Abstract
Indigenous screendance challenges US settler colonial constructions that drive political, environmental, and global injustices, which the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated. This article analyzes online workshops taught in 2020 by Rulan Tangen, Founder and Director of DANCING EARTH CREATIONS, as "movement as medicine" and "screendance as survivance." By connecting Tangen's workshops to Indigenous peoples' historical and ongoing uses of dance and the digital sphere for wellbeing and survival, we show how and why these practices provide powerful possibilities to counter settler colonial concepts of anthropocentrism, Cartesian dualism, patriarchy, and chronological time. Tangen's teaching offers ways for humans and more-than-humans—meaning land, cosmos, nonhuman animals, water, and plants—to (re)connect, drawing on the past to imagine the future and building human solidarity, which we theorize as "homecoming." Ultimately, we link our concept of "homecoming" to the Land Back movement because of the vital connections among Indigenous bodies, sovereignty, and survival.
Highlights
Indigenous screendance challenges US settler colonial constructions that drive political, environmental, and global injustices, which the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated
By connecting Tangen’s workshops to Indigenous peoples’ historical and ongoing uses of dance and the digital sphere for wellbeing and survival, we show how and why these practices provide powerful possibilities to counter settler colonial concepts of anthropocentrism, Cartesian dualism, patriarchy, and chronological time
Wayne Yang, the objective of settler colonialism is for settlers to make “a new home on the land, a homemaking that insists on settler sovereignty over all things in their new domain.”[13]. To do so, through policy and practice, the US government has attempted to annihilate Indigenous peoples and cultures in a multitude of ways, some of which we detail in our analysis
Summary
Whereas settler colonial constructs rely on binaries and hierarchies35—such as anthropocentrism and Cartesian dualism36—which may result in divisions, antagonisms, and global pandemics, Movement as Medicine workshops offer holistic ways of activating ecological epistemologies and recalling peoples’ responses to previous catastrophes. In Red Elk’s narrative the man literally “[comes] home” with the knowledge to heal peoples and their Nations, which takes the form of dancing.[50] Red Elk herself organized a “prayerful gathering” featuring Jingle Dress dancing at the Pendleton City Hall on Umatilla land in what is often referred to as Oregon, where she resides, following the horrific murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.[51] Red Elk emphasized in a Facebook post that the event was “NOT a protest,” and that social movements can be a form of medicine, aimed at building human solidarity to alleviate structural inequities.[52] Scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hoopa Valley Tribe) explains how ceremonial dancing, the Hupa Flower Dance, challenges settler colonial narratives by contributing to Indigenous knowledge and solidarity.[53] Baldy connects embodied practices to methods of “(re)writing, (re)righting, and (re)riteing” that elucidate how and why ceremonial forms generate solidarity-building. These danced prayers of connection, reclamation, and transformation circulate and aim to heal, offering movement as medicine to humans and more-than-human relatives, who have long sustained our survival
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