Indigenous Performance 2

To highlight a common interest shared across the essays published in sail 25.1 (Spring 2013), I designated the issue “Indigenous Performance.” For sail 26.4, I return to that designation to highlight once again what is clearly becoming a central focus in Native American literary scholarship: how individuals, communities, nations, and texts of all kinds do not passively represent Indigenous identities but actively perform versions of indigeneity that respond to the particular needs, desires, and circumstances of both audiences and performers. As in the earlier issue, the essays brought together here explore a wide range of Indigenous performance strategies engaged for an equally wide range of rhetorical and political purposes; as important, they demonstrate those strategies operating across a wide range of specific contexts.

The issue begins with the script for a performed essay that includes stage directions and cues for sound and projected images. Actor, director, and theater scholar Michael Greyeyes first performed the piece in 2013 before an international audience of scholars, practitioners, and activists gathered in London for a symposium on indigeneity, performance, and globalization. In his narrative of personal growth and formal education, Greyeyes relates his experience as a Native actor asked to play iconic Native characters created by non-Native writers, especially his portrayal, early in his stage career, of Chief Bromden in the play adaptation of the popular novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Grey-eyes demonstrates how his dramatic embodiment of Bromden and his necessary exploration of Bromden’s mental illness and confinement to a mental institution contributed to his own growing critique of the institution of the settler academy and, specifically, the colonial politics of its curriculum and canon.

The articles that follow continue this exploration of the critical effects of analyzing, embodying, and performing—or choosing not to perform—Native roles desired or assigned by settler culture. Peter Bayers investigates how Luther Standing Bear constructs a viable contemporary Lakota masculinity in his 1928 autobiography My People the Sioux by creating an idealized model of “traditional” manhood in his portrayal of his Lakota father, a model that appeals to the desires of non-Native audiences but is nonetheless useful for himself and, potentially, other Native men. It is this idealized model, Bayers argues, based in Standing Bear’s early childhood experiences of his father before being sent away to boarding school, that enable him to survive his experiences of assimilative settler institutions and the imposed ideals of non-Native masculinity. Next, Colleen G. Eils takes up David Treuer’s 2006 work of metafiction The Translation of Dr. Apelles in order to explore Treuer’s critique of the assigned role of the Native translator as a transparent conduit of “authentic” Native culture. Rather than provide the desired reading experience of unmarked authenticity, Treuer invites readers into a nuanced performance of dissimulation, one in which they must actively participate. By subtly and strategically displacing non-Native stereotypes, Eils argues, Treuer disrupts the idealization of Native identities for non-Native consumption through a politics and a performance of sophisticated literary aesthetics.

Finally, Drew Lopenzina brings the issue full circle with a critical review of the April 2014 reenactment of the wedding of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, believed to have occurred at Jamestown, Virginia, in April 1614, on the four hundredth anniversary of that (supposed) event. Rather than write from the perspective of a performer, Lopenzina writes from the complementary perspectives of a member of the witnessing congregation-audience that attended the reenactment and a scholar of US colonial literature and history. He is thus positioned to situate the highly charged, contemporary performance of Pocahontas’s assent to non-Native marriage—and all that she and that marriage have come to stand for in settler culture—within their multiple historical, consumer, and media contexts. In doing so, Lopenzina reveals the multiple ironies of the ongoing idealization of Pocahontas in US settler culture and the ongoing suppression of the reality of settler violence in both the past and present. Like other performances of Indigenous identity within the context of settler celebration, this version of an embodied Pocahontas evokes not only her fascinating presence but also her...