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Indigenous Performance in Oceania: Affect, Sociality, and Sovereignty
Get PDFHow are affective regimes of colonialism, such as the discourses and sites of memorialization, recognition, tourism, and climate change, challenged and negotiated within Oceania? What is at stake in these formations of colonialism and the ways they have been addressed by both Pacific nations and Pacific scholars? One powerful way to address these questions, I argue, is through the examination of contemporary Indigenous performance. This project examines politically informed Indigenous performance in Oceania that includes various elements of contemporary and traditional dance and ritual, installation, performance, and spoken word poetry. In my examination of these performances, I analyze performance archives, which include costuming, program notes, photographs, and other ephemera, as well as the affects, aesthetics, sound, movement, and embodiment of the performances. Through my readings of these archives and performances, I argue, Oceania performance politicizes the relationship between affects, bodies, and environments through innovative uses of movement, space, and corporeality. Affectively overlapping and blurring boundaries between bodies, this Indigenous corporeality articulates alternative notions of sociality that require thinking through what it means to be of Oceania, and what a self-determining Oceania might look like. Many of these intentional modes of community and belonging, or, what some scholars call sociality, importantly question the ways in which colonial ideologies of gender and sexuality operate within Indigenous movements for self-determination and sovereignty. Thus, I argue, Indigenous performance intervenes into the affective regimes of colonialism by imagining and creating inter-Indigenous socialities in Oceania that at once move beyond colonial demarcations and practice sovereignty in ways that are expansive, inclusive, and grounded in Indigenous epistemologies
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Artistic Expression in the Crossroads of Los Angeles: Adornment, Beautification, and Guerilla Jewelry
Get PDFABSTRACT OF THE THESISIndigenous Artistic Expression in the Crossroads of Los Angeles:Adornment, Beautification, and Guerrilla JewelryBy Damien Monta�oMaster of Arts in American Indian StudiesUniversity of California, Los Angeles, 2016Professor Mishuana Goeman, ChairThe intended purpose of my thesis is to, initially, explore the transformation of the cultural functions of traditional Native American artwork and jewelry occurring today. In addition, I will define the concept “Guerrilla Jewelry” in the particular context which I have applied the term by presenting existing figurative and literal representations relevant to my work. Furthermost, I will present an argument distinguishing the correlation between Indigenous Art and Guerrilla Art
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Rotiskenrak�te: Violence and the Anti-Colonial
Get PDFThe past several years have seen the emergence of Indigenous film and music production among more mainstream audiences. Interestingly, several of these recent films and videos have centralized violence as a primary theme or plot device. While violence in Indigenous media has generally been represented as happening to Indigenous people, these films and videos have reversed that logic to represent Indigenous women, in particular, enacting or threatening violence as acts of retribution. Approaching Indigenous cultural production as a primarily political form of media, my dissertation, Rotiskenrak�te: Violence and the Anti-Colonial considers the relationship between violence and subjectivity formation, exploring expressions of violence or threats of violence as retributive acts that demonstrate the performer’s transformation of subjectivity. I assume a colonial subjectivity forming the basis of each main character’s identity at the outset of each narrative in order to expose the way violence often acts as a productive representational form that refuses colonial ideologies and the continuation of colonized subjectivities. My dissertation pays special attention to the representation of subtle shifts in self-understanding that takes place as characters/performers decide on, plan, and enact violence upon settlers participating in settler state structures upholding efforts to eliminate Indigenous people through various forms of settler violence. Understanding cultural production as having the capacity to reflect an anti-colonial representational practice in a settler colonial context, these forms of narration, moreover, embrace a logic of anti-colonial pleasure where the viewer experiences satisfaction at the representation of violence enacted in response to colonialism. Watching performances and reading literature that represents violence as an effective form of preservation which speaks to a future yet to be determined pushes the viewer/reader to reevaluate the role violence plays within Indigenous cultural production and our sovereignty and self-determination struggles. It, also, represents the potential representational violence holds as an anti-colonial ideology that pushes imagination into an Indigenous futurity that negates the assumption of a settler colonial future
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Policing, Incarceration, and Dispossession: California Indians and Carceral Statecraft
Get PDFPolicing, Incarceration, and Dispossession: California Indians and Carceral Statecraft examines the interconnected relationship between conquest and the formation of the carceral settler state in northwestern California, centering the experiences of my people, the Hupa. Policing, Incarceration, and Dispossession is an interdisciplinary critical Indigenous studies project which traces the carceral logics of genocide, surveillance, containment, and removal across different sites of conquest, demonstrating their endemicity to settler state formation. In northwestern California, military forts, settler domestic space, and the bordertown are sites of conquest through which the occupying settler state enacts carceral violence against Indigenous peoples as a strategy of ongoing dispossession and statecraft. Centering northwestern California in my analysis reveals that Indigenous dispossession requires a sustained carceral structure that enables the expansion of the state’s capacity to discipline Native resistance. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on the prison-industrial complex and addresses the understudied intersection of carceral violence and colonial conquest in California. Centering this region in my analysis of the carceral settler state also makes visible abolitionist genealogies of California Indian resistance. My analysis of conquest and carceral statecraft enriches the history of the prison-industrial complex with the stories of California Indian peoples who continue to resist state practices of genocide, surveillance, containment and removal. Stories of California Indian resistance challenge their erasure and shed light on the carceral experiences of Native peoples living under settler state occupation. Ultimately, I argue that ongoing California Indian dispossession is intimately linked to the development and expansion of the carceral settler state in northwestern California
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(Re)writing and (Re)righting California Indian Histories: Legacies of Saint Boniface Indian Industrial School, 1890 to 1935
Get PDFCalifornia Indians histories are interwoven from oral accounts of our ancestors’ hardships and triumphs, intertwining experiences of lost and concealed culture, traditions, and perspectives on our past, bound together by generations that have overcome adversity through endless resiliency, directly tying Indian people to our ancestors’ experiences, Indigenous knowledge systems, cultural connections and familial bonds. One overlooked narrative in California history is that of the Mission boarding school experience. California Indian boarding school literature continues be dominated by the Sherman Institute, and there remains an absence of perspectives of California Indian students attending Saint Boniface Indian Industrial School. Cross referencing archival documents, oral histories, and family photographs, this thesis provides a narrative of California Indian Mission school history by exploring how descendants of former students are (re)writing and (re)righting histories. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how descendants of one family from Sahatapah, California have overcome the loss of familial bonds and cultural connections to reclaim their California Indian heritage
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Colonial Order and the Origins of California Native Women’s Mass Incarceration: California Missions and Beyond
Get PDFThis thesis begins to explore how understanding settler colonialism is significant to understanding and dismantling the prison industrial complex (PIC). Using the historical dehumanization, racialization, gendering and criminalization of California Indians as a lens reveals the way Native women specifically have become entrapped by a legal system that gives impunity to those who enact violence upon Native women but criminalize behaviors that are often associated with the trauma of victimization. I begin with the arrival of the Spanish in 1769 and closely examine the way the monjeríos, the room in every mission that locked young girls and women up until marriage, functions as a site of gendering and racialization through their imprisonment and specific conditions. Building off of that work and culling from newspaper sources, the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians formalized and codified the criminalization and carcerality of California Indians through the federal government, the state, and local communities. This specific time period marks a shift from mission and Spanish control to one of conquest by law and criminalization, which begins a period of jurisdictional law designed to leave Native women vulnerable to settlers. Later, adding to the complex matrix of jurisdictional injustice imposed on California Indians through The 1850 Act, was The Major Crimes Act, Public Law 280, Oliphant v. Suquamish, as well as other laws and policies, all which reinforce the gendered entrapment of Native women. The paper concludes by looking at the work of two California Indian women, Stormy Ogden (Pomo) and Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen) whose voices have illuminated how the historical legacies of settler colonialism continues to impact Native women today. Their voices are significant tools to begin to dismantle the PIC through sharing stories of survival
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Decolonizing Moby-Dick: Native Centered Readings with Classroom Activiites
Get PDFThis thesis performs Native centered readings of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and suggests classroom activities that may prompt discussions of Native sovereignty. This paper utilizes a critical framework rather than a multicultural one that generally does not address the unique aspirations of Native peoples. This critical approach includes showing students how power is embedded in readings of texts, how different readings of texts evince vastly different understandings, and how creating texts of their own may be a tool for combatting oppression in their own lives. Students will also see colonialism in a variety of places that they may have taken for granted: in education, in literacy, in mapping, in tourism, and even tattooing. Teachers must make their best efforts to learn how to see the American literary canon from Native eyes if they are to create an anti-colonial environment for all of their students
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The UCLA Fowler Museum & Collaborative Repatriation: An Analysis of NAGPRA Compliance Working with California Indian Tribes
Get PDFMuseums and archaeology are forever entrenched in the legacy of American colonialism. Early American anthropologists established their careers by studying American Indian songs, stories, kinship systems, food, material culture, languages, and bodies. Established in 1901, the University of California, Berkeley’s anthropology department began funding archaeologists’ excavations of California Indian graves against Native American requests. But the1960’s saw an emergence of social justice activism including the Native American Repatriation Movement (NARM), demanding the return of all Native ancestors and cultural objects stored at museums nationwide. As a result of NARM and the work of Native American and Indigenous activists, lawyers, students and allies, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990. Working collaboratively with tribes for decades, the UCLA Fowler Museum is widely regarded as the premier example of a successful repatriation approach within the University of California (UC) system. To date, the Fowler has repatriated nearly all Native American human remains in its collection, and continues to work to bring the last ancestors to their communities. In this thesis I use archival research to explain the history of repatriation at the UC, California Indian resistance and how UCLA differs from other UC’s in its repatriation approach. I examine two NAGPRA case studies at the Fowler Museum to explain how UCLA and the Fowler took a different approach to NAGPRA, bringing more ancestors home than any other UC
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Pride and Property: Queer Settler Colonialism, Blackness, and the Landed Politics of Accountability
Get PDFThis dissertation plumbs the often-eclipsed connections between antiblackness, Indigenous dispossession, sexuality, and urban space. It contributes to an understanding of the racial and gendered sexual economy of settler neoliberalism by examining a variety of (queer) narrations, practices, and imaginaries of space, place, property, and land in San Francisco and Oakland, CA (Ramaytush Ohlone and Lisjan territories), from the late 1970s to the present. “Pride and Property” is not a history; rather, it constellates a series of moments that elucidate how the twin projects of Black surplus and Indigenous disappearance in the settler city create the conditions of possibility—and the grounds for—what has long been narrated as a “gay homeland” or “queer mecca.” While many queer spatial imaginaries constituting the Bay Area are entrenched in antiblackness and settler colonialism, still others practice, imagine, and bring forth anti-colonial, abolitionist futures. Mobilizing theoretical frameworks from critical ethnic studies and queer of color critique, Black feminist theories of slavery’s afterlife and the carceral state, and critical Indigenous studies, this project joins a growing literature that disrupts the ways scholarly formations are too often thought to be discrete. In utilizing archival methods and textual and visual analysis, it centers the role of narrative and representation both in naturalizing racialized dispossession and in providing alternate visions of futurity, belonging, and collectivity. The narrative of the “Great Gay Migration” of the late 1970s and early 1980s relied on the disavowal of settler colonialism and slavery amid the deepening polarizations of neoliberalism and growing carceral state. In the decades that follow, narratives of queer loss during the “dot-com booms” mobilize nostalgia for San Francisco’s progressivism in ways that disavow past and present modes of violence and dispossession. With a focus on property relations and attunement to the ways incorporative logics animate but also precede neoliberalism, this project culminates in a theorization of the distinct, yet relational “dispossession by inclusion” of Black and Indigenous peoples in Oakland, CA, and the distinct yet relational refusals—that precisely through reckoning with dispossessive histories of property—invoke other temporalities to craft a politics of accountability
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Moving Bodies: Sovereignty, Science, and Indigenous Ontology in the Poetry of Heid Erdrich
Get PDFIndigenous peoples throughout the world have a difficult, tenuous, and troubled relationship with science. Despite positivist commitments to scientific value-neutrality, empirically produced knowledge about the social and natural world is inherently political and politicized, and indelibly linked to statecraft, empire, and colonization. Yet, contrary to popular misconceptions, indigenous approaches to science are not exclusively oppositional, though invasive and non-consensual scientific research practices certainly warrant opposition from indigenous communities. This thesis applies interdisciplinary methods from science and technology studies, critical legal studies, and literary analysis to demonstrate how contemporary Ojibwe poet Heid Erdrich uses poetry to illuminate the complicated cultural, ethical, legal, and political nodes connecting science and contemporary indigenous lives. Through close readings of several of Erdrich's poems, the following chapters demonstrate how Erdrich challenges mainstream legal and scientific discourses by activating and appropriating scientifically-conversant metaphors to create emergent narratives of indigenous mobility, identity, and generational continuity
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