Native Women Language Keepers: Indigenous Performance Practices Symposium
Video Documentation
Madweziibing - Music Rivering. 10 mins, 2013
This video was created as part of the Native Women Language Keepers symposium organized by Margaret Noodin and Petra Kuppers at the University of Michigan, in February 2012. It features the symposium fellows, people engaged in Anishinaabemowin/Ojibwe and Niimipuu/Nez Perce language revitalization through the arts, and short scenes fellows worked on, by Heid Erdrich, Howard Kimewon and Margart Noodin, as well as the Miskwaasining Nagamojig/Swamp Singers, an Ann Arbor-based hand-drum group, and paintings by Daphne Odjig. The symposium fellows are introducing each other, respectfully citing Maori mihimihi (formal introduction) to center indigenous ways of doing in a community that did not share any one cultural form.
Essay developed in relation to the symposium:
Edges of water and land: Transnational performance practices in indigenous/settler collaborations.
Publicity
January 28th to February 1st 2013, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Aanii! Join us for UM’s sixth arts-based research symposium, a week-long exploration of Native women’s practices as language teachers, activists, and artists. In this week, we’re workshopping a play by celebrated Native playwright Alanis King, and we will work in close connection with Miiskwaasinii’ing Nagamojig (The Swamp Singers), a Michigan-based hand-drum group, who will work with King to create a praise song for Daphne Odjig’s woodland paintings in the University of Michigan’s archives.
This symposium will marry the strengths of the University of Michigan’s Anishinaabemowin language program, a thriving community of language teachers and learners, with our series of arts-based research symposia, in which we investigate ways of knowing through creative means.
In this week, we want to ask questions about the place of performance and women’s work in language survivance and revitalization, about decolonizing methodologies and performance, about honoring Native women artists, and about intercultural performance practices.
Program
Monday
11.30 to 1, Angell Hall 3222
Presentation by Alanis King, an Odawa Playwright/Director originally from the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve, the first Aboriginal woman to graduate from the National Theatre School of Canada.
Tuesday
Afternoon, 2pm, Duderstadt Video Performance Studio, North Campus
Emilie Monnet is an interdisciplinary artist with Anishnabe and French heritage and a graduate of Ondinnok’s First Nations Theatre training program – in partnership with The National Theatre School of Canada (Montreal, 2007). Emilie co-directed and performed Bird Messengers, for which she was awarded the LOGIQ prize for the most outstanding Art/Culture project of 2011. In May 2012, Emilie directed Songs of Mourning, Songs of Life, a musical theatrical show addressing legacies of genocide and the role of art for collective mourning, in collaboration with the Aboriginal women’s drum group Odaya and the Rwandan traditional musical ensemble, Komezinganzo.
She has two works in development: OKINUM, a one-women interdisciplinary performance inspired by her great great grand-mother, and another theatre collaboration with indigenous artists from the Amazon, Colombia. Emilie’s artistic engagement is inspired by years of social activism with indigenous organizations in Canada and Latin America, and community art projects with incarcerated women and Aboriginal youth. Emilie is the founder and Artistic Director of ONISHKA, an arts organization that fosters artistic collaborations between indigenous peoples worldwide while honoring their richness, diversity and resilience (www.onishka.org).
(for symposium fellows and organisers only: 3.30-5: Opening Circle, Duderstadt Video Performance Studies)
Evening, Central Campus North Quad, Room 2435:
7pm, Formal Symposium Opening with Heid Erdrich
Poet Heid E. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her Ojibwe mother and German American father taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school.
Erdrich’s poetry often explores themes of indigenous culture, mothering, and the natural world, using the cadence of oral storytelling and a close attention to sound and meter to drive poems rich with sensory and dreamlike imagery. Erdrich is the author of several poetry collections, including Cell Traffic (2012), National Monuments (2008), winner of the Minnesota Book Award; The Mother’s Tongue (2005), part of Salt Publishing’s award-winning Earthworks Series of Native American and Latin American literature; and Fishing for Myth (1997). In a 2006 review, Twin Cities Daily Planet critic Erin Lynn Marsh described The Mother’s Tongue as “an exploration of our culture’s relationship with the term ‘mother’ and of the beginnings of language.”
With her sister, the writer Louise Erdrich, she founded the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop. In 2008 the sisters co-founded Birchbark House, an organization that promotes literature written in indigenous languages. The sisters describe their vision on the foundation’s website: “We foresee a vital return to our Native American languages through the efforts of elders that are already underway. In creating ways to keep their words alive, through books, films, teaching and more, we will keep our languages viable and more, we will allow the means for creative fluency, the hallmark of a fully living language.”
Wednesday:
(for symposium fellows and organizers only: 10:00 a.m – 11:30 a.m., Duderstadt Center)
11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Marcie Rendon workshop. Duderstadt Video Performance Studio, North Campus. Marcie Rendon (Anishinaabe) is a theatre maker and writer activist who supports and encourages other writers to write in Ojibwe. Among her projects are a writing residency she facilitated on the White Earth reservation as part of a three-phase Project Hoop Residency to create theater projects at a community level.
She will lead a ten-minute play, Friends..., which was published in Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theater, and which she and the group will translate into Ojibwe for possible production in Winnipeg in 2013. We will have a reading of the script and then work together on translation issues. With 298 and 323, in Duderstadt
(for symposium fellows and organizers only: 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Duderstadt Center)
6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Angel Sobotta Presentation. CSP Conference Room, Angell Hall Angel Sobotta (Nez Perce), is a Nez Perce language teacher in the tribal headstart, local schools, and at the Lewis Clark State College in Idaho. She is also a writer and documentary filmmaker of projects like, "’Ipsqilaanx heewtnin' weestesne – Walking on Sacred Ground – the Nez Perce Lolo Trail" and "Surviving Lewis and Clark: The Niimiipuu Story" both winning the Aurora and Telly awards respectively. She is also a theater maker with the Lapwai Afterschool Programs, teaching language by adapting legends and directing the youth, including "Niimiipuum Titwaatit – The People’s Stories," an anti-bullying project (2012). Angel is a University of Idaho Interdisciplinary Masters student. Her thesis involves an immersion experience for language teachers by adapting the Nez Perce creation story, written in the Nez Perce language, into a stage play.
(for symposium fellows and organizers only: drum making in CSP office, with catering: 7-10)
Thursday:
(for symposium fellows and organizers only: 1.:00 p.m. – 3.00 p.m.)
3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Virginie Magnat workshop, Duderstadt Video Performance Studio, North Campus
Virginie Magnat is Assistant Professor of Performance at University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She conducts embodied research on transmission processes among women performers from different cultures, traditions, and generations; and draws from Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies to examine the interrelation of lived experience, embodied knowledge, tradition, creativity, and spirituality. Her essay "Can Research Become Ceremony? Performance Ethnography and Indigenous Epistemologies" appeared in summer 2012 in the Canadian Theatre Review.
She will share a workshop called "Sharing Embodied Cultural Knowledge Through Traditional Songs." In this session, participants will be invited to share/teach/learn traditional songs from their cultural legacy so that we can get to know each other through our songs.
6.00 -8.30 Swamp Women/ Miiskwaasinii’ing Nagamojig workshop
Create a new praise song with the Swamp Women, Miiskwaasinii’ing Nagamojig, among Daphne Odjig’s’s paintings. Come, sing, drum and be part of the community!
Friday:
On Friday morning, we’ll gather for a workshop sharing and video recording in the Duderstadt Video Performance Studio. 10-1.
In the afternoon, we end our gathering with a presentation by Margaret Noori, followed by a communal reflection on aesthetics, women and performance. 2.00-4.30, Duderstadt Video Performance Studio, North Campus.
Margaret Noori (Anishinaabe) received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is Director of the Comprehensive Studies Program and teaches the Anishinaabe Language and American Indian Literature at the University of Michigan. She is also one of the founders of the drum group Miskwaasining Nagamojig, current President of Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, one of the Clan Mothers who coordinate the annual Native American Literature Symposium, and member of the Anishinaabemowin-Teg Executive Board. Her book Bwaajimowin: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature is forthcoming from MSU Press and her poetry has recently appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas and Cell Traffic by Heid Erdrich. For more information visit www.ojibwe.net where she and her colleagues have created a space for language that is shared by academics and the native community.
She will be work-shopping a chapter from a forthcoming book on Anishinaabe narrative traditions which traces the way "oral" traditions are actually "physical" performance traditions which carry thought into space and allow us to exchange our interpretations of the world around as word which becomes stage dialogue, story, lyrics or poetry.
Contact for information and queries, contact the symposium directors, Margaret Noori and Petra Kuppers: mnoori@umich.edu and petra@umich.edu
Generous Support provided by the Institute for World Performance Studies, the Rackham Dean’s Strategic Funding, OVPR, LSA, the Humanities Institute and the International Institute, the Duderstadt Center, the English Language and Literature Department, the Women’s Studies Department, and the Trauma Studies Collective.
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Call for Fellowship Applicants
Native Women Language Keepers: Indigenous Performance Practices. An Arts-Based Research Symposium with playwright Alanis King.
Directors: Margaret Noori and Petra Kuppers
January 28th to February 1st 2013, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Deadline for applications: September 10th 2012, notification: September 15th 2012.
Aanii! Join us in a week-long exploration of Native women’s practices as language teachers, activists, and artists, focused on the workshopping of a play by celebrated Native playwright Alanis King, and in close connection with Miiskwaasinii’ing Nagamojig (The Swamp Singers), a Michigan-based performance group, who will work with King to create a praise song for Daphne Odjig’s woodland paintings in the University of Michigan’s archives.
This symposium will marry the strengths of the University of Michigan’s Anishinaabemowin language program, a thriving community of language teachers and learners, with our annual series of arts-based research symposia, in which we investigate ways of knowing through creative means.
In this week, we want to ask questions about the place of performance and women’s work in language survivance and revitalization, about decolonizing methodologies and performance, about honoring Native women artists, and about intercultural performance practices.
The core guest for the week-long symposium in January 2013 is Alanis King, an Odawa Playwright/Director originally from the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve, the first Aboriginal woman to graduate from the National Theatre School of Canada.
We invite up to four fellows (graduate students, faculty, independent artists and activists) to come together with the organizing team for our week-long journey. Before the symposium, a small collection of material from all participants will be made available to prepare us for our time together. During the symposium, each fellow will have two hours to present their work and engage others in a seminar. We will be in residence at the Duderstadt Video Performance Studio on the University of Michigan's North Campus, home to multiple performance technologies with innovative tech wizards at the ready.
Each invitee will have transport and accommodation costs reimbursed up to $500 dollars. The conference hotel offers rooms for about sixty dollars a night, and we will assist people who want to be hosted by graduate students and locals.
Application Process: please email us a short CV, a sample of your work, and a brief statement about why you would like to participate. Direct all materials to the symposium directors, Margaret Noori, mnoori@umich.edu, and Petra Kuppers, petra@umich.edu. If you need to send us physical material, please direct it here: Margaret Noori and Petra Kuppers, University of Michigan, 435 S. State Street, 3187 Angell Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003.
Deadline for applications: September 10th 2012, notification: September 15th 2012.
Migwetch, Gigawabamin Nagutch
Noongwa e-Anishinaabemjig/The People who speak Anishinaabemowin today: website at the University of Michigan
Return to Olimpias page (with links to previous arts-based research symposia)