Unsettling Existence

Abstract

This article addresses land acknowledgement in contemporary Indigenous performance to illustrate how the invocation of Lakota cultural knowledge animates the contradictions of existence. The Native American Medicine Garden (NAMG) on the University of Minnesota campus, and Cânté Sütá-Francis Bettelyoun's (Lakota Oglala) pedagogy, informs the overarching conundrum with the ontological turn in academia, that is - how to ally with non-extractive knowledges in a way that isn't extractive? Through participant-observation at the NAMG, drawn from 2016-2019, I identify how Bettelyoun invokes Lakota cultural knowledge to set the conditions for participation by bringing attention to settler-colonial relations with the environment, and illuminate alternative modes of human-environment interactions. I ask how NAMG, surrounded by genetically modified organism (GMO) testing fields on a research university, unsettles logics of existence by applying pressure to the ‘agrilogistic' promise to ‘eliminate fear, anxiety, and contradiction… by reducing existence to sheer quantity’ (Morton). I approach this inquiry by thinking from the political and philosophical horizons made possible by Cânté Sütá-Francis Bettelyoun (Lakota Oglala) to consider how the Native American Medicine Garden functions as a performance paradigm. To illustrate the idea of thinking from the garden I outline how the conditions are set for participatory and tactile engagements with place, juxtaposing theory with ethnographic vignettes. I then turn to a discussion of relationality within the garden and the only ever partial connections scholars of settler ancestry have to Lakota cultural knowledge. As I respond to Morton's thoughts on mono-culture and noncontradiction, the inquiry will circle back to the initial acknowledgement - the land on which I live, work, and study - to honour the Dakhóta and Anishinaabeg histories and contemporary actions allowing me - a settler of German and Polish ancestry - to be unsettled about where I stand.