The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System

Dancing with Native American Epistemology

Shay Welch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030049362
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This book investigates the phenomenological ways that dance choreographing and dance performance exemplify both Truth and meaning-making within Native American epistemology, from an analytic philosophical perspective. Given that within Native American communities dance is regarded both as an integral cultural conduit and "a doorway to a powerful wisdom, " Shay Welch argues that dance and dancing can both create and communicate knowledge. She explains that dance—as a form of oral, narrative storytelling—has the power to communicate knowledge of beliefs and histories, and that dance is a form of embodied narrative storytelling. Welch provides analytic clarity on how this happens, what conditions are required for it to succeed, and how dance can satisfy the relational and ethical facets of Native epistemology.

© The Author(s) 2019

Shay WelchThe Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge Systemhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04936-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Shay Welch¹

(1)

Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, USA

Shay Welch

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been an upsurge in Native and Indigenous performance arts to revisit and remember—to tell through retelling—stories of the past and how they have shaped Native and Indigenous identities and knowledges as those stories, identities, and knowledges have struggled to survive continued expropriation, abuse, and erasure. Native dance, specifically, has experienced revitalization through a number of Native artists’ endeavors to interweave the traditional with the contemporary. Native and Indigenous performance arts companies such as Native American Theatre Ensemble, DAYSTAR, Institute of American Indian Arts, Dancing Earth Contemporary Indigenous Dance Creations, Native Earth Performing Arts, Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, Spiderwoman Theater, and Red Arts Performing Arts Company have utilized embodiment and motion as a way of accessing and extracting blood memory to communicate such knowledges to Native and non-Native audiences. In the Foreword of Native American Dance: Ceremonies and Social Traditions, W. Richard West Jr. (1992) explains that:

Dance is the very embodiment of Indigenous values and represents the response of Native Americans to complex and sometimes difficult historical experiences. Music and dance combine with material culture, language, spirituality, and artistic expression in compelling and complex ways, and are definitive elements of Native identity. (ix)

Beyond the articulation of identity, dancing within the Native American worldview is deeply entrenched in and as a way of knowing. Charlotte Heth (1992) explains: “Indeed, in Indian life, the dance is not possible without the belief systems and the music, and the belief systems and the music can hardly exist without the dance” (9).

In 1921, the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs issued the following Circular decree:

I have, therefore, to direct you to use your utmost endeavours to dissuade the Indians from excessive indulgence in the practice of dancing. You should suppress any dances which cause waste of time, interfere with the occupations of the Indians, unsettle them for serious work, injure their health or encourage them in sloth and idleness. You should also dissuade, and, if possible, prevent them from leaving their reserves for the purpose of attending fairs, exhibitions, etc., when their absence would result in their own farming and other interests being neglected. It is realized that reasonable amusement and recreation should be enjoyed by Indians, but they should not be allowed to dissipate their energies and abandon themselves to demoralizing amusements. By the use of tact and firmness you can obtain control and keep it, and this obstacle to continued progress will then disappear.¹ (Scott 1921; see Fig. 1.1)

Fig. 1.1

Letter from head of Canadian Department of Indian Affairs (see Scott 1921). Full text of document included in Appendix A

This circular demonstrates why it is that the deployment of dance as a mechanism for articulating Native American epistemology is not merely a fanciful interdisciplinary trick. Dance, whether as social or ritual performance, has always been a cornerstone of cultural practice and education and communal relationship strengthening. Further, dance is often explicitly regarded as a highway for Truth, as exemplified by David Delgado Shorter’s book title, We Will Dance Our Truth: Yaqui History in Yoeme Performances (2009). It is for this reason that the activity of dancing specifically was targeted by settler-colonial states as one that needed to be promptly eradicated throughout the Americas.² Scholars and practitioners of Native and Indigenous dance have had to fight for their right to dance within the broader fight for sovereignty and cultural rejuvenation. Historically, the fight was merely to dance at all. Today, the fight is to dance on one’s own terms: as a tribal nation, as a performer, as an urban Native American, as a mixed-blood, and as a storyteller. Therefore, I offer this analysis of dance as a mode of Native American epistemology in solidarity with others as a decolonial act of resistance, both in the academy and on the stage.

To begin, I would like to situate myself to create more familiarity with my reader so that she or he may travel this path with me in relation. I think that the reader can glean much insight from knowing why I approach these ideas from the specific angles I do and why it is that I highlight some respects more than others. My trajectory through this analysis is not a result of ranking and prioritizing any one idea over another but rather consequent my own personal knowledges and how I understand and try to make sense of these ideas for myself. I did not come to this intuition that dance is a primary mode for Native American ways of knowing as a result of my Oklahoma Cherokee heritage. My dad’s side of the family is, and has been for a very long time, non-traditional folk; my great-grandfather chose not to pursue citizen status after being placed on the Roll. And I am not a dancer. What I am, however, is an aerialist, which many people call sky dancers. While I dreamt my whole life of becoming a dancer, I was prohibited by doing so by a disability in my legs that I was born with. So when I found aerial “dancing”, I finally found a way of creating and expressing with my body as I had long fantasized about doing. Coincidentally (or not) enough, it was about this time within my academic trajectory that I could finally slow down and take the time to immerse myself in Native American Philosophy and Native American Studies so that I could better understand my heritage and my kin. Thus, I believe it was the unique, simultaneous intersection of delving into aerial dance and Native epistemology that spurred this project, which might never have come about had the two spheres of my life not sprouted in tandem in my imagination.

This information is all particularly relevant for two reasons beyond creating relations. First, it is relevant because my perspective on dance, embodiment, and choreographing all stem from a unique perspective from that of a traditional dancer or dance theorist. I came to aerial innovation and choreography as a fully formed (or corrupted, one might say) philosopher, which means I have always approached it with inadvertent conceptual objectives rather than as love and experience of pure art. Also, I understand dance quite differently in that I have come into my relationship with choreographing without ever having a firm foot on the ground, as it were, in that I do not have full use of my legs.³

Second, my relationship to and knowledge of Native American ways of knowing, while incredibly familiar upon learning, are not my original epistemic praxes. I want to make it very clear from the outset that while I aim to write as consistently as possible with Native American ways of knowing, I am not capable of fully writing from a Native American way of knowing even though I have recognized such epistemologies practiced within my family that were taught to me. As a result, I write this with an always glaring concern of my risk of subconsciously “justifying” Native American ways of knowing through Western theory in a colonizing way rather than merely elaborating on Native American ways of knowing with the help of some Western theory. Historically and to the present day, Western philosophy has been egregiously guilty of distorting Native theories and practices. Aside from seemingly innocuous failed endeavors to represent Native constructs that have no corollary in the Western perspective, Western theorists have intentionally manipulated and damaged Native and Indigenous ideologies for the purpose of misrepresenting them as childish and primitive for the purpose of justifying genocide and domination. So, I ask you, as the reader, to yourself also be mindful of conflating or subconsciously interpreting compatibility between Native American epistemology and Western theory with Western theory’s legitimization of Native Philosophy.

Laurelyn Whitt offers a clear explication of what it means to reject the conception of epistemology as a universal frame of knowing when she states:

To speak of a knowledge system is to abandon the idea that a single epistemology is universally shared by, or applicable to, all humans insofar as they are human. It facilitates instead a cultural parsing of the concept of epistemology, suitable to the heterogeneity of knowledge. There are specific epistemologies that belong to culturally distinctive ways of knowing. (2009, xv)

Thus, in this book I aim to flesh out, from an analytic philosophical perspective, a Native American epistemology, specifically in terms of its being a performative knowledge system. Very specifically, my purpose in this book is to fully develop an analysis of the Native American philosophical definition of Truth, which is purely procedural and action-centered; that is, my goal in this book is to articulate what it means and how it is for Truth to be constituted by the performance of an action rather than by content or nature of statements. This definition is discussed in chapter 2. Generally speaking, a knowledge system must contain four characteristics: a theory of knowledge that accounts for what counts as knowledge, tells us how we know, constrains how knowledge is or may be accrued, directs how it is learned or taught, and explains how new things can come to be considered forms of knowledge. To give substance to the notion of Native epistemology as a performative knowledge system in a way that satisfies these criteria and, more specifically, to provide contextual depth and richness to this analysis, I argue that and demonstrate how the phenomenology of dance choreographing and dance performance exemplifies both the definition of Truth and meaning-making within Native American epistemology. Given that within Native American communities dance is regarded not only as an integral cultural conduit but also as “a doorway to a powerful wisdom” (Longboat 1997, 8), I argue that and substantiate how it is that dance and dancing can both create and communicate knowledge. That dance—as a form of oral, narrative storytelling—has the power to communicate knowledge of individual and collective beliefs and histories is not of much controversy from the perspective of dance theory and Native Studies. Narrative is the heart and soul of both knowledge and ethical relations in the Native tradition, particularly because narrative is born through an oral tradition, which relies on the sharing of individual experiences for knowledge construction; it helps individuals apprehend and deal with the complexity of the world by providing a storied picture through which to see particular instantiations of more general occurrences (Deloria 1999, 67; McPherson and Rabb 2011, 110). And dance is a form of embodied narrative storytelling. My work with respect to this claim is to provide further analytic clarity on how this happens, which conditions are required for it to succeed, and how dance can satisfy the relational and ethical facets of Native epistemology. The more convoluted task for me, however, is to give traction to the idea that dance creates and effects knowledge by eliciting unique embodied metaphor cognates in the body to reify through the body ideas and stories that may be ineffable. This line of argument may bear additional fruit for Native Philosophy and Native/Indigenous Studies; such explications can be explored ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Native American Epistemology
• 3. Native Epistemology and Embodied Cognitive Theory
• 4. Native Epistemology and Dancing
• 5. Native Dancing: The Truthing in Performative Knowing
• Back Matter