Moderator: Selena Couture
Location: Zoom Room B
Online Session
“Oh, to confound Justice with Laws!”: Imagining beyond settler colonial time in Beth Piatote’s Antimony
Indigenous artists-scholars have long urged settlers to go beyond performative utterances, “beyond [the] settler present, beyond colonial sovereignty, and beyond the human” (Stewart-Ambo & Yang 27). To do so, they ask that we first situate ourselves in our own stories and that we truly contend with the past and present and confront the “white ignorance” (Mills 247) behind which many of us have had the privilege to hide before we think of presenting ourselves as trustworthy co-conspirators in the radical reimagining of the structures that organize our living together. This paper reflects on an attempt at such “a relational turn” (Carter 186) through a ten-week undergraduate course at the University of California, San Diego. It focuses on the sustained collaboration between the students, myself, and author Beth Piatote (Nez Perce) whose play Antikoni, a superb Nez Perce adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, was central to the class. This article meditates in particular on the research and reflection that led the students and myself to enter in a deeper and more reciprocal embodied relationship –the beginning, perhaps, of relational turn– with Antikoni and its author, but also with UCSD, and its history on Kumeyaay land. This article reflects on receiving a story –that is, being entrusted with it– as ways to activate settler accountability and it documents how the students and I chose to reciprocate this gift by preparing and performing a staged reading as a way to listen to, reflect on, and begin to respond to Indigenous voices invested in thinking beyond.
Julie Burrelle, University of California – San Diego
Julie Burelle is a professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec (Northwestern University Press).
Working Title: Playing in (the Eighth) Fire without Getting Burned
Encounters at the Edge of the Woods (2019) is a devised show—commissioned by Hart House Theatre to open its centenary and to mark one century of theatre-making on Indigenous land while excluding Indigenous voice. The creation of Encounters necessitated the curation of fluid spaces in which Indigenous participants and non-Indigenous allies would be able to address the history of ongoing colonial predation and consider a tangled and delicate project of relational repair. This paper considers the process of relationship-building and intercultural collaboration in the wake of many valiant (albeit, infelicitous) attempts to forge efficacious Eighth Fire productions—attempts that predate Encounters by as many as four decades (see Nolan). In this, I hope to contribute to existing scholarship around such collaborations and to begin to address Melissa Poll’s call for “studies that articulate and compare protocols within Indigenous-settler rehearsal processes” on Turtle Island (394).
References
Nolan, Yvette. Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture. Playwrights Canada Press, 2015. 118-122.
Poll, Melissa. “Towards an Eighth Fire Approach: Developing Modes of Indigenous-Settler Performance-Making on Turtle Island.” Contemporary Theatre Review. 31:4. (July 2021). 390-408.
Jill Carter, University of Toronto
Jill Carter (Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi) is a theatre practitioner and researcher, currently cross appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies; the Transitional Year Programme; and Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.
Shining Light on the Indian Hospitals: Reawakening Languages Through Theatre
The play Scenes from the Nanaimo Indian Hospital by Dr. Laura Cranmer is based on her three year stay at the Nanaimo Indian Hospital as a young child. While federal colonial laws greatly constrained Indigenous bodies and lives by corralling whole populations into federal institutions, such as residential schools and Indian hospitals, these spaces became meeting places for the great diversity of unique languages specific to their traditional territories. In this play, the Indian hospital is now re-imagined to be the confluence of the island’s great linguistic diversity embodied by three young girls—Dorothy Myth representing the Kwak’wala, Esther Williams representing Hul’q’umin’um, and Mary Robins representing Nuu-Chah-Nulth—whose growing friendship in the hospital’s Ward B consists of delight in language comparisons while sinister undercurrents are revealed in dialogue and action between the medical staff. This play script is the foundation of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant (co-applicants Drs. Amanda Wager and Laura Cranmer) to support the translation of the Hul’q’umin’um’, Nuu-Chah-Nulth, and Kwak’wala Languages by fluent Language Experts, who are Elders, from each language family, as well as to support the hiring of language learners, who are also new actors, to be coached in the pronunciation, teachings and exposure of their languages.
Amanda Wager, Vancouver Island University
Amanda Claudia Wager is a Canada Research Chair in Community-Engaged Research/Professor of Education at Vancouver Island University. Of Jewish Ashkenazi ancestry, born in Los Angeles and raised in Amsterdam, she embraces learning languages and creating art as cultural advocacy. Her research focuses on community-led art projects and participatory arts-based methodologies.
Laura Cranmer
Laura Cranmer is the daughter of Pearl Weir of Old Masset, David Cranmer of the ‘Namgis First Nation in Alert Bay, and raised by her grandparents, Chief Dan Cranmer and Agnes Cranmer. Laura’s research interests include Indigenous latent/semi-speakers seeking to increase their proficiency, arts-based research and Indigenous language reclamation research.
Daisy Elliott, Vancouver Island University
Daisy Elliott (Snuneymuxw/Musgamagw) holds a BA in Indigenous/Xwulmuxw Studies and is doing her MA in Community Planning at Vancouver Island University. She is the Crisis Line Manager for the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, the mental health support at rehearsals and performances and the Nurse Faith actor, a Kwak’wala speaker.
Ann Hayamxsala’ogwa Woodward, arc: a Centre for Art, Research & Community
Ann Ha̱ya̱mxsa̱la’ogwa Woodward (Finnish/Kwagu’ł/Tlingit/English) holds a BA in Indigenous/Xwulmuxw Studies from Vancouver Island University, where she is currently the Research Centre Coordinator for the arc: a Centre for Art, Research & Community. Ann is a Kwak’wala language learner playing the role of Tsunuk̓wa, a legendary giantess.