Gesturing Indigenous Futurities Through the Remix

Abstract

This article explores Vancouver-based multi-media collective Skookum Sound System's Ay I Oh Stomp's (2012) mobilization of “decolonial gesturings” as they create a future imaginary attentive to the past, critiquing the present, and venturing into the beyond. These gestures activate Indigenous futurities through traditional style Kwakwaka'wakw dance and choreographies of sea travel, popping as a “street dance” of holds and releases, and the mobilization of digital polychromatic shifting and looping. I illustrate how the video is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, and how it remixes dance, movement and gestures that “jump scale” out of colonial cartographies.