Relinquishing Expertise: Notes on Feminist Indigenous Performance Methodology

In this piece of writing, the author offers notes on performance research arising out of her experience studying performance in Kiji Sibi territory. Indigenous feminist research, for the author, includes decolonizing her understanding of the place she grew up and of her own heart by exploring family, local, and official archives as well as her relationship to the land, waters, ancestors, and generations to come in that territory. Leaning into Indigenous paradigms of knowing and away from hegemonic and destructive narratives of colonial capitalist heteropatriarchal expertise, the author finds the resistant possibilities within relinquishing the arrogance of mastery in the midst of wrestling with cultural loss and reclamation.