Editorial
The
contents of Volume 5.2 of Transmotion reflect the interdisciplinary
breadth of our editorial vision, which allows us to continue to highlight the
diverse range of work being produced by scholars in the field of Indigenous
Studies today. The scholarly articles in this issue explore texts and topics in
the realms of contemporary film, visual art, museum studies, and musical
performance.
In
"Do You Recognize Who I Am?: Decolonizing Rhetorics in the Indigenous Rock Opera Something Inside is
Broken," Shannon Claire Toll analyzes the decolonizing rhetorics displayed in
an Indigenous rock opera that toured California and the Southwest United States
in the Fall of 2016. Applying LeAnne Howe's concept of tribalography, Toll
discusses the decolonizing potential of this musical performance, focusing on
the implementation of Nisenan oral tradition, history, and language in its
libretto. Leveraging the advantages of our online platform, Toll's article also
includes links to songs from the production to allow the reader and listener to
experience the music and Nisenan language featured in the work. While Toll's
piece engages, in this way, in a bit of "curation" for the benefit of our
readers, Courtney Cottrell's "Indian Made: Museum Valuation of American Indian
Identity through Aesthetics" takes us directly into the heart of some key theoretical
questions in museum studies. Cottrell explores that ways that ethnographic
museums create and communicate a taste for American Indian art through their
acquisition practices and their "rhetorics of value." She goes on to argue that
these rhetorical practices are creating rigid standards for what constitutes
American Indian art that is deemed worthy for museum display, standards that often
exclude traditional art forms and contemporary motifs deemed important by
tribal nations and individual American Indian artists. Cottrell concludes her
piece by exploring how some tribal museums (such as the Oneida Nation Museum)
are employing their sovereign authority and citizenship standards to develop
more inclusive collections and broaden the taste for American Indian art.
Contributing
to this taste-expanding work, Kristina Baudemann's "Laughing in the Dark: Weird
Survivance in the Works of Bunky Echo-Hawk and Daniel McCoy Jr." employs and
extends Vizenorian theoretical lenses to explore the role of humor in the work
of two major contemporary visual artists. Focusing on the surreal, strange,
outraging and simply weird elements in the artwork of Bunky Echo-Hawk
and Daniel McCoy Jr., Baudemann introduces the concept of "weird
survivance" as a way
of encouraging readers to remember that survivance is not exclusively produced
by positive and pleasing images. Her article focuses instead on dark humor—a
kind of laughter that is spurred by confrontation with the weirdness of our
reality, and that comes from a place of sadness, frustration, or even disgust, in
spurring renewal and resistance. In this way, she engages in the playful, transmotional
exploration of critical categories that is part of the spirit of this journal.
Finally, turning to film, we have Matt Kliewer's
"Translating Images of Survivance: A Trans-Indigenous Corporeal Analysis of Spear
and Maliglutit." Drawing on Michelle Raheja's theorization of visual sovereignty,
Kliewer argues that, while the creation of tribally specific images of
survivance represents a fundamental process in reinforcing visual sovereignty
and enacting self-determination, the application of survivance characteristics
across tribal boundaries creates a powerful inter-tribal, globally Indigenous
challenge to the colonial gaze. Analyzing Indigenous images from vastly
different geographical and colonial contexts, he suggests, allows us to find
common colonial images that Indigenous image makers strategically deconstruct
and remake in performative acts of inter-tribal sovereignty. By analyzing
Stephen Page's Spear and Zacharias Kunuk's Maliglutit, Kliewer
demonstrates how this inter-tribal aesthetic directly engages Western colonial
film conventions and colonial imagery, reframing narratives where Indigenous
bodies encounter and resist their historically limited positionality in filmic
mediums.
We
complement these articles, as always, with our wide-ranging reviews section and
cutting-edge creative work. For this issue, we feature a piece by Sámi poet, Niilas Holmberg titled "Máttu
oahpus / A Lesson from an Ancestor." We are pleased
to reprint this poem, both in the original Sámi version and in an English
translation. Our readers will appreciate Brad Hagen's sharp reflection piece, a
meditation "On Dreamcatchers" that opens up into wider consideration of memory,
tradition, and identity. We are also pleased to feature a reflection (with
video accompaniment) on indigeneity in Star Wars, by Stephen Graham Jones. With
too many reviews to highlight individually here, we will content ourselves with
drawing particular attention to Matthew Fletcher's graphic review of John Borrow's Law's Indigenous Ethics. Fletcher's piece highlights the innovative expansion of the boundaries
of academic writing made possible by our journal's format. Also deserving of
specific mention here is Deborah Madsen's review essay (really an article in
itself) of Adam
Dahl's, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of
Modern Democratic Thought, which Madsen considers as a
thought-provoking, yet limited, example of "complementary scholarship" for the
field of indigenous studies.
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Transmotion is open access, thanks to
the generous sponsorship of the University of Kent: all content is fully
available on the open internet with no paywall or institutional access
required, and it always will be. We are published under a Creative Commons 4.0
license, meaning in essence that any articles or reviews may be copied and
re-used provided that the source and author is acknowledged. We strongly
believe in this model, which makes research and academic insight available and
useable for the widest possible community. We also believe in keeping to the
highest academic standards: thus all articles are double-blind peer reviewed by
at least two reviewers, and each issue approved by an editorial board of senior
academics in the field (listed in the Front Matter of the full PDF and in the
online 'About' section).
David Carlson
December 2019
Theodore C. Van Alst
James Mackay
David Stirrup