 26.
See Sklar, “On Dance Ethnography”; Sklar, “Reprise”; Ness, “Being a Body.” Dance scholars André Lepecki and Sally Banes’s edited volume Senses in Performance engages with “a critique of the whole hegemonic or majoritarian politics of the perceptible and the imperceptible” (2–3). They argue for how, “as the senses shift in relation to social and cultural changes, what they also change are the political conditions of possibility for entities, bodies, and elements to come into a being-apparent” (2–3). Foster’s work deeply historicizes “kinesthetic empathy,” linking it to European colonization. Foster, Choreographing Empathy.
George and Foster, Natural Body, 47.
George and Foster, 37.
See Wilderson, Red, White, and Black.
Personal discussion, Oakland, Calif., October 7, 2017.
Burt, Ungoverning Dance, 5.
Personal discussion, at the restaurant Kitchen, Oakland, California, October 7, 2017; further discussion with Jen Hong, fall 2018. George also discusses the economic shifts and pressures that lead somatic practitioners to professionalize and institutionalize. George and Foster, Natural Body.
Bryan’s discussion of embodiment makes clear how colonialist presumptions about the world undergird this history, citing philosopher Elizabeth Behnke’s discussion of German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s “account of how we encounter other embodied agents in the shared space of a coherent and ever-explorable world.” Bryan, “Embodying the Rite[s],” 240. George also touches briefly on ways that “somatic practices can be seen to have participated, albeit unwittingly, in Australian settler colonialism.” George and Foster, Natural Body, 96.
Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence.
For discussion of “pay-to-play,” see Sahin, “Core Connections,” 11.
“Somatics” is largely a white space, but of course not all “somatic” leaders are white. And a number of those who are—and who are foundational to the field—are white Jewish women (Bainbridge Cohen, Hay, and Halprin among them), with ancestral histories linked complexly to European colonization.
Dohee Lee’s work with Anna Halprin comes to mind here.
George and Foster, Natural Body, 55.
I’ve participated in Simas’s workshops at the Talking Stick Festival in Vancouver in 2013, at the University of California, Riverside, and at Sherman Indian High School in 2014.
Field notes from Talking Stick movement workshop with Rosy Simas, February 28, 2013.
This resonates with dance scholar Susan Manning’s discussions of “Negro dance” and modern dance as co-constitutive. See Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance, xiv.
See Behar and Gordon, Women Writing Culture, 2.
E.g., see 1980s French feminism’s “écriture feminine” and the work by the many writers of color in groundbreaking collections like Moraga and Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back. For more discussion of the gendered and racial components of narrative form and scholarship, see Behar and Gordon, Women Writing Culture, and Franklin, Writing Women’s Communities. For discussion of dance, gender, and writing, see Dempster, “Women Writing the Body.” See Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography; Garcia, Salsa Crossings, xix; and Behar, Vulnerable Observer (discussed in many dance studies works, including Blanco Borelli, She Is Cuba, and Garcia). For an overview of the history of performative writing, see Robinson, Hungry Listening, 81–83.
See Foster, “Textual Evidances,” for just one of many.
See Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion; Blanco Borelli, She Is Cuba; Garcia, Salsa Crossings.
Wong, Choreographing Asian America, 5.
Royal, “Ārai-te-uru.”
Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 150.
Archibald, Indigenous Storywork.
Million, “There Is a River in Me,” 31. See also Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 25, for discussion of “felt” as well as “smelt” knowledge.
Miranda, Bad Indians, 201; see also Harjo, Spiral to the Stars.
In Beyond Settler Time, Rifkin writes, “Stories help provide the background for Indigenous experiences of time, shaping perceptual traditions while also influencing sensations of what’s possible” (34).
Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 119. Thanks to María Regina Firmino-Castillo for comments cautioning against upholding “normativity” as a benchmark.
Simpson, 123. Michael Tsosie’s unpublished scholarship on Olive Oatman, arguing for a two-spirit reading of her time living with the Mohave, underscores this as well.
Simpson, 127.
Croft notes as well that, similar to Indigenous, “queer does (rather than is).” Croft, Queer Dance, 2.
Croft, 2.
Croft, 2
DeFrantz, “Queer Dance in Three Acts,” 172.
DeFrantz, “Bone-Breaking,” 66.
DeFrantz, 15.
DeFrantz, 2.
DeFrantz, “Switch,” 18. Croft, too, finds one vital site for queer dance on the social dance floor, seeing it “as very much a place for a simultaneous imagining, rehearsal, and performance of queerness—a space where there is a moment-to-moment navigation of desire and physical enactment borne out across a group.” Croft, Queer Dance, 4.
See Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative series; Desmond, Dancing Desires; Croft, Queer Dance, 31n28.
Croft, Queer Dance, 6.
Croft, 10.
Croft, 13.
See Ahmed, What’s the Use?
Foster, “Closets Full of Dances,” 147–208.
Croft, Queer Dance, 5.
Attention to the foundationally intertwined understandings of queerness and Indigenous dance has manifested in recent articulations, both in writing and in performance, including, to give just a few examples, Angeline Shaka’s writing on kumu hula Patrick Makuakane’s “hula mua” (Shaka, “Hula for the Future”), June Scudeler’s discussion of Rene Highway (Scudeler, “Fed by Spirits”), the BAAITS Powwow, and performances like Javier Frequez-Stell’s Mother the Verb and Lukas Avendaño’s Yo No Soy Persona, Soy Mariposa.
In the early 1990s, performance studies scholars Philip Auslander and Peggy Phelan (as well as others) engaged in debates about ephemerality, liveness, disappearance, and presence as constitutive of performance itself. Phelan argued that performance was in fact defined by the moment of fleeting disappearance. Auslander, on the other hand, advocated that evolving technologies no longer necessitated a live body and its disappearance for a performance to ensue. In the mid-2000s, critical conversations about liveness and performance reemerged in performance studies, particularly in analyses of reenactments. See Schneider, “Performing Remains.” Thanks to J. Dellecave for research and discussions around this topic.
Giersdorf, Body of the People, 8.
Siegel, quoted by Schneider, “Performing Remains,” 97.
Giersdorf, Body of the People, 135. These concepts recur in recent discussions of dance as (again) an ever-disappearing art, understanding this both as a given and as an artistic problem dance artists must work with. See Lambert-Beatty’s description of (mostly white, postmodern) dance as a “temporal art, disappearing even as it comes into being” in Being Watched. She is referring to mostly white postmodern choreographers working in the 1960s and early 1970s, and to Yvonne Rainer specifically.
Lepecki and Banes, Senses in Performance, 131.
See O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting; Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs. See also Bruyneel, Third Space of Sovereignty.
Swain, Dance in Contested Land, 5. In this book focusing on the Aboriginal dance company Marregeku, Swain notes the different terms used for this, citing a 2011 Yawuru Cultural Management Plan’s discussion of how “Bugarrigarra is a world creating epoch” and how “from Bugarrigarra our country is imbued with a life-force from which all living things arrive.” Swain notes how she has come to “understand Bugarrigarra as offering both a mapping of country and a mapping of social interactions, operating in both the past and a continuous present.” The term everywhen, she notes in the book, comes from a 1956 essay by W. E. H. Stanner (11).
Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, xiii, 3.
Rifkin, 234.
Rifkin, 14.
Rifkin, 41.
Rifkin, 3.
Rifkin, 47. See also Nanni, Colonization of Time.
Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 159.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 91.
Harjo, 91.
Harjo, 116.
Royal, “Ārai-te-uru,” keynote presentation, 2016.
See also Kedhar, Flexible Bodies, 4, 41, for discussion of ways contemporary dance circuits “privilege innovation.”
See Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, for discussion of how “modernity and tradition are two modern concepts, not two ontologies, one modern and one premodern” (118). See Kedhar, Flexible Bodies, for discussion of how, “with regard to South Asian dance in Britain, innovation is what distinguishes contemporary from classical, folk, and popular dance, modern from traditional, and, given the funding of ‘innovative’ work, professional from amateur” (32).
See George-Graves, Urban Bush Women, introduction. For discussion of “ancestorism” in African dance, see Welsh-Asante, Zimbabwe Dance.
Kedhar, Flexible Bodies, 41. Kedhar is building on work by Mitra.
For one discussion of this, see Wesley Y. Leonard, “Eradicating the e-Word: Musings on Myaamia Language Reclamation,” World Literature Today (blog), November 11, 2019, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/cultural-cross-sections/eradicating-e-word-musings-myaamia-language-reclamation-wesley-y.
Quotes from interview, University of Auckland, June 1, 2009, unless otherwise noted.
See https://vimeo.com/21085515 for video excerpts and discussion by Pōtiki-Bryant.
Royal, “Te Whare Tapere.” For more on the performance investigations Royal organized and produced, see (available to viewers in New Zealand) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KVCJnoFfZo (part 1) and https://youtu.be/tgZpOPOrNg4 (part 2). See also Royal, “Making the Modern Whare Tapere,” a lecture presented in 2011 as part of the project “Indigeneity in the Contemporary World,” led by Professor Helen Gilbert at Royal Holloway University of London and funded by the European Research Council from 2009 to 2014, which discusses these videos, at https://vimeo.com/42605741.
Royal, “Te Whare Tapere,” 5.
Royal, Wānaga, 61, 42. Royal notes ways, in Māori worldviews, on one hand, knowledge is already present and “the goal of the knowledge journey, therefore, is not so much the gathering of discrete pieces of humanly created knowledge but rather the ‘cleansing of the lens of perception’ whereby the world itself seems to speak (kōrero) to those who have the commitment and willingness to hear” (5). At the same time, he notes that “much traditional knowledge was also ‘created’ through the ubiquitous human activities referred to as the observation of phenomenon, the posing of hypotheses and the testing of theories” (5). He adds, “By ‘creative potential’ we mean the uplifting of aspects, features and fragments of mātauranga Māori to inspire new creative and innovation activities” (6). He continues, “Creativity and innovation strengthens and deepens traditions and pre-existing knowledge” (63), strengthening an “Indigenous of the future not of the past” (87).
Goeman, Mark My Words, 2.
Goeman, 2.
Miranda, Bad Indians, 135–36.
Important early work in this area includes Joann Kealiinohomoku’s “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet,” which addresses Hopi dance; Deidra Sklar’s work on “body and faith in the fiestas of Tortugas, New Mexico” in Dancing with the Virgin; Zoila Mendoza’s work on performance and identity in the Peruvian Andes in Shaping Society through Dance; Sylvia Rodriguez’s work on the Matachines dance in relation with ethnic domination in the upper Rio Grande Valley in Matachines Dance; and Tharon Weighill’s work on “The Two-Step Tales of Hahashka.”
Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion; Chatterjea, Butting Out; Cruz Banks, Decolonizing the Body; Srinivasan, Sweating Saris.
Cruz Banks, “Of Water and Spirit,” 12, 11.
Askren (Dangeli), “Dancing Our Stone Mask,” 38.
Askren (Dangeli), 39.
Swain, Dance in Contested Land, 111.
Swain, 6.
Swain, 2. Swain notes how this located relationality includes how “kinship systems within Indigenous ontologies dictate that non-human species, landforms, minerals and atmospheres can also be family” (48). Swain further delineates how these and other Indigenous ontologies “interrupt settler-colonial narratives and linear ways of seeing and knowing” (56). Swain situates these discussions in relation with her primary focus on the company’s “intercultural choreopolitical processes,” arguing for “ways the works themselves ‘remember forward’ past/futures in the northwest revealing ways in which land endures as an active presence” (1) and how this is activated via the company’s “engaging with this aliveness through experimental choreographic processes” (2). These processes, Swain explains, include Marrugeku’s “dramaturgies of listening” (110), which center involving the “scrutiny and guidance of cultural custodians of stories, songs and dance, whose authorship extends into the works through the dancers and in the complex net of kinship ties and cultural responsibilities” (6).
The choreographic work created via these processes and in relation to specific local experiences with “the violent operations of colonial and liberal governance of Indigenous populations in Australia” happening on a national “stage set by the agendas of capitalist extractivism and its ontological implications” (109), she argues, “both express[es] and critique[s] this war of values sustaining neoliberal, neocolonial capitalism and the ontological separation of life and nonlife” (111).
Swain, 1.
Swain, 2.
Swain, 4.
Dangeli, “Dancing Chiax,” 75.
Blu Wakpa, “Culture Creators,” 113.
Blu Wakpa, 119.
Blu Wakpa, 9, 13, 8, 21. Blu Wakpa’s subsequent work builds on these conceptualizations around “colonial cartographies,” “settler colonial choreographies,” their relation to (and effect on) Native humans as well as “Indigenous more-than-humans,” and ways multiple Indigenous movement practices unsettle these. For example, in “Challenging Settler Colonial Choreographies during COVID-19,” she argues for how these structures have “sought to control and subordinate Native and people of color bodies, movements and performances on and off stage with material consequences that have detrimentally impacted them.” She also demonstrates the ways, through movement forms including yoga, “Native people can process and dispel the disproportionate amount of historical and enduring trauma caused by settler colonialism in order to contribute to positive Indigenous futurities.” In “From Buffalo Dance to Tatanka Kcizapi Wakpala,” Blu Wakpa further applies these understandings of the ways Indigenous movements process and articulate beyond settler-colonial imposed structures, offering a careful choreographic reading of Lakota dancers’ movements in the 1894 film Buffalo Dance “as a brilliant expression of Lakota sovereignty and survival within and beyond U.S. settler colonial confines” (1). In this and other scholarship, Blu Wakpa narrates her process of community-engaged research and forwards arguments and theoretical offerings developed in relationship with Native peoples connected with the physical movements she engages, including, in this piece, a direct descendent of a performer in Buffalo Dance who is incarcerated at South Dakota State Penitentiary, where Blu Wakpa has conducted research on prison powwows. See also Mattingly and Blu Wakpa, “Movement as Medicine,” and Blu Wakpa, “Hozho Yoga.”
Recollet and Johnson, “Kin-dling and Other Radical Relationalities,” 23.
Recollet and Johnson, 18. See also dissertations by Evangelina Macias (University of California, Riverside, “Dancing Defiance: From Native American Women’s Fancy Shawl Dance to Indigenous Burlesque and Pole Dance,” 2021), Sam Aros Mitchell (University of California, San Diego, “W/riting Indigeneity; Circularities through the Codices of the Native Body,” 2021), and Tanya Lukin Linklater, Queen’s University, in progress.
Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” 55.
Firmino-Castillo, 55.
Firmino-Castillo identifies “three ontological tenets associated with genocidal coloniality: that some persons are things, that matter is inert, and that some humans are independent from an ecological matrix” (55). Firmino-Castillo’s subsequent writings build from this frame. For example, in “What Mach Lach’s Bones Tell Us,” Firmino-Castillo points to ways “in which performance posed insistent challenges” to each of these three tenets (32). She grounds her discussions in Ixil, Kaqchikel, K’iche’Maya, and Nahua language concepts (much as Royal does with Māori terms and Dangeli with Squamish and Tsimshian ones) and registers multiple registers of performance, specifically performing name exchange with a plant; “chaj (ceremony) to address collective trauma from the 1982 mass killing at Xoloche” (33); the work of performance artists who come to create work with Maya community members and to create performance work out of their experiences (San Francisco–based Mexican performance artist Violeta Luna as well as Firmino-Castillo and her partner, Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Valey Brito); and the ways this work resonates with the “embodied theory” of Zapotec muxhe (third gender) performance artist Lukas Avendaño (38). She considers as well “the everyday performances of living and surviving” (39), arguing for how “relational ontology and praxis continue to be performed in ceremony and in quotidian performances which accompany many daily activities that sustain life” (40). She writes, “The performing into being of a kab’awil/kamawil ontology of relationality between humans and maize within an agentive material context represents a re-realization of matter and an expanded sense of personhood—both human and other than human—that powerfully contests the three tenets of genocidal coloniality” (56). This and other of Firmino-Castillo’s writings are developed in longtime relation with the artists and communities about which she writes, some written collectively with those whose work she is engaging. See “Ruximik Quk’u’x” and “Beyond the Border,” both written with Brito Bernal and Grupo Sotzi’l leader Daniel Guarcax.
Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous dance artists have articulated the import of the fragment in fueling artistic creation and scholarship. At a discussion of the Bay Area Shellmounds, Rumsen Ohlone basketweaver, Tule boat builder, tribal historian, and language advocate Linda Yamane discussed how she learned to weave Ohlone baskets by engaging with “knowledge in little bits” that she had located in museums, anthropological notes, and baskets themselves—not in person-to-person/voice-to-voice teachings. “I will find a little bit, put the knowledge together, and make something that has not been made in a hundred years,” she explained. Working with “knowledge in little bits” this way requires and fuels generative desire. It enables, and is required for, ongoing creation and thus is a positive force. Comments made at Native Teachings, a benefit for the West Berkeley Shellmound Campaign, David Brower Center, Berkeley, California, April 7, 2018. Dramaturg Katherine Profeta cites artistic director Tim Etchells’s assertion “that the creative process thrives on partial fragments,” discussing how “a fragment can be both mournful and generative, gesturing back toward an implied past or forward toward what might yet be. It encapsulates both loss and possibility. That is why the Romantics adored it, and that is why experimental artists, arguably their direct descendants, are drawn to it today.” Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion, 27. Dance scholar Marta Savigliano creates “a story of tango bodies,” reading “tango’s fragmented history through the memory of power” and reading in those fragments “traces of movements/displacements, which are the movements/displacements of power itself.” Savigliano, “Fragments,” 202.
Royal writes that the benefits of Māori innovation and creativity include “enabling an accommodation and a consideration of intuitive, non-rational knowledge: As we know, conventional scientific approaches do not make explicit provision for intuitive, non-rational and ‘spiritual’ assessment of life and phenomenon. The involvement of mātauranga Māori with rational scientific research approaches opens a ‘site’ whereby rational and non-rational approaches, whereby physical, mental and spiritual may come together into wholistic approach to experience and the production of knowledge.” Royal, Wānaga, 64.
Thanks to Mike Dangeli for comments around this, as noted further in chapter 4.
Thanks to Rachel Fensham for pointing this out to me in a Skype conversation in January 2016.
Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 26.
Simpson, 33.
1. Choreographies of Relational Reciprocity
Iwi is a Māori language term, often translated as “tribe,” that refers to the largest political grouping of a Māori people or nation.
Jackson, “Globalization and the Colonizing State of Mind,” 177, 172.
Larsen and Johnson, Being Together in Place, 173, 155.
See Larsen and Johnson, 165, for discussion of how “this war canoe symbolized a cultural revival in canoe building” in the context of the larger history of the treaty and Treaty Grounds.
Description is based on a January 2009 visit.
Haka translates as “dance,” though it typically refers to a specific type of fierce, energetic, synchronized dance that displays pride, strength, and unity. The most widely known haka is likely Ka Mate, performed by the All Blacks (the New Zealand rugby team) at the start of its games. Haka are used at Māori celebrations and ceremonies to honor guests and show the importance of the occasion.
Te Matatini National Kapa Haka Festival book, 2009, 40.
Te Matatini National Kapa Haka Festival book, 66.
Te Matatini National Kapa Haka Festival book, 58.
Taranaki Whanui ki te Upoko o te Ika were buying it as part of a NZ$25 million Treaty of Waitangi settlement for breaches of an 1839 block sale in which much of Wellington was sold to the New Zealand Company. The land had been used for military purposes since 1885, for 124 years. When the Crown took over the block in 1941, it failed to set aside one-tenth of the land for Māori, as the Treaty of Waitangi required; took land for public purposes without compensation; and locked up remaining Māori land in perpetual leases. In addition to the NZ$25 million, the settlement also included an apology from the Crown for having done these things. This event involved the Royal New Zealand Air Force ceremoniously handing the land back.
For more on Ngapo Wehi, see Haami, Ka Mau Te Wehi.
This was written in response to an invitation to contribute to a special issue of Biography 36, no. 1 (2013), edited by Salah D. Hasan and titled “Baleful Postcoloniality and Auto/biography.”
Silko, “Language and Literature,” 48–49.
Byrd, Transit of Empire, xxxix.
Manaaki means “to care for,” and tanga means “the doing of”; the compound word signifies the act of looking after others, the reciprocal nurturing of relationships with kindness and respect. One of the key parts of this word is mana (force, power, spiritual strength). This could be looked at as a way of transcribing respect toward a person, a sense of generosity and hospitality, of making a person feel like a humbled and cherished guest. The most common symbol is that when a guest comes to your house, it would be impolite not to offer them a cup of tea. This socialization, when we feel accepted, cared for, and present, allows us to get to the heart of our exchange.
Special thanks to Michael Tsosie, whose contributions and feedback infuse this discussion.
Whakapapa (the “wh” is pronounced as f) is usually translated as “genealogy,” yet it refers to the act and principle of understanding and introducing oneself in respect to one’s roots or ancestral lineage; papa also refers to the ground, so (like the term roots) it implies a deep connection both to one’s ancestry and to the land.
For discussion of coloniality, see the introduction and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Foundation Frantz Fanon, https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/.
This is one issue with “imagination,” a concept others have critiqued: see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 274–79, and Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 21.
The Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907 targeted, fined, and imprisoned Māori healers for “practicing on [Māori’s] superstition” or for “professing or pretending to profess supernatural powers in the treatment of any disease, or in the foretelling of future events.” Of course, many have since argued that this act was not particularly effective in its attempts at this suppression. For an analysis of the Tohunga Suppression Act, 1907, see Stephens, “Return to the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907.” Tohunga are spiritual and sacred Elders, medicine men, lore makers, and holders of whakapapa and tribal lineages and prayers.
Wairua means “spirit” in the sense of the whole being of a person. It is the four sides—mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual—coming together to inform the complete well-being of a person. It is also a reference, when you say “on a wairua level,” that acknowledges the unseen: spirits, ancestors, kaitiaki, and other extrasensory perceptions. It is also something that can be perceived and felt through performance or an event or happening. It is what gives you goosebumps and lifts the hair on the back of your neck.
Body Weather is a comprehensive physical training and performance practice that investigates the intersections of bodies and their environments, cultivating a conscious relation to the state of constant change inside and outside the body—as in the weather. It was initiated by butoh dancer Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku Performance Company in Japan and further developed by exponents worldwide.
This literally means to sit on a marae, which is a Māori communal complex of buildings and open spaces where people can gather for social and ceremonial purposes. The term now is understood to mean a marae stay-over.
Byrd’s idea of “colonial cacophony” resonates with us as a way of describing what Jack’s dance-making process accesses, as well recognizing it as a tool for accessing “possibilities for anticolonial action that emerge outside and beyond the Manichean allegories that define oppression.” Byrd, Transit of Empire, xxxv.
Korero can refer to discourse, discussion, focused conversation, talk, story, and a nice long chat about something that matters.
Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” 10.
Thank you to Michael Tsosie for his articulations—and enactments—of this as the purpose of Indigenous performance, following our travels to the Santo Domingo feast day dances on August 4, 2012.
Robyn Kamira, personal communication, April 28, 2016.
See “Decolonial Aesthetics (I),” https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/.
Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” 27.
Jack Gray, “Where’s the Contemporary Dance?,” Facebook, May 25, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/jack.gray.167/posts/10154249958308156. Gray is addressing the 2016 Festpac (Festival of the Pacific Arts) in Guam.
“Atamira–mitimiti,” Madicattt, http://madicattt.nz/2015/10/02/mitimiti.
For additional online resources relating to this topic, please visit the Manifold edition of this book at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/dancing-indigenous-worlds.
Gray founded Atamira Dance Company (“the leading creator and presenter of Māori contemporary dance theatre in Aotearoa”) in 2000. “About,” Atamari Dance Company, http://www.atamiradance.co.nz/about/.
Jack Gray, personal communication, March 9, 2016.
Robyn Kamira, personal communication, April 28, 2016.
Personal communication, March 19, 2016, cited with permission.
Robyn Kamira, “Tumoana te whare,” Kamira Whanau (blog), June 20, 2009, http://www.kamirawhanau.com/.
Kamira.
After some reaching out, Pomo dance leader David Smith came to welcome Jack with Pomo song and dance. Jack responded with contemporary dance/movement practices. Smith said it was the first time he had come onto the Berkeley campus, which has a long, troubled history of relationship to northern California Indigenous peoples due, among many other things, to its holding of Native ancestors in boxes beneath its anthropology buildings.
The film is about Sisk’s tribe’s history of land and water dispossession by the state of California and about Winnimum Wintu people’s travels to New Zealand to meet their long-lost Chinook salmon relatives, which have been missing from their McCloud River homeland for more than sixty-five years. To welcome Chief Sisk, Gray cajoled and inspired University of California, Riverside dance and Native studies students, faculty, and campus leaders to develop a welcoming that included both improvised contemporary dance moves and local Cahuilla bird singing.
“Lenapehoking Transformance Laboratory Roundtable,” https://apa.nyu.edu/event/lenapehoking-transformance-laboratory-roundtable/, and “Transformance Lab,” Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/transformancelab/.
Imada, “Army Learns to Luau,” 328–61. In her use of the term mili-touristic, Imada is drawing on work by Teaiwa, “Militarism, Tourism, and the Native.”
Coulthard, “Place against Empire,” 79.
Coulthard, 79–80.
Coulthard, 79–80.
Imada, “Army Learns to Luau,” 350.
See Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.
Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 258. He writes of “a betrayal of sorts of the trans-ontological relation (of gift and reception between self and Other)” as core to an understanding of Being steeped in coloniality (258). “Coloniality erodes the basis of giving and receiving, which is intersubjectivity,” he further delineates. Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” 21.
Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” 55–73.
Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, 45. Thanks to Susan Leigh Foster for bringing this work to my attention.
Weiner, 45.
A shorter, ten-minute Mitimiti toured to Honolulu in 2014.
“Decolonial Aesthetics (I).”
Descriptions from the Facebook page of Aurora Alchemy. See https://www.facebook.com/AuroraAlchemyOils/posts/388894517974212 and https://www.facebook.com/AuroraAlchemyOils/posts/388470268016637.
See “Atamira Dance Company—Mitimiti: Episode 2, Beginnings,” YouTube video, 2:38, September 3, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQnswXX-4iM.
Comments made during VIP backstage walk-through, October 3, 2015.
Comments made during VIP backstage walk-through, October 3, 2015.
For further discussion, see Tia Reihana-Morunga, “Mitimiti—a Collaboration of Indigenous Voices,” Theatreview, October 2, 2015, http://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=8531.
Jack Gray, personal communication, February 12, 2016.
Speakers included Marama/Tracey Lloyd; Selena Bercic, a teacher from Mitimiti; and Precious Clark, a prominent leader and political advocate from Ngāti Whātua.
Robyn Kamira, personal communication, April 28, 2016.
For additional online resources relating to this topic, please visit the Manifold edition of this book at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/dancing-indigenous-worlds.
Recollet, “Gesturing Indigenous Futurities,” 141.
Colonization, following Wolfe and others, actively works to produce an “Indigenous” in which Indigenous peoples’ “place”—if it exists at all—is only somewhere remote and static (separate, small, easy to “other” and bracket aside) or previous (so absorbed and erased as to no longer be Indigenous). Wolfe, Traces of History, 16–17.
Re-Indigenized is a term first brought to my attention by Angela Miictlanxochitl Anderson Guerrero, in conversations around 2016–17.
Imada, “Army Learns to Luau,” 338. Imada explores how photographs have functioned as coercive instruments of biomedical experimentation (though also as ways of enacting critique of public health institutions and policies). Adria L. Imada, “Capturing Leprosy: The Medical Gaze in America’s Pacific Empire,” research presented at the University of California, Riverside and ASA, http://grantome.com/grant/NIH/G13-LM011898-01A1.
Jack Gray, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/jack.gray.167.
Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” 27.
Coombe, Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, 241.
Coombe, 250.
For more on “radical decolonial love,” see Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love, drawing on discussions by Junot Diaz.
Thank you to Lily Keitling for insights on T-shirts and tourism.
Coombe, Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, 808.
Coombe discusses how legal understandings that see authorship/ownership as frozen are part of “the colonial categorical cartographies that underlie our legal regimes” (197). In this context, “reiteration, recoding, and reproduction” (872) on equal terms challenge these models. She argues that insisting on a system of exchange that affirms and claims is not so much part of “the postcolonial struggles of indigenous peoples to eliminate commodified representations of their alterity” as it is an articulation of how rights of possession are exercised within an Indigenized context (232).
Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 259.
Maldonado-Torres, 258.
2. Choreographies of Perspectival Relationality
April 22, 2011, workshop at UCR: personal notes, experience, and video recording.
After more research on his part, particularly into the purposefully hidden and intentionally denied African origins of humanity and civilization, Deollo now identifies as Aboriginal Indigenous American, or Xi-Amaru, the Indigenous people of Tameri, now called “America.” Personal email to the author, December 11, 2019.
This is detailed further in the program notes, which show that, in addition to the forms mentioned, several trained in competitive studio dance (Nichole), ballet (Ericka, Serena, Sarracina, Alyxis Trujillo), or modern dance (Serena, Sarracina) and mention other forms, such as tap, jazz, aerial, and circus dance.
This exercise was shared with Tangen by Georgina Martinez (Zapotec), who received it from Huichol people. Personal correspondence with Rulan Tangen, July 30, 2018.
Tangen and Queypo danced a version of this piece at the SDHS conference held at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2006. Rulan Tangen, Tree of Life: Time of Drought, Margaret Greenham Theatre, Society of Dance History Scholars Conference, June 16, 2006.
In using the term Indigenous in 2006, Tangen was referring to Indigenous peoples globally, beyond borders, waters, or governmental definitions. Personal communication.
This was Geraldine Ziegler. Tangen recounts how, as a young woman, she had developed a respectful and trusting relationship with her and her grandson Zuya-Ile (Michael Wayne Ziegler) and other members of that “dance clan.” Tangen was ceremonially adopted into their family in 1990, becoming recognized as a “Hunka Lakota” relative—though not herself Lakota. (Hunka references her identity as adopted.) Tangen later tells me that this work is the core of the first dance company she codirected (with Zuya-Ile), starting at age twenty-one: a powwow dance group of mostly youths, Make Chante or Heart of the Earth intertribal dancers. Personal correspondence with Rulan Tangen, July 30, 2018.
Specifically master farmer Mykel Diaz in New Mexico.
Personal conversation with the author, May 2011.
For discussion of this, see Shea Murphy, People Have Never Stopped Dancing, 10, which draws on Foster, Choreographing History.
Firmino-Castillo discusses the centrality of these “of the earth” beings, which she names “telluric.” See Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse.”
Absolon (Minogiizhigokwe), Kaandossiwin, 31.
Daystar/Rosalie M. Jones, “The Dreamed Imagination: Indigenous Dance, Ceremony and Performance,” Daystar Dance, 2008, http://www.daystardance.com/dreamed-imagination.html.
Blu Wakpa, “Culture Creators,” 110.
Blu Wapka, 118.
Blu Wapka, 119.
Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” 65. Firmino-Castillo was a participant in the 2014 Dancing Earth Intensive and does not identify as Indigenous. At the time of the writing of the article cited, she identified as “mestiza,” specifying that by use of this term, she intends to center “Indigenous ancestry without negating other histories” and without “delegitimiz[ing] Maya socio-political claims.” At the time of this writing, Firmino-Castillo does not identify as “mestiza” due to her critique of this and all colonial categories. She writes that she considers herself “ex-latinx and ex-mestisx because of the slippery ways these terms can be used in ways that I do not intend.” Firmino-Castillo, “Beyond the Border,” 34. Personal communication.
Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” 70. As of this writing, Firmino-Castillo no longer employs the term Indigeneity in her work due to a growing interrogation of all colonial taxonomies. Personal communication, November 23, 2021. Firmino-Castillo, after Sara and Sara, “Between Dance and Architecture,” explains “trans-ontology” as “a way of thinking and being that explodes the rigid dichotomies (nature/culture and object/subject) that mark Western modernity’s ontological tendencies” (69).
Firmino-Castillo, 67.
Firmino-Castillo, 69.
Firmino-Castillo, 70. Firmino-Castillo’s discussion connects Tangen’s work with Mignolo’s discussions of the “pluriverse” and with Mario Blaser’s discussions of “the dynamics through which different ways of worlding sustain themselves” (55). She writes, “Walter Mignolo defined contemporary pluriversality (implying the historical contingency of any ontology) as ‘several cosmologies’ inextricably entangled by ‘a power differential,’ which he defined as ‘the logic of coloniality covered up by the rhetorical narrative of modernity.’ In this sense, a pluriversal ontological praxis is political, for it is ‘an experiment of bringing itself into being . . . the dynamics through which different ways of worlding sustain themselves even as they interact, interfere, and mingle with each other’” (56).
Shea Murphy, “Dancing in the Here and Now,” 553.
Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity, 211.
Chatterjea, 227.
Chatterjea, 215.
Chatterjea, 219.
Chatterjea, 222.
Chatterjea, 225.
Chatterjea, 232.
Chatterjea, 219.
Red Rhythms Roundtable, Red Rhythms Conference, University of California, Riverside, May 7, 2004.
Red Rhythms Roundtable.
Telephone conversation with the author, June 14, 2011.
Telephone conversation with the author, December 15, 2014.
See Shea Murphy, “Dancing in the Here and Now.”
“We come to know the world through our senses,” writes Robinson in his discussion of both artistic presentations and the “vocal expression of sensory memory” expressed by survivors at Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Robinson, drawing on scholars who have shifted disembodied discussions of aesthetics to discussions focused on bodily, sensate, material experiences and their affective forces, for example, Jacques Rancière, considers “what Indigenous sensate sovereignty would look like when enacted in the public sphere.” Via this focus on what he terms “Indigenous sensory agency” (he is addressing that expressed physically and vocally [58], including the ways a survivor’s voice “makes contact with our bodies as listener-witnesses” [54]), Robinson suggests, “The sensory qualities of the arts here hold immense potential to disrupt the normative felt experience of national belonging and spatial sovereignty” (61).
Of Bodies of Elements premiered, as part of the Global Dance Fest and the Two Worlds VSA North Fourth Art Center in Albuquerque, on February 6, 2010. In an early discussion of Of Bodies of Elements, I described how “layered narratives of destruction . . . throughout the work suggest a palimpsest of gender imbalance and global capitalism” and how the piece shows “the effect of colonization” to include rendering “Native peoples invisible, inauthentic, separated from land.” I argue that the piece provides an alternative to these by harnessing contemporary dance making “to access Indigenous ways of knowing” and provide its young dancers with ways “to embody and articulate their experience as Indigenous people, and to refuse the disconnection from Indigenous ways-of-being that colonization has wrought.” Of Bodies of Elements performance review, 2010. Description here based mostly on the performance at UCR University Theatre, April 2011.
Although the choreography of Of Bodies of Elements is set, the deer dance that Cortes performs depends on his availability, as well as production length; the aerial hoop dance performed by Rascon has particular rigging requirements not all spaces can provide; guest artists like Raoul Trujillo, Kalani Queypo, and Gina Pacaldo aren’t always available; and local dancers who’ve worked with the company in the past, or have a relationship with it in some way, sometimes are. When Of Bodies of Elements started touring, the two toddler daughters later incorporated into the women’s dance—including one dancer’s baby, named Rulan—weren’t big enough to be included; later they were. The ensemble, as well as the shape of the production, swells, shifts, and contracts in relation to what is available, and what is needed, in each situation.
For discussion of “colonial division of intimacy,” see Lisa Lowe, who argues for intimacy as “close connection,” that is, the “implied but less visible forms of alliance, affinity, and society among variously colonized peoples beyond the metropolitan national center.” Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 19.
The litany of ways that Nation states like the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia attempt to disconnect Native peoples from their Indigenous communities is long and has been widely addressed by many scholars: through boarding/residential schools to which Indigenous children were stolen from their families and forcibly removed from their language, dances, and other practices; through stealing children, in which Indigenous children were “adopted out” from their communities; through multiple slave trades, including the Atlantic trade, in which people were stolen from their Indigenous communities in Africa and trafficked as property; through relocation policies and practices, where Indigenous people were encouraged and enticed away from their reservations with false promises of economic prosperity in urban centers; through the creation of reservations in the first place and the forced and violent removal of Indigenous peoples from ancestral homelands; and through the poverty that these removals created. Tied to all these colonizing agendas are debates about (and policings of) American Indian race, ethnic identification, and “recognition” both by a settler state and by a tribal community.
While the company is articulated as an “Indigenous Contemporary Dance” company, its workshops and auditions are open to anyone. Tangen notes that she trusts that those drawn to them, and who are willing and able to bring to and connect with the kinds of tasks the company engages with over time, are appropriate to the company’s approach. “The work we’re doing is so deep, it’s going to attract and repel,” she said. If it’s not right, “they’ll find their way to something else.” Interview with Rulan Tangen, San Francisco, May 17, 2011.
Described in the Of Bodies of Elements program, personal archive; Littlebird later edited and expanded her comments for clarity. Personal email to the author, February 8, 2021.
Email to the author, July 28, 2011.
Personal communication with the author, Facebook, August 14, 2019.
Personal communication with the author, Facebook, August 18, 2019.
For compelling discussion of global Indigenous artistic and political connections, their intellection and artistic assertions, and the import of “trans Indigenous” literary scholarship, see Allen, Trans-Indigenous.
Tangen, interview with the author, May 28, 2010, Oakland, Calif.
Tangen, interview with author, May 17, 2011, San Francisco.
See Wolfe, Traces of History, 4.
Telephone conversation with the author, December 15, 2014.
Lopez described how “it’s part of what the company does and sees as important” and how this has inspired him. Interview with the author, May 21, 2011.
Discussion with the author, August 13, 2019.
For early productions of DE, a main focus was on the dancers and other collaborators and on the Native peoples of the region in which the group was performing. “In some cases, the dancers would say that they are dancing for their ancestors, for spirit or life force, more than anyone living and present in the room,” Tangen said. For some later productions, such as SEEDS and Water, cultural advisors gave direction that focused on sharing knowledge, and so those teachings guided the dancers. In this, though, it was the cultural advisors’ direction they were responding to, Tangen notes. Personal communication with the author, July 30, 2018.
Deborah F. Rutter to Tangen, cited with permission via email, January 25, 2021.
Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 21.
Tsing, 19.
See chapter 3 for fuller discussion of Povinelli’s Geontologies.
For compelling discussion of what she terms “interconnected individualism” in DE’s approach (developed through discussion of a “basket-weaving piece” performed by Anne Pesata and choreographed by Pesata and Tangen), see Blu Wakpa, “Culture Creators.”
Interview with Lopez, May 21, 2011.
Telephone interview with the author, June 14, 2011.
For example, Tangen has used all recycled costumes since 2000—in part because she couldn’t afford anything else. “I used old fabric for costumes because I had no choice,” Tangen explained. Interview with the author, Oakland, California, 2010.
Rulan Tangen, telephone conversation with the author, December 15, 2014. Remaining quotations in this paragraph are from this interview.
As these practices have continued, dancers have helped process a sheep with Apache relatives, partaken in a gourmet feast from foraged foods made by Pueblo chef Karlos M. Baca, learned Navajo stick planting techniques from Tony Skrelunas and Roxanne Swenzel, and shared Pueblo foods grown in waffle gardens.
Personal communication with the author, August 15, 2019.
See also Coté, “‘Indigenizing’ Food Sovereignty.”
Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 6.
This includes histories involving my ancestors: the Irish Potato Famine that propelled several from counties Kilkenny and Cork in Ireland to the United States and Canada in the mid-1800s was the result of monoculture, which was itself a product of British mercantile colonialism via its development of Ireland as a colonial holding for producing wheat for export to England. This created Irish dependence on one kind of efficiently grown potato to feed themselves—a potato susceptible to blight. It is also part of the history of my ancestors from England, including those born in the mid-1800s in Middlesex and Surrey, who benefited, along with the rest of England, from the wealth and health that the export of wheat from Ireland produced. See Braa, “Great Potato Famine.”
Personal communication with the author, August 15, 2019.
Personal communication with the author, August 13, 2019.
Challenging these economic structures is not unique to DE and other Indigenous dance collectives but is also part of what numerous avant-garde, postmodern, and experimental dance structures played with and disrupted. Contact improvisation, postmodern dance associated with Judson Church, and many somatics practices also challenge structures of dance as commodity. For discussion, see Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion. Yet, they are still rare for a touring, presentational dance company.
Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.”
Chatterjea notes similarly, from her own witnessing of performances, how DE’s training “animates the stage such that the dancing becomes larger than the individual dancers even as it foregrounds them . . . thickening and Indigenizing the aesthetic engagement for diverse audiences.” Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity, 231.
The piece emerged over a three-year creation process in relation with Nozhem First Peoples Performance Space in the Indigenous studies program at Trent University in Canada, a process Nozhem artistic director Mumford has described in depth. See Mumford, “Naadmaagewin.”
Mumford, 144.
Multiple conversations with the author, usually over Thai food, including one key discussion on January 29, 2015, Best Thai, Riverside, California.
A short documentary about the making of Of Bodies of Elements includes further discussion around this: “Making of Bodies of Elements,” YouTube video, 12:23, October 23, 2014, https://youtu.be/IOdqeWnk8a8.
Jesus Jacoh Cortes, interview with the author, June 10, 2011, San Francisco.
Kalani Queypo, telephone discussion with the author, June 8, 2011.
Thanks to Mique’l Dangeli for discussions around this topic.
Raheja, too, links a “continuity of expression” to discussions of “indigenous aesthetics.” She cites Steven Leuthold’s articulation of “indigenous aesthetics” as “primarily synthetic, involving a search for an appreciation of the connections between categories of experience. . . . Continuity of expression, whether its source is historical, religious, conceptual, generational, tribal, or cosmological—is a central ingredient.” Leuthold, cited in Raheja, Reservation Reelism, 30.
Candace Hopkins, “Transforming Institutions, Creating Communities: Indigenous Methodologies and Exhibition Making,” keynote lecture, “Indigenous Methodologies and Art History” symposium, organized by Jolene Rickard and Polly Nordstrand, Cornell University, April 29, 2016, http://www.imah-event.org/.
Simpson, cited in Mumford, “Naadmaagewin,” 129.
Myrton Running Wolf, “Real Indians Don’t Do Shakespeare: The Politics of Native American Theater Adaptations,” lecture, University of California, Riverside, April 6, 2016, and email correspondence with the author, April 27, 2016.
For discussion of ways that artists Paul Klee’s and Franz Marc’s work from this period drew from “prehistoric” cave drawings, see “Rock Paintings, Art of Prehistoric Times,” https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/berliner-festspiele/programm/bfs-gesamtprogramm/programmdetail_137493.html, and Melissa Eddy, “Berlin Show Features German Ethnologies Copies of Art of Prehistoric Times,” New York Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/29/arts/design/berlin-show-features-german-ethnologists-copies-of-art-from-prehistoric-times.html. For more on these kinds of connections, see Lisa Hix, “Before Mondrian, Native American Women Painted Abstract Art on Saddlebags,” Collectors Weekly, April 13, 2016, http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/native-american-saddlebags/. See also discussion of Oscar Howe by Shea Murphy, “Art of Native American Dance.”
Kedhar, “Flexibility and Its Bodily Limits.” Kedhar discusses how interpreting story/philosophy in “an abstract, non-narrative, non-literal fashion” is linked to “Western,” “contemporary” expectations for choreography and production, for example, pairing story with “an abstract concept, such as the body, mathematics, space, rhythm, time, or energy,” and how a “lack of narrative, of mythology, and of facial expressions” gives dance work by South Asian choreographers “mainstream appeal” and makes them “more accessible to white British audiences” (30).
See Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, for one example of European object relation theorizing that engages with multiple questions around how aesthetic experience lies with the perceiver-participant. Rebentisch proceeds from “the fact that there is no art outside the historically changeable experience of the viewers” (59). Bringing to the discussion a focus on viewers’ physical activity in relation to an aesthetic object, she writes, “Art is autonomous not in spite of but because of the inexhaustibility of the experience to which it infinitely gives rise” (57, italics original). DE’s choreography, I suggest, does not give rise to an “infinity” of inexhaustible aesthetic experiences open to the interpretation of a beholder who can make of them whatever meaning they wish. Rather, it intends to communicate a specific understanding, along with the awareness that witnesses may experience that communication, and also communicate their visions, from a plurality of perspectives.
I’ve written elsewhere about similar issues in Native artists’ depictions of Native dance: ways, for example, many Native artists convey meaning through direct symbolism, designed to convey specific meaning, in ways that differ from abstract imagery in many non-Native artists’ treatment of Native dance. See discussion of Oqwa Pi’s Hopi Snake Dancer and Ralph Albert Blakelock’s The Vision of Life/The Ghost Dance in Shea Murphy, “Art of Native American Dance,” 74, 68.
Michael Tsosie, personal discussion with the author, February 11, 2015.
This section of the work was developed by Raoul Trujillo.
See Shea Murphy, “Dancing in the Here and Now.”
See Dance Research Journal, April 2016.
For discussion of the expression decolonial aesthetics and its emergence, see Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” 27.
Performance as an act of “bringing to form” ways of understanding beyond those imposed by colonization is a formulation articulated by Māori scholar Charles Royal in Kōtātara, the Newsletter of Ōrotokare: Art, Story, Motion, Trust, no. 9 (October 2008).
These possibilities are not activated via “imagination,” a concept many have understood to be a European category reductive of visionary ways of “seeing beyond the real.” See Chakraborty, Provincializing Europe, 173–79. Nor is it an exteriorizing of a singular artistic en-visioned interiority, such as that, as Lisa Lowe writes, Western philosophy defines as constitutive of being human. See Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 21. It is visionary in the sense more akin to what Chakrabarty describes (173).
DE’s practices are an example of what Maldonado-Torres describes as “decolonial aesthetic creation.” He writes, “Decolonial performances of self and subjectivity are, among other things, rituals that seek to keep the body open as a continued source of questions, as a bridge to connect to others, and as prepared to act.” Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses,” 27.
Avelar, “Amerindian Perspectivism,” 9. He explains further, “Although we see ourselves as persons, that perception differs from the way other species perceive us and themselves. Jaguars too see themselves as persons. In their eyes, we are nothing but prey, wild pigs.” He adds, “When the jaguar sees you, he is the one who is a person. He is the one endowed with attributes of personhood. You are a prey. In other words, whereas the Western debate between relativism and objectivism addresses the primacy of a subject position vis-à-vis the object (or the other way around), in Amerindian perspectivism we have a whole system altogether, where the subject position itself is variable and can be occupied by humans, animals, plants, the Earth, and so forth” (13). See also Firmino-Castillo’s complexifying of “dehumanizing” in her discussion of how genocidal violence is also ecocidal, targeting nonhuman others, in “Dancing the Pluriverse.”
Avelar, “Amerindian Perspectivism,” 9.
Firmino-Castillo, “Dancing the Pluriverse,” 70.
See Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire.
Personal email from Rulan Tangen to the author, July 30, 2018.
Personal email from Rulan Tangen to the author, June 11, 2018. Quoted with permission of George Burdeau, granted February 10, 2021, via telephone. Burdeau elaborated, “I felt I needed her to know that she has not lost the real support that she already has in the world. . . . We all make mistakes. If we make mistakes, it’s an honest one.”
Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 76.
Lyons, X-Marks, 2–3, 40.
Lyons, 84.
Lyons, 158, 100. This, Lyons suggests, means opening up to the multiple possibilities that present Indigenous peoples are, in fact, engaging with. “Rather than using tradition to define identities, I would suggest making it work the other way around: defining our identities in ways that promote tradition,” he writes (59).
See TallBear, “Genomic Articulations”; Arvin, Possessing Polynesians.