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Gathering from Within: Indigenous Nationhood and Tanya Lukin Linklater's Woman and Water

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2010

Abstract

This dossier contribution focuses on Alutiiq performer Tanya Lukin Linklater's Woman and Water. It examines how the piece creates the opportunity for an experience of a way of being in the world, in intimate interconnection with one another, the land and other animals, and the experiences of time that this intimacy compels, that differs from the models of affiliation presumed in understandings of ‘nation states’ generally referenced by contemporary academic discussions of nationalism and transnationalism.

Type
Performance Dossier: Actions of Transfer – Women's Performance in the Americas
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2010

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References

NOTES

1 Phone conversation, 6 November 2009. All subsequent quotations from Lukin Linklater are from this conversation unless otherwise noted. Special thanks to Tanya for these generous discussions about her work.

2 Personal email correspondence, 23 November 2009. Lukin Linklater noted that Alaska Native fishing and hunting rights were extinguished with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, although they were extended for a certain amount of time.

3 Performance, Politics, and the Nation State was one of the Actions of Transfer conference topics.

4 Weaver, Jace, Womack, Craig S. and Warrior, Robert, American Indian Literary Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), p. 45Google Scholar. Weaver is quoting from Daniel Justice's unpublished manuscript for what was subsequently published as Daniel Heath Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.)

5 Justice, p. 46.

6 Ibid., p. 45.

7 Smith, Andrea, ‘American Studies without America: Native Feminisms and the Nation-State’, American Quarterly, 60, 2 (2008), pp. 309–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 312.

8 Lisa Brooks, ‘At the Gathering Place’, Afterword in Weaver, Womack and Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism, pp. 225–52, here p. 229.

9 Michelle Raheja, ‘Transnational Studies: An Indigenous Provocation’, response to Emory Elliott's American Studies Association Presidential Address, Transnational Studies Roundtable, University of California, Riverside, April 2007. Unpublished manuscript. As scholar Jace Weaver writes (American Indian Literary Nationalism, p. 46.), ‘Unlike any other racial or ethnic minority, Native American tribes are separate sovereign nations. As flawed as it was, the treaty process confirmed this status.’

10 Ways that Indigenous performance not only theorizes about sovereign political status but is also part of what constitutes an Indigenous relationship to territory, for example, is something even the Crown in Canada recognized in its 1997 admission of adaawk oral tradition, and kungax, spiritual song or dance or performance, as evidenced in the Delgamuukw land trial. See Persky, Stan, Delgamuukw: The Supreme Court of Canada Decision on Aboriginal Title (Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation/Greystone Press, 1998), p. 27Google Scholar. See also Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, ‘The People Have Never Stopped Dancing’: Native American Modern Dance Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 217–39Google Scholar.

11 Brooks, ‘At the Gathering Place’, p. 244.