Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue

5. Native Performance Culture, Monique Mojica, and the Chocolate Woman Workshops

5 Native Performance Culture, Monique Mojica, and the Chocolate Woman Workshops Ric Knowles For indigenous peoples the pre-colonized culture is the site of decolonization crawling and clawing our way back to sanity. – Dr. Larry Emerson, Diné (Navajo) scholar At a point of crisis in her personal and professional lives and in the development of Native theatre on Turtle Island that had brought her long-time collaborator , Floyd Favel, to the brink of giving up on theatre (Favel, “Poetry”), Monique Mojica initiated a new project that would save her self by rejecting “the victim narrative” and returning to what is “not broken” in traditional Native cultures (Project Description).1 In order to do so, she returned to two of her own long-standing sources of creation and healing in the theatre: the story-weaving process developed by her mother and aunts as Spiderwoman Theater in New York, and the research project on Native performance culture that she had been developing with Favel, her aunt Muriel Miguel, Pura Fé, and others over almost two decades. Building upon these processes and upon her own earlier creation work,2 she launched a new project , Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, one that she hoped might help to suture the wounds inflicted by colonization while moving herself, her community, and Native theatre forward. 73 Mojica’s creation work in the theatre has always derived from her embodied life as a mixed-race, indigenous performer, from her “blood memory ” (“Stories”), and from the history of indigenous women on the continent. In her own work, such as her 1989 play, Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, and in her work with Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble on The Scrubbing Project in 2002 and 2005, and The Triple Truth in 2005, she has deconstructed negative and hurtful images of Native and mixed-race women, attempting to purge the painful history of colonization from her body and the body of her community. In much of this work, she was bearing witness to atrocity, attempting to “build memory” (Turtle Gals 358), and always to heal and to urge her people forward—even if that meant, as at the end of Princess Pocahontas, a blind leap of faith in the dark (169). Together with suturing wounds and ruptures effected by colonization, Mojica’s work has always involved putting pieces of herself together: Mojica is Kuna, Rappahannock , and Ashkenazi by birth, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) by adoption. She also has a strong affinity with the indigenous people of Chiapas , Mexico, whom she visited and came to know through her eighteen-year marriage to Mayan activist and healer from Chiapas, Fernando Hernandez. She has explored and knit together these aspects of her personal, embodied interculturalism in much of her work. In Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, she explores her Rappahannock heritage, in The Scrubbing Project, her Chiapan, Ashkenazi, and Rappahannock parts encounter her double heritage of genocide, and in all of her work she makes connections with mixedrace women of the Americas. With Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, she turned her attention to her Kuna heritage, centred on the autonomous territory of Kuna Yala on the coast of Panama. Work on Chocolate Woman began when Mojica saw in the paintings of her Kuna cousin, Oswaldo DeLeón Kantule, a figure central to Kuna culture whom she immediately knew and recognized: Puna Siagua (Chocolate Woman or Red Cacao Woman), the spiritual figure directly responsible for healing. (See Figure 5.1.) And it began with a new question. In an attempt to turn the focus away from colonizers and colonization, to escape the deadly enticements of “the victim narrative” (Mojica and Knowles 2), and to re-enter what Favel calls “the zone of incertitude and research” (“Artificial Tree” 69), Mojica entered the Chocolate Woman process asking “what my work would be like if I didn’t begin from a place of my greatest woundedness ” (Anderson et al.). “What stories would I tell if I started from a place of connectedness instead of from a place of rupture? What do I have that is not broken?” (Project Description). 74 COLLABORATION, CROSSTALK, IMPROVISATION The first time Mojica used the title “Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way” was for a talk she gave at a Distinguished Lecture series at the University of Toronto in January 2006 that was delivered again while she distributed cacao beans and wore a traditional Kuna mola dress at the “Honouring...