Reclaiming territories through indigenous performance

This thesis project illustrates how Indigenous-centered performance enables and supports collective meaning-making and indigenous continuity. An examination of the Canadian policies regarding indigenous ceremony, public performances, and community gathering is presented to show the effects this complexity history is felt by indigenous people today. The use of counter-narrative, and telling ancestral stories of resistance provide insight into the way in which indigenous people have resisted these assimilation policies over generations. Our program here is to animate indigenous people within a living framework of continuity and Indigenous Knowledge Systems by focusing on how today’s performance and performing is connected to oral cultures, indigenous intellectual traditions. Indigenous performance and indigenous artists who while giving an insight into how indigenous people are creating safe social and learning spaces and can invoke positive spectrum emotions to combat colonial trauma. Interviewing five indigenous artistic performers, who engage many genres in performance, sets the basis of indigenous research methods including Kovach’s conversational method of interviewing. Presenting indigenous performances’ role in indigenous continuity, education, and generational knowledge transmission affirm the deep consideration of indigenous artists today and their role in leadership and in empowering indigenous people and communities. This research also uncovers a generational knowledge system that values of education, healing, protection and reciprocity that compose legacies of ancestral knowledge that can propagate healthy and loving indigenous realities. ; Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies ; Graduate