In the introduction to this collection of essays, Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny argue that cultural performance has become essential not only to the articulation but also to the substantiation of indigeneity. They explain that indigenous performance became increasingly common during the second half of the twentieth century, in conjunction with the international recognition of indigeneity as a legal category. Such performance is also self-conscious and reflexive, shaping what is an emergent process. Indeed, devoid of cultural performance, the condition of being indigenous seems unimaginable. Indigeneity, rather than a thing in the world, is a work in progress, a tentative political horizon.
Indigeneity is often conceived as a condition of some kind of continuity with pre-colonial societies, but in practice it is also a normative construction, policing indigenous bodies through the symbolic compartment of the indigenous other. Graham and Penny make clear that performing indigeneity is not only about explicit performance but also about performativity; following Judith Butler, it is the construction of the subject by iterative acts. Indigenous peoples ‘achieve, accomplish and even improvise Indigeneity through performance and performative acts’ (p. 4), but always constrained by the conventions and expectations sedimented by power-laden, previous acts.
Most of the essays focus on ways in which indigenous activists are redefining indigeneity, challenging its stigmatising normativity and enacting novel articulations through the power of performance. The main strength of the book is the analysis of indigenous agency and the indigenous body in relation to history. In addition, paying attention to the uncertainties of indigeneity, the book strengthen current research trends that overcome explanations based on rational choice, which ignore embodied sentiment in the constitution of indigenous and non-indigenous subjects.
The collection raises important issues, of which I will discuss or summarise a few. Are there limits on who can be accepted as indigenous? In his essay, Michael L. Cepek presents the findings of his research, already published as a book, on Cofán leader Randy Borman. The Cofán are indigenous people of Amazonian Ecuador, and Borman, born to American missionaries, has pale skin and blue eyes. Cofán-ness, however, rather than racial or genealogical, is about a person's practical enculturation into their way of life. Borman has lived as Cofán most of his life, and, from a Cofán perspective, he is Cofán.
In contrast, for the German hobbyists who re-enact Native American lifestyles, in Penny's essay, the racial barrier is unsurmountable: ‘No matter how well you play your part, your ass remains white’ (p. 197). Penny undermines the notion that all performance of indigenous culture by non-indigenous groups amounts to theft and/or stereotyping. Hobbyists put significant effort at ‘getting it right’, and Native Americans have taken the emulation as compliment. Comparing both essays reveals that dominant and indigenous ideas about indigeneity might differ widely. Whereas the former aims for a universal definition, the latter might depend on local ontologies of personhood.
The essays by Bernard Perley (Tobique, Canada) and Brendan Hokowhitu (Ngāti Pukenga, Aotearoa/New Zealand) criticise the idea of decolonisation as misguided, and propose projects for indigeneity. Perley shows the ways in which indigeneity is played out on the ground through narratives of personal experience, ranging from the contradictory to the traumatic. Hokowhitu argues that popular understandings of the Ka Mate, the haka (dance) commodified as a symbol of patriotism by New Zealand's rugby team, are oblivious to its connotations of female power and protection, and run counter to its original epistemology.
Perley proposes ‘critical indigeneity’ as a commitment by indigenous peoples to live ‘their Indigenous traditions on their terms and in their everyday lives’ (p. 33). Hokowhitu argues for ‘embodied sovereignty’ as a recuperation of the indigenous body, focusing on what culture ‘feels like’ rather than on culture as knowledge to be preserved (p. 296). Both projects aim to lessen the contradictions of indigeneity and challenge its dominant normativity. However, as calls to action of what indigeneity must be, both reveal the unresolved gaps of moving from the analytical to the political.
Indigenous gender has always been an important locus of colonial regimentation and stereotyping, and some indigenous activists today are articulating new indigeneities through the reworking of gender. Ty P. Kāwika Tengan analyses the ways in which Hawaiian men are re-articulating indigenous masculinity through dance to challenge the erasing of men from dominant discourse on Hawai'i's lands and people. Laura R. Graham compares two Xavante communities, from the Brazilian Mato Grosso, to examine the ways in which the adoption of the discourse of environmentalism in one of them has led to a rethink of conventional Xavante gender roles.
Beatriz Perrone-Moisés analyses two theatrical performances staged by Tupinamba of coastal Brazil before the kings of France in 1550 and 1613. At that time, the Tupinamba and the French were allies against the Portuguese and the latter's own native allies. Rather than seeing the event as performances of exoticism under colonial domination, as most historians have done, Perrone-Moisés argues that they were diplomatic rituals of which Tupi agency was as constitutive as French intentions.
The book includes other innovative essays. Dorothy L. Hodgson analyses the ways in which the Maasai have learned to perform indigeneity in the United Nations. Catherine Baglo studies the history of Sami ethnographic exhibitions, and demonstrates that rather than being hapless victims, they ‘exploited these exhibitions for their own ends’ (p. 138). The essays by Fred Myers and Mark K. Watson explore the performative aspects of, respectively, aboriginal Australian paintings and indigenous memorials in urban settings. The essay by Greg Johnson is a valuable account of burial protection activism in Hawai'i. However, it does not carry through its analytical proposal of performance.
Because of its heterogeneity and scope, the collection would have benefitted from a concluding chapter addressing comparative broader issues, such as the self-conscious nature of contemporary indigenous performance or the differences in political power of such performance in the past and the present. In spite of this, Graham and Penny have edited an original and stimulating collection of essays, a welcome contribution to the understanding of the complexities of indigeneity.
