This article offers a spatial and gestural analysis of Vancouver-based multi-media art collective Skookum Sound System'sFootnote 1 digital remixedFootnote 2 video Ay I Oh Stomp (2012). Specifically, I will explore how this remixing intervenes in settler colonialism's disappearances and erasures, to illustrate the ways the video (particularly its activations of dance, movement and gesture) mobilize ongoing Indigenous presencing into futurity. Inspired by Mar-abe (Reference Mar-abe2015)'s writings on the “black imaginary,” I argue that Indigenous futurity decolonizes the Indigenous imaginary. Ay I Oh Stomp's (2012) remixing creates a future imaginary attentive to the past as it critiques the present, and ventures forward into the beyond. I illustrate how the video, as it holds space within the collective imaginary, is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, expressing, as Mar-abe (Reference Mar-abe2015) writes, the “unalienable right to be that radical, to create new worlds in the place of the ones that oppress us.” As I will describe within this article, the mechanisms through which we spatially and temporally gesture “otherwise,” that is—bodily embrace this map to tomorrow, comes out of a process of “jumping scale” (Harjo Reference Harjo2014). Gestures of futurity are choreographies of possibilities and hope—not residing so much in an unattainable dreamscape, but rather they are in constant figuration and reconfiguration all around us. I illuminate instances where futurity is activated or glyphed (Recollet 2014) through the decolonial gesturingsFootnote 3 of dancers and cultural producers’ visual /aural archiving. Indigenous motion, through glyphing, I suggest, produces maps to tomorrow as a result of mobilizing multiple geographical/territorial scales. By glyphing I am referring the ways that music, dances, and other forms of persistent Indigenous motion activate specific spatial/temporal cartographies in much the same way that petroglyphs activate Indigenous presence on land/ sky spaces. This work is rooted in the premise that we build a relationship with the land through activating it. What then, are the lexicons of land and territories, and how can we activate (re)mapping to explore the futuristic narrative of complex land histories?
I discuss the video as a remix that samples dance, movement and gestures that “jump scale” out of colonial cartographies through a series of activations. As a form of discourse, the remix acts as a cultural binder bringing elements together beyond music. It relies on the relentless combination of all things possible (Navas Reference Navas2012), and therefore is an intriguing conduit to house future imaginary relationships to space/time and territory. The remix itself, according to Navas, has no form but is quick to take on any shape and medium. Navas states that the remix is meta-always unoriginal, at the same time, when implemented effectively, it can become a tool of autonomy (Navas Reference Navas2012, 4). I would suggest that the technologies of remix actually illuminate the scales that are already present, including the intentionality of presence that had yet to fully come to light. The multilayers activated in Ay I Oh Stomp mirrors a collective form of futurity-building through inviting others into the frame. The remix is generative in that it creates in-between time, as the space of futurity. The remix activates Indigenous futurities in these creases, in this between time (the slipstream to illuminate the multiverse)Footnote 4 through the technologies of polychromatic shifting, popping, repetition and looping- to enter into the slipstream (Dillon Reference Dillon2012).
Ay I Oh Stomp routes and roots Indigenous bodies to territories (including cosmologies) with total access to the futuristic spatial cartographies and geographical scales that have been denied to us through the destructive processes of settler colonial intrusions. I share, too, how I have come to experience another form of remix from my positioning as an urban Cree Indigenous person living within and jogging through the multi-versed worlds of Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in their territory that is known as the ‘dish with one spoon’ territory.Footnote 5 In these ways, this essay centers the choreographic fugitivity produced by these various Indigenous forms of remixing which manifest the future and, at the same time, critique the persistent structures of settler colonialism.Footnote 6
In the 2012 video Ay I Oh Stomp, digital remixer/producer Bracken Hanuse Corlett mixes Kwakwaka'wakw paddlers and dancers sampled from Edward Curtis’ In the land of the headhunters (1914),Footnote 7 with video featuring popper Julious iGlide Chisolm. In the first frames, Corlett digitally remixes Curtis's footage of three Kwakwaka'wakw ocean canoes; a Thunderbird dancer occupies the bow of the most prominent. Sequentially, Corlett transitions from the Kwakwaka'wakw fleet to frame iGlide's popping within an industrial, sterile space—which iGlide transforms into a space of motion and suspension, holding and release.Footnote 8 Popping (a term initialized in the 1970s) describes a technique for contracting and releasing isolated muscle groups in rhythmic repetition. According to dance scholar Naomi Bragin (Reference Bragin2015), these innovative aesthetics of movement, isolation, contraction and release constitutes “a praxis of black power that trained or unconsciously prepared practitioners in sensory-kinesthetic expressive play” (p. 44). Within popping, and other associative street dances, miniature explosions internal to a dancer's body become visible to spectator's through the dancer's manipulations of perception, using the styles’ aesthetic principles of illusion and control. Popping signals a failure to move in free flowing ways, opening meaning to a whole other reality (Keeling, cited in Bragin Reference Bragin2015) which, according to Bragin, poppers describe as both limitless, and illusionary, expansive and unreal (2015, p. 44).
Photo 1. Julious iGlide Chisolm and Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird Dancer, Ay I Oh Stomp (2012). Photo credit: Bracken Hanuse Corlett.
The sequenced transition to popper iGlide is marked by a faster tempo of motion and sound, and the Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird, I argue, “jumps scale”—discussed further below—from its location in the 1914 Kwakwaka'wakw vessel to occupy the same frame with iGlides popping vocabulary. As evidenced in Ay I Oh Stomp, radical relationality and remembrance are produced through sampling as ancestors are brought into futurity through the remixed coupling of the Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird and iGlide. Inducing polychromatic shifts, duplication and layering creates the conditions for the Thunderbird dancer to jump scale into the past/ future with iGlide. This instance of fusing iGlide and Thunderbird illustrates how in futurity thinking, the body is in constant formation and reformation (this includes thinking through gender containerization processes). In radical relationship, the Thunderbird glyphed on top of iGlide's otherwise movements might be temporally and spatially situated as a choreopolitics of futurity based upon André Lepecki's (2014) discussion of the choreopolitics of protest “as the choreography of protest, or even simply the freedom to move freely,” which he explains is the “ultimate expression of the political.” Seen in this light, b'boy iGlide is practicing a choreopolitical tactic of defiance through Indigenous motion. The layerings of media work, electronic pictures, and remixed tracks produces the ‘aural kinesthetic’ (Kai Johnson 2009) to create the space of a choreopolitics of futurity and this becomes embodied in the forms of both the Thunderbird dancer and iGlide. Lepecki (Reference Lepecki2014) argues “that if to be political is the ability to move freely, then the ideal political subject, is ‘the dancer.’” Sampling Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird with iGlide intervenes, challenges, and in some cases re-appropriates historical narrative tropes of Indigeneity such as the ‘vanishing Indian’ and other persistent settler colonial fantasies of erasure.
I argue that the aural/ visual kinesthetic of popper iGlide, and the Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird dancer produce what I am calling “choreographic fugitivity.” The choreographic fugitivity samplesFootnote 9 the Thunderbird dancer's movements on iGlide's video to produce a mash-up. This represents a form of fugitivity as reorienting and mixing modes of dance and movement (both temporally and spatially) to produce expressions of resurgent Indigenous presencing (Martineau and Ritskes Reference Martineau and Ritskes2014). As a musical remix/ video mash-up Ay I Oh Stomp brings the Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird perhaps as a ‘conceptual strategy’ (Navas Reference Navas2012, 6), into the present in order to produce a set of ideas about the future. I look to the practice of sampling in the creation of the video mash-up as a reterritorialization of Indigenous presence through the production of the spatial scales “in-between” and within the creases of the aural and visual loops, layers, and syncopations. It is the activation of these between spaces that is the space of futurity where the past is brought forward to critique the present and is useful in a project whereby we imagine future worlds, relationships and actions. In other words, what is compelling about the remix are the creases within the layers of the remix (the in-between spaces as one video segment merges into the next) and how they produce desirous spaces for future possibilities and ways of imagining other worlds.Footnote 10 In this article, I mobilize concepts that are in relationship with Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes’ (2014) expansion of the term decolonial aesthetics,
Within these spaces, Indigenous artists and creators are remixing media, aesthetics and modes of expression to refuse the constraints of colonial narratives on creation production, and reorienting art-making to effect resurgent practices and Indigenous ways of being. (ix)
Decolonial aesthetics gesture towards creative, desirous futures, practicing an active ongoing refusal of dispossession and erasure. Such modes are intimately linked to Ashon Crawley's articulations of Otherwise spaces. In Crawley's seminal article “Otherwise Movements” (2015), gesturing Otherwise is a process of dreaming new worlds into existence; a refusal of being stilled; and the activation of a radical imagination whereby social change is created through different forms of nuance and style (Crawley 2015).
Corlett's piece reminds me that there are traditions in futurity, and that they reside in the creases between the layers, activated within the superimpositions and syncopations. Within the mechanics of the spatial glyph, the interstitial passageway becomes an important focal point for understanding how working in between layers shape patterns of Indigenous resistance and futurity. Indigenous motion is in the creases—activated through sampling, repetition, and looping—bringing what is traditional into futurity. In this sense, radical relationality includes remembering those who come after us.
The act of sampling the traditional, ceremonial vocabulary of the Thunderbird with iGlide's popping vocabulary, I suggest, activates the space as a decolonial (re)mapping. Indigenous studies scholar Mishauna Goeman conveys the urgency of (re)mapping, as “the ‘real’ of settler colonial society is built on the violent erasures of alternative modes of mapping and geographic understandings” (Goeman Reference Goeman2013, p. 2). I extend Goeman's thinking on re-mapping to orient the sampling of dance and movement vocabularies of Kwakwaka'wakw and iGlide as spatially/temporally (re)mapping to produce Indigenous futurities and possibilities. I take up Goeman's critical (re)mappingFootnote 11 projects, wherein (re)mapping is understood as the reveal of the multiple Indigenous scales that intervene in settler colonial projects that have erased Indigenous bodies and threatened our radical relationship with territories. Remapping creates a situation where settler colonialism is no longer relevant, nor determinative of Indigenous futurities. Within hip-hop cultural production the glyph can be aural, visual and a mash-up of multiple forms mimicking the multiple Indigenous scales that exist everywhere at once. I believe that we can look to the remix as models for social change. The mechanics of the remix suggest alternative maps into where and how we can be in the future.
A main element in the decolonial project of (re)mapping settler colonial cartographies, is the activation of multiple Indigenous scales as, I would argue, multiverses.Footnote 12 This remapping, I suggest, takes on fugitive poses (Vizenor Reference Vizenor1999) in the form of gestures of “jumping scale” (Harjo Reference Harjo2014). In arguing this, I draw from Muscogee Creek scholar Laura Harjo (Reference Harjo2014), who explores complex Indigenous scales that intervene in the containerization process of settler colonial scales as “pre-fitted scales that we have to conform to.” Harjo describes the Muscogee Creek nation's stomp dance as it manifests Indigenous claims to territory through the production of Indigenous spatial and temporal scales activated through the motion of the dancers. I extend Harjo's discussion of spatial and temporal scales activated through stomp dancing to the multiple motions/gestures and creases in this video, looking at the way these show not just multiple scales, but the ability to move—or jump—between them. I am interested in these acts of “jumping scale,” as articulated by Harjo, through the sampled dances and movement vocabularies of Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird, and iGlide, which take us into “the beyond” of Indigenous futurities. Fusing critical geography with critical Indigenous studies, Harjo suggests that Indigenous scales activate radical relationality between human and non-human forms. As a decolonial gesture, jumping scale allows for a reconfiguration of power through a somatic spatial and temporal repositioning into different realms or world(s) where we can create different narratives and alternative possibilities. Basically, jumping scales describes the process of transcending beyond settler geographies. Time travel achieved through jumping scale carries the capacity to propel us into a futurity where, to borrow a phrase from Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice, “our complexity continues.”
In this context of jumping scale, the video's fugitive gestures activate Indigeneity as a choreographics of possibility and hope residing not so much in an unattainable dreamscape, but rather in constant figuration and reconfiguration all around us. IGlide's popping and Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird movements reconfigure space to produce the protocol of urban spaces, which also necessitate temporal switches and shifts in strategies. Within the project of glyphing futurity through spatial reconfigurations, these gestures are time travelling devices remixing past, present, and future.
What I explore in the following sequences are technologies of the remix (as gestures) that activate futurity, including elements such as duplication and polychromatic shifts in color. These modes are powerful in that they resist and intervene in the hyper-representational mode of describing Indigeneity and Indigenous world(s) as anachronistic and stuck in the primordial past. These technologies re-orient the ocular/aural sensory experience to illuminate the multiple Indigenous scales that exist everywhere at once. Read as a series of gestures, Ay I Oh Stomp offers us tangible insights into the future imaginary. The future imaginary also offers new possibilities for relationships with land and territories as perhaps an overflowing of boundaries to include the multiple Indigenous scales that occupy spaces simultaneously.
Key Concepts
I'm trying to find a map to tomorrow and it has to include the past and the questions that I cannot explain. (Andrea Hairston cited in Mar-Abe Reference Mar-abe2015)
What is compelling to me about Ay Oh I Stomp is how it imagines and activates a sensorial experience of futurity through a series of decolonial gestures whether it be in the repetitious and looped movement of Kwakwaka'wakw paddlers, or the popping vocabulary of Julious iGlide Chisolm. Gesture mirror's José Munoz's sense of the word as it ‘signals a refusal of a certain kind of finitude’ (2009, 65), complimenting Crawley's insistence that imagining Otherwise signifies a refusal of being stilled. As such, my gestural analysis is not as concerned with what gestures mean, but, rather what they do- what they perform and/or activate—how they atomize movement (Munoz Reference Munoz2009).Footnote 13 Skookum Sound System's remix mobilizes precise activations as decolonial gestures that manifest new spaces of possibilities for radical change.
The mobilization of Indigenous spatial glyphing within this article attenuates to how the complex layered, looped and syncopated enunciations of Indigeneity on Indigenous territories “mediate and refute colonial organizing of land, bodies, and social and political landscapes” (Goeman Reference Goeman2013, p. 3). As longstanding practices, petroglyphing—such as in the forms of clay on rock and coding territories in digitized space—produce what is traditional in the future. Spatial glyphing, likewise, describes the functions of visual and aural gestures actuated within Indigenous new media, including hip-hop aesthetics, as decolonial strategies shaping patterns of Indigenous futurities.
Glyphing, a process of spatially tagging,Footnote 14 draws upon the activation of treaties, bundles, scrolls, and petroglyphs – as maps to tomorrow or time travelling devices into futurity. Spatial tagging could be interpreted as a manifestation of an Indigenous futurity through the production of counter spaces (Anderson Reference Anderson2012) to resist oppressive socio-spatial arrangements of space. Spatial tagging, as glyphs take the shape of variant practices such as rock-painted and carved petroglyphs, performance, voiced and sung activations (whereby the song is the glyph), video mash-ups, dance and movement practice, mural and graffiti production (spatially tagging the urban environment as Indigenous territory), and other forms of Indigenous activations. Spatial tags formulate rich and compelling visual optics of Indigenous presence on urban Indigenous territories, and represent futurities in the making. These sophisticated devices create our multiverses wherein we can see that our past is in our future. Spatial tags, and glyphs produce Indigenous decolonial aesthetics or rather, what Mignolo terms “aestheSis” (Mignolo) as a worldmaking process achieved through the activation of our senses. I appreciate the scope of gesture as enunciation or utterance as opposed to containing Indigenous motion within the realm of representation (Mignolo, cited in Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Gaztambide-Fernández2014).Footnote 15 This creates the spaces wherein alternative gesturings are not confined as responses towards the nation state for instance, but are generative in the sense of propelling new world(s) and relationalities into being.
Decolonial gestures are rhizomatically rooted within the generative, desirous, yet rupturous spaces of decolonial love. This work draws upon movement building moments of Michi Saagiig scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's articulations of decolonial love Footnote 16 and its relationship with future land pedagogies. I am inspired to think about radical decolonial love and decolonial creative intimacy as Indigenous forms of holding spaces for each other through, within, and despite the rupturous interstices of settler colonialism. Radical decolonial love presents itself in all of its flaws, inconsistencies, imperfections, ruptures, releases, gorgeousness, and brilliance. Radical decolonial love is an urgent matter of Indigenous survivance. It has propelled Cree scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt to honor the space of ‘loving fast.’ Belcourt fiercely describes, “some of us don't have time to waste. I am suggesting that there is a radicality to loving fast in the battlefield of settler states, that it can be a form of worlding through which new pockets of consensual ethical intersubjectivity emerge” (Belcourt Reference Belcourt2015). In the moment of decolonization that is “an unclean break from a colonial condition” (Tuck and Yang Reference Tuck and Yang2012), Belcourt calls for “more complex and messier forms of love, ones that can, in their otherworldliness, sustain Native peoples’ attachments to themselves” (Belcourt Reference Belcourt2015).
Ay I Oh Stomp
Sequence 1: The Kwakwaka'wakw Canoe Fleet
In the Kwakwaka'wakw canoe sequences discussed above, we witness how fusion, duplication, and polychromatic shifting function to “jump scale” out of colonial cartographies. Corlett's digital remixing of the Kwakwaka'wakw canoe fleet mobilizes these three distinct, yet related gestures of futurity. Each activates a) multiple Indigenous scales to create a radical relationality between human and non-human forms (Harjo, Reference Harjo2014) b) collective Indigenous motion which reproduces the persistence of Indigenous life and c) time/space shifts that remap futurities. They produce the ‘overflowing of boundaries’ that is required to challenge settler colonial erasures of Indigenous motion and being.
Corlett digitally fuses two Kwakwaka'wakw canoes (with paddlers) that initially mirror each other into one Kwakwaka'wakw vessel that transfigures into an organism in and of itself.Footnote 17 Kwakwaka'wakw motion fills this sequencing, layered with the delicious sounds of water flowing the curvatures of the paddles. Sonically and visually, the remixing folds the canoe inward—as the paddlers evaporate or dissolve, accentuating only the bow of the canoe. Nisga'a visual artist, carver, and dancer Mike Dangeli expresses these moments as “canoe dances,” honoring the transformational processes, as it is understood within Indigenous epistemologies that it is the canoe that makes the journey (personal communication, August 20, 2015). In this activation, the Kwakwaka'wakw canoe is revealed as a being, as that which makes the journey across the ocean.Footnote 18
The act of duplicating the Kwakwaka'wakw canoe in the second sequence releases the inward fold, illuminating the process of (re)mapping settler colonial cartographies through acts of presencing Indigenous water spaces with an Indigeneity that overflows the boundaries. Duplication in these frames increases the bodies of the knowledge holders (paddlers), thereby signaling towards an Indigenous futurity that refutes settler colonial fantasies of Indigenous disappearance and erasure. Duplication, as a technology that ‘jumps scale,’ can be perceived as the utterance/ gesture that is enunciating the protocols of futurity.
Corlett and Hunt's video mash-up transcends a rootedness in linear/ chronological history through the layering of color, sound, and image. Corlett and Hunt's digital visual remixing syncopates the moments of contact between the paddles and ocean with the beat production – while introducing visual surges of polychromic mash-ups of color superimposed onto the repetitious motion of the Kwakwaka'wakw ocean seafarers. This syncopation centers the paddles and paddlers persistent (on-going into forever) motion positioned between the break beats -that active space between where all things are possible. Duplication produces a canoe multiverse, further activated through polychromatic shifting, vocalized chanting, water sounds and paddling gestures. Imani Kai Johnson's term ‘aural kinesthetic’ (Kai Johnson Reference Johnson2012) describes this kind of embodied/ sensorial mash-up experience of sound and movement activating the multiple Indigenous scales within Ay I Oh Stomp. Within the Kwakwaka'wakw canoe sequences, sonic loops layered over the repetitious paddling gestures produce the aural kinesthetic acknowledging sound's “omni-directionality, coming at you from all sides” characteristics (Kai Johnson Reference Johnson2012).
(Re)mapping through the neon glyph is a refusal of the black and white, or sepia ‘haunting’ where Indigenous absence is typified through ghostly incarnations devoid of Indigenous survivance.Footnote 19 In other words, neon (re)mappings counter the erasures and disappearances of Indigenous peoples of settler colonial (il) logics. Both Bracken Corlett and Dean Hunt have lineages that ancestrally link them back to the community of the people that were filmed for “In the Land of the Head Hunters” (1914). In a sense, sampling the Kwakwaka'wakw canoe fleet mirrors the persistence of Indigenous life and radical relationality through genealogy. These activations are bringing us into futurity—is futurity—where our relatives are repatriated back to this time/ space continuum.
Visually and sonically, the world making project manifests itself through spaces in-between the break beats where the neonFootnote 20 color-shifting seems to want to break through the sepia toned black and white, thereby intervening in the ways that settler colonialism lays claim to temporality. The polychromatic neon glyphing, through highlighting the spatial and temporal shifting, activates multiple Indigenous scales to (re)map cartographies. The cosmic background colors shift from blacks, deep reds, and yellow accentuating a rich blue vessel. The Indigenous motion is embedded in ephemeral traces, or glyphs as the Kwakwaka'wakw and their paddles surge white in motion at points of contact with the water; while the vessels themselves -the paddles, canoe, and ocean- are accentuated with color. The neon glyphing, and flashes of light throughout the video are that force of dissident visibilityFootnote 21—the hidden that reveals itself in the motion of the graphic, and the paddlers themselves. These flashes of neon overflows the borders away from being positioned into an ‘authentic’ past, propelling Kwakwaka'wakw into a more futuristic now. The canoe sequencing is a form of spatial glyphing accentuating the doing, and the collective presencing of Indigeneity.
Spatial glyphing is a form of tagging the insistent persistence of a collective Indigenous presence. Spatial glyphing practices a shared history of producing geographies of resistance, activated through making visible our active Indigenous presence and futurity in otherwise contested Indigenous territories. As the paddles establish repetitious contact with multiple Indigenous scales of sky and water they illuminate this process of jumping scales through a form of physical and embodied looping.Footnote 22 Polychromatic overlays of the neon and vibrant colors, I argue, assist in the production of the glyph, highlighting suspended moments of Indigenous presence and movement in the act of paddling as a gesture. This technology of glyphing suspends time, through activating the creases of the ongoing momentum of the paddlers as they jump scale into futurity. The vessel, paddles and paddlers form the glyph, where remapping, as Goeman writes, “is not just about regaining what was lost and returning to an original and pure point in history, but instead understanding the processes that have defined our current spatialities in order to sustain vibrant Native futures” (Goeman, Reference Goeman2013). Read as a spatial tag, the remixed (sampled, duplicated, and looped) Kwakwaka'wakw fleet allows for a freedom of motion whereby resistance itself evades being located completely in one space, and at one time, thus challenging over simplistic categories and conditions of resistance. Interpreting the remixed Kwakwaka'wakw fleet as a spatial tag reflecting the in-flux nature of a ‘creative solidarity’ (Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Gaztambide-Fernández and Malewski2010), reminds us of the possibilities for new ways of being in the world. (Recollet Reference Recollet2015, 139).
The persistent motion of the Kwakwaka'wakw paddlers, as a form of spatial justice, acknowledges the power of Native epistemologies in defining collective movements toward spatial decolonization (Goeman Reference Goeman2013, 4). The looping movements of paddling (as enunciation and activation), can be said to intervene the structures of containment of the ‘representation’ (Mignolo, cited in Gaztambide-Fernández Reference Gaztambide-Fernández2014) which restricts Indigenous motion. This creates the spaces wherein alternative gesturings are not confined /encoded as solely responses towards the nation state, but are generative in the sense of propelling new world(s) and relationalities into being. Within these contexts, (re)mapping requires that we jump scale as a generative strategy of futurity building. Called forth from their spatial/ temporal positionings, Thunderbird is creating this futurity in the sequencing that follows the Kwakwaka'wakw fleet.
The Interstice
Skookum Sound System builds upon these glyphing practices as way to produce alternative maps. The variation of colors and light effects in the video reveals the multiple Indigenous scales, alongside the soundscape of the water. The ephemeral effect of the neon glyph embraces the intensity, rupture and movement of time travel into a futurity, wherein the Thunderbird who is seen as part of this epic fleet of Kwakwaka'wakw, is later transposed onto iGlide's body. This creates the moment—the transversal in space-time—as a represencing of Indigeneity throughout Indigenous lands, waters, body gestural vocabulary, and in effect—territory.
Sequence 2: iGlide
Through popping and remixing, iGlide, Corlett, and Hunt produce an aural kinesthetic which (re)imagines geographies of place through calling on specific histories, to produce “cognitive mapping that threatens the worlding of colonial and imperial dominance” (Goeman Reference Goeman2013, 159).Footnote 23 In this way, certain hip-hop cultural producers who (re)map/ reworld contribute in significant ways to the activation of complex Indigenous futurities in urban spaces as part of a much broader decolonial project. IGlide's gestural vocabulary creates the ‘pop’ as the jump, or moment of transcendence towards a radical otherwise. Meeting places within the muscles contact with somatic surges that hold the space as tension and release them into something new, perhaps shaping ‘otherwise’ movements internally. Meeting places within the muscles symbolically mirror ‘meeting’ places within Indigenous spatial scales, such as Oodena – the Anishinaabemowin conceptual meaning of ‘the place where the hearts gather’ (meaning city).Footnote 24 The somatic surges, represent the activation of the city as Indigenous scale. In this way Indigenous motion enacted through dance (as glyphs occupying multiple scales), constitutes a persistence of Indigenous (re)mapping praxis.
A form of spatial tagging, iGlide's ‘otherwise’ movements communicate pressures of resistance and release of the body, thus creating new possibilities for alternative actions. Gesturing futurity through popping and waving can be intentional, whereby you think about the illusion that you are trying to give, adding that fixed point, and frame it with intentional movements (Poppin John Reference John2012). Popper's shape space by creating complex embodied maps through motions that are intentional and deliberate in transforming and holding space through fixed points and paying attention to details. The use of speed changes—showing how space moves through the body—is akin to migrations on territory (as intentional holds on fixed points), our relationships to the land, which are affected by similar shifts and movements. Consequently, popping as a gestural vocabulary- with intentional focus on fixed points and speed changes as ways of holding space – might inform principles for solidarity building, upholding Indigenous protocols (of the freedom of motion) within an urban diaspora on Indigenous unceded territories.
iGlide and Thunderbird
iGlide's movements in relationship with the Kwakwaka'wakw Thunderbird dancer (sampled from footage of “In the land of the headhunters” (1914), co-create an ‘otherwise space’ gestured through the dancing body. Accompanying the transition from the footage of Kwakwaka'wakw paddlers, iGlide produces otherwise movements as his upper body acknowledges, holds, and nurtures the space of the Thunderbird.Footnote 25 His movements are careful, precise and gesture differently in the space through popping and wavingFootnote 26 as a way to contour and activate the scales vertically and horizontally. Thunderbird activates, the scales above and below in quick jumps, while iGlide focuses his movements on activating those scales at a much slower pace. It is almost as though iGlide is aware of the dance that is happening all around him. There are moments where iGlides arms gesture as wings, as the Thunderbird passes through his image—a moment of gesturing futurity—as a form of flight.Footnote 27 Within his repertoire of movement, while there is tension and release, resistance and release—that release is fluid and flowing. Perhaps iGlide is fugitivity in the making where he, as Crawley writes, is “operating out of a different set of concerns altogether, fundamentally not assenting to current configurations of power and authority, but about creating new lines of flight, of force, for operation, for action” (Crawley Reference Crawley2015).
Intermittently, iGlide becomes infused by the Thunderbird as though in a form of Thunderbird glyphing, sharing similar sensorial politics. This is an important moment to witness as we embody histories, migrations, diasporas, multiverses—and we see how it moves the body. Contrasting waving with the changing levels of the Thunderbird highlights the various scales that are possible as a practice of creating space.
Corlett's remix practices, alongside the subjectivities of the remixed- the Kwakwaka'wakw paddlers, Thunderbird dancer, and iGlide, can be described as engaging ‘choreographies of possibility’ (Shea Murphy and Gray Reference Shea Murphy and Gray2013). Further, the layering of moving bodies is an instance wherein relatives are repatriated back to this time/ space continuum. Skookum Sound System propels decolonial love into a project of “otherworlding” (Belcourt Reference Belcourt2015) where beings hold space within the ruptures and between the break beats. This spatiality is jumping scales through the encounters and layerings of bodies, illustrating that it is possible to “love one's broken-by-the coloniality-of-power self in another broken-by-the coloniality-of-power person” (Díaz 2012). The remix enacts this kind of radical relationality through this practice of decolonial intimacy- of layering; jumping scale through bringing the ancestors forward into futurity.
The video mash-up becomes the appropriate conduit for the transfiguration of settler colonialism's attempted erasures and containerizations of Indigeneities. This is appropriate in the now, whereby a shift in ground tactics is needed to transform streetscapes as visionary space where new relationships are possible, and are created in the moment via a complex and intuitive gesturing (but also gesturing which is structured via protocol and Indigenous/ black diasporic aesthetics).Footnote 28
(Re)Mapping: Exceeding the Limits of Land and Territories
Imagining otherwise (Crawley Reference Crawley2015) can be applied to our thinking about Indigenous land pedagogies wherein we can draw upon radical love in all of our relationships (human and non-human) with the multiple Indigenous scales. Choreographies of possibility emerge from the experience of the multiple Indigenous scales within territories that ‘go beyond’ into ‘otherwise spaces.’ If we critically, yet intentionally see land pedagogical praxis as exceeding these limits, otherwise movements reveal hidden scales through layering, repetitions of motions such as the Kwakwaka'wakw paddlers shaping an aural kinesthetic—where music and images are the glyph (Morin 2015).Footnote 29 Through this form of radical remembrance, Kwakwaka'wakw paddlers surface the epistemologies of grandmothers and grandfathers in bringing what is traditional as futurity.
Futurities require remixing to transcend the containments and erasures of settler colonialisms. Perhaps upon surfacing, our bodies respond to this aural kinesthetic as a form of radical remembrance necessary for the projects of creating new worlds. Provocative of futurity, generative and persistent choreographies of creation (in the Kwakwaka'wakw canoe fleet and the iGlide/Thunderbird glyphing) imagine and manifest alternative worlds into being whereby freedom of motion is not only a given, but a precondition of life. This freedom of motion has been achieved through the technologies of the remix such as fusion, duplication, polychromatic shifting, popping, and imaging (iGlide/ Thunderbird glyphing). The future imaginary offers new possibilities for activating our relationships with land and territories as an overflowing of boundaries to include the multiple Indigenous scales that occupy space/time simultaneously. I believe that the process of jumping scale from settler colonialism and its hold on territories and bodies, activates the Indigenous scales that refuse racialized gender violence- and in this refusal shape movements as choreographies of radical love and hope.
Illuminated in iGlide's industrialized/containerized environment, Ay I Oh Stomp engages urban territories with complex histories of settler occupation. Activating Indigenous multiverses, Skookum Sound System holds spaces for complex relationships to territories that exceed the limits of settler colonial cartographies. There are multiple Indigenous scales around us at all times in the cities. For instance, I am a Nehiyaw (Cree) visitor on Huron Wendat/Anishinaabe land in Toronto—the fresh water salmon, eels, manoomin (wild rice), and underground waterways that flow beneath the city produce multiple Indigenous scales. These otherwise spaces can be activated through the presencing of Indigenous motion (spatial and temporal) critically aware of the layers of settler colonial occupation and the multiple erasures that accompany these processes. These Indigenous scales also include those who problematically often get left behind, furthering the need for radical inclusivity with those who have alternative mobility practices, those in juvenile detention centers, incarcerated youth, and folks living in the precarity of homelessness.Footnote 30 How does jumping scale manifest in all of these formulations, and how are we practicing this radical inclusivity? The desire for an urban repatriatory protocol includes creative intimacies with the territory, and all of our relations. What I speak about now, is my own sequence, gesture of futurity wherein I experience the multiverse in the incommensurable space of being an Indigenous visitor on Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe territory. What are some of the tensions of being rooted/routed within Indigenous territories and how might they be activated through the enunciation of aural/optic sensorial experience of our own remixed lives? Further, how might scale reveal itself in the city of Toronto to an uprooted/ routed Nehiyaw (Cree) person?
I am deeply interested in how the decolonial project calls upon Indigeneity to situate itself within traditional territory, and asks for a particular kind of land pedagogy that might not apply to us all, nor reflect all of our experiences. Gesturing futurity carries the potential to push against comfortable notions of territory, home and land-based resurgence. However, since we are focusing on multiple scales, gesturing futuritiesFootnote 31 can accommodate land-based and all of the other realms of experiences where the territory exceeds and pushes against its settler colonial containments.Footnote 32 One way to activate this ‘multi-plexual’ (Daybi No Doubt) space is through the remix. Through the remix, my experience is that I establish decolonial creative intimacy with territory that enunciates ‘otherwise,’ as the Missasauga's of New Credit, Huron-Wendat territories. As I activate Garrison Creek, for instance, a form of water walking transposes into a jog on top of the, now buried underground waterway that inhabits Toronto. Indigenous land-based pedagogy can be understood as shaping the aural kinesthetic, as water beings of Anishinaabe creation/ recreation stories, fresh water salmon and eels surge upwards as decolonizing practice. I believe that as Indigenous pedestrians on Indigenous territories we are also unearthing the scales down below through Indigenous motion, an important praxis of Indigenous land pedagogy as futurity. Further, this activates a praxis of radical decolonial love as one embodies the senses to activate these multiple scales, of which the remix gestures outwards tending to all of these multiple senses. We also have to be mindful, that in futurity thinking, we are not activating further oppression. As Mar-abe writes, “what might appear to be a brand new world on the surface might be the same old hierarchies and oppression underneath the shiny technology. In other words, what is futuristic is not necessarily progressive” (Mar-abe Reference Mar-abe2015).
Complex and critical land intimacies can manifest through everyday, pedestrian movements in the city as a form of gylphing Indigenous presence through a multitude of different forms of embodiment, bodily vocabularies that produce rich Indigenous scales. Bodies shape the space around them, but also, space can be the agent that determines movement (Kwan Reference Kwan2013). It becomes important to consider the impacts of kinesthesia (the bodies awareness of motion, Kwan Reference Kwan2013, 14), within the context of settler colonialism, particularly in Anishinaabe and Huron-Wendat Indigenous territories of Toronto as multiple Indigenous scales requiring their own protocols of place/ space/ and temporality. What if we thought about territory in terms of all of its multiple scales and engaged protocols to include the manifestations of radical inclusion, radical relationality, and the building of creative intimacies as our (re)worlding project of love.Footnote 33 This would reflect a complex and critical understanding of settler colonialism's impacts and include ‘jumping scale’ as a methodology to create decolonial futurisms.
My activation of the space, through jogging, is gesturing radical remembrance of water (underground flow) through thinking about the multiple scales above and below. The Earth dive as an experience of the runner jumping scale through sonic optics surfaces the consciousness of underground waterways as acts of Indigenous survivance on Indigenous territory through a reciprocal use of nature. My jog runs me through the territory of Garrison Creek through Christie Pits Park, the site of a buried creek that was formed as a result of the Wisconsin glacier activity 12,000 years ago. The motion becomes a form of engaging the sidewalk interstice as the creases of transmotion (Vizenor Reference Vizenor1999). Indigenous scales of futurity are spaces where our relatives are repatriated back to this place through forms of jumping scale. We are in radical relationship with the fresh water salmon and the eels that used to reside underneath the city. The technologies of the remix—syncopation, layering, duplication—create the slipstream/ between spaces to think through the complications and tensions of what it means to be in radical relationality with multiple scales. These are the multiple scales that are being activated in my running, which I forward as a gesture of Indigenous futurity within a very specific embodied experience on territory. According to Grande, “Indigenous communities and nations need their pedagogies of disruption, intervention, affirmative action, hope and possibility” (Grande Reference Grande2004, 26).
Cultural producers illuminate creative intimacies with the spatial layers around us, as seen in iGlides gestural vocabulary, producing the visual optics of futurity- whereby his gestures are (re)worlding in real time. The remix carries significant portals towards how we imagine Indigenous futurities- as forms of neon glyphing, popping patterning through iGlides's reconfigurations of space, and the layering of Kwakwaka'wakw bodies over popper's bodies. These praxes call on the use of fixed points and illusion, imagination and desire to create otherwise spaces wherein we can practice a radical relationality with each other and the non-human forces that exist around us (Hunt and Corlett); iGlide, and Kwakwaka'wakw jump scale towards new land pedagogies through acknowledging the multi-directionality of territories (revealing hidden scales.) Gesturing futurity calls upon us all to engage these multiple scales of desire within which we have the freedom of motion to create choreographies of possibility, hope, and …yes… radical love.
