It's About the Land! 9
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IT’S ABOUT THE LAND! KA HAKA MĀORI & INDIGENOUS PERFORMANCE STUDIES SYMPOSIUM 14-16 November 2019 The Presidio, San Francisco 1 2 1 2 CONTENTS Welcome! 4 Greetings 5 Hosts 6 Ka Haka 8 It's about the land! 9 Schedule 10 Abstracts 13 3 WELCOME! We are coming together these handful of first time for Turtle Island (North days in the Presidio National Park of San America), it is an honor to support these Francisco, located on the unceded and good circles of voice, knowledge and occupied territories of the Ramaytush exchange. We are excited to collectively Ohlone. We recognize and acknowledge expand and deepen the conversation the heritage and sovereignty of the on the relationship between Indigenous Ohlone peoples – past, present, and cultures, lands, and performance. We future. We honor these first sacred are grateful to the American Indian relationships of land and people and Studies Department at San Francisco their continued connections. State University for their support and contributions to our time here. We very We give thanks for the gift of this day much look forward to our time together. and ask in a good way to be here on this land, the land that has been nurtured Kia ora! Welcome! since time immemorial by the Indigenous peoples, the native landscape, and all original beings. Melissa K. Nelson Boozhoo, Lios em chaniavu, PhD (Anishinaabe/Cree/Métis) President & CEO, The Cultural The Cultural Conservancy is deeply Conservancy honored to co-host the third Ka Haka Professor, American Indian Studies, Māori and Indigenous Performance College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco Studies Symposium with our Te Ara State University Poutama colleagues and whanau at Sara Moncada Auckland University of Technology. As MA (Yaqui) the symposium leaves Aotearoa for the Vice President of Programs, The Cultural Conservancy 4 GREETINGS Takahia te ara Poutama ki ngā pae tāwhitiwhiti, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. It is a special pleasure for me to welcome you to Ka Haka 2019. The power of performance to remind us of our attachment to the land, to reflect ideas of belonging, to build identities, create communities and empower peoples is strongly felt in Te Ara Poutama. The presentations you make and the performances you share here will, I’m sure, create important conversations now and in the future. Professor Pare Keiha (Te Whānau-a-Taupara o T’Aitanga-a- Māhaki, and Rongowhakaata) QSO, MSc, PhD, MBA, MComLaw, FRSA MinstD Pro Vice-Chancellor for Māori Advancement Tumuaki/Dean of Te Ara Poutama and the Faculty of Culture and Society Auckland University of Technology 5 HOSTS The Cultural Conservancy Auckland University of Technology The Cultural Conservancy (TCC) is a Te Ara Poutama, the Faculty of Māori Native-led, San Francisco based non- and Indigenous Development, aspires to profit organisation whose mission lead AUT as a faculty of excellence and is to protect and restore Indigenous innovation in teaching, research and cultures, empowering them in the scholarship relevant to the communities direct application of traditional we serve. Our qualifications are at the knowledge and practices on their cutting edge and have been developed ancestral lands. Founded in 1985, we in response to the need for skilled Māori work with Indigenous peoples both professionals in the fast-growing Māori locally and globally on a wide variety of community-based projects, from sacred sectors of business and media. Our range site protection to the conservation of of courses give students the tools not endangered languages, the preservation only to succeed in Māori development, of song and arts traditions and the language revitalisation, Māori media revitalisation of Native Foodways. Critical and te reo Māori (the Māori language), to our work is the acknowledgement but also in leadership, innovation of the sacred relationship that Native and technology. Most importantly, we peoples have to their lands and waters, celebrate the values and contributions of and the importance of this relationship all peoples to the future advancement of to their physical, mental and spiritual Aotearoa. health. Takakawehia te ara poutama, kia whakareia koe ki ngā tohu o te mātauranga. Traverse pathways of learning to acquire knowledge and wisdom. 6 American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University American Indian Studies offers an interdisciplinary and comparative curriculum committed to providing educational programs and services grounded in Native values and cultural practices. It is distinguished in its continuing work with community organizations, tribes, and other academic disciplines to foster understanding about the political and social importance of Native sovereignty and self determination inclusive of the Native peoples of the Americas and the Pacific. Its mission is to educate, inspire, and prepare undergraduate students for engaged careers and/or graduate school and to be an educational hub and site for community participation and learning focused on the Native Peoples of California and the United States. 7 KA HAKA The Ka Haka Māori and Indigenous Now, for the first time, Ka Haka leaves Performance Studies Symposium was Aotearoa for Turtle Island. Co-hosted created by Te Ara Poutama, the Faculty of by The Cultural Conservancy in San Māori and Indigenous Development, at Francisco, in collaboration also with San Auckland University of Technology as a Francisco State University, we are looking way of providing a platform for exploring forward to expanding and deepening the enormous, as-yet largely untapped, our conversation on the relationship body of knowledge stored within Māori between Indigenous performance and and Indigenous performance, from the culture. traditional to the contemporary, and from the popular to the avant-garde. The first Ka Haka Symposium – ‘Empowering Performance’ – brought together academics and artists at AUT in 2016. Ka Haka 2018 – ‘Old Ways of Knowing, New Ways of Doing’ – followed as part of the International Indigenous Research Conference (IIRC), hosted by Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga (University of Auckland). Proceedings from both Ka Haka 2016 and Ka Haka 2018 were published in Te Kaharoa – the e-Journal on Pacific Issues (tekaharoa.com). 8 IT’S ABOUT THE LAND! For Ka Haka 2019, participants will stake As the climate shifts and with it the earth a position in a conversation about the on which we stand, how can Indigenous relationship between performance, performance in the 21st century be power and land in the development of seen to touch on commonalities across Māori and Indigenous identities and the differences and particularities of communities. What might it mean to cultures, peoples and places worldwide? perform the act of taking a stand on As we gather our acts of performance, the land? What can contemporary bringing our words and dances into Indigenous performance make present the Ka Haka meeting space, how can for us: socially, culturally, politically, we come together in celebration, rising personally, ecologically? How, that is, is from our own places into a space of performance performative – constructive unification? of memory and identity, of time and place? How does performance re- connect Indigenous peoples to the land? Conversely, how might performance serve to un-settle the colonial identification with and attachment to land? 9 SCHEDULE Thursday 14th November 9.00am Registration 10.00am Formal welcome 12.30pm Lunch 1.30pm Symposium kick-off 2.00pm First panel session 4.00pm End of first day Friday 15th November 9.00am Coffee and conversation 10.00am Second panel session 12.00pm Lunch 1.30pm Third panel session 3.30pm Tea break 4.00pm Fourth panel session 6.00pm Break 6.30pm Dinner 8.00pm Performances 9.30pm End of second day 10 Saturday 16th November 9.00am Coffee and conversation 10.00am Fifth panel session 12.00pm Closing reflections 1.00pm Lunch and farewell 2.30pm End of event 11 12 ABSTRACTS Amelia Jones with headphone-piped music; softly University of Southern California singing to themselves, Nopera then painstakingly retrieves the shards of Tāwhanga Nopera’s Māori (Queer) broken objects. The artist notes that in Performance as Space and such performances they activate public Time-making space as vā as well as tā: taking over the space in a minor, yet trajectory shifting This paper pivots around the way, they slow people down, encouraging performance works of Tāwhanga them towards greater awareness of Mary-Legs Nopera, a self-identified the indigenous occupation of time queer Māori performance artist (and and space in colonized lands such as PhD) who lives in Rotorua, Aotearoa Aotearoa New Zealand. In such works, New Zealand. Their performances such Nopera offers a new way of thinking as Wrapping Up (2018) explore place- about gender liminal bodies against the making and place-claiming through grain not only of the literal European enacting their body in public space (in colonization of indigenous lands, but this case, a plaza at Waikato University, also of normative North American queer where they obtained their PhD). They and performance theory—gently, quietly, operate through the temporality of relationally reconfiguring public space performance as an overtly gender liminal and time through their positioning of body signaling a range of masculine private objects and gestures enacted via and feminine attributes. In Wrapping a complexly identified Māori body. Up Nopera places small objects from their personal collection (stones, shells, trinkets, jewelry) to mark the space, masking the painful sounds of passersby stepping on and crushing the objects 13 Edwardo F. Madril and amplify the voices and visions of (Pascua Yaqui) traditional knowledge, Native sciences San Francisco State University and worldviews. As such, the power of the pahko’ola performance offers a path Sara Moncada towards bringing traditional knowledge (Yaqui) systems into understanding with a The Cultural Conservancy current worldview. It is in this time of critical need of alternative systems of Exploring Hiakim: The Movement of living in the world that we explore the Land and People possibilities of strengthening our human, social and ecological relationships In the Yoeme language, the traditional through ourselves as hiakim.