Prompts for Acknowledging Relations

Prompts for Acknowledging Relations Chris Bell (bio) “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a short story by Ursula LeGuin, tells the tale of Omelas, a utopian society that has a disturbing secret: their joy, abundance, and security are contingent on the neglect of a child living in the basement of a building in the town square. From time to time, townspeople break from the festivities to visit the child. Most visitors feel pity but do nothing, knowing that ending the child’s misery would mean the end of Omelas. Some, however, refuse to participate in a society built on the suffering of others and walk away. The complex layers that LeGuin generates in the narrative offer a reflection on utility and justice, hope and hopelessness. She gestures toward an essential component of performance pedagogy: the nature of artistic responsibility. In this note, I affirm land acknowledgment—naming the fact that we occupy the ancestral lands of specific Indigenous peoples—as an essential responsibility of theatre educators. Such acknowledgment asks us to notice systems that support and restrict life.1 It can even, I argue, prompt us to embrace a model of liveness that reaches beyond the immediately visible. And pedagogy during times of COVID necessitates a reassessment of how “liveness” is mediated—those fragile and ephemeral moments always and already permeating the present. How might we foreground the “liveness” of land acknowledgment as an essential responsibility of the humanities? Land acknowledgments have become commonplace in cultural and academic institutions in settler-colonial states, serving as a way to honor the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary stewards of this land. It is also important to note that land acknowledgments are part of an expansive process: a starting point to better understand our obligations in the humanities, to enact repatriations and set intentions for more equitable approaches to performance. My current academic home base, the University of Minnesota’s Department of Theatre Arts and Dance in the Twin Cities, is part of a university system with a land-grant legacy, an educational infrastructure founded on land grabs and the displacement of Indigenous peoples. These violences against Indigenous peoples of (what is now) North America are not confined to the past; extraction, appropriation, and the marginalizing effects of systemic inequities continue in many of our cultural and academic institutions. Although institutions like mine remain tied to ongoing structural violences, I sense an opportunity to unsettle our discipline’s assumptions, troubling the intellectual foundations that underpin dominant ways of knowing the world. Rather than accumulate and extract knowledge from Dakota and Ojibwe communities (the peoples most directly affected by my institution), how might I prompt my students to nurture meaningful relations with those communities, histories, and knowledges? Connecting questions of “liveness,” responsibility, and land acknowledgment, I reflect on transitioning my class—originally a site-specific collaboration at the Native American Medicine Garden (hereafter NAMG) on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus—to an online course convening twice a week on Zoom. Imagined and enacted as both an opportunity for devised performance practice and as a critical dialogue about the contemporary and ancestral land of the Dakota Oyate, our Zoom classroom collaboration prompted students to reflect on their responsibility to set the conditions for land acknowledgment within public spaces. I draw on a few specific examples of student responses to illustrate approaches to liveness, responsibility, and land acknowledgment that establish performance as a mode of inquiry that enables pathways to critique the contours of dominant structures restricting and supporting life as it is known—and summoning the will to walk away.2 End Page 187 Noticing Relations The NAMG is a one-third of an acre plot of land that hosts diverse plant life native to the region and sits amid industrial agriculture testing fields on the St. Paul campus. Until recently, the NAMG has been under the stewardship of Cânté Sütá (Oglala Lakota). The NAMG, originally founded in 2003 by Barbara Graham-Bettelyoun (Sicangu Lakota, former director of Woodlands Wisdom), is a distinct site at the University of Minnesota, offering a teaching place for students, faculty, staff, and visitors to learn from Lakota perspectives and modes of stewardship. Since taking...