introduction INDIGENEITY AND PERFORMANCE

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Helen Gilbert
In a recent analysis of the (falsely) oppositional categories of the ‘indigenous’
and the ‘cosmopolitan’, Maximilian Forte argues that indigeneity ‘is a deeply
current issue, which, over the past decade, has relentlessly forced itself onto
social, political, and academic agendas across the planet’ (Forte 2010b: 35).
His observation is directed firstly towards anthropologists as part of a call
for research that follows new ways of ‘being and becoming indigenous’ in the
twenty-first century (Forte 2010a: 2), but the view that indigeneity underpins
contemporary debates of global importance has broad resonance across a
number of scholarly disciplines and in the material, artistic and ideological
domains they map. There has been a marked increase over the last ten to
twenty years in the visibility and reach of cultural and political networks
invested in indigeneity, especially in Latin America. Also, questions about
what particular rights that status might confer in relation to natural
resources, cultural practices, governance and sovereignty, to name just a
few contentious areas, have spread well beyond the confines of nation-states
tasked with the unfinished business of decolonization (Brown 2003; Shaw
2007). Indigenous identity formations, responsive at once to local con-
tingencies, global cultural flows and supranational bodies such as the United
Nations, have also become more complex and mobile since the emergence of
national and regional indigenous political movements in the 1970s. In this
newly reconfigured global context, indigeneity has accrued a certain
composite
and implicitly moral
character, at least in intellectual terms,

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interventions, 2013
Vol. 15, No. 2, 173
180, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.798467
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
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regardless of the acknowledged specificities of indigenous cultures in various
parts of the world. At its broadest scale, the concept now operates,
simultaneously, as a portmanteau category establishing commonality among
different peoples with distinct histories and geographies (Castree 2004: 153)
and a heuristic framework for thinking about that commonality in relation
to origins, affiliations and postcolonial redress.
With the increasing recognition of indigeneity as an important, if often
thorny, issue affecting political and cultural configurations on a global scale,
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efforts to codify the ‘indigenous’ have been both intense and intensely
1 The United resisted in a variety of fora. These debates, too extensive to rehearse here,1
Nations Declaration have tended to settle provisionally on flexible parameters that are sensitive to
on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples, the genealogical and place-based connections commonly marking indigene-
for instance, took ity, as well as to the fluidity of those connections as they are negotiated
over 25 years to across different contexts and moments in time. Joseph Roach (2009)
formulate before its
adoption in 2007,
succinctly describes this dynamic approach to cultural belonging, honed
not only because the not only in the political arena but also in the recent flowering of indigenous
rights it seeks to arts and letters, as ‘looking back while moving forward’. Performance is a
enshrine are
usefully elastic concept through which to explore such negotiations,
contentious in some
countries, but also particularly at the level of praxis. At one end of its spectrum, loosely
for lack of consensus following Judith Butler’s (1993) elaborations of performativity, is the notion
about who might of self-fashioning acts that contingently constitute subjects through the
count
or not
as
indigenous. embodied processes of enactment. Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel draw
on this kind of iterative performance (but in a process more deliberate than
the repetition of normalized acts underlying Butler’s theory) in their assertion
that being indigenous ‘means thinking, speaking and acting with the
conscious intent of regenerating one’s indigeneity’ (Alfred and Corntassel
2005: 614). At the spectrum’s other end are highly aestheticized acts of
performance, sensual but ephemeral, rehearsed and executed with an eye to
effect, inclined towards ambiguity and forged with/in creative semblances
rather than any putative reality. Between these two modalities, which are not
always mutually exclusive, are a great variety of other performative acts that
have also played a significant role in shaping contemporary formulations of
indigeneity. These range from roughly choreographed rights protests, to slick
Olympic pageants, to all manner of festival and ceremonial enactments.
Many such events encompass more than one register of indigenous
performance as individuals and communities go about developing specific
cultural and artistic projects, not least of which is to address the enduring
issue of (mis)recognition.
Mainstream postcolonial theory has had a great deal to say about
indigeneity as an evolving intellectual conceptualization but only a little
about performativity (beyond engagements with speech act theory), and even
2 The notable less about performance.2 Likewise, in the fields of both transnational and
exception here is regional indigenous studies, except in broad-ranging works such as Philip
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Helen Gilbert
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175

Homi Bhabha’s Deloria’s Playing Indian (1999) and Shari Huhndorf’s Mapping the
theorization of the
split between
Americas (2009), for instance, performance figures only marginally as an
pedagogical and analytical tool
or a focus for discussion
even though it permeates social,
performative aspects legal, cultural and political spheres, as ethnographers have long demon-
of temporality in the
strated. Analyses of indigenous performing arts, particularly film and
‘production of the
nation as narration’ theatre, are rapidly increasing in number and scope across the Anglophone
(1990: 297
9). settler nations (including the United States), but tend to circulate mostly
within their own disciplines rather than penetrating the broader currents of
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postcolonial interdisciplinary thinking. By comparison, contemporary dance

and music studies have been somewhat less nimble in approaching
indigenous works, often leaving their interpretation to anthropology and
ethnomusicology, even when their aesthetics are legible within performing
arts frameworks. Beyond the Anglosphere, performance studies as a
discipline focused on embodied expressive practices is yet without much
traction and its insights are seldom brought to bear on indigenous art forms.
The gathering pace of indigenous film and video production in Mexico and
other parts of Latin America may soon change that trend, though scholarship
in this field is still in its infancy. Recent indigenista protest movements in the
region are also ripe for performative analyses.
By bringing together essays that attend closely to performance and
indigeneity, as the two have been articulated in very specific sites and
genres, this special issue of Interventions hopes to yield new multimodal
insights into topics of perennial interest to postcolonial studies. These
include memory, embodiment, history and temporality, as well as the
provenance of oral and textual forms. How indigenous knowledges of
environments and events are gleaned or transmitted in particular places
across time is another recurring motif. Most of the essays are also concerned
at some level with the matter of representation
in both senses of the term

but the selection as a whole is much less about identity politics than about
the practical workings of indigeneity as a kind of sensibility in artistic,
political and social realms. The authors share an interest in the participatory,
phenomenological thickness of performance as a means of communication,
as well as in the material processes involved in its making. Whether dealing
with the performing arts, as most of the following essays do, or with specific
indigenous events or practices, the analyses tend to lead to, rather than
proceed from, theorizations informed by the different disciplinary perspec-
tives invoked. This focus on praxis treats performance not only as an
aesthetic medium but also, and expressly, as ‘a system of learning, storing
and transmitting knowledge’ (Taylor 2003: 16).
Communal memory, a key concern in many indigenous societies, builds
contingently from such knowledge systems, reiterating the embodied basis of
cultural transmission. Roach argues, in this respect, that analysing perfor-
mance allows us to fathom ‘the disparity between history as it is discursively
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transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its
consequences’ (1996: 26). Among the essays that take up the issue of
memory here, Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s contribution shows the ways in
which kinetic movements register and creatively transform that disparity.
She examines the work of First Nations dancer
choreographer Michelle
Olson, with an eye to probing connections between the physical impulses
from which the artist develops her performances, in a consciously intuitive
devising process, and the layers of memory sedimented in her body over
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years of engaging with both contemporary western and ‘traditional’

indigenous dance techniques. The memories Olson accesses through her
practice are not just personal but also intergenerational, providing windows
onto suppressed family histories. Something very similar can be discerned in
the expressive languages of the Canadian and Australian works discussed in
my own essay on Burning Vision and Ngapartji Ngapartji, each dramatizing
the collateral damage of nuclear warfare in remote indigenous communities.
These plays, I argue, excavate atomic history by way of communal memory,
realigning perception in the process. In so doing, they use performance’s
facility for materializing temporal and spatial connections in the brief
moment of the theatrical event to catalyse ethical, relational accounts of the
past as a shared basis for (multi)cultural belonging.
Film has proven to be an equally adaptable medium through which to
perform memory as a potent corrective to histories that discount indigenous
epistemologies. Therese Davis and Romaine Moreton’s essay reads
Whispering in Our Hearts: The Mowla Bluff Massacre as a documentary
modelling Aboriginal Australian ways of knowing in so far as it registers
phenomenological dimensions of a ninety-year-old story kept alive in place-
based oral and musical practices. In this film, the authors argue, the camera
captures affective elements of journeys and memory-based stories performed
in specific landscapes so that it effectively witnesses, in visual and aural
registers, what cannot be verified empirically: an apparently unrecorded
atrocity. Memory is also a motif in Charlotte Gleghorn’s account of
indigeneity in two fictional films about the colonization of the P’urhépecha
people in Michoacán, Mexico. Both works are seen to renovate the colonial
archive in aesthetic terms, albeit to different degrees, as they probe the
iconographies and mythohistories that have functioned to recruit indigenous
subjects into the nation-building discourse of mestizaje. Gleghorn is
especially alert to the porousness between history and memory and the
ways in which that relationality can be expressed, not just in the cadences of
indigenous languages but also through particular cinematic images and
collages. In this respect, she shows that film, like dance and theatre, is rich in
performative possibilities.
As several of the essays demonstrate, indigenous performance is readily
attuned to environmental phenomena and, in both artistic and social
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contexts, often works to make manifest multi-vectored webs of association

between humans and the non-human world, thereby situating water, land,
air and species as not just ‘enabling material factors for human existence’ but
also ‘participating agents of sociality’ (Campbell 2008: 21). Tina K.
Ramnarine’s essay turns our attention to modes of listening in cinema as
she traces sonic images of the sacred in Ofelaš (Pathfinder), making a case
for understanding the film as a repository of ecological knowledge. Under-
pinning this interpretation is an account of Sámi spiritual practices and
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performance traditions as they have evolved across centuries in dialogue with

colonial and postcolonial polar politics. Ramnarine also identifies a larger
sense of global interdependency embedded in the film, which she yokes to a
discussion of climate change in order to suggest the ways in which
indigenous acoustemologies might inform contemporary debates about the
environment. Angela Impey’s analysis of changes in women’s walking songs
in Western Maputaland over the last half-century likewise canvasses ways in
which performance enacts environmental sensibilities, but in this case the
research reveals a politics of land access that has fostered exogenous
conservation development projects, exiling indigenous groups from parts
of their Southern African borderland territories. Understanding musical
memory to be ‘transacted through motion’, Impey interprets the songs’
performances as spatiotemporal mapping practices that record the sonic
qualities of different places and historical junctures. These musical carto-
graphies mirror gendered patterns of mobility that testify, viscerally, to the
social and economic disruptions wrought by an insufficiently consultative
development agenda.
Approaching mobility and belonging through musical performance
prompts us to recognize in synesthetic terms what James Clifford has
described as the ‘different sites and intensities’ of ‘indigenous forms of
dwelling’, in which attachments to land are differently but persistently active
(2001: 481). My own essay takes up this issue via the concept of vertical
mobility as enacted in the condensed time-worlds of performances that
depict indigeneity as a long-term inhabitation of changing environments
through continual processes of localized adaptation. Shea Murphy’s insights
into the ways in which dance choreography encodes mobile versions of
indigeneity also illuminate the constitutive character of movement as a form
of social poiesis. In this respect, social and cultural experiences that are
otherwise resistant to articulation can be tracked through ‘genealogies of
performance’ that pay attention to kinesthetic vocabularies. In Roach’s
terms, such genealogies ‘draw on the idea of expressive movements as
mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered
by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in
the silences between them), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds not
prior to language but constitutive of it’ (1996: 26).
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The concept of performance genealogies has another inflection when
considered in terms of the long (and continuing) history of colonialist
representation approaching indigeneity as the ‘stuff’ of theatricalized
Otherness. As suggested by the perennial popularity of theme parks staging
3 Euro Disney in Wild West Shows and other ‘frontier’ dramas of their ilk,3 exoticism attains
France, to name just much of its power through the frisson of live performance. Stephanie Pratt’s
one example, stages
twice-nightly essay, written from the perspective of art history, traces an evolving mode of
reenactments of theatricalized display in the exhibition practice of nineteenth-century
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Buffalo Bill’s Wild painter, ethnographer and showman George Catlin, whose Indian Gallery
West Show during its
main tourist season. juxtaposed artefacts with performative illustrations of their use. Pratt
See Scarangella positions such display techniques in a liminal space between anthropology
(2010) for a nuanced and popular entertainment, noting how readily they were interpreted as
analysis of the ways
in which Native authenticating European ideas about Native Americans. It is partly such
American performers western genealogies of embodied (mis)representation that contemporary
have negotiated indigenous dancers, filmmakers and dramatists (with their various colla-
indigeneity in such
spectacles. borators) are working self-reflexively to address. Writing is not excised from
that recuperative project, but it is opened to different modes of visual
and
visceral
inscription. Shea Murphy notes one mode of performative writing
in Olson’s dance; Gleghorn discerns another in the filmic animation of
sixteenth-century Mesoamerican pictographs. As Davis and Moreton’s essay
also shows, Aboriginal documentary makers are likewise finding new ways
to overwrite the texts that have suppressed their sensory histories.
The expressive ‘doings’ of particular indigenous performances and the
insights and affects they generate, are not necessarily opaque to outsiders. As
performing arts, the genres of film, theatre, dance and music negotiate
indigeneity for at least two constituencies
their local communities and the
broader postcolonizing societies from which their audiences are drawn

while often building in modes of address that will speak to international
viewers as well. As social practices, indigenous performances may also have
much to say to a variety of publics, particularly policymakers, as Impey’s
essay illustrates. In these (mutually constitutive) realms, the artistic and the
social, we can grasp the import of what indigeneity seems to be doing,
performatively, only if we develop ‘a listening countenance’ (Moses 2010:
18), where listening encompasses a range of perceptual modes. Such a
countenance is essentially the subject of the final essay in this special issue,
Peter Kulchyski’s meditation on speech ethics at a Dene community meeting
about resource extraction in northwestern Canada. As part of the process of
attending and recording the daylong discussion, the author attends to the
particular protocols of embodied communication evident in the oratory.
What he finds is a spirit of listening that enacts mutuality and sociality in
public, political speech: a listening characterized by restraint, which in turn
enables the dialogue necessary to an ethical exchange.
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Ideally, it is this kind of reciprocity that performance, as a collective

practice, strives to instantiate. Nevertheless, as Elizabeth Povinelli (2002),
among others, has argued, the ‘cunning of recognition’
understood simply
as the political demand that the indigenous demonstrate their distinctiveness
in authentic (and thus anachronistic) terms that are legible to the multi-
cultural state
is a particular scourge for indigenous peoples attempting to
represent themselves, politically and culturally. Performance is no less
implicated in that process than any other form of representation, though it
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does have unusual power to register the contradictions of the moment. In this
respect, it is not just an isolated act but rather an interactive social praxis in
which the form and content of indigeneity is both responsive to history and
open to improvisation. Such radical contingency comes with no guarantees
but it can provide a space for creatively negotiating (across and within)
cultural differences.

Acknowledgements

This special issue of Interventions has developed from early dialogues among
the essays’ authors in a series of one-day workshops conducted to foster
interdisciplinary thinking about indigeneity and performance. I wish to
thank the European Research Council and the UK’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council for jointly funding these events.

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