Dancer. Teacher. Choreographer. Writer. Passionate Amateur Mime and Mask-Maker. Wannabe Puppeteer. Founder, Director of Daystar: Contemporary Dance-Drama of Indian America. Acknowledged ‘pioneer’ of native modern dance USA. My father's insight: One day you will realize that you were blessed to be a descendant of the original peoples of this land.

To me, life is essentially movement, and much of my journey has been living so that I may dance. Now, as a woman of color confronting disabilities as well as heightened awarenesses in my post-cancer reality, I dance to live; my dance has become a functional ritual for the continuance of all of life. I believe that art in some of its highest forms can be healing, thus I create dances to sustain health, harmony, and balance of all forms of life and interconnected relationships—the dance of ecology.

How to describe my experience? Some Indigenous peoples have prescribed, specific protocols around introductions, but this is not the case where I'm from. Or, if it was this way in the past, we've lost the knowledge of those introductory protocols. I respect that we should give space to those who have Indigenous ways of introducing themselves. As an Alutiiq woman who lives in a kind of diaspora from my island home of Kodiak in Alaska— and my villages of Port Lions and Afognak—I don't always know how to describe my experience. I am an artist. I live in Canada. I make dance, video, photos, texts.

I am a performer working primarily as a choreographer. My approach to dance making is multi-faceted – I design immersive containers for performance using sound, textiles, film, and paper.

Kia ora, tenei te mihi kia koutou. Warm greetings to you all. My culture shares ‘tikanga’, a way of doing, a conceptual framework based on notions of ancestral continuum and the passing down of codes, which embed land, sea, and sky within our consciousness. As the descendants of oceanic navigators, we as contemporary Maori still follow ancient practices of mapping to situate and connect place to person. In our traditional greeting, I would recite my ‘pepeha’—an oratory statement that places my ‘mana’ (power, authority) beneath the status of a tribal mountain, of our river, of our canoe (from our first navigators) of our meeting house (acknowledging the name of our first ancestor). Finally after all of these many genealogical citations, only then would we say our own name. Our name is always last, because we humbly do not put ourselves first. The land and all that has come before us is first and so it shall be for the next generation and the one after that. When Maori greet each other we constantly listen to find connective histories. Most likely we are distantly related and in doing so, it balances the space between where we may find mutual cooperation. In times long gone, these recitations would sometimes mean the difference between life and death, love and war. Reciprocity went both ways, and intertribal trauma inflicted upon one generation could be rebalanced in the next, perhaps killing, perhaps intermarriage. Contemporary Maori now deal with balances of other torn and shredded histories. But we are blessed with the knowledge that what was broken before, can and should be restored for the next. Tihei Mauriora. Let there be life.

I'm a choreographer and I make performance installation. I am from a very small town on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. I'm Yup'ik on my father's side, and my Alaska family is from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. I share this because it's where I'm from, and it's also where my work is from: the physical place of Alaska, and the confluence of my heritage and performance work.

This dialogue between artist and dramaturg documents the creation of Dee(a)r Spine, Sam Mitchell's adaptation of the Yaqui Deer Dance, performed on Kumeyaay territory at the University of California, San Diego. Weaving reflections on dance, dramaturgy, and methodology, this article posits that dancing offers a pathway to the repatriation of Indigenous memory and kinship, a way to honor the trajectories of those whose connections with their communities have been interrupted by settler-colonialism. Dancing as a repatriation methodology, we argue, carves a healing space of sensate self-representation that centers on Indigenous forms of knowing and leaves no one behind.

This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago.

This article focuses on the work of Squamish dance artist S7aplek (Bob Baker) and the ways in which the assertion, negotiation, and enactment of Chiax (Squamish protocol) is vital to his artistic process and performance. Unceded Squamish territory includes the lower mainland of Vancouver, Howe Sound, and the Whistler corridor in British Columbia. Through an analysis of two of S7aplek's collaborations, I argue that his practice affirms Squamish land rights, epistemology, and hereditary privileges among diverse audiences and collaborators. Grounded in Chiax, these assertions of sovereignty are an embodiment of politics and self-determination that I refer to as dancing sovereignty.

This article explores Vancouver-based multi-media collective Skookum Sound System's Ay I Oh Stomp's (2012) mobilization of “decolonial gesturings” as they create a future imaginary attentive to the past, critiquing the present, and venturing into the beyond. These gestures activate Indigenous futurities through traditional style Kwakwaka'wakw dance and choreographies of sea travel, popping as a “street dance” of holds and releases, and the mobilization of digital polychromatic shifting and looping. I illustrate how the video is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, and how it remixes dance, movement and gestures that “jump scale” out of colonial cartographies.

This article meditates on the interconnectedness of the making and meaning of an Indigenous contemporary dance work that draws on intergenerational Jicarilla Apache basket weaving practices. Rulan Tangen choreographed the piece, performed by Anne Pesata, which is inspired by Pesata's lived experiences as a Jicarilla Apache woman and fifth generation basket weaver. Tangen—who identifies as mixed culturally, including Native, Polynesian, and European heritages—founded and directs Dancing Earth: Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations, an intertribal company which originated in 2004. Tangen created the piece in February 2014 to honor Pesata and other Indigenous women leaders. The choreographer's commitment to undertaking projects that respond to Native elders' contemporary concerns and dancers' interests also guides its themes. Alongside music, the piece uses recorded voiceover that Pesata created and spoke. The voiceover makes transparent Pesata's familial connections with basket weaving and other Jicarilla Apache epistemologies and practices. The dance also elucidates relationships between basket weaving and Pesata's movements throughout, culminating in the creation of a figurative basket. According to Pesata, the dance “tells the story of the journey that you go through in making a basket from start to finish.”

During her tenure as Trent University's Canada Research Chair, Marrie Mumford created the Indigenous Performance Studies program and redefined her research goals as “Naadmaagewin … The Art of Working Together in Our Communities.” Anishinaabeg grandmothers in the United States who participate in the Mother Earth Water Walks around the Great Lakes requested the creation of a work about water. The journey began in 2011 at Trent, with Rulan Tangen working with student investigations that led to the creation and production of a work-in-progress. This new work developed into a site-specific work in 2012 and intergenerational workshops that resulted in the creation of a major new work that has since been performed in Santa Fe, New York City, and New Zealand. This article charts the journey of this original work on behalf of the act of clean water.

In this piece, co-director of the Ohlone Profiles project Neil MacLean relates experiences from his personal involvement over the last seven years producing Ohlone, Miwok and Pomo dance in San Francisco. Maclean offers an account of the renewal of Ohlone dance since the 1970s emphasizing how space for renewal was created by the Red Power movement and is activated by Ohlone, Miwok, and Pomo dance group leaders. MacLean argues for increased support for Indigenous culture from the city of San Francisco.