Issue #52-53
Fall 2019
Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance
For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory. Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship.
Editorial team
Editor-In-Chief
Moriah Evans
Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán - Rosy Simas
Articles
Sovereign Movements: Building and Sustaining Native Dance and Performance Communities -- A Dialogue
Native presence in dance journals/performances; importance of multiple perspectives for intersectionality; advocacy; sovereignty; collective/communal art and action; artistic labor and institutions; Western and Native value systems
When we Dance: Decolonizing Movements Across Generations
Decolonizing mind and body; Resilience; Importance of understanding roots; sports, movement, dance, song, ceremony as medicine for the spirit; Oppressive/Abusive Schooling, Intergenerational trauma
This Place We All Inhabit: A Shared Kuleana
Natural habitat as Family of Life (Ohana); Responsibility for stewardship; Native Land ceded
ode to all the displaced cyber Natives, kellexils, snpesqwawsex
“I will do what I want and there is no force that can stop me”; Displaced cyber natives’ digital connections to their people; Salmon peoples’ way of life is disrupted...
Provocative Moves: Remembering James Luna
“Cultural Warrior”; Puncturing settler colonial scripts about Natives; Performance art as ephemeral and not a commodity; Using the body/yourself as the performance/piece
Breath of Wind
The Church Rock uranium mine catastrophe has lost its visible evidence but continues to impact the surrounding Navajo Nation through the wind that carries radioactive particles; historical amnesia; dust, objects...
Someday We’ll Be Together
Beadwork in clothing; animal figures; violins/violas; Medals; Bells; Textiles; “Purpose”
Dancing for Spirit, Family, Community, and Culture
The distinction between visual arts and dancing is not present in many communities. Both regalia and dance are seen as signifying family, nation, clans, and communities. Many younger Indigenous dancers...
Kin-dling and Other Radical Relationalities
Kinstillatory gatherings are cyphers that encourage the collective untangling of settler colonial choreographies of space-making. These gatherings hold the capacity for both heartbreak and joy, and the spaces in between....
How we mark land marks us
Relation of bodies to each other, relation to the land, a large white sheet, standing together, laying down together
A Conversation with Tanya Lukin Linklater
Treaty is central to the foundation of Canada, but it also existed among Indigenous people prior to European contact as a sharing ceremony. Treaty is part of a larger recognition...
Grandmothers Talking on the Shore
Two grandmothers sharing stories in a cabin on the lake shore. Shores as liminal spaces where world meet and inspire art. Images: symmetry, translation, oceans, mountains, towers, pics, space ships,...
Skins, Forms, Flows, Tones; Bodies of Water; The Cleansing After; Close Your Eyes and Listen; Listening with the Body
1) Skins like water tension give form but are also a boundary between bodies. We are linked by our water composition, but separated by the stories our skins contains (inherited...
Beyond the Border: Embodied Mesoamerican Transmotions
18 November 2018 The presence of natives on this continent is obvious, a natural right of motion, or transmotion, and continuous sovereignty; in this world, natives are neither exiles nor...
Longer Scores: Native Choreographic Turns, Curatorial Visions, and Community Engagement
In Morgan’s own artistic work, he feels he’s turned a corner from unconsciously embedding Hawaiian identity into his “contemporary dance” work to directly addressing his identity through his work (Pohaku)....
Provocation and a Traveling Practice
Provocation A Travelling Practice looks at the Samoan design principles and ancestral knowledge held within the landscape and context of the contemporary keyboard. The keyboard becomes a crossover site that...
No Es Un Sueno
*This essay was commissioned by the Walker Art Center and published March 6, 2017, as part of its Artist Op-Ed series: walkerart.org/magazine/series/artist-op-eds* it was prophecy that cut the path for...
Exile: Vision Quest at the Edge of Identity (excerpt); Language to Visions (excerpts); a poet lost in translation
Exile: Vision Quest at the Edge of Identity (excerpt) wind wilding my hair the horse underneath me running abandoning the earth in flight hoof beats crowning the open ground steady,...
Voiceover Text for Videos (Listen; Exorcizing America: Building Lines of Communication; Exorcising America: Table Exercises; Exorcising America: Water Safety
LISTEN this is a true story stories are part of each other like water dipped out of water you can look away but everything that happens still is if it...
Exorcising America: Survival Exercises
Oh Nenié:iere' ne Aierén:nha' ne Aiakónhnheke' gasanieẋ daa.itnagóowu (to be recorded in Kanien'kéha & Tlingit, subtitled in english) When practiced mindfully, these exercises can promote physical, emotional, and cultural surv
Responses to Weave from Native Community Writers
A note from Heid E. Erdrich who invited Native community members in Minnesota to respond to open rehearsals and workshops during the creation of Weave: One thing I have learned...
Matao: Queerly Navigating Indigenizing Creative Practice
Ethel Marie Williams si Nånan Constante Tobias Alcantara si Carmen Marie Alcantara- Mafañågu gui' giya Tåno' Josefa 'Pai' Anderson Camacho Manggåfan Che' Taotao Felix Manggåfan ña, yan Vincent Jeffrey Anderson...
The Naming: Ka Ana Tuk Amuk; Alcatraz Reunion
The Naming: Ka Ana Tuk Amuk for my sister/friend Mineweh Deep, she said. Not in a flaky way As in 'cool.' Nor like we did in the 60s looking for...
Neither White Nor Surface: A Dialogue Between the Spaces of Dance, Indigeneity, and Adoption
"These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us...
Polynesian Talk Story: Indigenous Pacific Dancers and Choreographers in Dialogue
This is an abridged transcription of a longer three-hour conversation that occurred on June 15, 2018 in the NYC AIDS Memorial Park at St. Vincent's Triangle in Manhattan. Anthony Aiu:...