2009
University of Arizona Press
Wilmer’s volume is an important contribution to the cultural studies literature bridging traditional and modern Native American performance, specifically in the context of contemporary North American society. Raising issues of mythology, authenticity, embodiment, leadership, community, co-optation and innovation, the collection of essays offers a satisfying span of theories and practices to help readers explore the vitality, power and implications of a range of Native American arts experience, primarily focusing on performance art/theatre and media. Whether the authors consider the misshapen productions of the colonizer or the reframed aesthetics of First Nation artists, the diversity of practices is fascinating and detailed. The collection’s interdisciplinary theory-making about the functions of these aesthetic experiences as tranformations of oral tradition and Native experience is both persuasive and innovative.
Arguably the greatest challenge for Native American communities today is the paradoxical struggle to preserve tradition while adapting and growing within a transforming socioeconomic multiculturalism. The writers in
Native American Performance and Representation
articulate many ways this paradox is performed in plays, theatre and film. In addition to self-representation and the connections with the
Red Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the contributors also look at the ways First Nations peoples have been represented by non-Natives in different cultural contexts. The book’s scope is a useful base for important conversations about the tensions around the evolution and transformation of First Nation presence in both aesthetic production and in the contemporary imagination.
I was particularly interested in the ways themes of authenticity, empowerment and leadership percolated through the essays. Canadian Native modern dance innovator
Daystar/Rosalie Jones notes that community-based dance performance can offer “supportive leadership that would in turn stimulate [Native youth’s] own abilities to become leaders of a new generation of First Nations’ peoples” (35). Shelley Scott argues that self-identity, autobiography and one-person shows are common because these stories assist in the healing process of performer and audience, “out of a need to say something about native experience, not to educate people about spiritual ways but to remind and state that these practices are still alive – they are necessary for the healing of our people”(125). Indeed, Ric Knowles’ essay on theatrical interventions remembering the rape and violent disempowerment of Native women attest to the importance of “re-membering” or restoring women’s power “as agents of anticolonial and anti-imperial resistance and healing” (137).
Most authors persuasively argue that this heightened sense of possibility through performance comes from creating a ritualized, communal space in the arts to share the stories that can restore the power of the First Nation’s rich history of survival and struggle. Sources of inspiration for the First Nations artists profiled come from a variety of places, from ancient oral tradition as well as family stories and popularized myths with non-Native (and often offensive) overlays. From the bodies of performers to the masks deployed in performance and the images of visual and media artists, these scholars and the artists they describe are engaged in redefining authenticity as a process of self-invention, beyond “the buying and selling of authenticity” by the cultural tourist industry (Bryant-Bertail, 43).
There is a great deal of value in deconstructing colonialist imagery and mythology and throughout the collection the Pocahontas myth serves as an articulately historicized example of the necessity for displacing “the colonizer’s sterotypes and reclaim the images of Native American women for the women themselves, to rebuild identity, and to restore wholeness among the Native people” (Lyytinen, 87). In a Disneyfied culture, the artists with the courage to challenge, transform and reject the narratives that make them invisible are well worth exploring, although Monica Mojica’s excellent work is cited in many of these articles as a core example, and I would have liked more attention paid to others engaged in the same project.
Appropriately, the most attention is paid to innovations by First Nation’s artists. In Julie Pearson-Little Thunder’s essay about Red Earth Performing Arts Company, she uses Diana Taylor’s pivotal theory that embodied practices create an “act of transfer” to carry ancient cultural content into a modern and distinctly Native theatricality. She argues that
Body Indian, a play about alcoholism, embodied historical consciousness in such a way that audiences experienced performances as a kind of testimony, breaking the fourth wall and communicating its message with physical immediacy (121). In a separate essay, Jaye Darby notes that Hanay Geiogamah, the author of
Body Indian, created his work to generate “the living power of a vision for a community, [enacting visions on stage] intended to motivate this generation and their descendants to continue their rich tribal legacy in the face of enormous adversity” (167).
One of the great strengths of First Nations performance and art traditions is that this adversity is overcome, at least according to these scholars, with a great deal of humor, from the sheer joy of playfulness as healing embodiment to the ironic transformative power of the trickster. Kristin Dowell, in her essay about trickster aesthetics in the work of Mohawk filmmaker Shelley Niro, notes that trickster characters and humor is “a metaphor for Native cultural survival [in] aesthetic strategies of Native media” (213). Her ambitious and carefully theorized article does a good job of connecting the ways the humor of the trickster’s transgressive “embedded aeshetic”(212) gives artists and audiences access to media’s visual sovereignty as they struggle for Aboriginal sovereignty and cultural survival in their activism.
Aesthetics seem to fundamentally provide a way for old stories and old ways to be transmitted to a new generation of leaders, from a source Anne Kirby-Singh calls “a shared body of myth, legend and memory” (225) and Monique Mojica calls “the stories I carry because they have been passed on through my blood, encoded in my DNA” (98). After reading
Native American Performance and Representation,I am even more persuaded that sharing, transforming these First Nation stories offers a community crucible for creative empowerment, cultural survival and social change.
Reviewed by Carol Burbank, Union Institute and University
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