23 Indigeneity

Penny Edmonds

There is growing interest in Indigenous reenactment as a subversive form of performative politi­cal action deployed to force social change. This is especially so within the nominally “post”- colonial settler states such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, the United States of America, and South Africa, and various Latin America countries.

Far from being marginal, Indigenous performance when it is an agentic form of self-repre­sentation is a complex transnational phenomenon of critical significance, addressing and pro­testing key political issues of sovereignty, dispossession, land and sea rights, European violence, stolen and removed children, genocide, and issues of environment at the national and global orders. Indeed, identifying a crucial gap, Helen Gilbert has argued that while mainstream post­colonial studies has “a great deal to say” about Indigeneity as an “intellectual conceptualization,” it has not attended much to Indigenous performativity and less so performance, including reen­actment. Further, the fields of dance and theater studies have been “less nimble” in analytically connecting such performances to postcolonialism (Gilbert, 2013, p. 174). The push for counter­colonial and liberatory renditions of history, and urgent political demands from Indigenous peoples and allied others for decolonizing approaches in settler states (Tuhiwei Smith, 1999; Swadener and Mutua, 2008) have compelled scholars to engage more fully with Indigenous-led reenactment as political performance, understanding these as critical and often highly subversive spaces of embodied cultural interchange.

Contemporary forms of Indigenous reenactment can be subversive and unpredictable, they can both rewrite and interrupt entrenched historical narratives and remake them (produc­tion of historical meaning). The “double entendre” in Indigenous reenactment is registered here: it can deploy “resistive performances to challenge prevailing myths and representations”

Figure 23.1 Tame Iti shooting the New Zealand flag in 2005. Source:TVNZ.

of Indigenous peoples (Denzin, 2016, p. 32). Speaking of North America, Denzin notes that Indigenous reenactment challenges white, colonizing narratives, and in this way, Hollywood myths of Native American peoples are “troubled.” They “unsettle history and do so from within history itself”; they are “counterhegemonic performances” that use reenactment in “subversive and transformative ways” by permitting the “participant observer to step back in time into a moment in the past and see it through a critical lens” (Denzin, 2016, p. 33).

Settler societies are generally resistant to decolonization as settlers do not go home, and in the quest to overcome the violence of the past, stabilize the present, and reimagine the future, reconciliation has become a political catch-cry (Wolfe, 1999; Edmonds, 2016). In recent decades, settler nations across the globe have endeavored to forge political compacts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to address past grievances and to forge new national socialities and new ways of being.

Public cross-cultural performances of reconciliation brokered by the state are a utopic form of politics and can offer hope for a future built on the foundations of a sense of honor, obli­gation, and togetherness. Public performances in the name of reconciliation, which contain components of historical reenactment, can include Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engaging in mass public handshakes, thousands of people crossing a bridge together or paddling jointly down a river in traditional boats, or the re-enlivening of a treaty moment, are extraordi­nary, embodied, and highly affective cross-cultural collective events.

Such events often selectively reenact specific cultural memories and Indigenous and Europeans traditions of goodwill and diplomacy from the colonial past—for instance, the European and universal gesture of the handshake, or the North American symbols of exchange and agreement, such as the Native wampum belt or the cross-cultural tradition of the covenant chain (memory and commemoration). In this way, such “reconciliation performances seek tran­sition to a new moral order and may be understood as critical rites of passage in settler socie­ties, transformative moments embodied in specific local and cultural repertoires and traditions” (Edmonds, 2016, p. 8). Indigenous reenactment of past sufferings, trials, and violence may take on a particular tenor in the form of solemn, commemorative pilgrimages.

All such performative reenactments are enlisted for powerful and affective processes of social transformation. They are thus crucial to the radical political work of reconstructing history for the purpose of building affective engagement between people and, when author­ized at the national level, between citizens and the state, in moves toward new postcolonial socialities (production of historical meaning). At the same time, however, reconciliation is perennially fraught, and for some Indigenous peoples and allied others in settler nations, rec­onciliation has become a dirty word. With its heavy politics of consensus, reconciliation can be symbolic only, and shut down the space of the political. Reconciliation as a state-based and top-down social program, with its associated performances, can therefore be highly repressive and in fact reinforce colonial hegemonies as a poor symbolic substitute for actual and substan­tive reparations and real social change. Indigenous political activists may therefore use reenact­ment to radically challenge and reject the process of reconstructing the past that is so crucial to the consensus work of reconciliation in settler-colonial societies today. Veteran Maori activist Tame Iti's fiery reenactment of the New Zealand Land wars during the 2005 visit ofTreaty of Waitangi commissioners to Tuhoe lands, for example, sought to radically interrupt the con­sensus politics of the Treaty ofWaitangi and the mythic representation of it as compact for the nation. Recalling the violent past that his people suffered in front ofTV cameras, Iti's aim was to have the commissioners experience fire and violence directly and be both witnesses to and participants in the colonial past. Harnessing the politics of anger and resentment (Coultard), the Tuhoe reenacted the 1860s-scorched earth policy of the New Zealand government and the raupatu, the confiscation of their lands, asserting “We did not sign a treaty... we did not surrender!” This was a strategic piece of history-making and mediatized protest—part play on the savage spectacle, part counter-colonial intervention, part retelling of the past (Edmonds, 2016, p. 159).

Indigenous reenactors therefore both refute and revision reconciliatory performances in order to assert and re-enliven the historical and cultural dimensions of their sovereignties and work them into new forms of political action in the name of peace-building and counter­colonial resistance. These performances frequently shift between the local, national, and global. While some events remain grounded in specific local concerns, others address issues of the national via localized issues and practices; yet others self-consciously locate themselves within globalized communication networks of media and Pan-Indigenous political action in order to strengthen their presence within a discourse of global rights and within rights-based institutions (Edmonds, 2016; Phipps, 2009).

In a perceptive exploration of the encounter between history, performance, and colonial­ism, Diana Taylor reminds us of the critical political and interventionist work of embodied Indigenous performance, which “transmits memories, makes political claims, and manifests a group's sense of identity.” Drawing attention to the asymmetries of political and public culture in colonized societies and her quest to examine the relationships between “embodied performance and the production of knowledge”; she argues that “if performance does not transmit knowledge only the literate and powerful could claim social memory and identity” (Taylor, 2003, p. xvii.). Clearly, such reenactment work speaks directly to the tensions between Indigenous voices and experiences, and their material and oral histories, as opposed to text-based European accounts of the past, where “writing has become the guarantor of existence itself.” Through embodied per­formance, including forms of reenactment, historical and social memory and cultural identity are reimagined by Indigenous people through affective performances both with and against the state. As Taylor asks, if we “look through the lens of performed, embodied behaviors, what would we know that we do not know now? Whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible? What tensions might performance behaviors show that would not be recognized in texts and documents?” (Taylor, 2003, p. xvii).

The stakes are high in these performances of reconciliation as they invite radical border­crossings, which demand both trust and risk. They have a fraught and recursive dialogue with the past and are precarious cross-cultural meetings. Here, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peo­ples frequently stand in for their own ancestors as they face past violence together (Edmonds, 2016, 2017). As Roxana Waterson (2009) notes, in such performances “we are at the extreme end of the risk continuum, since these are rites in which the stakes are high, there are no com­forting precedents to fall back on, some might be at best reluctant participants,” and “participants cannot always know the outcome of the success of a performance in advance.” The intersubjec- tive, experimental, and precarious nature of such reenactments is highlighted here. Such perfor­mances therefore emerge as new cross-cultural sites of negotiation, which draw on complex and nuanced genealogies of Indigenous diplomacy, culture, and knowledge, just as they draw on a European cultural repertoire of diplomacy. These are not akin to medieval reenactments, which are creative anachronisms that are distant from time and place. Rather, such enactments emerge as emotionally supercharged retellings or subversions of specific local histories; they are grounded in community, and in deep genealogies of family, communal memory, and place. They are highly risky events, where descendants of Indigenous peoples and settlers face each other, and/or work together, or walk together, refuse each other, call the state to account, and offer a different order of national justice and possible new futures. Embodied, affective Indigenous reenactments, then, as praxis, constitute a site of risk and exploration and exist as a critical postcolonial alternative to traditional linear, legal, and text-based renderings of history (archive). This emphasis on praxis treats performance not only as an “aesthetic medium” and a way of fashioning and declaring identity, but also as “a system of learning, storing and transmitting knowledge” (Taylor, 2003, p. 175). Further, as Gilbert writes, “communal memory, a key concern in many Indigenous socie­ties, builds contingently from such knowledge systems, reiterating the embodied basis of cultural transmission” (Gilbert, 2013, p. 26). In these ways then, such powerful, embodied performances can reveal “the disparity between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (Gilbert, 2013, p. 26). This is the vital, socially emancipatory, and transformative power of Indigenous reenactment.

Further reading

Agnew, V., and Lamb, J., 2010; Casey, M., 2012; Coulthard, G., 2014; Johnson, M., 2011; Konuk, K., 2004.