38 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM SPRING 2017 | 39 IN SEARCH OF HÓZHÓ Notes on Performance and Performance Art Aboriginal performance art is the high-heeled, steel-toed moccasin of the telegraph; a series of mountain passes known for extreme weather and dangerous curves. Here, First Nations artists hybridize the telegraph, distilling the information into communal hyper-parable, the issues couched in metaphor or served raw. —Archer Pechawis 1 By Matthew Ryan Smith A RTIST REBECCA BELMORE (Ojibwe) was visiting a friend’s house in Lethbridge, Alberta, and picked up a book titled 1492 and All hat: Making a Garden Out of a Wilderness by Ramsay Cook, which tells the story of a Mi’kmaq man taken captive by French settlers. he settlers returned to France with the man and created an enclosure they described as a wilderness garden. In efect, the wilderness garden was little more than a human zoo masquerading under a diferent name. he man was forced to hunt a deer with a bow and arrow, skin it, cook it, and then eat it. he French audience watched him for a long time, clearly enthralled with what they were seeing. According to the Mi’kmaq people, the hunter later squatted down and excreted in plain sight of his captors. Doing so was an act of retribution, and presumably many of the onlookers could sense the hunter’s displeasure in the air. For Belmore, the event not only represents one of the irst international performances by an Indigenous person, but it’s also a dissident gesture of anticolonial resistance. 2 The Unbroken Line FOLLOWING 1492, it became common practice for settler-colonialists to capture and enslave Indigenous peoples. Some captives were put to work as guides or interpreters, while others were transported to Europe to perform for heads of state. In doing so, they would become instruments of political leverage, a means of garnering resources and support for the expansion of empire. 3 For example, Christopher Columbus enslaved Arawak people from the Bahamas and transported them to Spain for proof that resource- rich lands had been “discovered,” which helped secure ships and capital from the Crown. In the mid-19th century, once the settler-colonial prophecy of Manifest Destiny pushed West through the Plains and into the Paciic, artist George Catlin paraded his paintings and objects from Plains peoples throughout Europe as part of his Indian Gallery. Under the guise that these materials and people were vanishing, the successful tour essentially performed Indianness to European audiences hungry for last glimpses of tribal wonders and ephemera. “I have, for many years past,” writes Catlin, “contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization.” 4 Yet, perhaps the most famous example of these early performative gestures is Chief Sitting Bull’s participation in William Cody’s Bufalo Bill’s Wild West expositions. At most of these performances, Sitting Bull circled the arena on horseback, saluted the crowd, and charged audiences for his autograph and/or his photograph. In 1883, the wild west show’s orga- nizers celebrated the completion of the Northern Paciic Railway, and eforts to sing its praises were candidly expressed during performances. In response to the displacement and maltreatment of Indigenous peoples for the sake of the railroad, Sitting Bull is alleged to have cursed his audience in the Lakota language. 5 Telling of a vast majority of non-Indigenous audiences not only draws a line to the actions of the Mi’kmaq man, but also to a lengthy tradition of utilizing performance to refute and refuse the apparatuses of colonialism. Terrance Houle (Kainai-Saulteaux), Friend of Foe #7: iisistsikóówa (he is tired), 2014, performance at the 7a*11d Festival Toronto. Photo: Henry Chan. Image courtesy of the artist. 1. Archer Pechawis, “New Traditions: Post-Oka Aboriginal Performance Art in Vancouver,” INDIANacts: Aboriginal Performance Art, accessed November 24, 2016, web. 2. Rebecca Belmore, “Making a Garden Out of a Wilderness,” in Action and Agency: Advancing the Dialogue on Native Performing Art, ed. Nancy J. Blomberg (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2010), 16–17. 3. Greg A. Hill, “Caught... (red-handed),” in Caught in the Act: he Viewer as Performer, ed. Josée Drouin-Brisebois (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2008), 148. 4. Ter Ellingson, he Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 184. 5. Edward Lazarus, Black Hills White Justice: he Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present (Canada: HarperCollins, 1991), 106. On the other hand, to argue that performance or performative gestures occurred ater 1492 and evolved into the expanded ield of contemporary Live Art seems doomed to failure. To do so would mean that the history of perfor- mance by Indigenous peoples is merely 400 years old, while conceding that it is a discursive ofshoot of European colonialism. For curator and artist Greg A. Hill (Mohawk), “there is an unbroken line of performance going back to time immemorial that includes ritual, dance, oratory, storytelling, dream interpre- tation, and ceremonial protocols.” 6 In a similar line of light, Lori Blondeau (Cree-Saulteaux) airms that “perfor- mance is something we’ve always done as Native Americans. It’s storytelling. It’s a continuum of what we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.” 7 Performance by Indigenous peoples and artists is best understood outside the vacuum of settler-colonialism, since to bestow European colonialism with setting up the conditions for performance is not only misleading but afords it too much power over Indigenous cultural history. Rather, each performance carries a trace—consciously or unconsciously identiiable—of those who came before, and speaks to a cosmology of contexts, including gender, race, aesthetics, sexuality, or politics, that informed each performance. 8 his may also embody the transmission of elemental principles: Indigenous knowledge, language, family lineage, tribal narrative, spirituality, and storytelling. 9 hough we may not consider it as such, performance is an archive of events and experiences, a vessel of knowledge that connects the performer to his or her cultural history. In turn, the physical body of the performer functions as a repository of existence and generates meaning by articulating the act of living. Every performance is a performance of a previous performance. Surely this is the unbroken line. In an expanded ield, performance now symbolizes a breadth of practices and aesthetics that fall under the updated term Live Art. Contemporary live art is oten deined by its ephem- erality, by its willingness to disappear completely and forever. To this end, it is a “non-reproductive” 10 form of cultural expression that is actualized by the physical body while—depending on whom you talk to—necessitating the company of an audience. More commonly, performance exists through material documenta- tion taking the form of video, ilm, photography, and soon perhaps, virtual 6. Hill, “Caught... (red-handed),” 146. 7. Lori Blondeau in discussion with the author, November 24, 2016. 8. Elin Diamond, “Introduction,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 1. 9. Sue McKemmish, Livia Iacovino, Lynette Russell, and Melissa Castan, “Editors’ Introduction to Keeping Cultures Alive: Archives and Indigenous Human Rights,” Archival Science 12, no. 2 (June 2012), 93–111. 10. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: he Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 148.