TallBear, http://www.criticalpolyamorist.com/, text about podcast released October 29, 2018.
Dance scholars Ananya Chatterjea as well as Kate Mattingly and Tria Blu Wakpa have also written about these issues in relation to Tangen. See Chatterjea, Heat and Alterity and Mattingly and Blu Wakpa, “Movement as Medicine.”
The hoop dance’s transposition from the ground to an aerial form underscores the piece’s assertion of this recognizably “Native” dance—a healing dance that is relatively recent and often danced by young people—into new spaces and as new realms for this generation.
According to https://hyperallergic.com/449930/on-the-origins-of-they-tried-to-bury-us-they-didnt-know-we-were-seeds/, the phrase “they tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds” stems from a poem by Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos (Konstantinos Dimitriadis) from 1978 (translated into English in 1995) that was used by Mexican activists in support of the Ayotzinapa 43 (forty-three students who were forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially assassinated in 2013). Since that usage, it has been taken on by immigrant rights and other movements in the United States. Thanks to María Regina Firmino-Castillo for this reference. The line “take a stone in your hand and close your fist around it until it starts to beat, live, speak and move” is from a poem by Áillohaš, Nils Aslak Valkeapääs. Gaup describes Áillohaš as “maybe the most acknowledged and most talented artist/poet in Sápmi.” Facebook IM communication, November 27, 2021. For discussion of this line in Gaup’s yoik, see also https://350.org/songs-from-the-sami-a-yoik-for-the-climate/.
Facebook communication, July 2016.
Interlude/Pause/Provocation
Held in Peterborough from 2008 to 2012.
For a powerful discussion of “spectrality” in Lukin Linklater’s 2012 work In Memoriam, see Belcourt, “The Body Remembers.” Belcourt writes, “In Memoriam’s lost object is an Alutiiq-ness that could have been had the world not fallen apart, and the body is the medium through which it is invoked. I want, however, to risk also interpreting the dancers’ jolting lurches as responses to haunting, as if to be haunted is to be dealt blows to your body when it cannot contain the pesky drip-drop of social violence in the normal anymore. . . . This is what haunts me: knowing that there was once a world we could have loved in without the spectre of premature death stopping us in our tracks.”
Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, addresses quiet in relation to Black humanity but provides discussion of concepts around waiting, dreaming, the inner life, that feel relevant to the layers of survivance Lukin Linklater is performing here.
https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P3-73664850/a-living-heritage-the-alutiiq-story.
Goeman, Mark My Words, 120, writes of how “multiple scales of spatialities Native writers use in their work emerge out of broader social contexts that are dynamic, historical, and consistently engaging with the formation of tribal conceptions of human geography.”
Goeman, Mark My Words, 25.
Goeman, 33.
Goeman, 33.
Goeman, 27.
Goeman, 36.
Goeman, 120.
Audra Simpson, keynote address, “The Chiefs Two Bodies: Theresa Spence and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” R.A.C.E. Network Conference “Unsettling Conversations, Unmaking Racisms and Colonialisms,” fourteenth annual Critical Race and Anticolonial Studies Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, October 17–19, 2014, https://vimeo.com/110948627.
The Indian Act (1876 and still in force today) contained policies intended to control every aspect of “Indian” (those the Canadian government defines as having legal “Status”) lives so as to assimilate “Indian” peoples and terminate their distinctiveness as Indigenous. It disenfranchised Native women in particular, and among other gender-specific restrictions on movement, education, and sexuality, First Nation women with Status lost their Indian Status when they married a Métis or other non-Status man (while First Nation men with Status who married non-Status women did not). In 1985, the Indian Act was amended to address gender discrimination and to restore Indian Status to those who had been forcibly disenfranchised, though many other provisions, and ongoing effects and ideological retentions, remain. For more on gendered discrimination and the Indian Act, see https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/marginalization_of_aboriginal_women/.
For discussion of sexual violence against and murder of Indigenous women in so-called oil field man camps, see https://www.honorearth.org/sexual_violence_in_extraction_zones_past. For Canada’s 2019 national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIW) report, which showed a strong link between extraction zones and the MMIW crisis in Canada, see https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/.
See Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Think Chief Spence Is on a ‘Liquid Diet’? I Think You’re Ignorant,” Huffington Post, January 20, 2013.
Goeman, Mark My Words, 120.
See also https://afognak.com/. This brochure estimates that “between 2,500 and 3,000 Alutiiq people perished, primarily women and children,” in the Refuge Rock massacre (2).
3. Choreographies of Relational Abun-dance
See Rucha Chitnis, “In the Land of My Ancestors: Native Woman Stands Her Ground in Ohlone Territory,” https://truthout.org/articles/in-the-land-of-my-ancestors-native-woman-stands-her-ground-in-ohlone-territory/, October 12, 2015.
Welcoming at University of California, Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, August 2017.
Remarks made at Neo-Native: Towards New Mythologies symposium.
For discussion of languages as dormant, see Leonard, “Eradicating the e-Word.”
See TallBear, “Caretaking Relations.”
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 11.
Jung Soon Shim, “Neoliberalism and Contemporary Korean Theatre,” lecture, Interweaving Performance Cultures Center, Berlin, Germany, October 20, 2016. Shim speaks about precarity in Korea in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, its effect on the “880 Thousand Won Generation,” and the relation of these to theater practices in South Korea.
Pewny et al., “Editors’ Note,” 2.
Vallejos, “Subverting Precariousness,” 32–46.
Schuh, “Having a Personal (Performance) Practice,” 79–94.
Reynoso, “Democracy’s Body,” 47.
Several dance scholars have written compellingly on dance in relation to neoliberalism. Öykü Potuǧlu-Cook explores one local and global city, Istanbul, as its neoliberalist politics are negotiated through belly dancing, arguing that Istanbul relies on neo-Orientalism embodied through belly dancing bodies to aid in its gentrification project. Potuǧlu-Cook, “Beyond the Glitter.” Anusha Kedhar, focused on ways dance requires and fosters flexibility, turns her attention to Bharata Natyam practitioners in Great Britain, unpacking ways dance functions as a tool for negotiating the precarity of a neoliberalism that affects Indian immigrants with particular force. Flexibility, Kedhar argues, “is an embodied response to the contradictions and unevenness of globalization and a bodily tactic that allows racialized bodies to accumulate power and capital.” Kedhar also discusses the physical strain of this flexibility as well as “the limitations of the flexibility of brown bodies to move within the structures and strictures of state power.” See Kedhar, “Flexibility and Its Bodily Limits,” 24. Ramsay Burt, writing about European contemporary dance artists, proposes the commons as “an alternative to neoliberal politics and economics” for European choreographers (17), writing about “the needs of artists to find alternatives outside the centre ground of contemporary dance when the latter fails to be relevant to contemporary experience” (15). Burt’s focus arises from the neoliberal dismantling of structures that had served European contemporary dance artists (like public funding of the arts). He points to “knowledge about dance techniques and approaches toward movement” and “knowledge about improvisation and choreographic process” that dance artists share and exchange freely. “Contemporary dance artists share these common-pool resources as a knowledge common,” he writes. “These are the conditions of possibility in which processes of ungoverning can take place” (22). See Burt, Ungoverning Dance.
Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 1.
Tsing, 20.
Tsing, 21.
Tsing, 21.
Tsing, 20.
Povinelli, Geontologies, 9.
Povinelli, 28.
Povinelli, 15.
Yusoff, preface to A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
Wolfe, “Setter Colonialism.” Wolfe, among many others, also writes of “the shrinkage of Natives’ locally bounded subsistence stocks occurring in concert with, and being part of, the expansion of imperialism’s global networks” and of Native peoples “reduced to relying on a shrinking pool of indigenous resources whose reproduction had been severely hampered by settler encroachments.” Wolfe, Traces of History, 21.
Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” as referenced in Werry, “Oceanic Imagination,” 102.
Goeman, Mark My Words, 7.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars.
Wolfe notes not only how repeating settler “vanishing Indian” rhetoric sees Native peoples as continually just about to disappear but also how this discourse has systematically disarticulated from Native people the abundance of resources that Native technology, intelligence, creativity, and resilience have yielded. For example, Wolfe writes how, in the Americas, Natives taught European colonists to grow subsistence crops like corn and potatoes. Yet, despite these teachings and the technologies they demonstrated, colonists refigured the land as “pristine nature,” because (from a European perspective) only Europeans were seen as capable of making it bountiful. “In replacing Indigenous agency with that of the cosmos, the concept of nature enabled improvements effected by Natives to figure as serendipity. This is an enduring settler theme.” Wolfe, Traces of History, 23.
Martin writes of “the variable attributes of some underlying commodity” used in investments strategies that bank on risk, such that “different outcomes—a gain or loss, a default on mortgage payments—can be balanced or hedged against one another.” Martin, “A Precarious Dance,” 67.
Martin, 65–66.
Martin, 76.
Martin, 72.
Foster, “Why Is There Always Energy for Dancing?,” 23. Foster explains, “For Martin this coming together of people, actions, and purpose provided a palpable demonstration of what in Marxist social theory was referred to as ‘mobilization,’ the process through which people collectively determine their own future and move decisively toward it” (12–26).
Lloyd, “On the Right to Abundance,” 208.
Lloyd, 210. Lloyd continues, “Rather than redistribute, capitalism’s response to its cycles of over-accumulation has been to distribute consistently upwards to an ever-smaller percentage of the population. Out of potential abundance it creates the semblance of scarcity that it requires to create fear and induce discipline” (211).
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 112.
Candace Fujikane, “Rearticulating Race across Occupation and Settler Colonialism,” lecture, University of California, Berkeley, April 13, 2015.
Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 92.
Harney and Moten, 76.
Harney and Moten, 97.
“A feel, a sentiment with its own interiority, there on skin, soul no longer inside but there for all to hear, for all to move.” Harney and Moten, 98.
“Skin, against epidermalisation, senses touching. Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history and home, we feel (for) each other.” Harney and Moten, 98.
Harney and Moten, 99.
Harney and Moten, 99.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 102.
Martin writes, “From the pedestrian elaborations of Judson Church to the risk-taking pyro-technics of contact improvisation . . . postmodern dance, hip hop and boarding culture turn out to be more generatively derivative in their expressions, more assertive about what can rise from the ruins of progress, and are able to spin webs of creativity out of precarious conditions.” Martin, “A Precarious Dance,” 72.
Martin, 72.
Martin, 72.
Shea Murphy, “Gathering from Within.”
Shea Murphy, 170.
Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, xi. See also Shea Murphy, “Mobilizing (in) the Archive.”
Parker, “Certain Iroquois Tree Myths and Symbols.”
Recollet, “Gesturing Indigenous Futurities.” See also this description for a 2017 lecture at the University of British Columbia, hosted by David Gaertner: “Dr. Recollet centers the practice of ‘glyphing’ as the modalities, or forms that activate Sakihiwawin in multiple geographic scales, or levels (the night sky, the lake, river, or stream). Thus, an understanding of radical relationality through Sakihiwawin permeates through boundedness, to illuminate the overflow of lands, lives, and love. Jumping scales from terrestrial, subaqueous, and celestial modes of being acknowledges forms of radical relationalities as ‘kinstillatory’ connections between human and non-human entities.” “Dr. Karyn Recollet—Indigenous Radio Collective Speaker Series,” Facebook, October 12, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/events/281863898985580.
For more on the relation of these acts to Haudenosaunee land claims, see Shea Murphy, “Mobilizing (in) the Archive.”
See Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 84; Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 35. See also Million, “There Is a River in Me,” 31–32.
Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 142. See Rifkin’s discussion of duration, drawing on the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson, which treats time as “constantly in motion,” experienced “as part of a lived trajectory—a qualitatively shifting process of becoming,” Rifkin writes. “Bergson presents duration as the transition among qualitatively differentiable sensations such that they permeate each other in ways that defy enumeration,” he continues (22), layering this with work of feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s focus on collective experience (24). In this framework, grounded in sensory and perceptual traditions, temporal sensations—not timelines—orient collective experiences of time.
Johnson herself only discusses displacement and home in the video—not Indigenousness—and elsewhere describes it as “a performance/installation of dance, live music, storytelling and visual image connecting ideas of displacement, longing, and language to history, pre-conceived notions, architecture, and igloo-myth.” See http://www.catalystdance.com/thankyoubar/.
Emily Johnson, “The Thank You Bar,” YouTube video, 3:24, November 2009, http://youtu.be/APIZPPdQ8ig.
Emily Johnson, “#MNOriginal, Emily Johnson,” YouTube video, 9:11, February 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgA8103VJ_c.
For discussion of Niicugni, see Shea Murphy, “Dancing in the Here and Now,” 2017.
SHORE toured to Lenapehoking—Lenape territory, or what is today called New York City—during April 2015; to Homer, Alaska, in June 2015; and to Yelamu—the Ohlone land of San Francisco—in August 2015.
See Recollet, “Gesturing Indigenous Futurities.” In her discussions of “jumping scale,” Recollet draws on Laura Harjo’s presentation “Indigenous Scales of Sovereignty: Transcending Settler Geographies,” NAISA conference, Austin, Texas, 2014.
Personal conversation with the author, February 11, 2015.
Personal communication, September 11, 2015. Johnson explained that this spelling “is either because it used to be spelled that way which is totally possible, she [Johnson’s grandmother] didn’t know (she speaks but does not read Yup’ik because it—as a written language—came later), or she wanted a phonetic spelling because the bar is not in Yup’ik territory.” In the piece’s program note, Johnson explains, “The Thank-you Bar is named after the roadside bar my grandmother owned in Alaska, The Que-Ana Bar. Quyana means thank you and is the first Yup’ik word I consciously remember learning. She lived there. Going to grandma’s house was going to The Que-Ana Bar. It’s where my family gathered—aunts, uncles, cousins, and it’s where many of my memories come from—the fish cleaning hill, the smokehouse, the shirley temples, the pool table, the clams, the jukebox full of good, classic country music. . . . Making a dance about home and displacement, it seemed necessary to name it after this place, so tied to my memories, to my homeland, to language: Que-Ana, Quyana, Thank-you.”
See Billion Oyster Project, https://billionoysterproject.org/. The first “COMMUNITY ACTION” involved planting seedlings in Far Rockaway.
See also MacLean, “Ohlone Profiles,” 158–62, for a description of this.
See also MacLean for further description.
See https://www.wecycle-melbourne.com/blog/wecycle-host-shore-in-narrm-project.
See “Showcasing Creativity: Programming and Presenting First Nations Performing Arts,” Australian Council for the Arts, September 2016, http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/showcasing-creativity-programming-and-presenting-first-nations-performing-arts/.
See Recollet and Johnson, “Why Do You Need to Know That?”
General knowledge is sixty thousand years, although recent carbon dating suggests one hundred thousand years.
Martin, “A Precarious Dance,” 77.
Martin, 78.
Povinelli’s discussion of how “things exist through an effort of mutual recognition” and how “in turning away from each other, entities withdraw care for each other,” which she developed drawing on Karrabing analytics, propelled these formulations. See Povinelli, Geontologies, 28.
4. Choreographies of Relational Refusings
Colonial privilege entitled is a term from Kanyon Sayers-Roods (see later). Thanks to María Regina Firmino-Castillo for comments around reversing colonial privilege that helped clarify these thoughts.
Compelling discussion of this includes Paula Gunn Allen, who writes, “In the white world, information is to be saved and analyzed at all costs. It is not seen as residing in the minds and molecules of human beings, but as—dare I say it?—transcendent.” Gunn Allen, “Special Problems,” 382.
See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”
Million, Therapeutic Nations. We also talk about Tibetan Buddhism, in which she has a longtime practice, and Judaism and yogic philosophy, in which I have a longtime practice.
See Deborah Miranda on fragments, shards, and the collectivity needed for wholeness. She writes about how California Indians have many stories that “aren’t easy; they are fractured. To make them whole, what is needed is a multilayered web of community reaching backward in time and forward in dream.” Miranda, Bad Indians, 193. See also Recollet, “Gesturing Indigenous Futurities.”
See postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak (drawing on the writing of dance scholar Joanne Kealiinohomoku, among many others) in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 343, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s generative Decolonizing Methodologies. See also Wilson, Research Is Ceremony.
Tuck and Yang, “Unbecoming Claims,” 813.
Robinson, “Public Writing,” 98.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 92.
Harjo, 100.
Harjo, 108.
In addition to those referenced in the introduction, see “Research Ethics: A Source Guide to Conducting Research with Indigenous People,” Indigenous Geography, 2010, http://www.indigenousgeography.net/ethics.shtm, for many examples. A helpful download is available here: “Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies,” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, August 2019, http://aiatsis.gov.au/research/ethical-research/guidelines-ethical-research-australian-indigenous-studies.
Points of disconnect include how white settler-colonial concepts, focus on (and forms of) writing, lived experiences, and ways of knowing and being differ profoundly from Indigenous approaches to coming to understand. As just a few examples, Diane Knight, in Seven Fires, discusses oral traditions and storytelling as research methods; Kathleen E. Absolon, in Kaandossiwin, outlines Indigenous re-search methodologies and “Indigenous ways of searching for knowledge” (10); Laura Harjo, in Spiral to the Stars, describes Mvskoke production of knowledge “through feeling an experience, daydreaming, observing elements of the physical world, and sensing and intuiting relational energy, metaphysical energy, and entities” (84). Kwagiulth (Kwakwaka’wakw) scholar Sarah Hunt, in “Ontologies of Indigeneity,” asks, “How do we come to know that which is rendered outside the knowable world?” (31). See also Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Mihesuah, Natives and Academics.
For helpful discussion, see Simpson, “I See Your Light,” in As We Have Always Done, 175–90; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; and Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus.
Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 71.
Simpson, 69.
Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks.
Arvin, Possessing Polynesians, 201.
Arvin, 23. Using “regenerative refusal” as a frame for reading the visual art of Polynesian artists, and for contextualizing their arts’ critical reception, Arvin first notes the challenges the artists face in how their art is discussed in “canonical art criticism” (200). Her focus, though, becomes their delightful, incisive, and funny “refusal to participate in the production of ‘natural,’ ‘authentic’ Indigenous subjects who might be easily apprehended and utilized by either Western social scientific knowledge production or the Western contemporary art canon” (201).
Robinson, “Public Writing,” 96.
Robinson, 96–98.
Robinson, “Welcoming Sovereignty,” 7, 16.
Tuck and Yang, “Unbecoming Claims,” 814.
Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 175.
Tuck and Yang, “Unbecoming Claims,” 814.
Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 228.
Ogimaa Mikana is “a collective including the Anishinaabe artist Susan Blight and the Anishinaabe scholar Hayden King,” Robinson writes. “Ogimaa Mikana’s work visually reinscribes sovereignty across Anishinaabe territories by renaming street signs in Toronto with Indigenous place names, by ‘re-covering’ historical plaques with Indigenous histories, and by occupying billboards with untranslated texts.” Robinson, “Public Writing,” 95.
Robinson, “Welcoming Sovereignty,” 20.
For attention to Indigenous refusal in relation to discussions of “informed consent” but also “informed refusal,” see Benjamin, “Informed Refusal,” 967.
McGranahan, “Theorizing Refusal,” 321. For a helpful overview and discussion, see also Chazan and Baldwin, “Learning to Be Refused.”
Chazan and Baldwin, “Learning to Be Refused,” 2.
Tuck and Yang, “Unbecoming Claims,” 817.
Tuck and Yang, 817.
Tuck and Yang, “R-Words,” 223.
Thanks to Corrina Gould and the Reverend Deborah Lee for comments around being a good student (and a good guest) at Berkeley Shellmound prayer circle, September 13, 2019.
Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 231.
Hunt, “Ontologies of Indigeneity,” 31.
This stems from the relocation era when Oakland and San Francisco were hubs of urban Indian relocation and including the “Indians of All Tribes” Red Power movement and Alcatraz occupation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with their wide-reaching and continuing reverberations. I wonder about them as a form of what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls “Indigenous internationalism” (55) or ways Indigenous nations “create face-to-face relationships with other nations” (57) they visit, as she notes. Simpson, As We Have Always Done.
I discuss them with Kanyon Sayers-Roods, an artist-activist from federally recognized Costanoan Ohlone Indian Canyon in Mutsun Ohlone territory, but she isn’t sure who is doing them (these designs are different from the medicine wheel project that Navajo artist Tomahawk Greyeyes painted in the Bay Area in 2015, which were painted on sidewalks in clay and thus ephemeral; these are in paint, and I’ve been biking over them for years). See “Medicine Wheel Project,” Tumblr, https://medicinewheelproject.tumblr.com/. Kanyon Sayers-Roods, conversation with the author, Impact Hub Oakland, December 4, 2017, and Zephir, personal Facebook message to the author.
The Bay Area in 2017 is not Aotearoa, or Canada, where vibrant Indigenous presence is clearly marked and remarked in the daily public eye. This is starting to happen a bit more here, as place-names—Shellmound Street, Ohlone Way—register Ohlone relation to this land. In 2017, the Berkeley City Council agreed to put “Ohlone Territory” on Berkeley signage, which is a big deal in the United States, even in Berkeley.
This publication will “count” toward my promotion to full professor and contribute to the currency of my career, even as I do what I can to “pay it forward” to emerging Indigenous scholars, directing any funds it generates to support Indigenous dancers, and using any authority it garners, and other resources I have access to, to support Indigenous dancers and dance scholars. Thanks to Tria Blu Wakpa for discussion around this.
For discussion of “white body supremacy,” see Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands.
Over the past twenty years, I’ve been at many Indigenous-led discussions, talk-backs, and conversations, including at the Aboriginal Dance Program at Banff in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars, 89.
Robinson, “Public Writing,” 98.
Olson, conversation with the author, Medina Café, Vancouver, British Columbia, March 1, 2012.
Aboriginal Dance Choreographer’s Panel, Scotia Bank Dance Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia, May 2, 2012.
As just one example, dance maker Wendy Rogers, who is white and identifies with her Italian heritage, discusses her strategies for dealing “with the intermittentness of my situation and the scarcity of my resources” during a period of major shifts in her life. She describes practicing “the discipline of fragments” and instituting “del dia” daily exercises in her teaching, in which you “focus on a shard of something that carries—something! You don’t know what,” and working intentionally with impulses and fragments rather than long phrases, and waiting a long time to see where they lead. Rogers, “See What Happens,” public lecture, Univeristy of California, Riverside, November 16, 2016.
Silko, “Language and Literature,” 48.
As I’ve heard Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal say elsewhere, ancestors too. Royal, “Ārai-te-uru.”
In 2018, Maria Firmino-Castillo comes on as co-organizer of ICR.
For information about ICR, see http://icr.ucr.edu/.
The website to Emily Johnson/Catalyst dance’s Long Table and Durational Sewing Bee held at the Ace Hotel, New York, in early January 2017 notes, “Umyuangvigkaq is a place to gather ideas. Here we will recognize and celebrate indigenous people, artists, art, methods, and audience. We will stitch together a quilt of conversation, ideas and fabrics. We will acknowledge indigeneity as we work to indigenize the performing arts world and the world at large.” The event is structured, in line with practices used at Standing Rock, in such a way that the Indigenous of the territory are first to speak; Indigenous peoples from other territories are next, and then non-Indigenous. Tables are in a circle, with Indigenous peoples seated at the inner circle and invited to speak first, and with time and ways for those outside that circle to step forward and take a seat to speak as well, later on. Outside, sitting on the ground, people are quilting and listening. See http://www.catalystdance.com/umyuangvigkaq-ps122-long-table-and-durational-sewing-bee.
Cowles Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 5, 2017.
Sayers-Roods, conversation with the author, Impact Hub Oakland, December 4, 2017.
“When non-Native peoples seek out Native peoples, sometimes their colonial thought process is very consumeristic. There are times when Native peoples have been exploited or disregarded because a non-Native comes in and says, ‘I’m gonna talk to a Native,’ and that first Native says no to their inquiry, so that person then says, ‘Well, I still wanna do what I wanna do, let me find another one.’ Some people don’t know how to hear the word ‘no.’” Sayers-Roods, conversation with the author.
For more discussion by Sayers-Roods around these issues, see also Delilah Friedler, “A Native Activist on a Simple Way to Combat Land Grabs Like Bear Ears,” Splinter News, 2017, https://splinternews.com/a-native-activist-on-a-simple-way-to-combat-land-grabs-1821126991.
See https://docs.google.com/document/d/16aaQJ70h-SosvIMu9MuT8QBfa36P_IvvY3C3jKJfPGQ/ and https://www.grassrootsapothecary.org/ask-first.
In 2015, in anticipation of works by Simas and by Emily Johnson that had been programmed at the ODC Theater in San Francisco, ODC’s resident writer, Marie Tollon, contacted me for an interview. In that interview, we discussed how I came to research and write about Indigenous dance, what the works are doing that makes them Indigenous, and how the dances engage with time as layered, with memory, with trauma, and with “enacting particular Indigenous ways of being that are strengthening for the future.” When the piece came out, Simas wrote me a long email asking “about how academics can appear to be taking on the role of interpreter or translator of artistic work” and suggesting that “the fact that Marie is a European white woman interviewing a non-Native person (yourself) about Native artists” is problematic. Personal email to the author, August 2015. See https://thetripledogdare.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/a-compelling-way-of-understanding-the-world-a-conversation-with-jacqueline-shea-murphy-by-marie-tollon/.
“We wait in the darkness,” Facebook, November 2017, https://www.facebook.com/events/1944947235825267/1952192868434037/.
“How we mark land and how land marks us, 2017,” https://www.tanyalukinlinklater.com/images/how-we-mark-land-and-how-land-marks-us-2017-4.
See Christina Battle, “There Is Something in the Way,” essay for exhibition at Cold Cuts Festival, Dawson City, Yukon, 2018. See https://www.tanyalukinlinklater.com/blog/posts/13580/index.html and https://coldcutsvideofestival.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/tanya-linklater/.
Daystar writes that “Wolf has been learned/performed by students at Trent U, at Texas Women’s University when Daystar was in-residence, and by students at Trent University’s Indigenous Performance Studies program but initially by John Silversmith (Apache), and by John Jaramillo (Isleta Pueblo) while at IAIA, and most recently by Nanako Horikawa Mandrino in Rochester at MuCCC in 2019, with me as storyteller. Since 2008, the dance has been mainly performed by Daniel Fetecua, who is of mixed heritage from Colombia. She considers Daniel to be the ‘carrier’ of the dance into the future.” Daystar, personal email to the author, September 13, 2019. Descriptions are based on versions I’ve seen live (Brockport, New York, 2001 and Pomona, California, November 2016). This description is based primarily on the Pomona staging, with dancer Daniel Fetecua. Daystar, personal email to the author, November 3, 2019.
Daystar notes that the Mishomis book from which she worked the text and dance for this piece—book 2, published in 1976—was included, along with books 1 and 3, in the final and much-expanded version of The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway (Hayward, Wis.: Indian Country Communications, 1988).
Daystar is describing jiibayaabooz: Light in the Underworld, an Indigenous Performance Initiative in association with the Department of Indigenous Studies, Trent University, November 2013, http://www.daystardance.com/jiibayaabooz.html.
Conclusion
“White-body supremacy” is a formulation from Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands.
Many voices and words and experiences have led to the understandings in this paragraph. Echoing here especially loudly in my ears are words I’ve heard spoken by Rosy Simas (about skin and fascia, muscles and bones), Taj James (about the lies of separation), gina Breedlove (about this all not being fringe), Jack Gray (about radiance and love, reciprocity and transformation), and Allison Hedge Coke (about each of our voices carrying part of the whole). While these are ideas I’ve heard voiced in personal conversation or group discussion, Taj James’s articulations about “the world built around the lie of separation and supremacy” (230) can now be found in Kelly, American Detox, 225-45.
Ohlone leader Corrina Could has said, “If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you have to know that this place is full of magic. There’s movements that have come out of the Bay Area, like the takeover of Alcatraz, the American Indian movement, Indians of All Tribes, the Brown Berets, the Black Panthers, all kinds of technology and ideas have come out of here. But why would this bubble place be that place? Because our ancestors for thousands of years put down prayers on this land. This land is magic. It’s our responsibility to take care of this place in such a way. But, taking care of this place is not just for us to do. There are thousands of people that live in our lands now, and so now that you live in our lands, it is also your responsibility. Because this land also takes care of you. Those prayers that our ancestors put down for thousands of years also take care of you and your family.” Recording played at Jews on Ohlone Land (JOOL) action at the opening of a Contemporary Jewish Museum exhibit on Levi Strauss and the California Gold Rush, February 12, 2020.
Thanks to my JOOL community, especially Lauren Holtzman, for many discussions around “sacred reciprocity,” “right relation,” and the work of relational repair (t’shuva). See https://www.jewsonohloneland.org/about. Here, in Ohlone territory where I live, those of us who are not Ohlone can acknowledge our responsibility to the land by paying our Shuumi Land Tax (https://sogoreate-landtrust.org/shuumi-land-tax/). We can, when called, show up to Planning Commission meetings and organize letter writings and come to the West Berkeley Shellmound to join in painting and in prayer. You could do this as well, or be part of another decolonization/voluntary land tax/wealth redistribution Indigenous solidarity initiative where you live, following the lead of Indigenous leaders there. A few of many other (growing) land back/voluntary land tax Indigenous solidarity initiatives include Real Rent Duwamish (https://www.realrentduwamish.org/), the Mana-Hatta Fund (https://mannahattafund.org/), Klamath Land Back (https://www.klamathlandback.com/), and the Wiyot Land Tax (http://www.honortax.org/).
“Turtle Island” is “the name many Algonquian- and Iroquoian-speaking peoples mainly in the northeastern part of North America use to refer to the continent” (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/turtle-island). Walsh writes that “Abya Yala is the name that the Kuna-Tule people (of the lands now know as Panama and Colombia) gave to the ‘Americas’ before the colonial invasion.” Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 21–22. Thanks also to Marcelo Felipe Garzo Montalvo for discussion of this naming.
For discussions around transformation through recalibration, thanks, once again, to Jack Gray.
These understandings of the Anishinaabe medicine wheel come in part from teachings shared by choreographer Daystar/Rosalie Jones, who engaged with them through the teachings of Wikwemikong Anishnaabe elder Edna Manitowabi during the time they both were teaching at Trent University. Daystar shared these teachings with students at the University of California, Riverside on January 21, 2015, and again at a seminar at the Radcliffe Institute in June 2016. Daystar discusses these teachings more fully in the April 2016 “Indigenous Dance Today” Special Topics issue of the Dance Research Journal. For further discussion of Manitowabi’s teachings on the “4 Rs,” see Simpson, As We Have Always Done, 56. Thank you to Marrie Mumford, former Canada research chair for Aboriginal arts and literature for Trent and artistic director of Nozhem First People’s Performance Space there, for crucial course corrections regarding my engagements with these teachings and for reminding me—after she checked with Manitowabi about this—that if you engage with the teachings of the Anishnaabe medicine circle, respect always comes first. Mumford, telephone conversation with the author, November 13, 2017.