To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, filmmakers, designers, and performers to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2019.
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. A Bessie Award–winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based—after a long time living in Minneapolis—in New York City. Originally from Alaska, Emily is of Yup’ik descent, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and installations, engaging audiences within and through space/time and environment—interacting with a place’s architecture, history, and role in community. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across the United States and Australia. Recently she choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars. Her large-scale project, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars, is an all-night outdoor performance gathering that takes place among 84 community-hand-made quilts. Her new work in development, Being Future Being, considers future creation stories and present joy. In 2004, the Walker commissioned Heat and Life, a dance work examining terrains altered by overpopulation, climate change, and degradation of our natural environment.
Johnson was an advisory committee member for Creative Time’s 10th Anniversary Summit and an organizer of First Nations Dialogues and serves as Diplomat with the Pueblo Opera Cultural Council at Santa Fe Opera. Each month, Emily hosts ceremonial fires on the Lower East Side in Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Art Center. She is part of a US based advisory group—including Reuben Roqueni, Ed Bourgeois, Lori Pourier and Vallejo Gantner, who, with international colleagues, are working to develop a Global First Nations Performance Network.
1.
AMBER WEBB’S QASPEQ CALLING FOR JUSTICE
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Womxn crisis has been a crisis for hundreds of years. It is beyond time for our womxn, girls, trans, two spirit, lands, and waters to be safe. To be protected. To be celebrated and to thrive. Yup’ik artist Amber Webb draws life-size portraits of Indigenous womxn and girls who have been killed, whose deaths and disappearances are part of this current genocide across Turtle Island and the Global South. Highlighting the crisis and created as an act of recognition and healing, the portraits are depicted on a 12-foot-tall qaspeq which travels the state of Alaska—the largest city of which, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute in Seattle, has one of the highest number of unsolved cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous womxn. Find out what you can do so that not one more goes missing. If you do nothing, yet benefit from the ongoing colonization of these lands, then you are complicit.
#nomorestolensisters #MMIWGT2S
2.
OPENING OF NUNALLEQ CULTURE CENTER
The Nunalleq Culture Center in Quinhagak, Alaska officially opened in 2018. But the work continues and grows and in terms of cultural sovereignty, revitalization and accomplice partnership—this is perhaps my favorite story of the past decade! More than 60,000 of our cultural and ancestral belongings have come from the ground (due to climate change and an emergency archaeology dig). The Nunalleq Culture Center opened to house these belongings and to be a center for the community. In these days when our communities are working so hard to rematriate whilst many collectors, museums, and other cultural institutions persistently hold onto our belongings and ancestors—this is a welcome change. A partnership with the village corporation of Qanirtuuq, Inc., the village of Quinhagak, and University of Aberdeen Department of Archaeology, it’s a model for collaborative cultural work. At the center itself, kids and elders can hold belongings their ancestors made, study them, admire them. The objects, the dig, and the center have inspired carvers as well as young dancers—who back in 2012 decided they wanted to start Yuraq (dancing) again (dance in Indigenous communities of Alaska were forbidden by colonizing missionaries in the 1930s). The youth of the village founded Kuinerrarmiut Yurartait and they are badass.
3.
SANTIAGO X’S EARTHWORK MOUNDS
“I’m tired of fake European buildings in Native America. They have displaced people and ecosystems to glorify colonisers” —Santiago X (@xtheshapeshifter)
XX Santiago X, XX.
4.
THE WORK OF S.J NORMAN
S.J Norman is a nonbinary Koori live artist and writer. Their work, Cicatrix 1 (that which is taken/that which remains), specifically made for KIN at Performance Space New York as part of First Nations Dialogues 2019, was a chain of actions, woven from the syncretic tissues of buried rites for mourning and remembrance. In particular, Cicatrix 1 considered the collision of Indigenous, queer, and trans bodies with state power, specifically the abuse and obliteration of those bodies by the carceral state. A durational ritual unfolding over 4 hours, S.J Norman made a generous performance—offering pain and endurance, skin and blood—in a process of acknowledging and transmuting grief. They asked the audience to meet them in return—to take upon our own bodies the knowledge of and commitment to shift the deep injustice, racism, and deaths Aboriginal and other Indigenous people endure in the prison industrial complex.
S.J Norman and Joseph Pierce have organized another gathering for 2020 at Performance Space New York called Knowledge of Wounds. It takes place Jan 11 and 12 in Lenapehoking (NYC). If you are near, you should come.
5.
WHAT GOOD ACCOMPLICESHIP LOOKS LIKE
In May, artist Demian DinéYazhi’ posted on Insta: “To all Institutions practicing Land Acknowledgements, Tell us, what steps do you take to hold space and center Indigenous peoples? How are you actively working to: pay Indigenous people, donate to Indigenous causes, protect Indigenous land and water rights, and promote Indigenous sovereignty?” Roya Amirsoleymani from @picapdx responded with a list of what many of us consider to be a good map/model for partner, settler-run organizations. Roya, Erin Boberg Doughton, and the rest of the staff and leadership at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art have taken a serious dive into decolonizing and indigenizing the practices and curatorial processes of their organization. We are working with HowlRound to soon publish the full text so stay on the lookout for it. When it comes to this work, I like to talk about changing the DNA of an organization—which includes everything from ethos to structure and governance to values, leadership, and worldview. As partner allies become accomplices, the shift of consciousness and action that is needed in the world—recognizing, acknowledging, centering, respecting, and understanding Indigenous knowledge, art, making, culture, leadership, and sovereignty—becomes reality. This is what is needed as we build to equity. Thank you Demian for your consistent leadership and provocations.
6.
AUTUMN PELTIER URGES THE UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO WARRIOR UP
Young leaders around the world saying what is so. Leading climate marches and divestment actions across the globe, making speeches, changing their priorities and generally shaming the rest of us for getting the world into the fucked up situation it is in. It is time to listen to our future ancestors. They deserve far better than we have dealt them.
7.
REMATRIATION OF PASSAMAQUODDY SONGS
AND CHANGING LABELS AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
What happens with Indigenous leadership is that knowledge and languages are revitalized, songs and dances are sung and remembered, new systems are created and the world is transformed. Boom. This story is an inspiration and part of an ongoing process of undoing harm and restructuring some of the ongoing legacies of the settler colonial project specifically through protecting and identifying traditional knowledge, intellectual property and cultural heritage (localcontexts.org and enrich-hub.org). If you are a non-Indigenous institution, you probably need some training and to implement deep change.
8.
SEHSAPSING DELAWARE BLACK FLINT CORN GROWING
In January 2019, the Lenape Center and First Nations Dialogues gave a bunch of New Yorkers and international visitors (none of whom have yards to work with) heirloom seeds to plant, in an effort to grow the food that will help call the Lenape diaspora back home. I got photos from friends and strangers throughout the year of this corn growing on rooftops, upstate, in community gardens. In the fall, I got to be with Joe Whittle and Mia Nataneh as they harvested on their first visit back to their homelands of Lenapehoking. “Here, Campos Community Garden grows this three sisters garden in ongoing efforts of respect, healing, and learning—steps toward rematriation of Lenapehoking.”
#embodiedlandacknowledgement #rematriatetheland
9.
INDIGENOUS THEATRE OPENS AT NATIONAL ARTS CENTRE, CANADA
NAC Indigenous Theatre is the first national Indigenous theater department in the world! Run by artistic director Kevin Loring, it is a place of direction, resistance, celebration, new work, and self-determination. Congratulations and so much love!
10.
INDIGENOUS THEATRE OPENS AT (WHERE IN THE US IN 2020?)
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