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Emergence and Restraint: Indigenous Performances during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2021
Extract
During the summer of 2020, I intended to make my second visit to Iqaluit, Nunavut, to speak with people involved in performance and climate science practices, engage in “co-performative witnessing” (methodology after Dwight Conquergood), and work to make my doctoral research useful to communities in Nunavut.1 Needless to say, that didn't happen. However, the limitations imposed by COVID-19 have also been opportunities for all of us in performance studies to renew our understandings of what it is we do. The pandemic has forced me to understand my dissertation project differently and to reassess the complex process of respectfully engaging communities to which I do not personally belong.
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- Special Section: Notes from the Field: Remembering Times of Crisis
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.
References
Endnotes
1 Madison, D. Soyini, “Co-Performative Witnessing,” Cultural Studies 21.6 (2007): 826–31Google Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380701478174, accessed 14 June 2021.
2 See for example Watt-Cloutier, Sheila, The Right to Be Cold (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2015)Google Scholar, and Todd, Zoe, “An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1 (2016): 4–22Google Scholar.
3 David Venn, “Environment Minister Rejects Calls to Investigate Dust from Mary River Mine,” Nunatsiaq News, 25 March 2021, www.nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/environment-minister-rejects-calls-to-investigate-dust-from-mary-river-mine, accessed 14 March 2021.
4 Jariel Arvin, “The Latest Consequence of Climate Change: The Arctic Is Now Open for Business Year-Round,” Vox, 22 February 2021, www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-latest-consequence-of-climate-change-the-arctic-is-now-open-for-business-year-round/ar-BB1dVaRi, accessed 5 March 2021.
5 Over the past century and more, US, Canadian, and European colonists have dispossessed Inuit communities of lands through various violent and coercive tactics, and at times forcibly relocated Inuit communities (e.g., the Hingitaq 53) in order to make strategic territorial land claims on behalf of colonizing governments, for whom “effective occupation” is a means to reserving legal rights to the northern polar region; Shelagh D. Grant, Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010), 7–24, 291, 420. Between 1950 and 1975 Canadian officials began intensely to control Inuit movement in the Qikiqtaaluk by forcing Indigenous families to occupy permanent settlements and enroll their children in often abusive residential schools, among other atrocities. This incredibly painful period in Inuit history was the subject of recent Qikiqtani Truth Commission (2007–10); Emma Tranter, “Canada Apologizes to Qikiqtani Inuit for Sled Dog Killings, Relocations,” Nunatsiaq (online), 15 August 2019.
6 Jeffrey Huntsman, “Introduction,” in Hanay Geiogamah, New Native American Drama: Three Plays (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).
7 Thanks to those coorganizers (Jenna Tamimi, Carla Neuss, and Farrah O'Shea), and to the Center for Performance Studies and others for the funding support.
8 See https://glamcollective.ca/ for more information and upcoming publications and initiatives. GLAM's work was recommended by esteemed gender studies and American Indian studies professor Mishuana Goeman, whose Critical Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonialism in the Humanities class I was fortunate to take.
9 Lynn Gehl, “The Ally Bill of Responsibilities,” www.lynngehl.com/uploads/5/0/0/4/5004954/ally_bill_of_responsibilities_poster.pdf, accessed 14 June 2021.
10 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2d ed. (London: Zed, 2012), 5.
11 “The more-than-human world” is a popular expression derived from David Abram's ecologically minded writing on phenomenology that seeks to disrupt hierarchies premised on human superiority; Abram suggests that humans are inextricably, constitutively entangled with the rest of the world, and that all manner of entities (living and nonliving) are important and have the capacity to be influential. Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997)Google Scholar.
12 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3.3 (2014): 1–25Google Scholar.
13 Simpson, Audra, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (2007): 67–80Google Scholar.
14 See for example “Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital,” ed. Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton, special issue, Public 54 (December 2016).
15 Clifford Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out,” New York Review, 22 October 1998, www.nybooks.com/issues/1998/10/22/, accessed 14 June 2021.
16 John M.H. Kelly and Laura-Lee Balkwill, “Research Involving First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples of Canada,” 10 May 2012, YouTube video, https://youtube.com/watch?v=zR61Gf1XH2A, accessed 14 June 2021.
17 Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, and Carla Taunton, “Transmissions: The Future Possibilities of Indigenous Digital and New Media Art,” in “Indigenous Art” special issue, Public 54 (2016): 5–13.
18 Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, speaking at “Rematriation and Indigenous Feminisms,” Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, 8 March 2021, https://he-il.facebook.com/179297255754356/videos/522545495397022/?__so__=watchlist&__rv__=video_home_www_playlist_video_list, accessed live.