Interlude/Pause/Provocation

Refuge Rock: Otonabee River, Ontario, 2010

With Tanya Lukin Linklater

In June 2010, I am heading to the Otonabee River in Peterborough, Canada, to see a piece by Tanya Lukin Linklater. Lukin Linklater’s performance is part of a series of events curated by Anishinaabe-kwe curator, writer, image-maker, and community organizer Wanda Nanibush called Mapping Resistances, which is part of the annual Ode’min Giizis Festival.1 Nanibush writes in the Mapping Resistances “memento book” being handed out that this year marks “the twentieth anniversary of the summer when the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) of the Kahnesatà:ke went head to head with, first, the Sûreté du Québec, and then with the Canadian military in attempt to stop an encroachment on their traditional territory.

“The Indigenous artists in Mapping Resistances reinterpret what has come to be known as ‘the Oka Crisis’ from within longer histories of Indigenous resistance to colonization,” Nanibush writes. Mapping Resistances, articulating in relation to mapping as “part of the continued process of colonialism,” she explains, “attempts to draw attention to the ways in which space and how we interact with it is a political, epistemological and cultural activity. Art in public is one way of mapping space and our relationships to it along a more combative, fluid, fun, chancy and critical way.”

We arrive at Confederation Plaza in downtown Peterborough at twenty to six. The program said to arrive promptly and that a bus would take us to the first event, which is Lukin Linklater’s. A couple of people from the Indigenous Knowledges conference at Trent University, which I’d been attending, have come along—Natasha Verger from the University of Arizona Press and Métis choreographer Yvonne Chartrand, who we’d happened to cross paths with on our way to the parking lot. We were meeting Daystar/Rosalie Jones and her partner Ned Bobkoff there as well, and they’d brought Yoeme choreographer Norma Azaria with them. We park right in front of Peterborough City Hall and see a few folks milling around a large statue. There is James Luna! He is getting ready, talking to someone with a video camera, greeting a few friends. We wait. Lukin Linklater isn’t there. I overhear Luna say something about how the woman who was going first hadn’t shown up yet, so there was maybe going to be a change in the order and he would go first.

I start to get nervous—is something wrong? Is Lukin Linklater OK? We mill around, asking each other if we know what is going on—“do you know what’s happening?” “No, do you?” “I heard that maybe James Luna is going first.” “Did we miss Tanya? I don’t want to miss Tanya!” Daystar says. I am deputized to talk to the person who looks like she is in charge. She says not to worry, the bus will take us out to the site where Lukin Linklater will perform in just a short while. Everything is fine.

I report back: “She said to chill out.”

So we do. The air is warm and soft, the sun bright in our eyes. I eat an apple and share some airline peanuts. They say elders and those with mobility issues are to board the bus first (“Oh good!” says Rosalie), but our whole group makes it onto the first bus, a bright yellow school bus with those green plastic seats, which bounce us along as the bus takes us down to the river.

The air is so thick that walking from the drop-off spot around the bend, across a bridge, along a grassy path to the side of a river feels like sinking into pillows. It is that time of evening, not near dark, but when shadows are long and those flicks of quiet-brilliant light dance on the water, and you breathe in moist air along the back of your throat so fresh it makes you want to gulp. We walk around a small inlet and see the others stopping to look. There is Lukin Linklater, lying on her back on a tree branch that arches out across the inlet. She is draped over the branch, eyes closed, breathing softly. She wears a long skirt, light gray, maybe taffeta or silk—shimmery like that—looking like a painting.

She lies there on the branch, quiet. We are quiet too. The water reflects the trees and sky, dappled with lily pads and fallen leaves and branches poking up. We hush and wait for the rest of the people to arrive, for the space to settle, for whatever is going to happen to start to happen. I’d been in a conference room for most of the day, listening intently. It is good to sense the shift into this other space, but hard, too, to slow down into it. My heart is still racing.

Slowly, deliberately, Lukin Linklater lifts her arms and starts to curl up off the tree branch. She starts walking, looking downward, toward another river spot a few hundred feet away, sweeping her arm across her face, perhaps to wipe it. We get up from where we had perched ourselves and move our bodies across the ground with her. On a grassy spot on the other side of the river are five white rectangular containers with white hand towels covering them. Lukin Linklater stands near them, feet in a solid stance, and stretches forward, touching the ground. Then she puts her hands on her knees and arches her low back, at the ready. A woman picks up one of the white containers and, standing maybe ten feet from Lukin Linklater, hurls its contents at her. It is a white fluid, perhaps milk, and as it hits with force, Lukin Linklater wobbles a bit but holds her ground. It splashes all over her. Then the woman picks up the next container and hurls that at Lukin Linklater too, knocking her again. Again Lukin Linklater registers the force of the fluid whiteness drenching her, wobbling, then regains her stance. In between the five hurled buckets, Lukin Linklater shakes her long brown hair out of her face and holds her composure, waiting, breathing, setting herself up again. One time, she lifts one leg in a kind of forward arabesque while the fluid smashes into her. The next time, she holds her arms spread wide out, one leg bent and lifted to the side, foot flexed and articulated, as another bucket of white slaps her front.

After the five containers have been hurled, Lukin Linklater walks a few feet down to the river just behind her and wades in up past her knees. Her skirt billows out. Slowly, calmly, she bends over at the waist and begins to wash herself, splashing her sides, bending her elbows up, her focus still quiet and downward and far-away seeming. In the late-day sunlight, the splashing water sparkles. Bending forward, she swoops something around in the water, a piece of black fabric, swishing it back and forth, looking how I imagine women washing clothes in a river have often looked. Keeping the same calm focus and even tempo, she climbs back onto the riverbank and moves over to the containers, kneels in front of them, and dunks the black cloth in one, lifting it up and down, up and down. Standing, carrying the cloth, she again starts walking, slowly, deliberately, with downward focus, down a cleared path.

The group of us watching—fifty or so people, maybe half from the Indigenous Knowledges conference—start following her. She stays ten or fifteen feet ahead, then turns to the right, into the woods. Before I turn to follow her, I see two women walking their dog, a big black Lab, peering curiously at us, this big group of people following a woman wearing a long skirt, all wet and floating through the park and into the woods, a spectral-esque presence in this here and now.2

Not far into the trees, maybe twenty or so feet, Lukin Linklater pauses in front of a big wooden bowl, like the kind you might use for salad. She kneels down beside it and starts to spread out the black cloth, arranging it in a little circle, just so, a small nest. We move around her, encircling, watching. A few people have brought their coffees and take sips as we wait for everyone to arrive. A number of us are taking pictures. Slowly, still ignoring us as we position ourselves for the best view between the trees, Lukin Linklater settles herself. Kneeling over the black cloth nest, beside the wooden bowl, she scoops her right hand into it. As she draws it out, thick, golden amber drips from her fingers: honey. She raises her hand and swoops it across her forehead and to her hair. You can see it dripping down her face, toward her eyes. She brushes her forehead with a finger, slowing the honey’s drip.

This is about when the mosquitoes start settling in. They are looking for a feast, and they are finding one. One is on my neck and biting; I slap it, and then another on my leg, and my arm, damn, they are everywhere. I am finding it hard to stay focused on Lukin Linklater, who has honey dripping into her eyes and seems to be partially just bearing it and partially trying to wipe it off as best she can with a sticky hand. Zing: damn! The other people around me are slapping at themselves as well, slapping our legs, slapping our arms, slapping ourselves. The bites and blood-sucks prick me out of my easy pleasure in the gentle beauty of this land of milk and honey, forcing me to focus on the thick stickiness dripping into Lukin Linklater’s eyes and hair.

I start to realize, with a slap to my shin, that this piece, on this beautiful land by this beautiful river, maps the path of an Alutiiq woman who has just had buckets and buckets of whiteness hurled at her in repeated attempts to knock her down. And who maintains her balance. And holds her stance, sometimes shifting it. And when the assault subsides for a moment, it maps how she heads into the river and continues with the work of washing up, of dealing with the mess this hurling has created on her. It maps how she takes what she has from this assault, washes it, creates a nest for her birds from it. It maps the force of her waiting, her walking, her staying focused, balanced, grounded, breathing—her creativity, her “sovereignty of quiet.”3 It asks to witness this mapping/unmapping: the simultaneously registered ongoing histories of hurled whiteness aimed painfully, repeatedly, at Indigenous women, and the other paths she is showing Indigenous women also walking, which continue to map the land otherwise. Our feet follow Lukin Linklater, now marking those paths too.

Gratitude toward these mosquitoes, doing what they do, for pricking me out of my isn’t-this-beautiful dreamy state.

Under the trees, Lukin Linklater doesn’t look happy, though she is still in her zone, breathing evenly and full, inhabiting and creating a sense of deliberation in the midst of this stinging, this getting eaten up. Slowly, she stands up from the honey nest and moves a few feet forward to a tree, where a handful of small origami birds are perched, tied with blue string. Gently, carefully, cradling their fragile wings with great delicacy, she unties them and brings them back to the circular nest she’s made with the black cloth, placing them around the circle so they face in and can dip their beaks. Then she goes to another tree and unties more and brings them all over to feed. When the birds are all placed—there are seven or so—she stands beside them and sings in Alutiiq. Her voice is lovely and loving: a song to the birds, to the land, to the river, to herself, to us, to the mosquitoes. Like a song to end ceremony, it marks a shift.

When she finishes, she looks up at us all. “Camai,” she says. “Thank you.”

People clap, and all around is the rustle of leaves and branches as people start to head out. “Jacqueline!” Lukin Linklater says as I say hello. There is honey on her face and hands. The woods are starting to clear, people are heading back to the bus; there are only a few of us left.

“Uh, do you need any help?” I ask, looking at her sticky hair and milk-soaked front.

“Actually, yes,” Lukin Linklater says. “Could, could you take the birds?”

“Of course. These, too, all of them?” I point. A few are still perched in the trees.

“Oh, there you are!” Lukin Linklater says to them. “I couldn’t find you!” She unties them and hands them to me. I balance the bunch of them in my hands. She starts to clean her face, and someone else helps with the bowl, and those of us remaining—Ned and Rosalie and Norma have stayed as well—start to head back to where the bus had dropped us.

It is a bit of a way to walk, through the trees, but there’s a fresh, light breeze off the water, and the sun is still making everything soft and sparkly, feeling lovely again now that we are out from the mosquito swarm. I talk quietly with Rosalie and Norma as we stroll across a grassy spot near the river. Ned follows slowly; we glance back at him. Rosalie explains that he has bad knees and that it’s hard for him to walk on uneven ground like this. There is a park bench a few feet in front of us. “Should we wait here?” I ask. I have a feeling we are missing the bus back to James Luna’s performance, which I would really like to see, but figure they’ll send a second bus for us, as it took two loads to get us over. Something will work out. We sit. Ned joins us, and we rest, and talk a bit about the performance. When we walk back across the bridge, the bus is gone, but a car sees us waiting and offers as many of us who will fit a ride. Lukin Linklater shows up in her car, too; we just have to squeeze in the back. I place the birds, which I’ve been cradling, gently in the car trunk. We make it back just in time for the start of Luna’s piece.

Back home at my desk, days (and then years) later, I continue to think about Lukin Linklater’s performance as an Alutiiq woman’s act of “mapping resistances.” In the “memento book” I turn over in my hands, reading and rereading, Nanibush writes, “Indigenous Peoples’ lands were mapped out in boxes and lines by colonialists and those maps can be read for the culture that underpins them.” The memento book also includes a poem by Lukin Linklater that begins with an epigraph from journalist Tina Pamintuan’s “A Living Heritage: The Alutiiq Story,” which is about a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded exhibition at the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak in 2000.4 It says,

In 1784, an incident at Refuge Rock became a turning point in Native-Russian relations. A crew led by Grigorii Shelikhov attacked a group of natives on a small islet off the shore of Kodiak Island. Shelikhov’s crew was more numerous and better armed than previous fur-trading expeditions. Seventy-one Russians stormed the rock with muskets while others fired cannons from shore. Nearly five hundred native men, women, and children were killed and hundreds more were captured. This confrontation precipitated Russia’s conquest of Kodiak Island and the Natives who lived there. Hostages were taken to the newly established Three Saints Harbor in southern Kodiak Island, the first Russian settlement in Alaska.

Nanibush, writing of the Mapping Resistances program, notes not only the boxes and lines that colonialist maps imposed but also the Indigenous culture legible through them. These layering-the-surface maps, she explains, require a different way of reading. She writes, “In contrast, our lands were mapped by us in abstract images marking out their use and the animate universe to which we belong. Places were named by the movement and fluidity of the life found there. In many ways our land was lost in maps. The Kahnesatà:ke as well as many other Indigenous nations had their lands passed between aristocrats, colonial companies and governments without their consent and often without their knowledge.

“The land was continually re-mapped while we continually resisted both the loss of land and the cultures that colonial maps tried to erase,” Nanibush adds. She explains that performances such as those that are part of Mapping Resistances “participate and allow us as audiences to participate in a number of Indigenous resistance strategies.”

Nanibush’s articulations clarify an understanding of how Refuge Rock, both the place and the event Lukin Linklater references in her poem and its epigraph, was long mapped by the Alutiiq men, women, and children who lived there before Russian invaders murdered them in 1784. And they bring to the fore how it, and its story, is “continually remapped” by Alutiiq people who continue to exist there and elsewhere, including by Lukin Linklater’s performance in the space between bank and river of the Otonabee in 2010. In this performance, Lukin Linklater maps herself onto branches and across the land and woods and waterway, concretely and abstractly tracing her connection to the land’s own endurance and beauty, despite the repeated white hurlings. The work addresses the felt and embodied presence of long history, not as immediate-trauma crisis happening here and now (it does not mimetically represent Refuge Rock or a massacre), but in the multiple scales of gendered, physical violence of colonizers’ taking of lives and land and resources, and the imposing of lines and boxes, of these acts’ reverberations.5 It is a piece with milk and honey that signals, not an idyllic land of utopic return, but the sticky, difficult, painful, colonizing violence that has mapped land on this continent. At the same time, Lukin Linklater’s present, strong, sensual Alutiiq female body moving into and out of the Otonabee River maps the murdering of Alutiiq people at Refuge Rock in Alaska such that these lands are not (just) sites of massacre and of ongoing trauma and loss, and not just past, and not just distanced, but also layered in scales underneath and overtop with her own present, focused, grounded, breathing body as embodied assertion of endurance, ongoing generativity, duration, and stamina. The piece tells of silences—stories that are not told—in relation to songs and acts of singing, in words and languages that are both written over and continue. It tells of no-longer-physically-present-in-this-realm bodies that are part of this mapping, layered in relation to the embodied physicality of Lukin Linklater’s strong and present experiences here and now.

In Lukin Linklater’s piece, this mapping is narrated in acts (washing in the river, singing, nesting and tending, maintaining one’s stance in the face of whatever is thrown at you), often “carried on through women,” as Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman writes in her compelling discussion of “Native women mapping our nations” through poetry and literature.6 Goeman writes, “Colonization is not just about conquering Native lands through mapping new ownerships, but it is also about the conquest of bodies, particularly women’s bodies through sexual violence, and about recreating gendered relationships.”7 Native bodies, “conceived of as part of the flora and fauna,” Goeman continues, “resulted in legalizing conquest and incorporating Native lands into the regimes of geographical knowledge produced by the state.”8 Goeman’s project instead focuses on “the power of cognitive maps produced through narrative,” particularly Native women’s narratives,9 to mediate these “colonial spatial constructions.”10 She goes on to examine “embodied geographies” as a crucial site of discourse, noting that “for Native people whose bodies are highly regulated by the colonial settler state and for whom places are highly relegated by settler discourses of where one belongs, examining embodied geographies is a necessary component to decolonization.”11 Lukin Linklater’s body, at first draped over a tree branch and hard to distinguish from it, then entering the river, then singing to and tending birds in the woods, both registers a colonizing and romanticizing viewing of Native women as part of nature and also embodies a geography of that relation that underlies and supersedes the mappings and borders deployed in colonizing Native land and of discourse romanticizing it. Her body moving on and across the space narrates an embodied geography that refutes colonizing spatial constructions and mappings and the story of colonization as the only story to tell.

This forwarding of her Alutiiq female body as not massacred but alive—washing, singing, tending—is particularly incisive given the ways, as Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) scholar Audra Simpson has pointed out, “Canada requires the death and so-called ‘disappearance’ of Indigenous women in order to secure its sovereignty.”12 This requirement happened and continues to happen in multiple ways, including through the legal and spatial casting out of women of the Indian Act—that was also the casting out of the possibility of a woman transmitting status to her children, and that was also a blow to the Indigenous governance systems within which Indigenous women’s bodies and minds signified so strongly. The Indian Act, as one example of a systemic, gendered approach to mandating disappearance, removed women, who represented an alternative political order, from their power, including in some systems from positions as chief. “They embodied and signaled something radically different from Euro-Canadian governance and this meant that part of dispossession, and settler possession, meant that coercive admodifying, sometimes, killing power, had to target their bodies,” Simpson argues.13 Simpson thus discusses the threat posed not only by Indigenous women’s capacities to bear and pass status to their children but also by Indigenous women’s bodies’ symbolic power. “These were and are sign systems and symbols that could effect and affect political lives and choices that people were making around them. So they had to be killed, or at the least, subjected, because of what they were signaling or symbolizing.” Their bodies—as symbols of an Indigenous political order—were “a direct threat to the political legitimacy of settlement,” Simpson argues. “As with all bodies these bodies were more than just flesh.” Thus, despite how settler states like Canada narrate themselves (liberal; committed to social policies of redress; seeking to repair, through good policies, the histories of violence that created them), Simpson argues, Canada in fact seeks an “ongoing settling of land” that is “dispossession” and that is fundamentally gendered. She notes how this drive—for an ongoing settling of land that currently includes “aggressive moves into soil and subsurface soil” toward the massive capitalist accumulation seen as needed to secure Canada’s sovereignty—“is killing our women in order to do so, and has historically done this.”14

Simpson turns to a discussion of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s six-week fast, undertaken in December 2012 to bring awareness to Canada’s pervasive indifference to treaties that have been signed but not honored and to demand a meeting with then prime minister Stephen Harper to discuss First Nations issues. Simpson notes the vitriol Spence’s fast raised in public commentary, where many viciously mocked her—and her “fleshy appearance”—because her “soft fast” included fish broth. Simpson quotes Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson discussing how Indigenous people prayed for Chief Pence’s fortitude and explaining the respect her decision elicited from an Anishinaabeg perspective because “through her physical sacrifice she is closer to the spiritual world than we are” (and noting this to be the kind and compassionate thing to do15). Yet, Audra Simpson notes, for the Canadian public, Spence’s “fleshy appearance” itself “defies a logic of genocide.” This is because, in settler logic, “what she is required to do, with or without the willful starvation, is die.” Simpson adds, “In fact her very life, like the lives of all Indian women in Canada, is an anomaly, because since the 1850s, they/we have been legally mandated to disappear.”

Yet, as Simpson also touches on in her discussion of Chief Pence’s fleshiness, Indigenous women’s threat to the colonial order is also infused in the flesh, not as symbol, but as flesh. It is not just that her body serves as sign of a political order in which women wield power but also that her body holds knowledge and power. One example of this, which Simpson argues for, is how the continuing presence of Indigenous women’s physical (fleshy) bodies as vibrantly physically alive, in a system in which their death—and thus the removal of their flesh(iness)—is required, so raises settler ire. It is the physical presence of these bodies and the ongoing knowledge these bodies hold, practice, generate, in their acts of existing—moving, washing, singing, nesting, tending—and in their life-giving capacities that threaten settler authority justified through white supremacy and on the prediction of Native women’s disintegration and disappearance.

The article from which Lukin Linklater draws the epigraph that she puts before her poem, by Tina Pamintuan, quotes Sven Haakanson Jr., director of the Alutiiq Museum, telling about the horrific methods anthropologists would use to obtain data:

In the 1960s, Haakanson’s mother had all of her healthy teeth removed by an anthropologist who was tracing the origins of the Alutiiq by studying their physical characteristics. According to Haakanson, the scientist used his title of “doctor” to convince her that his methods were legitimate. “He told her, ‘Your teeth are going to fall out anyway, so you may as well take them out,’” explains Haakanson, who is also an anthropologist. “At that time, any outsiders who came in—especially ones with the title of doctor—were supposed to know more than us.”

Lukin Linklater registers, and moves through and past, these histories of extractive physical violence enacted by colonists and scholars on the bodies of Alutiiq women. Her performance maps onto the land the physical, embodied, present actions of her Alutiiq woman’s body in ways that refute the legitimacy, and the stability, of a settlement mapped with lines and boxes and massacres and dependent on Native women’s murder and removal. She maps the land with her body, laying her physical presence down upon it, traversing its shores and pathways; she maps her body with the land, its branches supporting her, its water cleansing her, its trees sheltering a nest she’s built. In deliberately and intimately connecting her body with the land, and performing that relation, slowly, with us watching, she engages what Goeman calls, in reference to Native writers’ work, “the multiple scales of spatialities.”16 She is not depicting a singular line or moment in history but performing a multiscaled understanding of space as relational—one in which, as Nanibush, quoted earlier, writes, “our lands were mapped by us in abstract images marking out their use and the animate universe to which we belong.” She enacts physically, with her alive and vibrant body, in ongoing defiance of the murder and removal of Indigenous women’s bodies required by the settler state, not lines that demarcate borders but grounded, embodied lineages of ongoing relation.

Lukin Linklater’s embodied response to the bloody murder and erasure of Indigenous women (and other sources say that at the Refuge Rock massacre, between twenty-five hundred and three thousand Alutiiq people perished, primarily women and children, not the five hundred Pamintuan reports17) is to stand on the shore, and plant herself there, while buckets of milk are pelted at her, repeatedly, their whiteness spreading wide like a sheet across the frame in the photos I take, smacking and soaking her. She stands, and withstands, and then goes into the water and washes, as generations of women have done. This is a physical act, just as murder and genocide are physical acts, enacted violently on bodies. This is a gendered act, this hurling of milk, the constant demands on women as caregivers, this holding your balance and grace in the face of this repeated smack coming at you, this body dripping with stickiness, this constant buzzing of annoyances that really do suck your blood and make you want to scratch at yourself, this inability to concentrate on anything else while you’re doing so, these birds, little nestlings, this constant need to tend, and the beauty in that, as well as the difficulty, fragility, and simplicity.

The resistance her piece maps shows ways of being, walking, breathing, smelling, feeding, that “allow us as audiences to participate in a number of Indigenous resistance strategies,” Nanabush writes. This participation is a witnessing; it includes experiencing the warm river air and getting eaten alive. It includes attending to her body and movements, and to mine as I traverse this space, with my settler ancestors and their histories. It includes being in community: attending to one another—staying with elders like Ned and Rosalie, who can’t walk as fast, helping Tanya because I have known her for years, making new connections. It involves joy, including the pleasure of being out of that conference space and out by the water, in the breeze, and the registering of whiteness as violence that has given you access to that land. It involves experiencing, and considering what you know and what you are learning and what you are unlearning—and all you haven’t experienced and don’t and can’t know.