Dance Workshop, Riverside, California, 2006

With Rulan Tangen

In April 2011, Rulan Tangen, director of Dancing Earth Creations (DE), comes to my campus for a main-stage production of Of Bodies of Elements (2010), the new work she has built with her company. Beforehand, I arrange for her to give a workshop to our dance students and whoever else shows up—which turns out to be a bunch of folks: students and staff from the Native American Student Association; a few University of California, Riverside (UCR) faculty members; a few members from the local Native community.1 We’ve invited students from Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, and they are supposed to come too, first to take the workshop, then to meet with UCR faculty, then to share a dinner together at the Native American Student Programs offices, then to attend the performance. But they haven’t arrived yet. Most of the faculty, staff, and community members sit quietly in chairs around the sides of the studio space. I cajole them to join with little “c’mon over” hand gestures (smiling, but nooooo), then take a breath, gather my courage (my colleagues are watching!), and turn into dance-scholar-in-sweat-tights. I’m in it now.

The group circles up. The DE dance artists introduce themselves “Dancing Earth style”: they describe their origin place or nation or clan in words and also in movement. Nichole Salazar is from Santa Fe, New Mexico; she has been training with Rulan since she was sixteen and dancing with the company for about four years. She also danced with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and with others in New York. “I am of the Shoshone Nation, and my pose is of Sacajawea, which looks like this.” She takes a wide turned-out stance with her legs and bends her right leg down, then swoops her hands from left to right, starting at chest level, then lowering as she comes down to her right knee, hands and gaze extending out to the right, chest lifted. We all do it with her. Tangen contextualizes: “Sacajawea was a female leader, and that’s something I see in all the women in our company, that leadership, associated with strength and curves and movement.” Eagle Young has been with Tangen for two years. “I come from the Hopi tribe, and we have clans, and my clan is the Spider. And it looks like this.” He takes a wide stance and bends forward over his legs, elbows up, fingers wiggling, hopping. We wiggle and hop with him. Eric Garcia Lopez, from the Navajo nation and the Purépecha tribe of Mexico, is a competitive B-boy who has been dancing in that form for fifteen years. His figure is the Chac Mool, embodied from a Purepecha sculpture. Musician Quetzal Guerrero, also a B-boy, works now as an instructor in capoeira, an African-Brazilian martial dance, in Los Angeles. “My dad is from the Yaqui, Juaneño tribes, and my mom is from Brazil, she’s from the Cambiva people,” he tells us. “I’ve been a break-dancer for many years, but now my focus is on music. I focus on the vibrations in class today. It’s quite a pleasure to be here,” he says. Ericka Archer is from the Meherrin Nation of North Carolina; she dances in a hip-hop crew in Washington, D.C., where she lives, and dances fancy shawl as well as jingle dress. Sarracina Littlebird, who has just graduated from Columbia University with a double major in dance and environmental biology, has family at Laguna, Santo Domingo, and Tesuque Pueblos. “My icon is like this, because it’s a little bird,” she says (she kneels, one knee up, arms stretched back, torso forward, head to the side, smiling). “Like me, my last name is Littlebird.” She lifts her elbows, stretching her hands behind her, legs crossed. “I’ve been working with Rulan since I was twelve years old, and it’s been a really good training.” Serena Rancon, Yaqui tribe, has also known Tangen since she was twelve and is currently a dance instructor at schools. With her, we embody “feminine energy,” because her people have a traditional story whose main character is a woman. We lift and catch our back leg from behind, other arm out forward, making a bow. Ehren Natay, Navajo Nation, dancer, musician, and artist, says, “My dancing experience goes as far back as August.” When we finish laughing, he has us make a symbol and tells us, “It’s more commonly seen as a swastika, but what the symbol actually means to my people—and also to some Asian people—is the whirring of the universe. What Hitler did is he took that symbol and he flipped it over and he reversed it. He was trying to symbolize that he had control over the universe.” Deollo Johnson, who at the time2 claimed ancestry of Cherokee, Blackfoot, and Fulani, an ethnic group in parts of West Africa, tells us he’s done West African dance professionally and trained in other styles, such as Afro-Haitian and capoeira. He has us embody the signature instrument of capoeira, the berimbau, a strung, bow-shaped piece of wood with a gourd attached: left arm up, right hands grab right ankles and pull them up to our thighs. Jesus “Jacoh” Cortes, from Veracruz, Mexico, started training in ballet folklórico when he was six and in the deer dance when he was sixteen. “My pose, of course, is the deer. I pull my fore feet in front and I open my chest and I look up.” White-dance-scholar-wondering-what-her-pose-would-be (maybe something from Ireland or Wales?) is getting into this chest-lifting deer move, too, when Tangen steps in to explain that Cortes is being modest. “Jacoh is the living master of this particular version of the deer dance,” she says. Then she layers in teaching about dance as a form of medicine, and of protocol for learning a dance, and responsibility in dancing. “There is only one master, and that master passes it to one living person. Like maybe some pass medicine bundles and this kind of thing, in Native traditions. He’s the carrier of this deer medicine.” Did we notice, she asks, that he mentioned, offhand, that he’d danced for ten years before learning the deer dance?

Dance-scholar-in-ethnographic-observer-mode looks around, thinking whoa: there’s a whole lot of very different people, with connections to different Nations, with different dance training, here.3

Tangen tells the group that part of her intention in founding the company as an explicitly Indigenous dance company in 2004 was exactly this: to make a space for all to contribute. Having all Indigenous dancers, all Indigenous composers, costume designers, lighting designers, stagehands: that was the first part of her vision, and a start. “But beyond that, what would make it Indigenous?” she asked. She explained that she wanted a dance company that was “a creative space, an open and trusting space,” in which people could not just serve another’s vision but bring in something of their own, be it “a dance step, or a story from their origins, or a story about being disconnected from their origins.”

Dance Article for J.S.M. Publication

Rulan Tangen

Written on Thanksgiving 2006

By 2002, I had danced as if my short, wide brown feet were encased in the magical Red Shoes of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale. I had chased the dance from country to country, from ballet stages to modern dance studios to powwow grounds. I had danced as a pointe-shoed tango-ing murderess at the Café de la Danse in the Bastille district of Paris and at the Black Box Teater in Oslo, Norway; an eagle woman at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in Canada; the chunkiest of four little swans and a Rhapsody in Blue at Woodstock Playhouse, which burned to the ground in 1988; an operatic gypsy on the SummerStage in Central Park; and the Stabat Mater at the Florence Gould Hall and a Graham-esque tribal ecstatic at the Marymount Theatre, both in Manhattan. I had been a first place prize winner in the Women’s Traditional Buckskin category at Hunter Mountain, a waltzing flower at the Marin County Civic Center, and a masked river spirit in Vancouver. In the show TRIBE in Minneapolis, I transformed from First Woman to deer to concrete warrior backup dancer and back again, all in less than an hour. For more than forty choreographers, I had passionately devoted myself as an instrument, in the humble transcendence of helping give birth to another’s vision.

It is a path of struggle and surrender for a young dancer to learn the sublime dissolution of ego, to learn to become one’s self by embodying everything and anything that another being could envision. All these choreographies and characters engulfed me, mesmerized me, captured my imagination and my kinetic responsiveness. Yet still I was waiting for the roles of my lifetime. I was waiting for someone to create the dances that were ancient and futuristic, the anthropomorphic and mythic and profoundly human creatures that walked endlessly in my dream landscapes and in the unsilenced oral histories that spoke through the land: the Star People, the Woman Who Fell to Earth, Corn Goddess and Lady of Serpent Skirts, Pele the Volcano Deity, the Tree Beings, the Winged People, the Rock People, and more.

But what is the moment that I decided to dedicate my life to the expression of my own voice and my own vision? To bring to life themes so deeply rooted and so huge that they didn’t even feel like my own? To stop waiting for another to make the dance but step into the role that nature has made for all women: to be a Creator? Probably it was the moment when I was wondering if I had another breath left to breathe, if the Red Shoes dramatically evoked in the 1940s film had indeed danced me all the way to death.

* * * * *

I was lying fragile, hairless and gray skinned, in a hospital residence room in New York City, ironically overlooking the Lincoln Center neighborhood where I had studied and worked and performed and lived for so many years. The other hospital where I received my radiation treatments—the “walk of fire”—was in Union Square, which had been my downtown modern dance beating pulse. The only movement I could make without pain and effort was a gentle rotation of my wrist and forearm, spiraling in and spiraling out. That was the last dance left in me, with the nauseous metallic accompaniment of chemotherapy. I wondered, in the haze of reality/unreality, how much of me was dead and how much was alive. Surely, even if dead, I was quite sure I would still be moving my bones in a feeble indication of dance, a skeletal Día de los Muertos pavane. Then it came to me—if I was breathing, I must be alive. I was reminded of Indigenous creation stories of the origins of life emerging from mud, from earth, from clay. How did that mud become life? How did it give birth to life? By breathing life into itself, by infusing its breath into each entity? My body, once voluptuous with mountains and verdant with long hair, was now a tiny puddle of dry dust. But by reenacting the creation story, I could breathe life into being, rebirth myself.

I shut my eyes and saw shadowy figures enter the room. Ah, it must be my dead ancestors, relatives: my two delicate aunts, one grandfather I had known and another set of grandparents I had not, and friends, so many young men passing early of AIDS in the 1980s, assembling into the space to claim me. This must be how it happens—the shadows become long-lost, familiar embraces to lead me into the spirit realm. The shadows came closer and closer, and familiar they were—until I realized that the gentle round dance I was being beckoned to was led not by the dead but by shadow spirits of the living. A small gasp of recognition, and I whispered the name of one friend, followed by another, and then the next. One by one, I began recognizing and naming all the people in all the parts of the world who cared about me, who were holding me in their hearts, their thoughts, their ceremonies and prayers in longhouses and roundhouses from northeast woodlands to Pacific islands, who were lighting candles in churches in the outer mission of San Francisco, holding pipe ceremonies in the northern Rockies, cutting hair and gathering salt in Hawai‘i, singing in sweat lodges in rural New Mexico, burning sweetgrass and sage. One by one, more and more, overwhelmed by love and compassion and connectedness between beings, I whispered their names, and with each name, the breath kept me going, and going, and going . . .

In the dance studio in Riverside, the DE dancers say they’re going to show everyone a section of Of Bodies of Elements, the work they’ll be performing that night. In what they show us, we’ll be able to find all these figures we’ve just embodied. Dance-scholar-in-sweat-tights is intrigued. She has seen the piece before (just as dance-scholar, no sweat tights) when it premiered in Albuquerque. But she didn’t see Sacajawea, or a spider, or a little bird, or a swastika, in that piece. (OK, maybe, yes, she saw the deer.) But this time—oh, wow, there they are, yep, just like we were doing them. There they are, these figures that each of the dancers brought in from their backgrounds and materialized in physical form, through these young dancers. Cool.

Dance-scholar-in-dream-mode is thinking about this materialization of beings in the bodies of dancers and about this practice Tangen has honed that enables these young dancers to physicalize in this way. But she doesn’t get far in her mulling about this before it’s time to circle up again and move.

Tangen starts teaching by element. First is fire. Feet apart, upright, she begins jumping side to side, in small hops, elbows up, fingers curled and touching. The rest of the group joins. “This is a Huichol exercise. Heels touch the floor,” she says as she jumps.4 “We’re trying to get heat in the body. This creates a spiral in your bones and in your muscles.” Cortes steps forward to show everyone a few steps, stepping in rhythm with the drum and hopping over one foot as Quetzal Guerrero responds to his movement with the drum’s beat. Then we rub our hands together, creating heat between them, and bring them to our faces, over our heads, and down our bodies. Tangen continues: “And now we’re going to go into water, and we’ll do the torso, so just move the torso down [we follow, curling down, legs bent] and up [arching forward], inhaling, then exhaling, curling forward, and inhaling, and exhaling, getting faster and more undulatory.

“So, we’ve gone from fire to water; now I’d like to go starting from earth—just any kind of position that connects you back to the ground you can find. You can be curled up like a tree root. Sixteen beats to go curling up—stay connected to the ground. Now eight to go down.” Everyone grows up, slowly, and down to the ground, repeating, getting faster and faster, until it’s two counts, then one count, to get up and down. “Stay in your tree position,” Tangen tells everyone. “You’re going to move when wind passes by you.” Serena runs in the circle. Wind passes from person to person, movement going around the circle.

Tangen is watching carefully as everyone starts to get a little carried away with this exercise. “Try to be aware not only of what’s happening next to you but of what’s happening on the other side,” she says. “Right now, we’re going to place your awareness on everyone else in the room.”

After the group does some practice tuning awareness to each other, and to their intentions, which dance-scholar-in-teacher-mode notices works to tone everyone down, the UCR participants introduce themselves, using sound and rhythm and the same number of movements as syllables in their names.

Next is group work. Tangen says, “We’re going to create a functional microcosm of interactive diversity. Which in Indigenous terms is the world.”

We break into groups. In one, Archer teaches some fancy dance steps. In another, Cortes teaches deer dance steps. In another (the one dance-scholar-in-sweat-tights joins, of course), they play games: red light, green light, freezing in their positions as Young comes around asking what is embodying in the way one has froze. “I’m grabbing something voluptuous!” someone shouts out, to peals of laughter. In the next game, Littlebird gives everyone a role, and Edwin (a UCR dance major) has to guess what it is. “A horse?” “A bird.” “Are you—huh. Are you a turtle?” “Are you a ballerina?” “You’re a storm! No? Sunshine? Rainbow? Cloud?” There is a lot of laughing. “Are you from water? A running thing?” It is full of fun, movement, energy up.

Everyone comes back together so Cortes can teach the whole workshop some movement when six students from Sherman Indian High School arrive. Tangen greets them in a way that dance-scholar-in-teacher-mode notes is gentle and open: welcoming, but not too forceful. “Hi! Are you going to join us? Come on in—take your shoes off and join us.” Tangen leads them to the back of the studio, staying with them as they watch Cortes teach. He shows the steps again, two steps forward, one cross over and back. The UCR dance students are rocking it. Dance-scholar-in-responsible-caregiver-mode is hanging in, getting the moves, not too shabby, though a bit distracted; she keeps watching the Sherman students—are they OK? They seem anxious about joining and are shying away, but Tangen is working with each one individually, showing them the basic shapes. “More than going up, you go down,” Cortes says, showing the foot rhythm. They try it, giggling, and they get it. Everyone is getting it. The room is full of elation, and everyone rides it as we break into another set of group work.

Salazar tells dance-scholar-in-sweat-tights’ group to “be any kind of creature.” They start out on the floor in a back position, and then flip to the four-legged, and then crawl forward into a tighter circle, on counts, downward-dog-like, lifting one leg. In the circle, they improvise other beings. Dance-scholar-in-OK-be-gutsy-mode tries being an otter, playful, slippery, energetic, silly. One of the Sherman students puts her hand over her mouth, hesitant, smiling. But she joins in. Then everyone slaps out rhythms on their legs, each moving a quarter turn each few beats, first in a circle, then in two facing lines. They send movement waves across the line to each other, like water benders. Dance-scholar-otter is an excellent water bender.

In the other group, they are passing rhythms between them, around a circle. Natay says, “We’re having a conversation; we’re listening to each other. Don’t just be inside yourself. Really engage.” The spirit is light, and fun, and also focused: they are learning about paying attention, about following energy, about moving in circles, in their bodies and in the space. The kids from Sherman get more and more involved as the workshop builds toward bringing it all together. With Tangen’s instruction, one of them crawls to center, and the dancers from one group reach around her to support her with their hands before she crawls back out into the wider group. They group together, and the rhythm group surrounds them, sounds building and building. It ends with a burst of applause.

Tangen comes around and shakes everyone’s hand. “Come on, guys, let’s circle—everyone who is inspired to participate or has participated.” The dancers are going around giving people high fives.

“So, I love all the creativity and the courage that it takes to come and be a part of this circle. It’s not so easy to be crawling up on somebody that you don’t know and making a tree shape, trying to fit into the group,” she says. “That’s actually what we have to do with Dancing Earth,” Tangen continues. “We have to compose things in a fairly rapid amount of time, so we have to really be alert and aware.”

Dance-scholar-in-musing-mode thinks, huh, that’s interesting. So this workshop—and the training Tangen offers these young dancers—isn’t about honing your physical technique; it’s about honing your abilities in paying attention, physically, sensorially, in highly tuned ways, so you can manifest in whatever form, as needed. And if needed, quickly. And it’s about strengthening your tools for doing this.

Tangen elaborates, “I think the classical way is to create a consistent product that is perfect every single time.” Instead, “every time we do it, we’re actually trying to make it a little different,” she explains. “I don’t consider it a performance. It’s almost like a ritual.”

(Fast-forward to Tangen and THE NAMING)

Less than a year later, I was invited to be one of four emerging international choreographers for an Aboriginal Choreographers Workshop in Toronto, under the mentorship of the respected director and choreographer Alejandro Roncería. I had regained my ability to walk a few months earlier, and I was both intimidated and in excited anticipation of my first commission as a “real” choreographer, with the opportunity to learn about lighting and composing in relationship to choreography. My hair was growing back in an Afro, pressed down by the ubiquitous wool toques worn in the cold Canadian winters, and my body was still weak and unpredictable, so I welcomed the chance to create on three dancers as yet unknown to me, though I knew from previous work with Alejandro that the source material would be derived from my own improvisation, exploring the instinctive body for profound resonances.

In two weeks, three of the four choreographers presented versions of birth or creation stories! Mine started with a duet, for the lovely Carla Soto and Brian Solomon, about two clouds merging. I thought of the mating dance of clouds creating moisture to fall to the earth, to become mud, which then breathes itself into life. There was no mention of clouds being male or female; I wanted both to be both. I had dreamed this up years ago, to dance it myself with the extraordinary actor-dancer-singer Kalani Queypo, highlighting his lyrical qualities and my warrior qualities, in a nude torso embrace, both with waist-length black hair obscuring where one ended and the other began, embodying female and male energies in complete integration.5 Perhaps the time for that had passed, I didn’t know, but I was entranced by Carla’s breathy quality and Brian’s ardency, as enthusiastic as a wild puppy sometimes. I composed phrases that were especially made for his starlike left hand, for he had been born with undeveloped fingers. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect attribute for a dance about constellation and sky entities, so besides his flexibility and big jumps, it was that which made him different that so delighted me.

THE NAMING solo was the dance embodiment of the episode I described at that life/death/rebirth moment. Tiny, froglike, squatting, simple, I set it that first time on the Mexican dancer Alejandra, with her intense black eyes. I was complimented when Canadian actor Sid Bobb, at an open panel discussion after a performance, informed me that he had no questions because it was so absolutely clear to him! Although it is from a creation story as well, I always think of it as a point on re-creation, occurring at the end of the world, at the end of one cycle of time, when the earth breathes itself into a new existence.

If it is a creation story, how are there ancestors? Is it prehuman ancestors, our relations who are plant and mineral? Or is the dawn of the next world on the fallen backs of several previous? The body then startles open, to echo that sound of the deep earth core, and, by doing so, intakes breath. The dizzying rhythm of inhalation followed by exhalation then brings the primordial mud into readiness for birth. First birthing, then calling out the name to identify the contours of earth, the contours of myself, and then out there to you, calling you into being. The creation and recreation of earth, self, and the totality of beings in the audience or my imagination, all within five minutes! The dance holds its own, yet I also view it as a sketch for a full evening’s work, in which the various entities who are called into existence are actually physicalized by dancers.

When I performed it in Santa Fe for the ONE SOUL concert, I was asked to perform it at the beginning of the program, and again at the end, which felt so unconventional, and so right. With each performance, which are no longer performances to me but site-specific rituals, I feel as though my breath is calling in all the young dancers who appeared from all four corners within moments of my decision to choreograph and subsequently became the seedlings of my company, Dancing Earth. These incredible multitalents included the musical virtuoso Quetzal Guerrero, the creamy smooth lushness of Cina Littlebird, the powerful panther presence of Alejandro Meraz, the quirky inventiveness and sheer strength of Anthony Collins, the impeccable cool fire of Jessica Marisol Allen, my longtime muse of generosity and fire Kalani Queypo, the charismatic vivacity of Happy Frejo, our mentor the brilliant Raoul Trujillo, who danced with us his seminal solo Dream Medicine Time, and many more.

This five-minute solo of THE NAMING has subsequently been performed with astonishing response at the Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California; at two festivals in Toronto; in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; in Brazil; and on reservations, including the Six Nations Woodlands Cultural Center in Canada. I like to present it whenever it is my first time anywhere as a choreographer, this tiny love letter of gratitude for life and for all the relations who held me in a circle of love, this dance that simultaneously re-creates a creation story, along with the rebirth of myself, and tells my origins as a creator of Dancing Earth and the beginning of all the Dancing Earth dances and dancers that have come thereafter.

* * * * *

In dreaming up the creation of an Indigenous contemporary dance company, I asked myself, what would make it specifically Indigenous?6 Would it be Indigenous dancers, or Indigenous themes, or Indigenous teachers/trainers and cultural consultants? My answer was yes to all of the preceding, but more specifically in ideals of collective leadership. As a leader, I did not feel my role to be to impose my own training, choreography, or culture but rather to encourage and empower every artist and collaborator involved. In this manner, it would reflect Aboriginal collective leadership rather than hierarchical power structures and allow for intertribal or multitribal voices to emerge, rather than one tribal perspective (perhaps because I am of mixed cultures myself). It’s still an ideal. I think that it would involve a long investment of time for each dance work creation to fully explore such an ideal, and the funding reality is that we have no operating budget, we exist from gig to gig, with most offers being for me as a soloist, and I stretch the pennies to include at least one more dancer and as many as twelve. With this limitation of resources, the reality is that new work is sometimes created on the bodies in two days. Certainly I haven’t had longer than two weeks, and even that involved sneaking into free rehearsal spaces. I develop the dances by myself well in advance, taking many weeks, sometimes months, years, or even decades for a dance to grow from original conception in thought to actual living form. I create very strong formats and structures and themes, with music/lighting/costumes in mind, yet this form allows room for improvisation and spontaneity and the inclusion of ideas or themes from dancers. My priority is for fair wages for dancers, who are all from working-class backgrounds, each dancer getting paid equally or on a scale based on how many dances they participate in, including myself. There is usually no fee offered for choreographer or director, so I have to dance in each show so that I can make a wage, and I usually am doing the administration, promotion, and booking by myself. The tight budget has taught me to be a designer of lighting and costumes. This frugality sets us up as a very ecologically conscious company, with all costumes being remade from used clothing or fabric!

Last week, we performed at the National Performance Network annual event for an audience of presenters and many dance colleagues, and I was most interested when I heard the comment “very well-trained dancers” more than once. It showed me that the audience was able to recognize (and the dancers could clearly demonstrate) that arduous training can be in many forms: in my group, there is training in break dancing, martial arts, powwow, some ballet.

To explain further, Tangen tells a story about time she spent learning powwow dance from a Lakota Elder.7 She explains the process of how she was taught powwow and how it landed on her as a young ballet-trained dancer. “When I was a powwow dancer . . . well, I had been already a ballet dancer, so I was like, OK, I’m ready to do that super shawl dance [swooping her arms out to the sides, up and down]. I’m gonna spin on my toes [turning on one foot], I’m gonna have more beads than anybody [swooping one arm down the other, in elegant display]. Of course, I was very rude and ignorant as a young person,” she says, describing going back to the Elder and saying (sticking her chest out, arms back flailing), “I want to dance!” and the Elder saying, “OK, well, why don’t you try cleaning the stove?” “And I was like [chest curved, fingers to heart], ‘I’m not domestic. I’m an artist,’” Tangen says. The group in Riverside laughs. “So. Yeah. Many, many years of having to do what I considered kind of [shrugging cutely] boring jobs like that, and of learning how to sew things, or how to cook things a certain way, how to mash up choke cherries and buffalo in buffalo fat. I was like [teenage-like exasperation stance], whatever happened to wearing fully beaded regalia and learning how to dance?

“But what I was learning was how to be part of a community, how to participate in a community. And to serve. Because essentially, when we’re dancing, it’s in the service of, maybe a choreographer’s vision, or in the service of your own spirit or your own soul [arms moving toward her face, inward]. So you have to move your ego out of the way and just be like [torso scrunching up, elbows tight in, moving forward], I may look goofy, but maybe that’s how, maybe that’s what . . . the choreographer’s going to say, ‘Oh my God, I love that, do that for twenty minutes!’” We laugh. “And you’d be like [squatting more, arms tighter in, more scooching], ‘Well, I don’t think I look good, but in a costume maybe?’” More laughing.

“So when I did get invited into the powwow circle, I was, like, oh, yes [arms lifted, swooping, one leg up spinning].” But her teacher, Tangen says, had a different plan. “She was like [feet together, hands on hips], this is your first step [bending knees]. This is your second step [standing straight]. For twenty-four hours [bending knees and straightening]. This step.

“So I was like [arms out, reaching dramatically into the circle], ‘are you kidding me? I mean, that’s like beginning [first position plié] ballet, you know, like plié and straighten. There’s so much more I can do.’”

Still moving, Tangen reflects to the group what she learned doing this. “You do this from sunrise to sunset [standing straight, knees bending, knees straightening], you realize that this dance is the absolute pulse of the universe. If you can do this [knees bending, knees straightening] with a living spine [standing still, with energy, hands curved onto hips], you know, it’s all the things I ask for in a dancer—your fingers alive, the back of your neck is long, there’s space between your vertebrae. From sunrise to sunset. You’ll eventually get it. So, this was the dance that I was invited to do. These days, you can sort of [swags a bit] get out there and fancy dance, but because I was taught powwow dance through a protocol, and you have to be shared these ways, that’s what I did.”

I remember that when first working with mentors Raoul Trujillo and Alejandro Roncería, they mentioned how they themselves had to peel away European trainings like ballet to get down to the profound essence of dance, which was described by Raoul, and by Martha Graham, as blood memory.

Raoul’s Ancestor solo in Shaman’s Journey, with slow, deep contortions and distortions of white clay–painted face and body, revealing generational pain and wisdom, whether male or female, clothed only in a small hip wrap, was categorized by sophisticated New York City viewers of Sankai Juko as butoh influenced, although at that time, he had never seen butoh. The work, and the process of creating the work, had started long before the famed butoh troupe made their first appearance there. This solo began with improvisations on rocks inside of rushing rivers in northern New Mexico, when Raoul was trying to teach himself how to be a dancer, and long before his first dance classes. Alejandro Roncería, in his preparation for his evening-length solo based on Jaguar energy and imagery, described his preperformance process as lying on the floor of a completely darkened room for many hours, maybe a half day. This was also one of the traditional shaman preparatory rituals in his home country of Colombia.

This concept of decolonization of form and movement, specifically looking at wresting away mainstream attitudes and rules about body image, aesthetic line, and what makes a dance and a dancer legitimate, made me reluctant to attempt to retrain dancers who were coming to me with a variety of physical backgrounds, unless I was sure that I would not be replacing one style with another. At one point, I was adamant about developing a movement vocabulary, and elements of those warm-ups and combinations and phrases are sometimes incorporated into our warm-ups. But now, I reason, the dancers can take different routes to get to certain important awarenesses, such as breath rooting each movement, how limbs work in spirals based on anatomy, to be aware of their body angles in relation to space, be able to repeat and be consistent with dance phrases, differentiate rhythms, land from high jumps or quick turns in an efficient way, and train and cross-train with balance so as to avoid injury, and generally be able to articulate body parts in order to evoke characters, including those of the nonhuman world. I am trying to encourage diversity, so these awarenesses can come through study of anatomy, sculpture, pottery, then filter through physical work, such as martial arts, yoga, and traditional forms, such as ballet and Polynesian, and contemporary forms, such as contact improv and fancy shawl.

The question of pointed feet would come up every so often among my Canadian colleagues, but I wasn’t convinced that the quest for high arches was a necessary ideal for a dance company rooted in Indigenous philosophies and aesthetics. The same with long legs, extremely slim forms, or high extension in isolation without involvement of pelvis. Isolation of body parts in general (or isolation as a general philosophy, rather than interconnectedness) is frequently used in many dance forms at least for warm-up, but most warm-ups conducted by those individuals I recognize as part of this pioneering dance movement involve all the body parts, the torso integrated into movements of knee, hip, arm, and head.

I learned an important exercise in my late teens by observing the meticulous ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, dissecting for hours one arm gesture from her role of Giselle, repeating a tiny movement over and over, taking it at an impossibly slow pace, finding the impetus and nuance in every body part and how it translated to the emotions and the psyche. Now I relate that exercise to the expression of Seneca singer and composer Sadie Buck: “survival is repetition.” Every year, that phrase haunts me, and I have a different understanding of its layers of meaning. Think about it. Let it sit with you. You will learn new meanings of it daily.

In the Riverside dance studio, Tangen tells the students more about her intentions in choreographing for Dancing Earth. “I was aware that in Native cultures that I had experienced, there are wonderful stories, there are these ways of understanding the world that are different from other ways of understanding the world. It links into astronomy. It links into history. It links into what they call permaculture now. That’s basically just like Indian farming. And all these things, they could be expressed in a dance [swaying hips, moving arms up and down].

“So I created a dance. The three sisters are corn, beans and squash.” As she is talking, three of the dancers come forward. “If you look at the iconography, which means the symbols, of corn [one of the dancers, Nichole Salazar, puts her arms up over her head, bends her knees slightly], you’ll see it in a lot of ancient pots, it’ll have different V shapes, continuous V shapes. The corn grows tall. The beans wind up around the corn.” Serena circles Nichole, moving from the ground upward. “And then the squash has low leaves that are on the ground to create shade. So we have a dance right there, just by interpreting this wonderful feast. That’s one of the dances that’s in our production.”

Tangen explains, “I created that dance by asking Indigenous farmers how [they garden].”8 She says that the “Sticks” section of Of Bodies of Elements, with four men who, in pairs, drive sticks into the ground, stamping, was created similarly, in relation to patchwork gardening.

“This dance was actually created for a very small amount of space,” she explains. “It’s creating small squares for gardening instead of huge monocrops. And this rhythm that’s created by men working together, creating something beautiful.”

Tangen talks further about diversity, and biodiversity, and interrelation. “Each and every one of us has this special gift, something that no one else has. It only exists in this world because of who you are.” She adds, “Sometimes that’s shared with us through the names that we’re given, and sometimes through our purpose in life.”

A few years later, when I was twenty-one, I learned from my first mentor, Miguel Valdez Mor—a Mexican Apache of the Graham and Peridance dance companies—to learn a phrase and then do it without the legs. Then do it without legs or arms, so you would just be sitting on the floor with your torso thrashing like a tree in a storm in exact time and articulation to the musical phrase. It was a powerful demonstration that you could dance, indeed, you could live, without legs or arms, but if you had a torso (which can breathe), then you could dance. That lesson was poignantly highlighted for me one day when I was hobbling across Union Square to my chemotherapy appointment. I got caught somehow in the middle of the crowds and ran into a dancer I had been in limited contact with since dancing as partners in Europe with the Michael Mao Company. We stood facing each other. I was gaunt and bald, and he was a recent amputee, missing a leg due to a rare cancer. With few words, we had a conversation that only the two of us could ever have. His name was Homer Avilar, and it was after his amputation that he went on to have an incomparable career as a solo artist, working with some of the greatest choreographers in the world. He revealed to all of us the inestimable potential of the human body to express the dance of life, that we each must do it in our own way. He passed away two years later, before we could dance and choreograph on each other in this contemporary Indigenous mode, which was part of his Central American heritage, perhaps the only things he didn’t get to explore in his life of vital hunger for knowledge and creativity and experience, for living itself, and dancing up until the day before he passed.

Ultimately, these are all just trainings to get into condition. I don’t note Dancing Earth’s dance form as being an integration of ballet, modern, powwow, hip-hop, capoeira, Tahitian, even though they are among the trainings that dancers bring to the studio. In fact, I describe the work as acknowledging all these trainings as a route to total physicalization as a starting point. Then, to release all these trainings and concepts and styles, and the inherent philosophies from which they were created, we go through a series of exercises of unmaking, of returning the body into raw instinct, to find the deep essence of what makes us move a certain way, and why. We seek out the movement from the marrow, the actual DNA of ancestors. Then, by incorporation of diverse Indigenous languages and sound patterns and philosophies brought in by the group, we start to find rhythms and motions that bring articulation to the primordial ooze. That’s the best way I can describe it; the exercises change and adjust constantly, allowing in new ideas and insight rather than already being a codified technique.

Before the Riverside workshop closes, Tangen tells everyone in the room that she wants to create one last improvisation with us all together. “With Quetzal, who’s so wonderful giving us all these different rhythms, and I’m going to compose it with everyone who is here.”

She repeats, “I’d love it if everyone in the room could participate.”

There’s a zing in the room as those sitting against the wall perk up, looking anxious. Um, they thought they were just there watching? Dance-scholar-in-sweat-tights lights up, looking around. He-he, what’s going to happen now? She catches her Definitely-Not-in-Sweat-Tights colleagues’ eyes.

Tangen names the discomfort. “I know you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to be crawling on the floor like those crazy people,’” she says. She explains that her vision is much more sedate. “I can have some people that are seated in the middle, in the core,” she says. “So, if you’re willing to give up your comfort zone, take off your shoes and join us. I’ll create something very simple that’s going to start from a seated position with other people coming in. I’d love to see everyone in the room participate. We can have chairs.”

Anxiety is palpable in the air, as are laughter and embarrassed smiling. The students who have been participating turn and smile to those sitting along the sides of the room watching. Dance-scholar-in-sweat-tights feels like prancing about, oh dear, oh dear, te-he-he ruffling through her. “That hurts, to sit on the floor,” says an Elder, Henry James Vásquez, when Tangen approaches him. “No, I mean just sitting in a chair,” she says. Dance-scholar-in-service-mode scampers quickly to bring a chair and place it in the center. Henry sits there, smiling a little, but just a little. Oh dear, thinks dance-scholar-as-responsible-for-care, sensing his discomfort. But he’s fine. He seems fine. “Our seated dancers? Could we have them come out?” Michael Tsosie (a brilliant Mohave scholar who is teaching on campus that term), Josh Gonzales (the director of Native American Student Programs [NASP]), Michelle Raheja (Indigenous studies faculty in the English department), and a dozen others, including most of the NASP office staff, all join the formation. Vásquez is in a chair in the middle, and Tangen arranges the others sitting back to front in four spokes out from him. She gives each row simple movements to do with their arms.

“And then you’re going to repeat it, so it’ll go [arms forward], and then back.”

She places everyone else, including dance-scholar-in-participant-observer-mode, in groups in between the lines of the seated dancers. Then she goes around the formation, giving each group instruction. Everyone is laughing and talking; those sitting are looking around at each other, smiling sheepishly, eyebrows raising, eyes twinkling: can you believe we’re doing this?

Tangen asks the group to do the movements eight times through. The seated dancers do their arm movements. Another group steps. Another is working with the torso. Quetzal plays, the violin rising everyone’s energy along with it. When the group finishes its eight moves, Quetzal stops, and the room erupts with claps and cheers and hooting.

“Thank you so much!” Tangen says to all before going to thank Vásquez, in the center, who looks happy. And relieved.

Sometimes we are embodying human from past, present, or future, sometimes spirit, sometimes animal or bird, sometimes constellations, cloud formations, falling leaves, rockscapes: all of these are our ancestors. It’s called contemporary dance perhaps because it is being created now, but for these first few years, it seems I am often creating dances about times before the dawn of humanity, or perhaps the upcoming dawn of a new time cycle, as in the Mayan prophecies. We feel compelled to create these dances, perhaps to place ourselves in a context that isn’t linear time. For Dancing Earth, I say “we,” because that is my reason for creating as a group, to bring stories and ideas and themes to the studio that feel so personal but, once shared, have reverberations for all participants on many levels. From soloist to ensemble, from families to tribes, from intertribal to international, from humanity to the beyond-human world, visible to invisible, finally for us it is about dancing by, for, and of the earth. As in the earliest traditions of humans in every part of the earth, dances are rituals through which we invoke our relations with each other and with the earth, depict heroic struggles and sweet courtships. We welcome plants and animals and celebrate as part of our beings, as food sources and guides; we note changes in the sky and seasons and keep dancing our rhythms and breath to renew the earth, in an unending dance of life.

I take off my dance tights, put my professor pants back on, and go to meet with the Sherman students and other UCR faculty to talk about what it’s like being at university, and to share some food at the NASP office, and to see the DE performance, after which (though she doesn’t know it), at UCR Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs Cliff Trafzer’s request, I will present Tangen with the Costo Medal in Education, Teaching, and Service.

A few days later, Tsosie and I meet for dinner. He leans forward to tell me, “Jacqueline, that was amazing! It was all there!” He has a little smile, and his eyes are dancing. “That’s what Native culture is all about—recognizing that there’s a place for everyone. Everyone is valuable for what they bring. Everyone is there for a reason. No one is thrown away. That’s what it’s about.” Tsosie explained that this “includes ensuring that everyone looks good and feels good—that we all come away with a feeling of elation and joy, and purpose, and connectivity, knowing that we are a crucial part of something bigger than ourselves.” He talks more about what he saw in the teaching, and the doing, and about how exciting he found it. “It was all there,” he said. “And what [Tangen] showed is that it’s all embodied. I don’t think people realize that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that addressed in an academic environment. We don’t address that. But it’s all there.

“And the students and people there, they were seeing it. They were seeing the visible intellectual work in the dancing. It really helped me see that in our dances. It was phenomenal, what she was doing.”

Tsosie tells me he wants to take me to see the Santo Domingo Corn Dances, where some of his relatives are. “You’ll see, it’s the same there. Making sure there’s a place for everyone and that everyone looks their best. And is having fun, is enjoying themselves. That’s what it’s about.”9

Expansive Relationality/Of Bodies of Elements

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, a core tenet of dance studies is that dance theorizes and articulates—which is a tenet also core to Indigenous understandings. That Indigenous dance, including staged dance, enacts knowledge and “epistemological ‘ways of knowing’”—what Tsosie termed the “visible intellectual work” in DE’s dances as well as in Santo Domingo Corn Dances—and that these articulate and enact ways of being in the world that differ from those imposed via colonization, is a central point of The People Have Never Stopped Dancing.10 Building on these understandings, I unpack further in what follows how the dance making of DE theorizes and articulates relationality as a way of being and knowing. DE choreography, and the practices that surround the making of it, asserts an expansive relationality that refers to human relationships not only with other humans but also with the larger planet and celestial worlds. This includes relation to more-than-human persons—animal persons (deer, wolves), plant persons (corn, beans, and squash); specific places, mountains, bodies of water and waterways, ground, air, and sky; sky beings in the “outer-space” of stars and carbon; realms unseen and sometimes translated as “ancestral.”11 “People” or “human beings” are those particular beings (the humans) who are here on earth in relation to particular places, in interconnected relationship with a wide range of other humans from other places (who likely call themselves “the people,” too, in their own languages).

These understandings of radical relationality beyond the human, based in radical diversity and the import of relationships of exchange that require care and respect, are ones that numerous Native and Indigenous scholars, including dance artists, have long articulated in writing and in stories, songs, and dances. As Anishinaabekwe scholar Kathleen E. Absolon writes,

Indigenous worldviews teach people to see themselves humbly within a larger web of life. This web contains our relationships to one another and to all of Creation. Indigenous knowledge lives in the animals, birds, land, plants, trees and Creation. Relationships among family and kinship systems exist within human, spiritual, plant and animal realms.12

Daystar/Rosalie Jones, who is of Pembina Chippewa heritage, writes in her articulation of the “dreamed imagination,”

Indigenous Peoples have always been sensitive to the existence of the powers of the natural word: the animal powers, the plant powers, the powers of the elements, wind and thunder, the power of ancestors, and of the unseen around us. The cultures of Indigenous Peoples have, through the millennium [sic], taught its [sic] individuals to be sensitive to the powers of dreams as revelations, as inspirations to be listened to, understood, interpreted, and to take action upon. In these cultures, dream revelations or inspirations can be made public. One of the ways to make such revelations public is by creating a dance and/or a song.13

A number of dance scholars who have spent time with DE have also witnessed, described, and worked with ways the company’s dance making theorizes, articulates, inhabits, and asserts these understandings, enacting them as ways of being beyond what capitalist coloniality imposes. Tria Blu Wakpa, María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Ananya Chatterjea, and I have all written on Tangen’s work in relation to these ideas of an expansive, interconnected relationality and have suggested how the structures it creates through dance performance counter those imposed through ongoing settler colonizations. Blu Wakpa focuses on the interconnectedness choreographed in a “basket-weaving piece” Tangen co-choreographed with Jicarilla Abaachi dancer Anne Pesata. Blu Wakpa argues for ways the “interconnected individualism” of Tangen’s pedagogy and choreographic methods are “mapping a different terrain than that of settler discourses which have sought to erase contemporary Indigenous peoples and ways of life.”14 After addressing her own “embodied positionality” in relation to DE, Blu Wakpa focuses on how Pesata’s basket-weaving and plant-gathering gestures in performing the piece respatialize “layers of connection” between Pesata, her mother, and her grandmother, to depict and enact “a complex spatial layering of generational connection with one location that departs from the delineation of mainstream map-making.”15 She argues, “Pesata’s conception of interdependence transcends human-to-human interactions and presents an alternative to Western epistemologies, which hierarchize humans above plants.”16

Firmino-Castillo writes about how her experiences working with DE confirmed for her “that dance can be a practice of ontological regeneration,” but in specific and historically specific ways.17 Focusing on the “complex Indigeneity” of DE’s composition, Firmino-Castillo theorizes how dance making performs “a praxis of decolonization for Indigeneity to emerge as a pluriverse with trans-ontological possibility.”18 Noting the company’s “act of gathering dancers who represent this broad spectrum of Indigenous experience,” she argues that “Dancing Earth’s centering of this complex potentiality enacts ontological alternatives reflective of a pluriversal reality.”19 Firmino-Castillo describes the summer institute work of which she was part in 2014 and the tenth-anniversary performance that stemmed from it, noting the “diversity of Indigenous dance traditions and contemporary performance genres as well as the cosmologies of the people present in the space in which the performance happened” and how it could be “witnessed from multiple perspectives.”20 Noting these, Firmino-Castillo argues for the “ontological complexity”—rather than “shared ontology” of “cultural pan-Indigeneity”—the piece enacts as an ongoing act of “reality making.”21 I’ve written about how this same work could be witnessed only partially, depending on how one was positioned in the performance space and the lines of view that enabled and obscured, suggesting that this enacts understanding of all that is always happening beyond what one singular viewer sees at any particular moment and sparks awareness that others, from where they are located, are perceiving only partially as well. I discuss how this work, in articulating this awareness of all that is there but not seen, in its creativity and activations, and in the responsivity that these activations elicited, “brought people into connection with one another and with the universe, the ancestors and spirit world, the earth and elements,” in ways akin to what ceremonials enact. These “generate/create/acknowledge Indigenous forms of relationality,” I argue, “providing alternative experiences for navigating the impact and worldview that colonization and its requirements for recognition continue to impose on Native peoples.”22

Chatterjea, too, looks at Tangen’s “insistent foregrounding of Indigenous perspectives” and how this centering of Indigeneity in dance turns “Eurocentric value-systems on their head.”23 She describes some of the specifics of Tangen’s approaches to dance making: its attention to breath, its deep respect for and kindness to the body, its work “with repetition as a technique of renewal,”24 its balancing of delicacy of touch with connectedness to ground in its modes of walking, its prioritizing of structured improvisations and “working in the interstices of many influences and stories” and how this leaves room for “both individual response and recognition of the collective,” and how its process of “honoring dancers’ contributions while working through play and group dynamics” moves artists beyond a focus on “techniques” to arrive instead at a “way of moving.”25 Through these approaches, Chatterjea writes, dancers are “charged to become attuned to their natural reciprocity with the earth, breathing in the oxygen produced by plants, and returning the carbon dioxide that plants need.” This “lesson of dance as an interactive community practice is a constant theme in Tangen’s pedagogy,” she argues.26 Chatterjea further points to how Tangen’s fostering of imaginative “re-story-ing”—of stories she has been told by Elders, of “images from literature, oral tradition, and visual art”—“juxtaposes many planes of time and space.” This, she argues, creates an “entry into contemporary movement and choreography that is connected to Indigenous approaches to land and relationality.”27 “In a practice such as Tangen’s, we come to know land through embodied relationality,” she writes.28 Pointing to these and other aspects of Tangen’s “evolution of a multi-relational mode of dancing,” Chatterjea registers ways “the heat in Tangen’s work,” drawing from and flowing in concert with “the energy from down under her feet,” is woven from these repetitions, shaped improvisations, engagements with communities, and her persistent labor “flipping perspectives to center Indigeneity and nudging open existing constructions of Indigeneity and authenticity.”29

In what follows, I build from and along with these discussions, drawing further on Tangen’s own words and my longtime experiences with DE. I think more about the relationality so palpable in DE, embodying and inviting a multiplicity of ways of being and perceiving within systems in which everyone’s contributions are valued and needed, as part of an “interactive community process,” as Chatterjea writes.30 This relationality, and its registering and support of these multiplicities, creates and strengthens systems of support and resource sharing, and thus ways of being, beyond those of capitalist coloniality. I consider how this interactive relational registering of multiplicities—which includes registering how different beings are not only mutually intertwined in systems of support but also perceiving themselves and one another from different perspectives—is a vision both rose colored and also requiring alertness and caution, and involving conflict and pain.

As I have come to see it, over the many years I’ve followed its work—and as others have also registered—a grounding in relationality permeates what the company is asserting and enacting: in how it is constituted, in its movement training, in multiple other aspects of its processes of dance creation, in its choreography. The company is inclusive—committed to making a space for everyone—but its relationality is not about inclusion per se. It is grounded in an intention of manifesting, out of ways of perceiving pervasive interconnectivities and interdependencies and of recognizing differing positions from which one sees, a physicalization of some aspect of these relational ways of being, through dance, for an instance, on stage. And it is grounded in a commitment to strengthening the practice of this relationality, via its physicalized manifestations and through the way the company comprises, trains, tours, teaches, and approaches “contemporary dance” as a practice and form.

This relationality in which DE is grounded includes asserting meaning with specific political or symbolic intent; directing energy, rather than focusing on presentational display; prioritizing the collective care of company members; strengthening attention to the group and its various rhythms and needs for support over either audience numbers or attention to the self and the expression of its emotional or physical interiority; engaging Indigenous food knowledges, languages, and practices of reciprocal exchange in the company’s dance training and dance pieces; drawing on specific family and tribal stories, practices, “objects,” and words brought in to the dance-making process by contributors; cultivating connection with Indigenous land and peoples where the company tours, including seeking out Indigenous youths and offering them workshops; seeking out and following the guidance of Indigenous Elders and teachers; honing dancers’ capacities for attention to the multisensory, to the unseen, to more-than-human beings; and, in multiple other ways, decentering a “single-author” genius choreographer model toward a vision that is attentive to what everyone brings—including dancers, musicians, and production members, as well as water, seeds, and other nonhuman actors—and geared toward making a place for what all those beings offer. These practices, in turn, are directed toward strengthening Indigenous peoples—whether they go on to become choreographers, actors, fitness experts, farmers, professors, or leaders in other ways—for present and future generations. DE asserts and enacts these practices and their various economies of multiplicity, support, and exchange as ways of being in the world existing beyond those enacted, for example, in worlds strengthened by the ways of being that corporate patenting of seeds and artistic structures of royal and state patronage enact.

The company’s engagement with the multitude of dance forms that Tangen and the dancers bring into the studio composes part of this grounding in relationality. Most of the dancers in DE, including Tangen, come with deep connection to specific dance forms, including those a public might recognize as “Indigenous” or “Native American” and those it might not. DE sees these multiple dance forms (and the dancers who bring them into the company) as bringing value, and the company registers this value as part of an expansively relational whole. In 2004, at a panel at UCR, Tangen explained,

I don’t consider myself making fusion. I happen to have danced a different variety of styles. . . . I’m very much influenced, but I don’t consider it fusion. I consider all these are vehicles. They’re forms that our body has chosen or chooses to take to express these core, root, primal, older than, older and younger, and past and future versions, of what’s in us right now.31

Whatever dance skills and physical training Tangen and the dancers have and can bring are thus embraced as useful for what the company is manifesting and are welcomed. Again, this is not because the company is looking to “include” many dance forms but because the forms themselves are not the point. They are tools: vehicles for physicalizing “past and future versions of what’s in us right now” and for acknowledging and affirming the worth of what the dancers have trained in—be it powwow, contemporary dance, break dancing, folklórico, or some other physical practice—and the multiple ways of knowing and being that are physically embodied in all these practices and in the communities they come from.

“Dance” itself is also recognized to be just one component part of a larger whole, in which what everyone brings is valued and needed. Tangen has been articulating this since 2004, when she explained, “You know, we sing, we dance, we cook, and it’s all the same. That’s all the same thing. I mean nobody ever says, ‘Oh, check it out. An incredible fusion of song and dance.’ No. We expect music and dance to come together. So why shouldn’t we expect that we’re also painters and photographers and that we design the costumes and everything else? It’s all a part of it.”32

Working in this way of understanding involves recognizing the value of—and working with—whatever bits of knowledge dancers bring with them from their family and tribal backgrounds, however small or fragmentary that knowledge might be. In a way of being grounded in relationality, a few Indigenous language terms or a part of a song, say, or a family story, or perspectives on a political situation, or a telling of history, or an icon or culture hero are seen as integral parts of what can manifest as whole. They contain seeds from which to bring knowledge into greater fullness; the company values them for what they are (rather than what they are not).

Encouraging dancers to locate these bits of knowledge, however they can, is an integral part of DE’s dance making in ways that have likewise affirmed and inspired many of its young Indigenous performers. As just one example, for DE’s second dance cycle, Walking the Edge of Water, which toured during 2012–13, Tangen asked dancers to bring an experience with water from their lives or tribal histories into the studio. I asked dancer Nichole Salazar, whose relatives grew up on the Eli Shoshone reservation in Nevada, how she responded to this assignment. “I know that in Nevada, a lot of water rights are being fought over. So I went back and asked my aunts,” she said, noting how much she appreciates this aspect of working with the company. “I love being part of Dancing Earth because it makes me feel like I need to go back and really study, like I need to get in touch with my culture—whether that means looking it up, calling my grandmother, even just looking online.”33

This approach, working from a base in which what everyone brings is of value, also involves working with what those outside the company offer. DE’s dance-making process includes deep listening, alert perception, and responsivity. Its choreography builds from specific Indigenous teachings brought into the company not only through its dancers and their research but also through Indigenous leaders who have seen the work the company is doing, have come to know Tangen, and have come to her with specific requests. For example, Tangen recounts that DE created Walking the Edge of Water after being asked by Anishinaabe grandmothers to make a piece about water; its work SEEDS: Re Generation was guided by twenty-eight tribal Elders who asked Tangen and the company to make work about climate change. In 2017, after spending time with Tangen and seeing how she works, Pomo dancer Bernadette Smith asked Tangen to guide her in creating an acorn dance, in support of the White Oak Flats; Smith and another young Pomo dancer performed the work at Yerba Buena gardens in San Francisco in June 2018. In responding to these requests, Tangen attends both to the direct requests and to the teachings from other-than-human persons who were involved in the projects. She notes that working with seeds while she was developing SEEDS: Re Generation, for example, led her further into understanding how every time a work is brought into performance, it should evolve differently, depending on conditions. It taught her, she said, to ask, “What is the improvisation of life that we do when we arrive at a place? How can we respond with the seeds that we have? What’s the ground, what’s the soil?”34 This attentivity—and requisite responsivity—later extends to the specificities of each production’s location and context: the work attends to, and shifts in response to, what that location offers or withholds.

In creating choreography, then, Tangen has dancers engage with their bodies, in the dance studio, with the bits (or bunches) of knowledge they have access to or have located and/or with the topics she has been asked to develop. Indigenous young people in DE are encouraged, and trained, to physically and sensorially access, develop, and express whatever knowledge they hold. The ways the company makes space for its diverse young dancers to use their bodies to work with what they know or have found, and the training they receive to do so, activate and authorize its dancers’ bodies as both sites of knowledge and tools for knowing—including knowledge held strongly by generations of Native people, as well as that held uncertainly in the bodies of those from whom colonization has ripped away connection to families, Nations, lands. Tangen works with these contributions and teachings in ways that register their import within a relational world in which what every being brings to the table is valuable and needed—in which, as Tsosie explained, “no one is worthless.”

This practice functions as a way of strengthening and bringing aspects of these ways of being into form. In performances, the dancers physicalize these knowledges with their bodies, voices, movements, and (as I’ve discussed elsewhere) creatively fashioned attire.35 By physically and vocally performing these findings in present, vibrant, strong, and clear ways to audiences, they assert what Stó:lö scholar Dylan Robinson has called “sensate” knowledge—Indigenous knowledge held and accessed and engaged with materially, through their senses—against prevalent discourses of Indigenous erasure, reclaiming and asserting what Robinson calls “Indigenous sensate agency.”36 This “sensate” assertion is something many audience members experience (as I discuss later). The company, via its artistic productions and company teachings, thus insists on and asserts to the world, through contemporary dance making, the Indigenous knowledges that its dancers have located and worked with. The dancers’ healthy, fit, strong bodies assert the strength and fullness of these knowledges and knowledge systems to themselves, to each other, and to listener-witnesses, disrupting narratives of Indigenous erasure, scarcity, unwellness, and victimhood.

DE’s dance making is embedded in relational and sensate systems of communal affirmation and kindness that acknowledge everyone’s worth within a system in which all are connected and interdependent, even as they see from differing perspectives. Its relational practices of care-based attention to what each person brings; of sensory, physical, embodied training in developing those parts of knowledge through dance; of asserting them sensorially in ways that resonate for company members and witnesses, infuses and propels DE’s dance work—as performed in the company and as it has resonated beyond. Many of the great number of dancers who have trained and/or performed with DE have gone on to develop their own Indigenous knowledge–based careers, drawing on what they learned and honed in this DE process.

Each minute of the choreography contains these layers of experience and perspective in its narrative, intention, development, energies, and use of space and time.

Identities and Accountabilities, 2019

With Rulan Tangen

As discussed in this project’s introduction, a hotbed of robust discussion has circulated for years around what constitutes Indigenous and the politics of the term’s use. DE presents itself through the term Indigenous, which references the affiliations of its director, dancers, and other collaborators—who come from a variety of Native and Indigenous ancestries—as well the ways the company functions and the work it produces. In other words, the “Indigenous” DE asserts is based not in any specific Native American tribal affiliation of its director, as most all of the other companies discussed in this book are. It is widely and broadly asserted, without particular specific referent. Indeed, Tangen’s understanding of her identity has shifted over the twenty plus years she has been doing work with “Indigenous dance” and has been hotly contested.

Native and Indigenous identities are, of course, sources of strength, intelligence, pride, joy, and deep connection. From what I’ve seen and understood, Native and Indigenous identity issues are also, given ongoing U.S. colonization and its attempts to control and erase Native peoples, often vexed and difficult. They are grounded in painful histories, though their specific relation to practices of colonization, imperialism, genocide, forced relocation, land theft, human trafficking, slavery, structural illness, and decimation, among other aspects of coloniality, varies.

From my home in the territory of Huchiun, thinking about these issues, I make a cup of tea—tea, itself a product of how the British Empire appropriated (from China), built plantation-based extractive economies (in East Asia and Africa), and dominated all aspects of the tea trade, funding and fueling colonization. I steep it the way I’ve been taught through practices passed down to me by my English ancestors (pour your water over the tea; don’t dunk your bag in water that is already poured).99 I am steeped in this history too; I still ingest it daily.

Dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation talks with Tangen by phone, and over email, and in person over tea in the backyard, about identity and accountability. They’ve known each other a long time, though, these two, and have had versions of this conversation over the years—though not this directly. They are hard conversations. Tangen tells dance-scholar-friend that she is Kapampangan on her mother’s side, from what is for now called the Philippines, and so connected to cultural colonization through the U.S. military and colonizing political histories enacted there. Through her father’s side, she has always known she had Norwegian ancestry (Tangen is a Norwegian name). But she also believed, via family stories and letters, that she had Native ancestry through that line. Owing to various painful and private traumas, she separated at age nine from her father and from the paternal side of the family. Tangen recounts how, as a young woman, she turned to dance as a way to ground herself despite an unstable family environment. She also began researching her identity through a name in her father’s family line, “Burdeau”—the line she was told led to Native ancestry—mostly, in pre-internet days, by inquiring with any who would or could answer her questions and through making relationships. These inquiries directed her toward Canada, which she was finally able to visit in her twenties.

Before then, as a young woman in the 1980s, and a trained dancer (she was dancing with smaller ballet companies in New York), Tangen joined a group in a car headed to the Mashpee Wampanoag powwow in Massachusetts. She tells dance-scholar-friend that her initial impulse to do this was not out of any particular desire to go to a powwow but due to a confluence of unusual events, including prompts from Elders and dance teachers, and how she had grounded herself in dance:

I followed a hunch, serendipity, and clues from family letters . . . and, most of all, dance, which had led me to be on my own at age fifteen, to look for my path through dance, seeking roots through forms of movement as a means of connection—over conflicting stories, histories, letters, or documents—to the one place where I found truth. This is what brought me to the powwow trail.100

Dance-scholar-friend has heard most of this story before, but Tangen explains it more fully. While in South Dakota, Tangen caught the attention of a Lakota Elder, Geraldine Ziegler (originally of Crow Creek but spending her adult married life as Kulwicasa Oyate). Ziegler had Tangen call her “Grandma,” or “Unci,” and taught her Northern Traditional powwow dancing. Ziegler, Tangen reflects, “saw something in me. She wanted me around. She thought I resembled a big version of her much younger granddaughter Hollie, and she liked how the little girls looked up to me.” Ziegler and her dance clan family (including the memorable traditional dancer Michael, or “Zuya-Ile,” with whom Tangen had a short relationship and with whom she codirected the Make Chante children’s dance group from around 1986 to 1992) shared Lakota ways of being, especially in relation to traditional dancing. This led to “Grandma” Geraldine selecting Tangen for a Hunka and name-giving ceremony to adopt her into that family (this ceremony was in August 1990, by Tangen’s recollection). Ziegler has since passed, but Tangen tells dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation that she has continued to honor and acknowledge her Hunka Lakota family relations. In March 2017, two of her Lakota relatives, Hollie Dee and Tynielle Ziegler, joined her onstage in a performance at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota, as part of the Oyate Okadakiciyapi festival of Native dance and music, Tangen recounts; she took a photo of them together there.

Tangen tells dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation that in 1998, as she was still following paths that led to those with the name “Burdeau,” she met and was claimed as a relative by Blackfeet film director George Burdeau. She then developed personal relationships with others from that Burdeau family line, who also claimed her as relative. She was aware that she was very much a mixed-heritage person and did not claim identity as Blackfeet, but—from this point—she began referring to herself as “métis”—intending its meaning as “mixed ancestry” and not the specific reference it has to the Métis Nation in Canada—later stopping this usage due to confusion around this. She continued her explorations of Aboriginal/Indigenous dance practices under the broader term “Indigenous.”

Tangen talks with dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation more about how her understanding of her identity has shifted over time, as it does for many mixed people. And she talks about how, as she followed threads of information about her family, she also followed paths that led to relationship building with Native peoples. She describes how, over the decades, she continued to ground herself in ways of being learned from the Native teachers and Elders with whom she has had long-term relationship, in accountability to the Native peoples and communities with whom she had come into relationship, and in the work she has been doing with Native youths. Her public reference to any Native heritage of her own remained general, though often implied in her self-presentation.

When internet ancestry searches emerged, Tangen tells dance-scholar-friend, she was too busy running her company and with various upheavals in her family life to join them and search further for information about her father’s ancestry. Then, in 2018, Tangen was presented with information, learned through online research initiated by others on her ancestry, that the Blackfeet Burdeaus she thought she was connected to by lineage led instead to ancestry from Ireland.

The issues and histories this has stirred up are painful and complex, and responses to it have varied. Some have questioned Tangen’s self-presentation with DE and argued that she has inaccurately and knowingly presented herself or allowed herself to be perceived as “Native,” placing her in a long genealogy, as discussed in the introduction, of “wannabes” and “ethnic impostors” who have “played Indian.” In this, from this perspective, she has enacted both discursive and literal violence on Native peoples.

Others—including those who have claimed her as relative—have been supportive. When the online ancestry information was brought to her attention, Tangen immediately shared this information with dozens of professional and personal contacts. George Burdeau emailed her, “Wow! Thanks for sharing. . . . You’re still my relative where it counts the most! Life is about striving for balance with each step we take which makes us kinetic by nature, where everything changes with each breath we take. Perception of what is . . . changes also.” He added, “Your cultural legacy lives with all the connections you have made since birth. You are such a dear spirit to all around you and I am proud to be your relation. Love, George.”101

And dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation? She considers the badass and beautiful work Tangen has done: the many Indigenous peoples whose lives she has changed; the creative, generative ways she has led so many Indigenous dancers to use their contemporary bodies, and tools from their families and communities, to physicalize their own Indigenous understandings and ways of being; the ethical and respectful ways she has done this work; the relationships she has built with Native people who continue to claim her. She considers as well the histories—following Gerald Vizenor and others—of “dramatis personae” and invented “Indian” identities that traumatize those with known ancestral and political connection to their Native Nations. She thinks about how Richard Scott Lyons (and many others) have noted that Native identities are always a product of their political moment, “never static or singular but always dynamic and multiple.” She also thinks about how this “political moment” (say, the last five hundred years) is one in which Indian existence is constantly questioned and/or required to disappear. She thinks about how inventions of “Indian identity,” as Vizenor writes from his positioning (as one of “the People Named the Chippewa”), “cut our sense of presence to the bone.”102 And she thinks about how other histories of this political moment inflect Tangen’s story and situation: U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and Indigenous migrations across lands and waters; lateral and generational violence among displaced peoples; rapidly changing internet and DNA testing technologies; ongoing Native erasure and disappearance; resurgent Indigenous visibilization and empowerment; Brown bodies finding ground in white dance circles. As Black feminist and other theorists have clearly articulated, identities are always interwoven intersectionally. How to hold these histories in all their complexities, and be accountable to them, within relational infrastructures of love and care—relational infrastructures where the complex interconnectivity of all beings (who see themselves positioned in different ways) also requires heightened awareness to how one’s perspective is partial?

To dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation, this part is clear: it is not OK to pretend you are Native if you know you are not. At the same time, given colonizing’s ongoing rupturing of Indigenous families, bands, communities, and cultures, it is OK not to know, and to search, and to be mistaken. She has seen dancers—including a number working with DE who had lost contact with biological parents, as Tangen did—search for Native family relations and find them. Searching includes following uncertain paths that sometimes don’t lead where one thought or sensed they might. Lyons, discussing the X-marks that some Native leaders put on treaties, argues for thinking of these Xs as signifying a “contaminated and coerced sign of assent made under conditions that are not of one’s making” but with “hopes of a better future.”103 His analysis of the treaty Xs seems to understand the X-mark in terms of what Vizenor has called “traces of presence”:104 shadows of Indigenous presence traceable in the marks that past Native leaders placed in service of Indigenous futurity. As he registers the Native presence and intelligence even in these “contaminated” assertions, Lyons suggests focusing on defining “Indians”—who are also invented “simulations” (re Vizenor) created through identifying practices similarly contaminated by conditions not of one’s making—at any given historical moment in terms of the effects the definitions have. Lyons argues for choosing definitions of “Indian” that lead to “active presence” and the “making of more life” for Indigenous peoples and communities.105 This, like Kim TallBear’s discussion of Indigeneity as “a discourse of survival” and Maile Arvin’s argument for “Indigenous” as a category determined by the knowledge and praxis of Indigenous peoples (as discussed in the introduction), calls for activating “Indigenous” in ways that register Indigenous presence and agency and that work to strengthen Indigenous people.106

Perhaps, just as Vizenor notes that “indian identity teasers” also contain traces of presence, Tangen’s story—including the Native presence she thought was there through her father’s line—contains traces of Indigenous presence in the very impulse to search. Looking for Native ancestry one has been told one has and failing to find it, in other words, is still propelled by an understanding of colonization’s failure as a completed project. Even when paths don’t end up leading to the Native family members one thought they would, one begins looking for those paths out of an understanding that Native presence is ongoing. The search is propelled by an understanding that what appears absent may well be there, perhaps dormant or in the shadows, but able to be roused.

Paths—particularly uncertain ones—can also shift, opening up and closing down passageways as they reverberate over time. Dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation thinks about how relationality, as a way of being, includes shifting relations. It includes staying accountable to each other within those shifts, while still in relation (no one is worthless; what everyone brings to the table is helpful and needed). She thinks about how, as Kim TallBear notes, “the language of identity is necessary to address inequity”—and also about how, as TallBear’s statement continues, “shifting the lens to consider what it means to live in good relationship allows us to move beyond these silos into living together.”107

Tangen’s pre-internet family line searching has resulted, through practices of relationship building—including with the many Native dancers she has supported and inspired to work in Native arts and wellness—in more “active presence” and the “making of more life” for Indigenous peoples. Dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation remains compelled by the respectful, committed, indefatigable ways Tangen has worked; the relations with Native peoples she has built and who respect and value her; the service to Native youths and communities she has offered; the many young Indigenous lives she continues to change; the dance work she has directly created, taught, and fostered; and the field of contemporary Indigenous dance she has furthered via the opportunities she has created for other dance makers. She sees how Tangen’s work, and its activations of Indigenous traces of presence, including those registered in rupture, have created “active presence” and “more life” for Indigenous peoples and communities.

And she also knows that there are different perspectival positionings from which to see this.

For J.S.M. Publication

Rulan Tangen

September 2019

I take seriously my accountability to various circles: the families who claim me, blood relatives, students, dancers, extended Indigenous circles, audiences, funders, host venues—particularly institutions of learning—so as not to perpetuate damage caused by perceptions and misperceptions of identity that can further wound people who have been harmed by waves of colonization, assimilation, relocation, appropriation, and other violences.

In 2018, while I was still reeling from the implications of the birth certificates that had been presented to me—which cited different names of my great-grandmother than what I had been told (granted, my information about and contact with my paternal family members were extremely sparse, and from before age nine)—I reached out to more than two hundred of my contacts to inform them of the new information. This included students, dancers, presenters, funders, and collaborators, as well as cultural mentors, Elders, and those who had claimed me as family. The responses and advice I received were vast, and I listened.

I had not publicly asserted a relation to Native ancestry until adulthood, after I had been claimed by Burdeau family. Learning that this relation to Burdeau family ancestry was not supported in the documentation was still confusing and painful and leaves me still wondering about my deep commitment to ancestral knowledge that is revealed through physicality—as embodied ways of knowing that can precede or even supersede what is held as static fact at any given time. We accept that facts are unchanging, yet science and historical research show that even what has been accepted as fact is subject to change and nuance and different perspectives. I know that working deeply in this realm of kinetic knowing—awakening that deep-gut intuition and remembering—which may be the “blood memory” that N. Scott Momaday invoked and that has been referenced by dancers from Martha Graham to many leaders of the Indigenous contemporary dance movement—has led several of my dancers to uncover ancestral lineage and knowledge that they hadn’t previously had access to because of the countless challenges of disconnection and separation that are systemically reinforced, generationally. The patterns embedded into the body revealed stories that they hadn’t learned before and that were later affirmed in lived research. For me, I am now not entirely sure what I had uncovered with my bone memory improvisations of psychic excavation, but maybe time will reveal.

When I reached out to my contacts to communicate the information that was passed to me, to ask questions, permission, advice, and to listen, I heard many, many stories of pain and confusion in identity, even from those who I thought of as solidly rooted. This reveals to me an overwhelming undercurrent of discomfort with any identity that is not “pure”—which itself is an impossibility to prove, thus creating an unstable ground that so many seem to be walking on. Many more than I had realized have had changing understandings of identity over time. For many, there is a lot of shame about this fluidity and fear of nonbelonging as enforced through external systems and judgments. I found myself part of a wide network of pain from displacement; traumatic upbringing; separation; and lost, stolen, or appropriated identity. This pain seems to hold tight with fear, yet the wisest in my circle are able to counsel and embody an openness that springs from a security that is rooted in place, relationship, spirit, and experience and that can’t be taken away, no matter what comes up in certificates, DNA tests, tribal rolls, or the like.

In recognition of all this, I find myself embracing this continual mystery of mixedness in myself and humbly stepping to the side to be sure there is room for everyone to stand in their own identity, whether that is certain and singular or complex.

As a woman with lineage to Pacific Archipelago peoples who have been navigating harsh impacts of colonization, I recognize both the parallel and the distinctiveness of the Native peoples (enrolled or not) of this continent. I am examining my practices and processes to make sure I will work in solidarity when I am introduced by those in my networks to the host First Nations in regions where I am invited. So the pattern of walking humbly, looking for ways for dance to serve, listening to the conversations on the ground—these may have been my instinctive tendencies, but they have become a pedagogy with room for fluidity and ongoing deepening of integrity. The experience of this reflection brings me ever closer to powerful Native women who are my teachers, friends, mentors, and colleagues and to the younger women I work with, who ask me to be their mentor and who rise up to take on leadership that I find more and more moving from my hands into theirs, and repair any missteps. What do my Elders say?

Many people affirm that the work I do can stand as testimony to the teachings that I carry, as shared by Edna Manitowabi to Marrie Mumford and then to me, of four Rs of respect, relationship, responsibility, and reciprocity. Jillene Joseph at Native Wellness Institute reminded me about missteps, that it’s always easy to find fault, but that the real work is to put energy toward finding the good in something.

My role and purpose must be resolutely focused toward the center of what I do, which is to work as an advocate and to continue to strive to create opportunities for aspiring artists whose cultural backgrounds range the gamut: enrolled Native American and/or raised on the rez and/or language or culture carriers, or reclaiming those ways, including as mixed global Indigenous peoples, resisting the forces of colonization by stepping into their legacies as people of the earth.

Advice about accountability is quite wide and seemingly polarized. On one side is an accountability to paper certification as proof of identity. I continue to try to understand how to serve that accountability, using this opportunity to apologize for any offense that my understanding of myself has caused. On the other side, which is very different, are community members, including those who have claimed me. This side includes those who say that my accountability is to those Elders and those Elders only, because they are the ones who have taken responsibility for me.

It is appropriate to take this moment to apologize in written word to anyone who I unknowingly hurt or offended, to ask for forgiveness, and to forgive—including myself. The amends I make are through the ways I strive to live, including continuing to learn, to deepen understanding of unfolding truths and justice, and to act in service, alliance, solidarity, and collaboration, putting myself, not ahead of others, but as one tiny part of a greater whole.

Dance-scholar-friend-in-longtime-relation is thinking about how DE is grounded in embracing multiple perspectives and seeing things from different angles, while knowing that others are perceiving and engaging from where they stand; she is thinking about the many UCR students who are grappling with the challenges of understanding who they are and where they belong; she is thinking about young, brilliant Indigenous dancers, and strength, and about ongoing renewals and shifts in ways of seeing. She is thinking about how hard it is even to exist in an interrelated environment, full of threats and sources of sustenance, that requires awareness of the radically different understandings of one another’s positions. She is thinking about the challenge of staying open to conversation around complexity and to the “facticity” in multiplicities of ways of seeing.108