Dee(a)r Spine: Dance, Dramaturgy, and the Repatriation of Indigenous Memory

It is necessary that, with great urgency, we all speak well, and listen well. We, you and I, must remember everything. We must especially remember those things we never knew. Obviously, that process cannot begin with longer lists of facts. It needs newer, and much more complex, kinds of metaphors. Perhaps we must trust confusion more, for a while, and be deeply suspicious of simple stories, simple acts.

(Durham and Fisher 1995, 147)

Sam:

Dee(a)r Spine¹, a duet I choreographed, and then performed with musician Tommy Babin, was presented in 2014 at the Wagner Dance Building at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The piece was born out of my desire "to remember the things I never knew," to employ Durham's evocative expression (1995, 147). I was born Yaqui but was adopted early on by a white family and thus, like many other Native American children, I grew up far from my culture.² Through recent conversations with my biological brother, meticulous research, and with my grandparents' marriage certificate issued in Imuris, Sonora, I now know that my grandmother, Maria Luisa Aros Siquerios, was Yaqui. Her daughter, Evangelina Gaxiola, immigrated to California, married, and had my six siblings and me. Evangelina died tragically when I was an infant. As an adult, I embarked on a journey to reconnect with my family and community, and to find ways to "remember everything."

Photo 1.

Sam Mitchell performing Dee(a)r Spine. Photographer: Jim Carmody.

Julie:

But, how does one repatriate cultural knowledge--songs, practices, dance movements, and their related stories and ways of understanding the world--from which one has been estranged, or that one never knew? What creative methodologies and practices does one use to repatriate memory and the intangible: what was, and what could have been, had one not been separated from their community? Dee(a)r Spine engages with all these questions. Sam's personal adaptation of the Deer Dance, a Yaqui dance ritual performed around Easter that has adapted to and resisted colonial pressures and influences, is a piece that Durham might call a complex metaphor. It meditates on genealogy, on connections (lost and rekindled) with the landscape, and on the ways in which dance can serve as a vehicle to repatriate Sam's fragmented Yaqui heritage.

Working in San Diego on Kumeyaay territory, and on the UCSD campus, which sits atop a Kumeyaay burial site, added yet another layer to Sam's creative investigation. Indeed, from 2007 until today, UCSD has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Kumeyaay and with a contingent of its own faculty members over the repatriation of ancient remains, excavated from under the chancellor's house in 1976. The Kumeyaay and the Yaqui are very distinct nations, but they share a common relationship with settler colonial states (the U.S. and Mexico) marked by ongoing loss and desecration of their specific cultures and practices. I was writing about this repatriation case (Burelle 2015) when I worked with Sam as a dramaturg for Dee(a)r Spine, and thus our projects, while engaging with different communities, echoed and nourished each other in productive ways.

Sam and Julie:

This article documents the process that led to Dee(a)r Spine and is written in our two voices: the voice of a man of Yaqui heritage and the voice of a non-Indigenous woman from the settler province of Quebec, Canada. This conversational format is, in a sense, a natural continuation of the relationship between artist and dramaturg. More importantly, co-authorship practices a scholarship that aligns with the decolonizing gesture and the repatriation impulse central to Sam's work. By eschewing single authorship and offering instead a multi-vocal perspective, we hope to decenter a model of scholarship in which Indigenous artists' voices are subsumed under that of non-Indigenous scholars. Co-authorship is a way to "speak well...