Yirramboi, Melbourne, Australia, 2017

Before I come to Melbourne for the week of Yirramboi First Nations Arts Festival and as an invited delegate to the National Indigenous Dance Forum, I get an email with an International Delegate Protocol Brief. It has information about the “Closed Cultural Protocol Ceremony” curated by the Yirramboi Festival producing team and its director, Jacob Boehme, which will be held on Friday, May 5, 2017, in the Garden at Weelam Ngalut (Meat Market):

The Closed Cultural Protocol Ceremony is hosted and led by the Yirramboi Council of Elders from the five clans of the Kulin Nations. It is non-negotiable for all First Nations Delegates and International First Nations Delegates of the National Indigenous Dance Forum (NIDF), you must participate in the Closed Protocol Ceremony. . . . The Yirramboi Council of Elders ask First Nations delegates to consider the following when attending the Protocol Ceremony:

Please consider bringing a small item of significance from you or your people . . .

Please note; this ceremony is NOT open for non-Indigenous delegates of the NIDF. To save offense please do not ask to participate or witness this ceremony if you are not Indigenous. However, you may wish to watch the ceremony PARADE at 6pm–6.30pm from Courtney Street to Blackwood street, which leads into the YIRRAMBOI open welcome ceremony, BURRUN GANBU First Night 6.30pm–late, at Weelam Ngalut (Meat Market).

Right before the Closed Cultural Protocol Ceremony, I am in the midst of a lively conversation on the sidewalk outside the bar on the corner by the Meat Market with one of the people I’ve met that day during a workshop with arts presenters and Indigenous artists. She says, “Let’s walk together to the ceremony, we can keep talking.”

“Oh,” I hesitate. “Uh, I’m staying here.”

“Oh, right,” she says.

Everyone vacates the crowded tables and benches, and I’m alone for a few moments before two non-Indigenous scholar colleagues who have also engaged for many years with Indigenous dance, Rachael Swain and Rachel Fensham, come by. We get drinks and chips and have a fun time catching up. We don’t talk about the fact that we’re all there, at the bar, and not at the Closed Protocol Ceremony, but at a little after six o’clock, we’re done with our drinks and go around the corner and enter the space for a quick minute before we realize, despite what the clocks say, it’s still the ceremony, not yet the start of the First Night parade. We scurry quickly out, smiling sheepishly at each other, to wait for the open welcome ceremony.

The parade begins with a young, bare-chested man in jeans, with eucalyptus leaves tucked in his pockets, playing a digeridoo under a sculptured hanging light constellation, bathed in red light. The sound fills the space and reverberates through my skin, into my breathing. Then the Closed Ceremony participants flow by, and we follow them. The place is quickly jam-packed and throbbing like a dance hall, dark, full of reverberating sound and flickering lighting. A group of Elders come into the center with a fire that fills the space with smoke. It is hard to see, but the smell is sweet, cleansing, powerful, and I stand still and close my eyes and breathe it. The lights are shimmering, and the Elders are (I assume) offering a welcome to their land, the traditional land of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, to us as guests. There is a giant video projected on screens high up on both sides of the space with images of the very same Elders who are right there now in front of us, wearing the same attire, in that same space. I watch back and forth between the screens and the Elders, exhilarated by the continuum. There are spotlights creating circles in parts of the room, each illuminating a young man in jeans—the one who brought us in and several more—standing and playing a digeridoo. We crowd around them. The sound is calming and exhilarating. It feels like a giant nightclub—and then it is one: the music starts, and the night continues with free drinks and food (emu wraps, alligator rolls). The Elders have a dedicated tea space near the bar, a red-carpeted open room to rest in, with red velvet chairs and couches, beneath a lightbulb-studded sign reading “ELDERS.” I am tired and jetlagged and feeling a little surreal, but I run into people I know, and we hug and talk, and then there is a fabulous techno music duo, Electric Fields (“Delivering electro-soul in fabulous style by two fabulous feminine brothers’ ancient Indigenous culture. An evening of queer, gender-bending pop-up live arts, our opening party is nothing but First Nations Fabulous”), and we all watch and listen and smile at one another and then lose ourselves in the dancing.

A few days later, I take the train out to Warrnabool to spend two days with a beloved friend who moved to Australia years ago to raise her family. We talk a lot. She asks what my role is as a delegate at this festival. Am I presenting something? I say, no, not presenting, I’m just listening. “Weren’t you invited?” she asks.

Yes, I say. But as a witness, not an expert. And not to everything. I tell her about the Closed Protocol Ceremony. I tell her about a history-of-Indigenous-dance Open Space technology mapping exercise we did, where those of us who are non-Indigenous were asked not to write anything on the mapping boards but instead, if we thought of something to contribute, to find an Indigenous person, talk with them, and see if they wanted to add it.

My friend is taken aback. Doesn’t it upset me?

I say, well, it did make me notice some things. Like how not attending the Closed Cultural Protocol Ceremony left me feeling kind of unmoored and uncertain, and a little left out, on arrival that first night. The First Night open welcome ceremony was awesome and flashy and fun and full of sensory input and deep reverberations, but I didn’t feel grounded by it, exactly, as I have at ceremonial welcomings elsewhere. But, isn’t that interesting? That this festival is structured this way? Typically, “colonial privilege entitled” (mostly white) people have been authorized entry to structures that ground and orient, while colonized (mostly Brown and Black) people have been refused.1 I can see that it’s important, at this Indigenous arts event, I say to my friend, for me to feel refused—unmoored, uncertain, and unauthorized—on these Indigenous lands. I mean, colonial privilege entitled (mostly white) people seem always to presume our right to have access to anything we come across (as Indigenous scholars have long noted, and as I write about in this project’s introduction2). My friend and I talk about entitlement to knowledge and the way our schooling has taught us that absorbing all the knowledge we can get access to is unquestionably good and honed our skills in absorbing things so well that we may not even realize we are doing it. I talk about the Indigenous studies critiques I’ve been reading that question a focus on “reconciliation”—including via Indigenous sharing and settler learning. What is being reconciled? What changes for Indigenous people? We talk about “settler moves to innocence.”3 I take out the book I’ve been reading on this trip—Dian Million’s Therapeutic Nations—and we talk about trauma, and healing, and how a focus on healing so “we can all get along” doesn’t actually do much other than consolidate settler culture. She nods. We talk more about not having access to everything, and the work that does, as we’ve each experienced in our own bodily and spiritual practices.4

Maybe not being part of that ceremony was important in part, I say, because now we are having this conversation.

Later, BlakDance executive producer Merindah Donnelly, the person who invited me to be a delegate, asks me to send her some thoughts about what has struck and stuck with me during the festival. I reply:

• The National Indigenous Dance Forum breakout discussions, which involved dozens of Indigenous contemporary dance practitioners and addressed multiple approaches to supporting Indigenous dance. People talked about striving for more state and arts sector investment, and about developing art venues’ “cultural competency” so they can better present Indigenous work. In the breakout group I was part of, people also talk about something else: strengthening community funding models, with a focus on “for us by us” (FUBU) as guide, rather than a desire to appeal to funders or to reach white audiences. “Why does money have to be an impediment? We just do it,” said one participant, Joe Williams. “We have to make our own economy away from the colonized government.” He added, “The only reason art will stop being made is if we stop making it.”
• A dance class I took at Chunky Moves, in which Thomas Kelly (“a proud Bundjalung-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri, Ni-Vanuatu man”)5 directed us to move with our eyes closed and connect with the land underneath us. He remarked that he gives 80 percent of an instruction, and then 20 percent is for us to fill in, and that that’s how Indigenous teachings are: you’re not given everything, just enough, and then it’s up to you to do the filling in. (Plus, just the joy of moving, and how good it felt to sweat, stretch, curve, and curl, after sitting and listening for so many days.)
• The dance piece Divercity by Gidabul, Gulibul, and Yaegl dance maker Mariaa Randall; its centering of women, with Indigenous women leading, in an opening ceremonial invocation and preparation, using Indigenous languages, that invited and recognized all women (“hey Sista!”), in a spirit of joy, play, fun. The overlays of mappings: projected Google mappings of cityscapes with Indigenous markings drawn over them; the embodied mappings made by the fluid, articulate movements of two Indigenous women, rolling, dancing, laughing, talking in unison and separately (I didn’t catch all the jokes, but others in the audience clearly did), as their bodies mapped a contemporary, live, supportive Indigenous presence in the Meat Market theater space. The way our feet, we women who had been asked to enter the space first, and asked to perform in it by walking, and who trampled chalk all over without quite knowing what we were doing; the way the two dancers were able to find and pull out Indigenous designs from underneath that chalk overlay (despite the effort it took to pull up the taped markers, and the way the patterns got smudged, and how they had to be careful not to step on it more). Brilliant.
• Meeting artists from Wales who were invited to take part, as Indigenous, and thinking about this—including both the reach of the (friggin’) British Empire close and far and what it means to colonize and be colonized, as well as the privileges that come with being white and English speaking when caught in this global web spun by British colonization, grounded in white supremacy.
• Taking part in In the Absence Of during the citywide Blak-out, in which I and other participants embody figures in a fresco that had upheld a statue of British “explorers” in downtown Melbourne (the statue was absent at the moment, due to construction, so we were embodying it) while we listened to a podcast about notions of linear time and history, and ways this linearity places Indigenous peoples always in the past, and the vanquishing in the position of telling stories about how the vanquished are disappeared, overlaid over the sound of a creek that was from that spot, bubbling. And the spirited talk I had with the artist, Baden Hitchcock, afterward.
• The weaving in of gender-abundant gender nonconforming multiplicities throughout Yirramboi, as a given: the opening event with Electric Fields; the “Queer Dreaming Trail” curated journey of the daylong Blak-out, including Blak drag queens reading children’s stories at the library; nonbinary people and same-sex couples present everywhere throughout.
• The in-progress work by Jeanette Kotowich, a dance artist of Cree, Métis, and mixed European descent from Treaty 4 Territory in Saskatchewan, Canada: the supercrowded room; the walls scripted with colored chalk #words, #ceremony, #territory, #homeland, #walk softly on the mother; her calm and quiet presence despite the mass of us all around her; how she found space, regardless, in which to move.
• The closing night performances, including the strength and focus of the young men in the opening piece (“Ya Ya Yirramboi”) and in Culture Evolves; the use of B-boying as an Indigenous tool (including what I read as kangaroo jumps, layered in) and how they echoed what Rulan Tangen choreographed thirteen years earlier in Thunderstomp. First Nations choreographer (from Bundjulung [Australia] and Ngāpuhi [New Zealand] territories) Amrita Hepi’s embodiment of others’ movements in a kind of reverse appropriation, done with permission, where she asked for and was generously given movements and stories from all kinds of people in town, then took them into her own body and danced them out as The Dance of Melbourne. Talking with Joshua Pether about disability, and impulse, and not knowing your history but having a sense of it, and dance as a tool for working with this all. Closing down the festival with dancing.

Facing Refusal

For this final chapter, I planned to write about the regenerative actualities in things that flash in and out of visible presence. Building off work around fragments by Karyn Recollet and Deborah Miranda (among others), I planned to address the way Indigenous futurities and histories manifest in flickers and fragments, however small or brief, and then to talk about these flashes and fragments of knowledge/knowing as temporal layerings, recurrences from pasts and futures, with capacity for wholeness, through collective embodied engagement.6 These fragments, I planned to argue, are not those of modernism’s mourning and disillusionment but sites of potent resurgence and insurgence, insistence and reexistence. I planned, then, to argue for dance making as a collective way of accessing this knowledge.

I also planned to write about how Indigenous dance artists have used dance to investigate, archive, and forward family, tribal, and legal stories and histories that they have accessed sometimes just in intuitive flashes, or bits of language, or snippets of problematically recorded history. I would then address some of the specific contemporary dance-making tools different Indigenous artists are using to access this knowledge, from vibrant athleticism garnering both energetic force and a generative exhaustion; to embodied experiences of slowness outside of capitalist drives toward accumulation; to wry trickster humor in relation to decades of static, stoic, “Indian” images; to forthright forwardings of sensuality and sexuality; to attention to embodied sensations and signs; to practices of protocol, permission asking, and recognizing one’s relation to the land on which one moves. I was then going to address ways that Indigenous artists taking up and using contemporary dance-making tools recalibrates the terrain of (non)exchange, and appropriation, in which modern dance was planted.

I also planned for the final section of this project to have units on specific dance pieces. Each section would include a video link to the dance work, and I would write a little about the piece, its context, and the ideas I see it engaged with, posing questions for discussion and reflection.

Yet, as I started to outline this chapter, amid my excitement and my desire to voice the powerful work I saw these dances doing, as I listened to teachings at various Indigenous conferences and festivals, and continued conversations with Indigenous dance artists, and read more work by more Indigenous scholars, I heard, and sensed, and was confronted with some refusals.

As discussed in the introduction and touched on throughout this project, scholars have long discussed histories of the ethnic Other being in the position of an object to be studied by the Western subject; Indigenous scholars have long linked Western presumptions about right to the “pursuit of knowledge” to Indigenous peoples being researched as a form of being colonized.7 Tuck and Yang, for example, have theorized research “inquiry as invasion”—“a result of the imperative to produce settler colonial knowledge and to produce it for the academy.”8 In a similar vein, Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson has discussed settler/white peoples’ (xwelítem in Coast Salish, which he says translates literally to “starving person”) “desire and demand to know.” He continues, “At its worst, this hunger perceives knowledge with a voracious appetite that devours without consideration of those who have cultivated, harvested, and prepared the food of thought.”9 Laura Harjo writes compellingly of how “Mvskoke knowledge is not produced in the objective, detached manner in which ‘conventional’ knowledge operates; instead, it acknowledges the relationality of many realms and elements.”10 She describes this knowledge production as “a form of way finding, which means reassociating our knowledge with what it has been disassociated from—our bodies, our senses, our feelings.”11 “Non-Indigenous peoples are unused to negotiating Indigenous knowledges like felt knowledge and the experience of engaging and living as a member of a tribal nation. . . . The practice of settler knowledge production is problematic because it tends to gravitate toward the academician or the expert who views the Indigenous community as an object to which to apply theoretical frameworks.”12

In relation to these histories and issues, as touched on in the introduction also, Indigenous writers and editors have developed “Guidelines for Ethical Research in Indigenous Studies,” with many downloadable guides and discussions, many of which address the importance of consent and ongoing consultation and of “Nothing about Us without Us” practices that require Native peoples at the center of research projects about Native peoples.13 Many point to the differences, and also the lack of understanding, and epistemic violence, that can arise when scholars trained in Western ways of approaching knowledge bring those approaches to Indigenous topics and issues.14

Alongside the offering of guidelines and articulations around the skills settler scholars need to engage appropriately with Indigenous peoples and knowledges, Indigenous scholars have also addressed, and enacted, refusals.15 Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson laid much of the groundwork for this work through her discussions of “ethnographic refusal,” registering ways Indigenous peoples (with a particular focus on the “prodigious anthropology ‘of’ the Iroquois”16) turn away from settler-academic-imposed definitions and anthropological categories “that emerged in moments of colonial contact, many of which still reign supreme” and enacting what she terms “generative refusal” in her own research methods.17 In dialogue with this work, Glen Coulthard has theorized Indigenous refusal of settler and state recognition, and other forms of Western political validation, as a way of a movement toward Indigenous-to-Indigenous self-recognition.18 Kanaka Maoli scholar Maile Arvin has teased out Indigenous artists’ affirmations and delight in their refusals to adhere to colonizing academic artistic expectations. Noting how the Polynesian artists she writes about “perform evasion,”19 Arvin explains, “I seek not to make such refusals legible to Western science, but to spend more time with refusal as a mode of promoting more life and joy to Indigenous communities, even or especially in the face of seemingly insurmountable settler colonial power.”20 Robinson continues his discussion, writing, “It is increasingly important to refuse xwelítem hunger, a hunger that drives the production of knowledge in the university setting.” He explains, “In academic contexts of Indigenization, these forms of epistemic hunger—shxwelítemelh totí:lthet—are growing under equity auspices that quantitatively feed the university without challenging the structures of consumption.”21

In his scholarship, Robinson discusses Indigenous refusals of settler practices of knowledge acquisition and extraction and the refusals of artists and scholars—including himself—to be easily apprehended by those not part of the Indigenous group creating the art or scholarship. In one essay, he focuses on artists who include untranslated Indigenous language text in their works, addressing the agency of these Indigenous refusals of easy apprehension, and implements them himself by not translating parts of his own scholarship.22 In another piece, after a short introduction about spaces “of welcome and unwelcome,” before analyzing issues with Indigenous carved figures that have been situated at the Vancouver airport as friendly “gestures of welcome” rather than assertions of Indigenous sovereignty, Robinson asks that “non-Indigenous, settler, arrivant, ally, or xwelitem readers” please stop reading the next eight pages of the essay. Eight pages after, he thanks those of us who do for “supporting and respecting the sovereign boundaries established within this chapter.”23 As Tuck and Yang write and Robinson here enacts, “refusal is not just a no, it is a performance of that no, and thus an artistic form.” It is a “stance of objection, one that will interrogate power and privilege.”24 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes how interventions such as these

move away from a constriction of our intelligence within the confines of Western thought and the dumbing down of the issues for the non-Indigenous outside to a meticulous, critical, robust, and layered approach that accurately contextualizes and reflects the lives and the thinking of Indigenous peoples on our own terms, with the clear purpose of dismantling colonial domination.25

Indigenous refusals, in these approaches, are regenerative, creative objections to what Tuck and Yang call “the very processes of objectification/subjection, the making of possessors and possessions,”26 with a central focus on the possibilities they generate for Indigenous people beyond the confines of Western thought. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, extending analysis of the constrictions of white settler structures beyond academic research and scholarship and into Indigenous resurgence more broadly, writes that “there is virtually no room for white people in resurgence. Whiteness is not centered in resurgence.”27

While these scholars focus primarily on the assertions of refusal by Indigenous artists, and on how these refusals bring joy and agency and strength to Indigenous artists, Nations, scholars, and thought-worlds, several also turn to the experience of settler spectators and academics in relation to them. Robinson, as he discusses Indigenous artists’ acts of refusal, issues a call to settlers facing that art not to turn away but to look differently. “Decolonizing settler perception,” Robinson writes, “involves reckoning with the ways in which looking and listening take place in order to move beyond forms of hungry, starving, and extractive perception.” As he articulates these teachings, he addresses ways that the sovereignty of Indigenous artists’ work (he is referring to signage work by the collective Ogimaa Mikana28) “takes place through a demand for the public to learn, rather than through an offer to teach.” Here a refusal to be “easily apprehended and utilized,” such as that which Arvin articulates, comes in relation with a demand that the public not remain ignorant about Indigenous issues but rather perceive, and attempt to apprehend, from and about them differently. He (and the art he discusses), in other words, is demanding that settlers do learn—but in ways that respect Indigenous knowledge, people, and ways of learning and knowing: not asking for Indigenous peoples to focus their energies on teaching; when we do learn, using that knowledge not in greedy and extractive ways but in ways that consider those who cultivated it; respecting when we are refused learning, reading, seeing, and understanding. This is to say, Robinson writes, understanding the difference between “radical inclusion” as “Indigenous people extending welcome when interest is shown” and not “requiring inclusion when that inclusion is not welcome by Indigenous people.”29

Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars have also developed discussion around Indigenous refusal in relation to what it generates not just by and for Indigenous artists, scholars, and politics but also for how, as part of its “purpose of dismantling colonial domination,” Indigenous refusal shifts settler academic scholarship methods, practices, and assumptions. This discussion, following Simpson’s, addresses refusal not just as a “full stop” or simple withdrawal from research (nor of refusal’s inverse, consent, as a one-off signed pass for full-steam-ahead research).30 Rather, this Indigenous “staking of limits” to divulging knowledge and interpretability has the capacity to illuminate and “structure possibilities, as well as produce subjects, histories, and politics,” as anthropologist Carole McGranahan writes.31 Refusal and consent are thus theoretically, politically, and methodologically generative. “Closing down pathways,” May Chazan and Melissa Baldwin note, involves “opening others, leading to new relationships, subjectivities, communities, politics and knowledges”; “includes the negotiation of refusal within consensual relationship making”; and leads “towards ongoing, relational, contextual and often collective processes.”32 Tuck and Yang write in their discussion of teaching refusal to social science students that “refusal is not just a no, but is a generative, analytic, practice.”33 They conclude, “Refusal makes space for recognition, and for reciprocity.”34 Indigenous refusal thus demands that settler and arrivant scholars shift our approaches not just to Indigenous people but to learning, to writing, and to one another. As Tuck and Yang write, “we present a refusal to do research, or a refusal within research, as a way of thinking about humanizing researchers.”35

Learning to listen to refusal as expansive and generative, respectfully, without freaking out, with an openness to how its teachings might actually change things, including us—which might be new to those of us who are white, given how entitled to know everything many of us have been taught to be—is vital and challenging work. How to listen to and hear refusals—including refusals to be included or to be taught—as generative ways of objecting to objectifying colonizing structures like the university and of making space for recognition and reciprocity? How to be not just a good guest in others’ territories—as the opening chapter to this book engaged—but also a good student?36 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ends the section quoted earlier, noting there is no place for whiteness in resurgence, by observing that “when we put our energy into building constellations of co-resistance within grounded normativity that refuse to center whiteness, our real white allies show up in solidarity anyway.”37

As I think about this, the 80/20 teaching Thomas Kelly gave in his Yirramboi dance class resonates: that in Indigenous teaching, 80 percent is given but 20 percent is not and is there for you to figure out, to fill in on your own. I think about the 20 percent between refusing to teach settlers and demanding that we still learn. I think about the 20 percent between the two teachings Leanne Betasamosake Simpson gives: there being no place for white people in resurgence, and within constellations of resurgence that refuse to center whiteness, white allies showing up in solidarity anyway. I think about the 80 percent that comes from what I’ve seen and heard and been told directly and the 20 percent that comes from what I’ve sensed, felt, or come to understand, from the stories and comments and teachings of and time I’ve spent with those I’ve been in relationship with, including the land I’m on and have come from.

Kwagiulth (Kwakwaka’wakw) scholar Sarah Hunt, writing on “ontologies of Indigeneity,” asks, “How do we come to know that which is rendered outside the knowable world?” She continues, “I suggest, for non-Indigenous people interested in engaging with Indigenous epistemologies, this may involve becoming unhinged, uncomfortable, or stepping beyond the position of ‘expert’ in order to also be a witness or listener.”38

As I bike to the University of California, Berkeley campus, where I have an office space in which to write this book while on sabbatical, I pedal past dozens of medicine wheels. All up and down Telegraph Avenue, someone has painted the colors of a medicine wheel on the spokes of the bike wheels that mark the bike paths. I am on Ohlone land, but these are not Ohlone medicine wheels, I’m pretty sure, though they may be ones that register this region’s vibrant intertribal history.39 I hope it is a Native artist, maybe a Native visitor to this Ohlone land, who paints these; I will have to ask.40 One day, as I’m biking and musing, breathing hard, feeling active and alive, feeling the pulse of this place, carrying my books and laptop on land I pump my body across several times a day, I realize, with a start, that a few of the bicycle signs don’t just show medicine wheel tires on a white bike frame, registering this as Indigenous land.41 A few of them show white stick figure riders, one leg up, one leg down, propelling the colored-in medicine wheels. These markings on the ground remind me that, hard as I’ve worked to do research and write this book in a relational way, learning and writing in ongoing, continually negotiated relation with those whose work I am discussing, let’s face it, I am still doing so as a white-bodied, non-Indigenous settler dance scholar with a background in modern dance, in the way the academy tells me is the only real marker of value it can promote: as a single-authored university press “monograph” that will contribute to my individual career, within a knowledge-production/academic system that requires individual exemplarism for legibility and that is antithetical to the ways of knowing that Indigenous studies require, that forwards my (undoubtedly flawed and limited but positioned as expert) analyses and interpretations of what Indigenous dance artists create.42 As I propel this bicycle over this Indigenous terrain, steeped in the pervasive white-body supremacy of this era, my work is still contributing to the structure of coloniality, not to a dismantling of it.43

I stop writing. I consider trashing this whole project. I leave my office to sit by Strawberry Creek, under the tall, calm, quieting trees. I try to hear what comes.

I recall Lukin Linklater’s teaching: not just to edit out but to let your limits show.

I recall Indigenous refusal’s teaching to academic researchers: to let what we learn lead to change in our methods, practices, and assumptions, and in us.

Looking down at the medicine wheels on the streets I traverse daily, I try out paths in two directions.

Teachings in Listening

I have been thinking about relations between modern dance and Indigenous dance, and about ways performance counters hegemonic structures authorized through violence, for many years. The ideas in this book have been cultivated from this longtime research and theorizing, and also in longtime relation and conversation with, and writings by, and course correction from brilliant and generous dance artist thinkers, many of whom identify as Indigenous. In developing this project, I have been nourished by listening to, and offering to, and learning from these conversations.44 Some of the ideas in this project that stem from others’ contributions are obvious, in the interweaving of writings by those artists in earlier chapters and in the citations to others’ work mentioned throughout. But it goes deeper than that as well: all the ideas in here have germinated and grown in dialogue and conversation, even where not explicitly marked. As Harjo writes describing knowledge production in her community, “dialogue, whether according to formal or informal notions, produces knowledge.”45 Similarly, despite how academia positions knowledge and authorship, this book is not just, or even mostly, filled with “my” ideas: whatever knowledge it has to offer was produced in conversation.

In this section, I narrate a few specific examples of where some of the ideas that infuse this project germinated, in an attempt to prepare scholarship cooked in “consideration of those who have cultivated, harvested, and prepared the food of thought,” as Robinson writes.46 Acknowledging exactly where, and from whom, specific ideas sprout can be hard to do, as ideas circulate, and build, and are developed and nuanced and reframed, in ongoing relation and ongoing discussion, over time. In some ways, there is an aggrandizement of the individual mind in even thinking one could cite or trace ideas to a singular person or moment. So these are not tracings of origin but rather snapshot stories of a few of the ways, and a few of the people with whom, the ideas in this book have grown.

In March 2012, attending the Talking Stick Festival in Vancouver, I have brunch with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation choreographer Michelle Olson, director of Raven Spirit Dance, at a trendy café not far from Simon Fraser University.47 It is raining out, and cozy and warm in the café, and we talk about many things, including making a living in dance and her work with non-Indigenous dancers and how the vision, the way of seeing and working, is what makes the work Indigenous. We talk about Olson’s understanding of how things that connect Indigenous people are not genetic but a shared experience of having been disconnected from language, land, culture, and that is why there are commonalities between her and Māori and other Native peoples. She talks about using dance tools—she mentions Body-Mind Centering® and Laban Movement Analysis—as ways of accessing knowledge in the body, in and through dance. She talks about how some of the things she’s discovered in doing her work are more questions than answers and about her sense that they are inarticulable in the language she has. Because she’s lost her language, she can sense things, meanings, but doesn’t have the words to articulate them. We talk about structures, about creating structures (like the tipi or lean-to), but then also dancing, reaching outside of them.

Olson had just curated two evenings of contemporary Aboriginal dance called On the Cusp for the Talking Stick Festival, including artist talk-backs after each. At these, several other dance artists touched on the idea of how, in the dance making they are doing, they access something that they sense but don’t fully understand: a kind of knowledge that they can’t put words to. At the second talk-back, Cree, Métis, and German choreographer Starr Muranko asked the choreographers what made their work Indigenous. Métis and Anishinaabe choreographer Brian Solomon said he wasn’t sure how to talk about what made him Indigenous; it was something that was always part of him and that in his life, just walking around, comes out in him several times a day. He said that in his art, it is kind of the same: he doesn’t always intend to deal with it in his art, but even when he doesn’t, it comes out, just like it does in his life. Anishinaabe choreographer Waawaate Fobister talked about how, when he saw the petroglyphs on which the piece he’d just shown was based, even as a small child, five years old, it gave him a sense of time—like “oh, there were things that existed even before I was born”—and of connection. They are fragments left, and only his people know about them (and now us all too, in the theater that night), and he is engaging with them as fragments of information that were written there for others, for him, to find. Cree, Métis, and Dutch choreographer Daina Ashbee talked about the disconnection from her body, from food, from land—and wanting to engage with a piece that both spoke about that disconnection (from language, from our sexuality, our menstrual cycles, and whatever is going on in our bodies) in dance, and also to connect with it.

At an Aboriginal dance choreographers’ forum the next day, Byron Chief Moon, of Coyote Arts Percussive Association, talked about dancing and making dances in a racist, sexist, homophobic, ageist world that colonialism has constructed—and about dance as a tool for articulating and strengthening and asserting a way of being outside of, different than, what colonization has wrought.48 Margaret Grenier, Gitxsan and Cree, executive and artistic director of Dancers of Damelahamid, talked about how she grew up privileged to be connected so strongly to her culture—but even within that connection, when her father died, she had an experience of understanding that those connections could be shattered. That experience of disconnection to continuity compelled her to move the work in a different direction, so that the group was no longer working from a focus of revitalizing ancestral dances but instead started creating new works.

Listening to these Indigenous dance artists’ insights, I registered how dance is a way of knowing the potency of fragments. I know my non-Indigenous dance artist colleagues use contemporary dance-making tools to engage with fragments too.49 I see how these Indigenous dancers are taking it, and other contemporary dance tools, up—practices of sensory observing, feeling, discerning—to access knowledges that Indigenous cultures have submerged, often for protection, in this period of colonization and that are available to them now as impulses, in a glint or flash of knowledge, or fragment of language, movement, as something that is sensed/felt and thereby understood, rather than laid out along an irrefutable logic of A to B to C to Z, to reference Leslie Marmon Silko again.50

The next year, at Talking Stick 2013, Tsimshian art historian, dance leader, and choreographer Mique’l Dangeli curates Convergence: Currents of Contemporary Aboriginal Dance showcases and talk-backs. On the first night, Seneca choreographer Rosy Simas, after showing a work in progress that will later become the evening-length work We Wait in the Darkness, talks about cellular investigation, about “really going inside and investigating—where in my family, or in my relatives that have passed on, where are they in my actual body? And then how does that, in particular, make me move? Who comes with me? Who decides to show up with me on stage?” (“Tonight, my cousin and my great-great-grandmother” showed up, she answered herself.) “There is very little of our culture that has not been affected by colonization,” Simas notes as the conversation turns to controversies around publicly sharing, discussing how “they [ancestors] dictate what I’m allowed to show and what I’m not allowed to show. . . . A lot of the secrecy is about keeping the balance of things.” Nisga’a artist Mike Dangeli, Mique’l’s husband, talks about regalia and what is seen as “objects” as beings. “Nothing is inanimate—we have to be kind and gentle when we wear our things. Our nuc nuox, they need our love. They need our connection,” he says.

The next night, discussion revolves around training: the lack of, and need for, more training in Indigenous contemporary dance; how Indigenous practices of watching others, including nonhuman others, are a way of training. Métis choreographer Yvonne Chartrand, whose company V’ni Dansi includes Métis jigging, traditional Métis dance, and contemporary dance, talks about the possibilities and challenges of working as a company, and working as a group of dancers, with such diverse training. Cree dance artist Jesse McMann talks about turning to powwow as an adult but not feeling able to enter the contemporary dance training realm. “I started dancing about two and a half years ago. Powwow—that’s where I found my culture, that’s where I connected with my birth family. It was something that I did three times a week, to have fun, let off steam, to have confidence,” she says. But, she adds, there’s nowhere to train in Aboriginal contemporary dance in an ongoing way, rather than just for a week or two. And non-Aboriginal dance spaces are not very supportive for someone who is just getting into dance. Wesley Nahanee (Squamish Nation), from Spakwus Slulem Dancers, talks about process, about “those of us who have memories from before we are born,” and about watching others, including nonhuman persons, as a way of learning. “You watch, you just watch that animal, and see what they do,” Nahanee says. “When I do dance, I basically turn myself into the animal that I’m representing, because I’ve watched them so much.” Oji-Cree (Ojibwe-Cree) choreographer Lara Kramer notes the import of being around other First Nations artists and of making networks, for her and for future generations. Carlos Rivera, a Mexican dance artist who identifies as being of Nahuatl and Mixteco descent, notes, “I started out as a traditional dancer. . . . We learn to dance because we are close to our families, close to nature, because we are close to something.” He continues, “One of the mistakes that we make is to be apart. We carry with us lots of heritage knowledge, inside us, under our skin, that we should have access to, and we should explore more, as a source that ignites creativity.” He asks, “How is it possible that Canada, having a huge population of Native people, and being a country of dancers, how is it that it doesn’t have a school for these people to go and learn dance? We need to start thinking about how to build that.”

The dancers talk further about boundaries, about places they won’t venture, about asking permission and being attentive to the responses they get. “All the stories of all my relatives are in my cells, and so when I dance, it’s all there, and it’s safe, still,” Simas says. “So, I’ve been asking permission slowly from my relatives. This sounds so mystical, and it’s not—but my great-great-great-grandmother, I asked, ‘is it OK that I have your picture in this piece?’ And the answer was very clearly yes.” She adds, “I’m going to continually cross those boundaries, but I’m going to do it carefully, and I’m going to ask permission.” Nahanee adds, “We go to our Elders, we ask things, and they let us know it’s OK,” noting how, at the same time, “we would show it to ourselves. And we would watch for those signs, and they would show us things. That bird hitting the window—we’ve all been taught to watch for things, and that they show us stuff.” He adds, “Sometimes, I’ll hear a song, I’ll be sitting there and tapping away, and I’ll just start singing . . . and then five minutes later I can’t remember it. The way I’ve been taught, that’s not for me.” Mike Dangeli notes how Elders aren’t all the same and are complicated themselves and not always right.51 “If you wait and ask for permission, you’re going to have one Elder saying no and another saying yes.” He noted, “For my family—we still go and ask permission, but we get the same thing every time: why are you asking?” He notes that his family tells him, “We may not always get it, but when you see it, we support you.” He adds, “We’re pushing our boundaries, just as our people have always done.” He notes, too, that youths, not just Elders, are also part of the tradition.

These Talking Stick conversations generate a renewed sense of the importance of dance—including “contemporary” dance—not just as a way to represent Indigenous worldviews but as having tools that Indigenous artists are using to access Indigenous knowledges and affirm Indigenous ways of knowing. I come away having sensed how Indigenous ways of knowing are held in acts of dancing: in its hard work and discipline; in the practice of being in sensory connection to place and breath; in the dedication of taking dance seriously as a site of knowing, in the practice of being together, including with ancestors and with beings seen as regalia, or masks, or other “things.”

These discussions with Indigenous dance artists, and many others, form the grounding of this book.

Over the years from 2011 to 2019 (and continuing), I also organize and co-organize annual Indigenous Choreographers at Riverside (ICR) gatherings at my campus, bringing some of these same dance artists—and others—to campus to present work, give workshops, teach our students and students at the Sherman Indian High School across town and the Noli Indian High School on the Soboba reservation, and meet and discuss and share and eat and hang out with each other.52 Gatherings around Indigenous dance have been happening in Canada in several places, especially around Vancouver and Toronto, including Talking Stick and Trent University. Santee Smith, artistic director of Kaha:wi Dance Theater, hosts regular events and conversations in and around Toronto too. But when these ICR gatherings start, they are almost nonexistent in the United States, and discussions around Indigenous dance are largely absent from the field of dance studies. The ideas circulating at these ICR gatherings—in both their joys and their mistakes—infuse these chapters too.53

As the field grows in the United States, discussions around Indigenous contemporary dance, centering Indigenous voices, build. Emily Johnson hosts a Umyuangvigkaq durational sewing bee long table in Lenape territory, aka New York, in January 2017; Rosy Simas hosts an Indigenous contemporary dance gathering, called Oyate Okadakiciyapi, in Minneapolis in March 2017. I continue to listen at them and to learn from the Indigenous dancer scholars who speak with such brilliant clarity and passion, drawing from lived experiences that stem from both generations of colonization and land loss and generations of grounded practices of strength, resilience, and visioning, and from the ways they enact Indigenous “nation-to-nation” protocol in their engagements.54 Insights from these gatherings include, at the Umyuangvigkaq long table, Mique’l Dangeli’s comments on being good guests. “We are all guests here. And part of what we are doing today is bringing a critical consciousness to what it is to be on Indigenous lands. Because wherever we are, we are on Indigenous lands and Indigenous waterways,” she notes, talking further of Indigenous ways of being in relationship, of being a guest, of coming with peaceful intentions. “There is space for everyone, room for everyone on the land—which unfortunately is not the colonial way,” she says. Later, Karyn Recollet, kicking off a discussion on Indigenous futurities, asks what a territorial acknowledgment would look like in cyberspace. Later still, in a discussion around colonial rupture, Recollet urges us to “think about the glitch as a generative space,” including “those glitches our bodies feel,” including feeling them as lovable spaces. “How can we dream up new ways of relationality with each other, acknowledging that rupture is in the house?” she asks. At another point, Dangeli describes decolonizing as “a collective practice. It includes allowing ourselves to make mistakes—and learning from them. It includes, in all of the questions that everyone is putting forward today, walking very softly and consciously.”

At Oyate Okadakiciyapi, conversations around these and other issues—Indigenous to Indigenous relations, Indigenous to non-Indigenous relations, love, rupture, reclamation, refusal—percolate. At a roundtable and dance sharing hosted by Simas the morning after the main-stage performance at the Ordway, Osage choreographer Maura Garcia talks about Native invisibility and the limits of focusing on it. “We’re not invisible to each other,” she notes.55 Lukin Linklater talks about how her work, which is “meant for the museum and the gallery,” engages both with ways “in which we embody Indigenous ideas” and also with “the force of the way that museums and galleries look at us.” She adds, “There is a long history of the dehumanization of peoples on Turtle Island.” And yet, she notes, “When I look at our language, in our language, we are human, we are present.” Simas talks about “reclamation as a stubbornness and a refusal to allow someone else to put you in an anthropological display case.” Other participants talk about abstraction and storytelling, about how legible their work is, or isn’t, and to whom—about whom they are making work for, and why. For Simas, these ideas around whom her work is for, museumification, and who frames it extend to those writing about it. “I am working with two Indigenous writers, because I want to have Native writers contextualize my work instead of non-Native writers,” she says to the group. Kanaka Maoli choreographer Christopher Morgan discusses his approach to his work, also drawing on his relationship with his ancestors in focusing his intention. “I was commissioned by people that I cannot see [i.e., ancestors],” he notes. “Sharing the story with non-Native people is part of that.” Garcia tells about working on a dance piece with Osage kids and, in what it teaches—such as how to present and introduce themselves—for their benefit; the teaching is for them. “That said, the dance work is for everyone,” she adds, explaining further that “to be a tribal person is to treat other people well.”

These discussions, and many others, help form the grounding of this book.

Back in Oakland, I bike across town to have coffee with Costanoan Ohlone leader Kanyon Sayers-Roods to talk about Ohlone land/histories/politics, because there is a lot going on here, and I’m hoping to get a better sense of some of it as I become increasingly involved in some of the activism in this area. As we talk, she mentions, offhand, in the midst of various stories, that she wished some of the people doing work in Native activism and with land acknowledgment would talk about the times when they were working with Indigenous peoples and things didn’t go so well at first—about the mistakes, the things those doing this work had to figure out. “When it comes to non-Native allies engaging with Native peoples, it’s important for them to witness and interact with their process,” she says, adding, “It would be helpful for them to be documenting their processes, what they’ve learned—the cultural competency they’ve gained.”56

We talk about some of what this cultural competency entails for non-Natives, which in many ways is quite simple. One basic precept is that, before you ask for something from an Ohlone person (and perhaps as good practice, from any Native person, though practices and expectations vary), you bring them a gift. You don’t ask for something without offering something first. Tobacco is sometimes customary, but not always; generally, any gift is appreciated. (People have gifted her teas, scarves, food; before this meeting, I had given her a candle.) A deeper layer to this, as you build relationship and ask people to share more, is to observe—and to ask—what the person may need to accept your invitation or to answer your questions. And know that this will vary. Some people may need “door-to-door stuff”—a ride, say, perhaps a meal—to come to your event. Or they might need a visit ahead of time, so they can get to know you and your intentions; you might need to build a relationship, come to their house. Some people won’t need a ride but may need “cordial light reminders” about time and place, and perhaps not just by email.

Another related understanding she offers is that, if a Native person agrees to share something with you, including giving you their knowledge, their time, their understanding, what they’ve lived and learned, you should be thinking about and prepared to offer them something as well. What you offer really depends on the context and your situation. If all you can offer is a small token—but you are really in need of what they will bring—then say this when you make the invitation, so that they know and can decide what is possible. Chances are they will still do it, if it is a sincere need and respectful request, and if they can afford the travel and time. But it is helpful if they know ahead. And if you can be generous, do be: funding is deeply appreciated to cover time, travel, food, and living expenses so that they can continue to learn and share what they have with you. If you’re not sure what is an appropriate amount to offer, don’t ask the person directly: they can’t charge for ceremonial work (and if you are asking them to open an event or give a blessing to a gathering, that is ceremonial work). They can’t tell you what to gift them, though they do want you to know. Instead, ask someone else who has done this before what might be an appropriate range, given the situation. Or just be as generous as you can (and then, when others ask you later, let them know this as well).

It’s hard work, she acknowledges. And it’s not like there is one answer or exact moves to learn, and then you’re good to go. “There is no ‘I must walk with two steps with the right foot, two steps with the left,’” she said. “It’s that you knock, and sometimes it’s as simple as asking, What do you need? How may I be of help? I am here to be of help. How may I reciprocate?” It’s a process, she says. “You humble yourself, offer a gift. You ask yourself, what is something that you might offer them?”

It’s hard for everyone doing this work, including for herself, Sayers-Roods notes. “You learn along the way how to act responsibly,” she says. “You go through the onion layers.” When she first started doing land acknowledgments, she would say (arms spread wide), “Welcome to Ohlone territory!” Now, if she is in Ohlone territory but outside of Mutsun Ohlone territory—the southern Bay Area region where she is from—she says, her exuberance more contained, “I am from southern Ohlone territory” and notes that she has been asked, and given permission, by those from this part of Ohlone territory to do the welcome she is about to do.

And, she says, try as you might, sometimes you mess up. There are times she has not responded in the best ways to uncomfortable situations or when she has taken too much of the spotlight when she should have shifted it to others. And she has been reprimanded. There are deep issues here, and it can be hard when this happens. “There’s so much sadness and anger and lateral oppression,” she notes. “We don’t need to fight each other.”

In other ways, though, it’s important to sit with these course corrections, she says—for her and also, particularly, for non-Natives who want to be engaged but are anxious about “getting it right.” She talks about “colonial privilege–entitled fragility” (because she says fragility isn’t just white, though it’s part of white settler mentality) and the tendency of “colonial privilege–entitled” people to shrivel at critique and paralyze or step away (or alternatively to ignore it and go around until they find someone giving the answer they want to hear).57

“It’s OK to be told no,” Sayers-Roods says. “It’s not devastating or horrible.” It just means, most often, that there is more work to be done.

And yes, she says, it would be helpful for me to narrate my process and these ideas.58

Later, when we review this section before publication, she points me toward more work she has been doing to help foster cultural competency among those interested in working with Indigenous peoples and says yes to sharing those resources here.59

These discussions, and many others, help form the grounding of this book.

While much of the learning in this project has come from listening to and being in dialogue with Indigenous artists and leaders, and from reading Indigenous authors (another form of dialogue), it has also come from decades of physical practice in which I have honed my skills in paying attention to other bodies and entities, as well as in feeling what is going on in my own muscles and nerves and bones and breath and skin, and what they are teaching me, in relation to many things, including the ground beneath my feet. This includes the ongoing need to stretch, balance, and strengthen and to bring things, including me, into alignment, even as these things, and I, continue to shift. This honing has kept me going, even when I think I can’t, or shouldn’t, or don’t want to: to practice, to get up and put my weight on the ground, to feel its pulse, and my pulse, and, in relation to both, to move in a way that brings focus and awareness, peeling through layers including those that, like an onion, sometimes make me tear up.

These practices, including in many movement workshops taught by those discussed in this project, also form the grounding of this book.

The second move my seat on the bicycle has prompted me to try out involves getting off the bike.

The field of Indigenous contemporary dance is growing rapidly in the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa (even as I write this—so exciting!). There are more and more Indigenous dance artists, scholars, and other leaders speaking and writing. I am proud to have been part of building Indigenous dance as a scholarly field and of producing Indigenous dance gatherings in generative ways. And yet, the longer I listen, the more I know I have not understood. There is generational trauma that Indigenous dancers have experienced because of colonization that I have not; there are vibrant “ontologies of Indigeneity” that some Indigenous dancers have been steeped in since childhood that I have not; there are radical visionings that Indigenous thinkers are tapping that I don’t have awareness of. Like Harjo notes of most non-Indigenous scholars, I don’t have “the experience of engaging and living as a member of a tribal nation.” I read stuff I wrote earlier and think, yeah, not quite, I wasn’t seeing the half of it then. And I’m sure I’m still not seeing the half of it now.

In October 2017, Rosy Simas is in Oakland performing her new work Skin(s), and we have a chance to catch up over brunch and a walk. In the past, she has cautioned me about my role as a non-Indigenous scholar speaking and writing on Indigenous dance and called me out for accepting an invitation to be interviewed and speak as an expert about her work.60 I have been thinking about this and about my role as a white settler scholar writing about Indigenous dance. Trained as a literary scholar charged with analyzing and interpreting texts, Simas’s refusal came as a surprise—I’d presumed that analyzing and interpreting the open-to-the-public Indigenous dances I’ve seen, and voicing my insights about them as a dance studies scholar with years of experience in the field, was not only acceptable but expected, even welcome, for the interest registered and generated (provided that I approached the dance work responsibly, with care, awareness, and respect). But ruminating on her reprimand, and in line with the discussions of refusal touched on earlier, I’d begun to think further about this, registering how Western academic researchers—including me—presuming our rights to interpret, and speak expertly about, whatever Indigenous art we see or idea we grasp, are operating in a mind-set of extractive coloniality, rather than omnipresent relationality. I’d begun to think about refusal as a generative practice with the capacity to interrogate structures of power and privilege and to illuminate other ways. I’ve also been thinking about how working from a base in relationality requires approaching everything, including someone else’s publicly presented art, within ongoing, continually renegotiated constellations of coexistence and reciprocity. And that these constellations look different in different relationships, and in different contexts, and also shift, as times and contexts change.

As Simas and I walk around the lake, I mention her comment from the Oyate Okadakiciyapi gathering I attended, about how she has asked two Indigenous writers to write about her work, because she wants Native writers to contextualize it. I tell her I’ve been mulling something over about how to address her work We Wait in the Darkness in this book—a piece I’ve seen performed in process, and in full, in multiple locations, and followed online, and engaged with through an exhibition of maps and letters and family photos and archival materials she curated at All My Relations Arts in Minneapolis. I love recalling this work, and musing it over, and thinking about it. But I’ve been listening to her and starting to see the signs painted on the streets where I live and reading and thinking about refusal and consent. What if, I ask her, instead of writing about We Wait in the Darkness (as much I’d be excited to put it in dialogue with Mishuana Goeman’s work on mapping, and Mark Rifkin’s work Beyond Settler Time, and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, to mention a few), I were to write about not writing about it? What if, following what I am filling in from listening to her over the years and hearing her refusals, if I were to not address her work myself as an interpreter of it but instead were to write about her work by discussing refusal—and by asking Native scholars to offer their insights on her work?

She tells me, yes, that could work.

Indigenous Dance Works/Indigenous Dance Making/Indigenous Writing

With Rosy Simas, Mishuana Goeman, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Daystar/Rosalie Jones

This final part of the chapter, as initially planned, includes sections on specific dance works. The print version has short sections on three specific dance works, with video links and short commentary for each from the choreographer, along with reflection questions. The online Manifold edition is to include several more.

Hearing Simas’s request for Indigenous writers to write about her work, and as part of this chapter’s overall focus on listening to refusal, in this section, I step back from writing directly on any of these works myself. Instead, honoring and extending Simas’s request beyond an application to her work alone, I forward each of these dance works in ways that center the voice of the dance artist as well as the perspectives of Indigenous commentators, rather than my own.

The first work is Simas’s We Wait in the Darkness. I have sought out commentary on it by Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman, who provides a short section she plans to develop later in her own publication. Included as well is a description of the work by Simas and study questions she reviewed. Video of the work in excerpts and in full, video of an accompanying installation exhibit Simas curated around the dance piece, and additional writing by Simas and other commentators can be found online.

Tanya Lukin Linklater’s how we mark land and how land marks us, the focus of the next unit, is a video dance work. As such, it is available to online viewers in full, rather than as documentation of a work meant to be presented before a live audience. The section on it includes excerpts from an interview in which Lukin Linklater addresses the work in relation to the Two-Row Wampum, national parks, Indigenous displacement, and enacting treaty, as well as study questions we worked out together.

The final unit in the print edition of this chapter focuses on a foundational work by revered matriarch of Indigenous contemporary dance Daystar/Rosalie Jones called Wolf: A Transformation. For this section, Daystar, who is of Pembina Chippewa (aka Ojibwe or Anishinaabe) heritage, contributes new writing reflecting on the piece, on its making (including the permissions she sought from the Ojibwe Anishinaabe storyteller/author on whose telling she based the work), and on its meanings. Accompanying this discussion are study questions we worked out together; online is video of the work itself, as well as a video in which Daystar talks in depth about the work and its making and invites other Indigenous artists who were part of its creation as mask makers, dancers, and costume designers, including the dancer to whom she has gifted the dance, to talk about their experience with the work.

I urge you to give yourself (and perhaps your students) time to study, explore, and experience these powerful works, while listening to what Indigenous artists and scholars have to say about them.

In the spirit of amplifying Indigenous voices, the Manifold edition also includes an appendix with essays by Indigenous dance artists, writing on their dance-making practices in relation to their Indigenous histories and communities. This includes an essay written by the director of Raven Spirit Dance, Michelle Olson, titled “Dreaming the River: Contemporary Dance Practice and Creating Cultural Identity.” In it, Olson describes her dance-making process in relation to her Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in history and community, among many other relationalities that fuel her and her dancers’ moves. Contributions by other Indigenous dance artists are to be added to this appendix of the Manifold edition over time.