The participation of the Git Hayetsk Dancers is sponsored by the Federation for Humanities and Social Sciences EDID Initiatives Fund.
Location: Chief Dan George Theatre
Please join us at this performance of internationally renowned Northwest Coast First Nations mask-dancing group, led by Mike Dangeli, and Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm (Dr. Mique’l Dangeli).( UVIC Faculty of Fine Arts Art History and Visual Studies Assistant Professor).
Git Hayetsk Git Hayetsk means “people of the copper shield” in Sm’algya̱x. They are an internationally renowned dance group specializing in ancient and newly created songs and mask dances. Their dancers are from diverse northern Nations including Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Haisla, Haida, and Tahltan. All of whom live in the unceded territories of Coast Salish peoples, colonially known as the Greater Vancouver Area, the Fraser Valley, and Victoria. Working collaboratively, Mike and Mique’l taught three generations of dancers and created a large body of new songs, dances, masks, and regalia. Git Hayetsk performs at private ceremonies and public events in urban and rural communities throughout Canada, the US, and abroad. Some of their major performances were held at the Gibney Dance Center in New York, the National Art Centre in Ottawa, the National Museum of the American Indian in New York and Washington DC, UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Hobiyee T’samiks edition at the PNE Forum, the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival at the Anvil Centre, among other events and venues. Their international engagements have included Austria, Malaysia, Germany, Japan and Australia.
Biographies:
Mike Dangeli is of the Nisga’a, Tlingit, Tsetsaut, and Tsimshian Nations. He grew up in his people’s tradition territory in Southeast Alaska and Northern British Columbia. Mike is a renowned artist and carver. His work is collected and exhibited throughout North America and Europe. He is a singer, songwriter, and dancer. In partnership with his wife Mique’l Dangeli, Mike leads the Git Hayetsk Dancers – an internationally renowned First Nations dance group based in Vancouver, BC. He has carved over 50 of the masks performed by their group.
Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm (Dr. Mique’l Dangeli) is born and raised in Metlakatla, Alaska – Annette Islands Indian Reserve, of the Ts’msyen Nation. She is a dancer, choreographer, Sm’algya̱x language learner/teacher, and curator. Her work in Indigenous visual and performing arts focuses on protocol, sovereignty, resurgence, decolonization, Indigenous research methodologies, critical curatorial studies, repatriation, and language revitalization. She is an elected board member of the Native American Art Studies Association. Her current book project focuses on the work of Ts’msyen photographer Benjamin Alfred Haldane (1874-1941), who opened a studio in Metlakatla, Alaska in 1899. As one of the youngest advanced Sm’algyax (Ts’msyen language) speakers and teachers, Mique’l is devoted to teaching her language in community-based and university-accredited classes, curriculum development, and mentoring learners and educational staff in their process of language acquisition and co-creation of pre-K to high school curricula and programs. From 2016-2021, she taught Sm’algya̱x at the University of Alaska Southeast, the University of Northern British Columbia, ‘Na Aksa Gila̱k’yoo School (an independent First Nations K-12 school located on the Kitsumkalum Reserve), Kitsumkalum/Kitselas learners group, and in other programs in Northern BC and Southeast Alaska. She has also organized and facilitated Sm’algya̱x grammar intensives for advanced learners with fluent first-language speaker Velna Nelson and linguist Dr. Margaret Anderson. Mique’l is an active member of many online Sm’algya̱x learners groups and is one of the founders of Raising Sm’algya̱x, a nursery rhyme and early education-focused online group for parents, grandparents, and caregivers to learn and sing in their language together with their little ones. She also served as a Sm’algya̱x Mentor for the First People’s Cultural Council’s Mentor Apprenticeship Program. Mique’l’s most recent Sm’algyax project, she is co-creating Sm’algya̱x curriculum with speakers and teachers, Shu Gayna (Donna May Roberts) and Ahl’lidaaw, using the Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling Method (TPRS).
Mique’l served as the Director of the Duncan Cottage Museum (DCM) in Metlakatla, Alaska from 2007 to 2012. A historic house museum, the DCM is the former home of a missionary who brutally oppressed Ts’msyen cultural practices in her community. The methodology Mique’l co-created with community members to empower their people, language, and culture while supporting their healing through decolonizing the DCM was featured as a “Museum Success Story” by the Alaska State Museum in 2011. Mique’l also designed and implemented the strategic plan to aid DCM’s recovery from decades of collection mismanagement, which led to its grand re-opening ceremony in August 2010. She organized and facilitated the museum’s first public programs. She continues to work with and for her community as the curator of the Healing Art Collection—the largest collection of contemporary Ts’msyen art in Alaska—on permanent display at the Annette Island Service Unit. She has also served on curatorial teams for exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of History, Minneapolis Museum of Art, Newark Museum, Idyllwild Arts, Bill Reid Gallery, American Museum of Natural History, Columbia River Maritime Museum, National Museum of the American Indian, and Museum of Ethnology in Geneva, Switzerland. Mique’l’s life-long immersion in the dance practices and ceremonies of her people and neighboring Nations along the Northwest Coast is foundational to work as an art historian.
For over twenty years, she has shared the leadership of the Git Hayetsk Dancers with her husband Mike Dangeli, who is a carver, singer, and composer from the Nisga’a, Ts’msyen, Tlingit and Tsetsaut Nations. From 2014 to 2016, she served as the Protocol Consultant for the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance in Toronto. During that same period, Mique’l was an artist-in-residence at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver where she curated “Ancestralizing the Present,” a major dance event focused on building allyship that supports Indigenous resurgence, self-determination, and sovereignty through Indigenous-led and protocol-based collaborative practices. In 2023, Mique’l was an international dance artist-in-residence with Marrugeku, one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed Indigenous and Intercultural dance companies. During her monthlong residency in Gadigal Country (colonially known as Sydney), she shared her choreographic process in practice-focused dance labs with international dance artists from across the pacific and gave several presentations on Git Hayetsk and dancing sovereignty. She was also a scholar-in-residence at the Powerhouse Museum where her collection research focused on First Nations dance histories. Her scholarship has gained significant currency among dance artists and curators in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia, which led to the University of Sydney’s Power Institute inviting her to a keynote on Dancing Sovereignty and the role of Indigenous dance in Art History. This can be viewed at:
