Volume 7, Number 1-2, 2021 Performing (in) Place: Moving on/with the Land Guest-edited by Jenn Cole and Melissa Poll

EN:

Inspired by essay films meditating on time, travel and ceremony and informed by cinematic cartography, my short dance film, sing them home (2020), travels the specific bodies of water that form the route that Atlantic Salmon once journeyed as they migrated to Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory. Rooted in Nishnaabewin and Indigenous food sovereignty, toward a vision of the collective continuance of Michi Saagiig aki miijim, the film uses movement to activate sites in and on the shores of these lakes and rivers in the present while remembering the past and future of this waterway and her kin. This photo essay documents the film's journey and invites you to consider the making of this dance film as a prayer for the salmon to return.

EN:

In July 2020, I relocated from the territory of the Lenape in New York City, New York, to the ancestral homelands of the Coast Salish Peoples and the Lummi Nation and Nooksack Tribe, otherwise known as Bellingham, Washington. As a settler Canadian and "dependent" on my partner's US work visa, I wrestle with my precarious yet privileged footing here in the southern part of Turtle Island. As well, friends and family often ask me how I am "settling in." I deploy this very question as a provocation to ask, As a white settler, what does it mean to both responsibly unsettle oneself and "settle in" to a new home on stolen land? At the same time, due to the complexities of moving across the country during COVID-19, I feel unmoored and disconnected from my immediate surroundings. I am the most grounded when I am dancing. Working through the metatarsals of my feet, those bones that absorb shock and engender soft landings, is both a metaphor and a methodology for my practice-based research as a settler artist-scholar. Thus, through a piece that is part photo essay and part embodied reflection, I move with the land here on the west coast. With Whatcom Falls Park as my studio and soundscape, I will work through these questions and acknowledge the Coast Salish Peoples, the Lummi Nation, and the Nooksack Tribe, on whose land I currently move.

EN:

The degree to which authorized sites of commemoration such as monuments perpetuate deep-rooted practices of selective remembering and forgetting in settler states, and in doing so, help to entrench narratives and mythologies that mask ongoing colonial occupation and violence while denying Indigenous sovereignty, has arguably never been more evident. While official sites of remembrance undoubtedly shape the dominant imaginary, vernacular forms of commemoration exerted implicitly and explicitly in everyday life are also powerfully influential in the circulation of the nation’s ascendant ideation as what Audra Simpson calls “narration[s] of truth.” This paper will examine the ways “memoration,” an artistic/performance methodology I have developed through my inter-media art practice and scholarship, performs interventions into commemoration in the guise of public, national, and personal memory. As an adaptable and inherently relational, embodied and place-based methodology, memoration offers a framework of in Andrew Herscher's terms, “remembering otherwise”: one that activates a reckoning with the intergenerational responsibilities of being-in-relation, in my case as a white settler, on Indigenous lands that are at the same time “occupied” and unceded.

EN:

This essay is a thought experiment that explores walking’s potential in enacting recognition of Indigenous and territorial lands with the hope of rendering pedagogies of citizenship anew. More precisely, I ask whether walking can offer everyday lessons in unlearning Canada’s settler colonial frameworks of citizenship. This essay, attempting to respond to the question, also hopes to add to conversations in diaspora studies and the ways diaspora performance studies can learn from Indigenous recognition and care of territorial lands as relations and Indigenous methodological interventions to unsettle colonialism. Using a feminist and critical Muslim studies positionality, I bring together research in performance studies, walking methodologies, and politics of diasporic subjects in order to explore how walking as an everyday and citational form might offer diaspora subjects affective ways to home in on a relational politics.

EN:

How might diasporic experiences of loss and displacement aid immigrants in responding to and acknowledging Indigenous lands and territories? Drawing from my own immigrant experience, I retrace and reinvent my movement in Tkaronto through walking practices that recover memories of migrancy as a newcomer to the land known as Canada. Such memories can be useful sources for immigrants to consider their relationship to settler colonialism. Reactivating them through movement might elicit a new responsiveness to the land as well as recognition of its caretakers and their struggles. I reflect on the possibilities that such a practice of walking and thinking through embodied memories can open up for undoing the coloniality of thought that underpins migrant aspirations for “a better-than-survival kind of living” (Berlant) and that so often results in assimilation to, and participation in, a settler colonial state.

EN:

This paper is a meditation on the possibilities of walking performance as an embodied territorial acknowledgement. It discusses the problems of verbal territorial or treaty acknowledgements, and asks whether embodied territorial acknowledgements might overcome those problems. It asks whether settlers walking on the land can begin to enter into a kinship relationship with it, or whether they are locked into scopophilic and extractive ways of experiencing the land and are therefore incapable of seeing themselves and the land as sharing kinship ties. The paper’s theoretical discussions are grounded in accounts of walking performances the author has made in and around Regina, Saskatchewan, a city in Treaty 4 territory.

EN:

This article reflects upon two virtual reality experiences included in the Our Ancient Forests exhibition at the Sunshine Coast Arts Council: Sanctuary: The Dakota Bear Ancient Forest Experience and Tree Earth Sky. It works through questions about the use of virtual reality both as a means of visiting a wild place and as a means of moving audiences to environmentalist and anticolonial action. In doing so, it considers settler desires for deeper relationships with wild places and the more-than-human world and settler responsibilities within environmental and anticolonial movements.

EN:

In this forum, I bring a set of five questions about dancing with land to five contemporary dance practitioners based in and around the city colonially known as Vancouver, constructed on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəjˀəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil Waututh) First Nations. The artists featured include Michelle Olson of Raven Spirit Dance, Julie Lebel of Foolish Operations, Olivia C. Davies of O.Dela Arts, the OURO Collective, and Lee Su-Feh of battery opera. The questions build on my ongoing research (both academic and artistic) into the politics and kinaesthetics of site- or land-based movement. I seek to spotlight the grounded, refined, and body-based knowledge that dancers and choreographers cultivate in the articulation of their practice.