Acknowledgments

It is a daunting task in any book, but particularly in a book about relationality, to acknowledge the relationships through which the book has come into being. So many have been part of this endeavor, contributing energy, knowledge, wisdom, patience, critique, support, joy, and love to it, that even as I write this, their energies and generosity overwhelm.

I am humbled by the dance artists with whose work the chapters in this book engage, for all they have put forward into the world and all the lives they have enriched. Thank you, Jack Gray, Rulan Tangen, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Emily Johnson, Rosy Simas, and Daystar/Rosalie Jones, for what you do, for the many conversations and draft reviews, and for sticking with this project through its long gestation. I am honored to have created this book in relationship with each of you. Thank you to the many other dancers and dance makers I have come to know who have also been dancing resurge-instances of Indigenous worlds for these past decades and whose work likewise infuses these discussions in deeply generative ways, including Michelle Olson, Louise Potiki-Bryant, Santee Smith, Yvonne Chartrand, Jeanette Kotowich, and Charles Koroneho.

I am grateful to those who have offered written contributions to this book, and whose words also appear in its pages, as marked throughout. Parts of chapter 1 are cowritten with Jack Gray; Andrew and Diane Kendall, Toni Temehana Pasion, Tia Reihana-Morunga, and Deborah Cocker also contributed commentary to it. Chapter 2 is interwoven with writing from Rulan Tangen. The interlude includes commentary, and a poem, offered by Tanya Lukin Linlater. Chapter 4, in addition to discussions about their own work by Rosy Simas, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Daystar/Rosalie Jones, includes commentary on Simas’s work by Mishuana Goeman. Finally, Michelle Olson’s essay “Dreaming the River: Contemporary Dance Practice and Creating Cultural Identity,” written in relation with this project and intended as a companion to it, can be found in the Manifold online edition at manifold.umn.edu.

I am pleased to acknowledge the support I received from a Fulbright Senior Scholars Fellowship to Aotearoa in 2009; from a fellowship to the Interweaving Performance Cultures Wissenschaft in Berlin, Germany, in 2015–16; and from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) Center for Ideas and Society (CIS) Committee on Research and the UCR Senate’s Regents Faculty and Academic Senate Research Fellowship programs.

Many people have read parts of this project, at various stages, and provided feedback, critique, and encouragement. Susan Leigh Foster and Maile Arvin read an early first draft as part of a UCR CIS (re)Draft manuscript workshop; they and others at that discussion helped guide its development and shaping. Conversations with Marrie Mumford at a crucial juncture, relaying input from Edna Manitowabi, helped redirect its structure. Tria Blu Wakpa, Julie Burelle, Arabella Stanger, Mique’l Dangeli, Marcelo Felipe Garzo Montalvo, Cynthia Franklin, and María Regina Firmino-Castillo provided incisive comments on the Introduction, in all or in part, at various stages. Thank you, Robyn Kamira, Tia Reihana-Morunga, Holger Hartung, and Cynthia Franklin and the baleful postcoloniality crew at Biography, for comments on all or parts of chapter 1, which would not exist without Jack Gray, whose passion and brilliance permeate this book. Jack, what a pleasure to write (and play) with you. Deep gratitude to the many who contributed energies into chapter 2, including compelling critique and badass courage from Howaste Wakiya (aka Dr. Tharon Weighill), my former PhD student and always teacher; early engagement and encouragement from Michael Tsosie; helpful commentary from Dakota Camacho; clarifying input from María Regina Firmino-Castillo; and incisive editing from Shannon Wray, who read multiple drafts of this chapter through multiple reworkings, as well as the entire book manuscript near completion. Shannon, your sharp and gentle capacity to delight at paragraphs while also pinpointing exactly where editing is needed and the care and love you radiated toward it and toward me have strengthened this book in immeasurable ways. Thank you, also, to reader Thomas DeFrantz for supportive critique, insightful questions, and specific suggestions that helped strengthen final revisions.

I am moved by the many beloved colleagues who have not just seen to it that I had space to do this work but insisted on creating that space for me and on continually nudging me into it. Susan Foster, your mentorship, support, and friendship have propelled this project throughout its many turns. Sharing this long journey in relation with you across time and continents has been one of its deepest pleasures, and I am humbled and grateful for all you’ve offered. Thank you, Lisa Wymore, for finding me office space to write this book when you didn’t have to and for making sure, in more ways than one, that I had keys to use it. Thank you to those many who, over many years when this book was coming to form, so generously and warmly shared their So Cal homes with me during my itinerant work–life juggles. Thank you to the many UCR dance graduate students I’ve worked with over the years, for the lively exchanges in seminar rooms, lecture halls, and studio spaces; for all the knowledge, questionings, clarities, excitement, laughter, and love you have shared; and for all you have taught me. Thank you, Joel Mejia Smith, for your dedicated work as chair of our department, which made it possible for me to finish. Thank you to my other brilliant and fierce colleagues in the UCR Department of Dance, who are all engaged in making other worlds: María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Imani Kai Johnson, Anusha Kedhar, Anthea Kraut, Luis Lara Malvacias, taisha paggett, José Reynoso, Wendy Rogers, Linda Tomko, and Sage Whitson. I am honored to work alongside you.

Thank you to Sinjini Chatterjee and Rosalia Lerner for helping prepare the manuscript; to editorial assistant Zenyse Miller and copy editor Holly Monteith for your eagle eyes; to David Fideler for the interior design; to Daniela Blei for indexing; and to the rest of the University of Minnesota Press production team. Special thanks to Jason Weidemann for your clear-eyed belief in this project and in me and for holding that line between firmness and flexibility with such good grace.

As I discuss in chapter 4, the ideas in this book have been cultivated in longtime relation with, and course correction from, many brilliant and generous people—through dialogue, conversation, direct commentary, shared work, public presentations, webinars, workshops, on-the-side remarks, and the many other ways ideas circulate and build. I have tried to acknowledge as many of these people and moments as possible in the text and notes throughout; I also reiterate here how much this book has been built in personal and discursive relation, through engagements with others, over many years, such that while what it forwards builds from my perceptions and understandings, its offering is not in forwarding these as “my” ideas. I acknowledge those many, seen and unseen, who have pointed out pathways and encouraged me onto (or away from) them. I am grateful for the forces of strength and clarity these nudges have stirred up, built up, and infused in this project and in me.

Thank you to the many artist-scholars, friends, healers, and helpers whose comments and conversations have nourished so many parts of this project. In addition to those I’ve already named, many others, over many years, through various modes, have sparked and supported the intellectual, emotional, practical, and spiritual work that a project like this takes. For one- or many-time offerings of care and insight, thank you, Jacob Boehme, gina Breedlove, Snowflake Calvert, Ananya Chatterjea, Carmel Cochrane, Terri Ripeka Crawford, Stephen Cullenberg, Mique’l Dangeli, Bélgica Del Río, Stefan Donath, Merindah Donnelly, Rachel Fensham, Anne Flynn, Javier Fresquez-Stell, Jessica Friedman, Corrina Gould, Holgar Hartung, Kurt Hirsh, Lauren Holtzman, Melissa Hudson Bell, Paul Jahn, Torsten Just, Robyn Kamira, Samantha Kanofsky, Cary Littel, Evagelina Macias, Neil MacLean, Michael Madrigal, Susan Manning, Michelle Olson, Cuauhtémoc Peranda, Michelle Raheja, Karyn Recollet, Laura Rosensweig, Christine Şahin, Kim Sargent-Wishart, Kanyon Sayers-Rood, Susan Schweik, S. Shankar, Lorene Sisquoc, Tyler Stallings, and Clifford Trafzer. Special thanks to Taj James for so many insightful and heartfelt conversations. Directly and indirectly, the words and energies of each of you have guided me through this project, inspiring, challenging, protecting, supporting, deepening, and now resonating through it.

Many other friends supported this project by asking me about it while also gleefully enticing me away to play and by talking and listening in ways that helped open my heart. Special thanks to Judith Benson, Michelle Berlin, Leslie Bowling-Dyer, Bruce Burgett, Francine Contreras, Elizabeth Gessel, Anya Grundmann, Kelli King, Kerry Krouse, Sam Lapoma, Nancy Lipsitz, Lauren Stuart Muller, Francesca Royster, Maddalena Rumor, Cynthia Schrager, Marjorie Stamper-Kurn, Irene Tucker, Mark Ward, Frank Wilkes, and—with delight and gratitude for shared pleasure in words—Rob Zeiger. Special thanks to Cindy Franklin for being there always, with a full heart, sharp mind, and ready willingness to talk through the latest, be it same-old same-old or spanking new and in need of unpacking.

Thank you to the Adeline Iyengar yoga community for reminding me daily, and for decades, of the knowledge our bodies hold and how interesting it is to work with and of the powers of joy and practice in collectivity. A shout-out to Adeline’s “yoga and racism” group for keeping at the hard work with such steadiness. Thank you to the JOOL (Jews on Ohlone Land) crew for the joys and challenges of striving, with such passion, to live in right relation with where we are living now.

Thank you to the lands around me, for holding me and listening to me and being so present and kind: to the redwood trees and forest streams on Lisjan Ohlone land for your calming quiet and to the salty ocean waves at the Albany Bulb for your regular reminders of the rhythm of crashing forces beyond my control; to the Yuba River on Nisenan land for your clarity and rush and capacity to cleanse; to Cupsuptic Lake on Abenaki land for your silvery scent and the stillness of your depths; to the low-lying rabbits and desert sage on Cahuilla/Tóngva/Serrano land for your reminders of life always stirring underfoot.

Special love and gratitude go to my family for living this project with me so fully and over such expanses of time and place. Thank you, Gwendolyn Shea Murphy Graveley and Bridget Murphy Brown, for offerings over the long haul. Kenny Shea Dinkin, you have traveled with me across this earth in many directions during the coming-into-being of this book, supporting our lives, taking care of our children, and making this family–work–life juggle possible and exciting. Thank you for all you’ve done to make this book possible; for all the music and games and friendships you have brought into our lives; for sharing life’s journey with me along smooth and bumpy roads, straight ahead and divergent; and for your love and support as we both move on, in ongoing and courageous relation, with change as the only lasting truth. Jim Murphy and Caroline Shea Murphy, thank you for fostering years of “land-based learning” not as a thing but as a way of being, and for your ongoing love, support, and interest in this book and its focus. Thank you, Coda and Zira, for not giving a hoot about this book but really wanting me to do something other than sit at my desk all day.

My darlings Casey Shea Dinkin, Rickie Shea Dinkin, and Katara Shea Dinkin, I dedicate this book to you with love and joy and pride and gratitude and admiration. Thank you for being part of this project; for coming with me to so many continents, on so many outings, to so many dance shows and circles and sunrise ceremonies and prayer protections and plantings and placard paintings; and for traveling with me on these pages as you have been growing up, charting your own paths and ways. Thank you for being without me while I taught and organized and did the work this book has required. Thank you for your curiosity, your questioning, your courage, your willingness to register and rail against inequity, your insistence on rest and play. You are amazing, and you are also enough: may you hold those knowings always.

I also dedicate this book, with love, in memory of Michael Tsosie. Michael’s deeply perceptive empathetic capacities—and hilarious sharp registering of exactly what he perceived—brought a breathtaking combination of depth and levity to my life, as to those of many others. Thank you, Michael, for the many hours spent talking, directly and indirectly and with such brilliance, about ideas that circulate through this project; for reading early versions of parts of it with care; for whispering delightful commentary in my ear about the dancing you brought me to see; for seeing and affirming the goodness you saw around you, including in me; and for reminding me, as you did many times, of the infinite divinity that resides in the lines of connection that spark between friends.