Contemporary Shaman

Contemporary Shaman by Sarah Stupar FPST 498 Dr. Karl Hele 17 December 2013

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Every once in a while you read a book that completely changes the way you see the world. Or maybe you just remember the way that you see the world. I read one of those books this year, it was called If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground by J. Edward Chamberlin. It may not have been this book that changed me, so much as I read this book at the right time. It seemed to summarize in plain language just what I had done with my life in the months preceding. In this paper I will share with you my journey through the First Peoples and Performance class, and how it made me a better actor. I was drawn to Chamberlin's book because I consider myself a storyteller. I use the word actor most commonly, but really what I do is study stories. I act and I dance and I write, but all of those activities are really about the same thing. Telling stories. The book was a great read. It was full of stories and poems and legends and myths. In sharing them with the reader Chamberlin was arguing that the mere act of believing is our common ground. Our common ground lies in our ceremonies of belief.i This idea, on top of everything else I had experienced this semester helped me to appreciate even more what I do when I tell stories. This has been an interesting semester for me. I was not exactly 100% committed to being a student. Or at least not a Concordia Student. Academia is challenging for me. At the age of nineteen I studied Acting for Film and Television for 16 months at the Vancouver Film School. I was a student, but I did not write anything down. The faculty told us that the grades didn't matter. “We only give you grades” the teachers said, “because the government says we have to. They do not matter.” The diploma was meaningless as well. A piece of paper cannot show people that you are a good actor. Only you can do that. So you were either going to learn something, or you were not, and the choice was yours. Concordia was giving me trouble you see, because I have to prove myself in a different way, or at least that is how it felt. There was no creativity, everything seem so rigid and structured, 2

so ...academic. Everything I did at Concordia this year, I just barely committed to doing. It is actually quite funny when I think back. I remember my alarm going off on the morning of the anniversary of the Royal Proclamation. In celebration of the 250 th anniversary of the Royal Proclamation a symposium was organized in Ottawa. I was expected to be there to get one credit to count towards my degree. When my alarm went off at 4am I thought “Why am I doing this? I don't even want a degree. I am an actor. What am I doing here? I should just drop out of University and move to New York. I want to be an actor. I don't need a degree.” I think I even hit the snooze button once. Seven years ago my father revealed to me my Métis heritage and since then I have been making an attempt to gather with other groups of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people to talk about “Indian Stuff”. These gatherings have ranged from classroom lectures in the halls of Academia to a shake-tent ceremony on the shores of Gitchigoumi. At the symposium there were some things that happened that were of a great comfort to me. I heard Indigenous languages being spoken. The land was thanked. It was a simple and small amount of ceremony and I was glad to have it. Maybe because I had only been to one pow wow the past summer, I had really been hoping for a drum, and if there was a drum, maybe there could be dancing. There was no dancing, and my lack of sleep started to catch up on me. I celebrated the triumph of actually getting myself to the conference, by sleeping through a good third of it. Then I berated myself. “See!? You should have just stayed at home! You came all this way and you are not even paying attention. Why didn't you just stay home and sleep!?” Many attendants at this symposium belonged to nations such as Nunavut or the Nisga'a who have successfully negotiated comprehensive land claims agreements with the Canadian government. A re-occurring theme permeated my dreams as I slept through the presenters; while these organizations were successful in getting the Canadian government to sit down at the table and sign an agreement, after the agreement was signed the government would seemingly disappear. ii Much like the Governor General had done that morning. Singing a treaty is easy. Getting the government to live up to their 3

agreements turns out to be another matter entirely. In the afternoon I was better able to fight off sleep. A man name Jim Miller caught my ear. He talked about a lack of ceremony. He gave a presentation highlighting the diminished role of ceremony in treaty negotiations and the different perceptions of treaties between the two camps. Prior to the Royal Proclamation Indigenous nations were considered commercial and military allies, and the new comers in Canada were dependent on their assistance for survival. The British and French were drawn into the Indigenous ways of doing things and for them it was important to establish kinship relationships with military allies and trading partners. This was done through ceremony; highly ritualized interactions that made use of rhetoric of family, exchange of presents, sharing of food and often smoking of the pipe. These ceremonies had to be repeated annually or after long periods of time apart, and it was through the act of coming together in ceremony that these relationships were maintained. iii Miller pointed out that the use of Indigenous protocol was prevalent up until the War of 1812; after this time the use of ceremony and the rhetoric of kinship decreased, while pressure on Indigenous peoples to assimilate increased. He also noted that during this period of decreased ceremony, complaints by Indigenous groups about lands and treaty rights being infringed upon increased. iv New immigrants who arrived and who did not ever participate in ceremony would feel no need to honour treaties. The relationship between nations was faltering as ceremonies were abandoned. Miller did acknowledge a reintegration of Indigenous ceremony during the beginning of the numbered treaties era, as the Western Indigenous leaders were still expecting this kind of treaty making due to their experiences with the Hudson's Bay Company. Not only did the first of the numbered treaties (1 though 7) feature ceremony, they included multiple references to the Christian God or the Creator which indicates that the Indigenous people saw these treaties as three sided agreements with the deity included.v However shortly after signing these supposed Nation to Nation agreements, the Canadian government passed the Indian Act. The treaties had stipulated that the First Nations people 4

would be treated as partners; the Indian Act transformed these partners into child like wards of the state. Oh the Indian Act. I sat through that class and I still do not understand it. Well, I mean I understand that for Indigenous people in Canada the Indian Act has been a major blow against their sovereignty and an attack on 'common ground' in literal and metaphorical ways. Actually come to think of it the most interesting parts of the Indian Act Class for me had been those dealing with ceremony. Not only was there a decrease in ceremony between Indigenous and Settler Canadians but the Indian Act had attempted to outlaw Indigenous ceremony completely. vi The Indian Act also created the reserves system which saw Indigenous people confined to reserves, literally delineating space in a way that common ground would be almost impossible to find. vii That is from last semester though. This semester was supposed to be far more creative! My class was First Peoples and Performance! I had been really excited about this class because I was hoping to be watching lots of films produced by Indigenous People, but it was not like that at all. It was mostly concerned with the performance of First Peoples, also know as “The Indian.” I was bored at first. This has nothing to do with me!, I fumed. I was not very interested in “redfacing.” Instead of doing creative things and watching performances I was reading academic texts about communication theory. Redfacing is essentially the activity of playing “Indian”, but specifically playing an idea of what an “Indian” should be.viii Redfacing is usually discussed in relation to film and television, but it has its roots in the fairs and exhibitions of the late 19th century. Fairs and exhibitions had constructed a “show space” wherein Western nations constructed the idea of 'savages' to prove their own superiority. In their show spaces they created spectacles of savagery that complimented and justified colonization by juxtaposing civilized western nations against those of the savage other. At the same time they were 'neutralizing' these supposed beasts through their manipulation of performances, further proving the triumph and superiority of Western civilization. ix The performers did not actually represent the truth of 5

who they were or where they came from, they were performing an idea which reflected far more about western civilization than the lives of the performers. This isn't applicable to me, I thought. I want to be learning about who is making movies now so that I can go work with them. Until one night, while watching Reel Injuns', it all sort of came crashing down on me; this applies to me more than anything I have studied up until now. I always feel like I am not Métis “enough”; this is why. Decades of the performance of “Indian” had everything to do with me. Michelle Raheja argues that the production and consumption of these images has influence not only how non-Natives have constructed their understanding of Indigenous cultures, but also leant a hand in how Indigenous people themselves created their own identities.x There is a contradiction of visibility/invisibility that exists for Indigenous people in popular media; on the one hand the image is practically omnipresent in Hollywood, on the other it is often inaccurate, frozen in time, and continuously lamenting the disappearance of Indians.xi Why was I worrying so much about trying to be a real Indian, if “Indians” did not even exist? So I was starting to understand, but I still wanted out. “Why are you in Academia!?”, the voices in my head were screaming. “Get out while you still can!” Suddenly, a life preserver was tossed my way. At the recommendation of a friend studying Indigenous Performance at Trent, I enrolled in a Performance Workshop lead by Charles Koroneho. The workshop was called Tuahu and it was all about bringing people together in space. Koroneho comes from New Zealand and belongs to the Nga Puhi Maori tribe. His aim with Tuahu workshops is to create a “performance of community”. xii While based upon a traditional Maori world view, each workshop and performance are site specific and thus anchored to the space and participants. The goal is not to replicate tradition, but to move forward from a place informed by tradition to create a new practice “liminal, situational, culturally diverse and bound to the creative conditions surrounding it”. xiii Tuahu is a Maori word that describes “a sacred place for

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ritual practices, consisting of an enclosure containing a ceremonial platform used for divination and other mystic rites”.xiv On the first day of the workshop I was expected to perform a solo based on a Wakahuia. In Maori tradition a Wakahuia is “an elaborately carved wooden vessel for the storage and protection of precious objects [they] stored a person's most prized possessions.” xv We were invited to create our own Wakahuia and bring it to the workshop. In our case the Wakahuia would be made up of “material objects, writings, images, sounds and artistic influences” xvi and would help us to share our identities through performance with the use of such objects. We were encouraged to also include ideas that we found potentially too difficult to work with, or that intimidated us, and to question how we had been trained already and what restrictions we might place upon ourselves or our bodies due to that training. I was terrified. What on earth was I supposed to do? I procrastinated preparing for my solo by turning back to redfacing, and Reservation Reelism. The book tortured me with its excessive academic tone and complex bulky sentence structure. When I the chapter about Prophecy and Indigenous Film making though, a monologue suddenly jumped into my head. I knew what to do for my solo.

Oh Hi! How did you get here? I'm not sure where we're going. We must be in Saskatchewan though, look. Open space. Makes my heart feel bigger. Aren't you dead though? This must be a dream. I want to say I miss you. That's not fair though. That's about me, my regrets. The things I didn't say. But when I think about you sometimes I cry; the thought of you fills me with joy. When I think of you, I know I'm a part of something; I'm a part of something bigger than myself. I have no idea what yet, but it's out there I know. Something bigger than me. Are we going to the ranch? Of course we are. I could never find it without your help.

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You know at your funeral I learnt that Sitting Bull stayed here on the ranch. That's crazy. You had said that James Marshall was a guard for Louis Riel. The joys of being Metis. One side of the family policing the other. I'm going to roll a joint. I'm sorry but I have to. I don't drink you know. At the funeral someone said “She was so happy that none of her grandchildren are on drugs”...I wanted to turn to KJ and be like “uuuuuhhhhh...” People are on worse drugs though. Prescription ones. Sometime I know I smoke when I shouldn't, but sometimes it just helps me remember. Sometimes I feel like I'm just a cog in a machine and they're grinding me, grinding me, and then I smoke and I remember “Wait! This isn't me! I'm not a cog. I'm a human being! You know that movie? “Thank you for making me a human being!” Is this my bag? I don't remember bringing it. My postcard collection. I remember a time when I wanted to be a flight attendant. A waitress in the sky. I was always attracted to the unknown and things that are different. Now I feel more responsible sometimes. If I want to travel I think I should just stay here. Canada is big enough. I guess I can't do it all. Holy Shit, where did you come from officer? Sorry to swear, you really scared me. I'm just here with my Nana...I mean I was here with me Nana. You scared her away. No, I'm not trespassing, my ancestors are here, they are buried here. No, my name's not Marshall, but I'm one of them. My name is Stupar, look, I have ID Does this tell you who I am? Oh. Something's wrong. I don't understand. What's in the bag? Nothing, just these dance shoes. Yes they're mine look. They fit on my feet, look. You want me to dance? I need music. I can't. I can't do it. I want to wake up now. I want to wake up now. Please officer, I want to wake up now.xvii This monologue was a way for me to talk with my recently deceased Nana, and it also addressed two problems that I felt I was dealing with: an uncertainty over the place of drugs in my life, and my inability to readily admit to people that I was a dancer. It also addressed the odd fact that while I am Métis through my father's side, my Nana, my mother's mother, has actually been the most supportive one in my family of my journey to discovering more about my Indigenous heritage. I also included in the performance an artwork that I had made from photocopies of my passport that helped to 8

explain how I was feeling lately (fig1). I was so excited to perform that monologue that I volunteered to go first.

Fig 1. Stupar, Sarah. Does this tell you who I am? 2013, paper collage, 3.5'' x 5'', artist's collection.

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We spent the first two days of the workshop training and doing our presentations. It was not until the third day that Charles really formally introduced himself to us and explained what he was about. When he did though, it completely blew my mind. Charles shared with us his notion that performers are important members of modern communities as they perform a service similar to that of shamans.xviii The word Tuahu was expanded from its previous meaning of a burial platform, to include performance space.xix The Maori recognize the stage as an ceremonial space, a space between life and death. I have consciously studied acting and storytelling in various forms since around the age of seven. I found it very interesting to see how in finding a name for it, the Maori seemed to recognize the stage and performance space as a kind of sacred space. I have studied dance, theatre and improvisation and in all of them I received lessons that supported the idea of performance space as sacred. The performance space must be a safe space, mentally and physically. It is understood that when performers are on the stage they are making themselves vulnerable in different ways, perhaps physically, perhaps emotionally. Trust between performers must exist in order for a performance to be successful. Usually when taking an acting class, the first exercises you will be asked to do are trust exercises. If the performers cannot trust each other they will not be fully committed to their roles and the performance will suffer, if it happens at all. Performers depend on each other. In both my acting and improvisation work I have learned that the most important person on stage is never you; it is always your partner. If you are lost or if you forget the story, the answer will not come from you. The answer lies in your relationship to your partner and so you must look to your partner for answers. Most importantly of all, when you are on stage, you must listen to each other! When you create a performance with another person your actions must be influenced by those of the other person. You create a conversation, a dialogue, a relationship, and it cannot occur if you are not listening to the other person. 10

In past classes I had taken we had usually referred to this concept as “being in the moment.” In order to really do well in a scene you have to be in the moment with the other person. It had never occurred to me before to think of it as a kind of ceremony, but suddenly it was crystal clear. Other participants came up to me in the course of the workshop and thanked me for what I had shared. One woman said that she had initially felt very terrified about performing her solo, but that I had inspired her and she had put aside her fear. Another participant told me that he had felt very connected to his recently deceased father through my performance. My monologue had been a ceremony. Others in turn performed their ceremonies and many of them inspired me. I cannot express how important I think Chamberlin's argument is. In the foreword to his book “Me Sexy” Drew Hayden Taylor shares an anecdote about a conference where a vice-chief from the Assembly of First Nations, who had read some of his essays asked him, “Have you ever thought about writing about something important, like self-government?” xx That anecdote made me think of myself, snoozing through the Royal Proclamation Symposium, just wishing for dance. While lawyers and academics have surely made great progress leading the charge towards self government, it is only one form of sovereignty. What does self-government even mean? For some nations self-government means a return to traditional values, while for the Canadian government it appears to be Canadian style democracy controlled by Indigenous peoples. There is not a common understanding, so is real progress even being made? Indigenous people may be recognized as a people in law with rights on paper, but are they a people in the hearts and minds of Canadians? This is why Hayden Taylor's work resonates so strongly with people; 'Me Sexy' and 'Me Funny' are attempting to fight back at almost a century of 'redfacing' in popular culture. The constructed image of “Indian” is so powerful that Canadians essentially have no concept of who Indigenous people actually are. How can we expect to make meaningful agreements when one group barely recognizes the other, or worse, if we barely recognize ourselves? 11

Gerald McMaster argues that we now live in a “post reservation” society. McMaster sees the beginning of this society following World War II when Aboriginal people began working together across Nations to form political organizations such as the North American Indian Brotherhood. Also during this time more aboriginal people began moving to city centres, and by the 1960's “aboriginal people were energized by issues of land claims, self-government, and autonomy and vigorously affirmed their cultural identities, while demanding recognition from the larger society.” xxi Post reservation times sees us occupying the same spaces, but Murray Forman in his piece Race, space and place in Rap and Hip Hop points out “The spatial concepts around which we organize our lives become more and more patterned until they acquire a naturalized character”. xxii During the so-called Reservation period settler lives were organized around an assumption of terra nulis and a refusal to recognize alternate land use strategies. We built a civilization in a space created by the forceable removal of its inhabitants and repeated a story about empty land. Now in the post-reservation period we are confronted by the continued presence of Indigenous people and their continued cries of ownership. Our lives were patterned on the erroneous assumption of their disappearance, but these false patterns are still natural and normal to us as settlers. We built our society on the assumption of the disappearance of Indigenous people and we refuse to recognize them in out midst because they don't confirm to our notions about what a 'real Indian' should be. A reintroduction of the two sides must occur. We must make a return to ceremony to find common ground. How can we hope to negotiate further without knowing who we are? What would this ceremony look like? Tuahu type workshops could be very valuable as a way to return to ceremony, build common ground and discover common metaphor. They practice on a personal level real concepts that can then be applied to reconciliation. The performance space is a safe space, but it requires commitment. You must be in the space together. It applies the conceptual notions of peaceful coexistence to a very real activity of creating a performance together. We do not have to live in 12

performance space, but it exists as a place for us to come and commune with each other, and by doing so we understand each other all the more. Self-government, land claims, this is one way of relating to space; it has to do with administration and theory. Performance is another way of relating to space and it is based on being in space. Performance based workshops led by Indigenous people and incorporating Indigenous principles could be a very valuable tool in creating common ground. What I studied this year made me a better performer. It is almost unbelievable to me how well the theory and the workshop ended up coming together. I have a greater understanding now of what it is that I am actually doing each time I perform. At the end of the semester I performed a poem that I had discovered in Finding Common Ground for an open audition, and I performed it really well. I am very glad that my studies at Concordia have made me a better actor, and I look forward to the day when my role as an actor will help contribute to the recognition of my community.

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i

Sarah Stupar, “Finding Common Ground Book Review,” unpublished review of If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground by J. Edward Chamberlin. ii Sarah Stupar, “Well we signed the paper, so are we done here? A reflection on lack of ceremony.” unpublished paper about the Creating Canada Symposium: From the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to Modern Treaties. iii Jim Miller “The Royal Proclamation and Historic Treaties.” (Paper presented at the Creating Canada Symposium: From the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to Modern Treaties, Gatineau, Quebec, October 7, 2013). iv Miller, “The Royal Proclamation and Historic Treaties.” v Miller, “The Royal Proclamation and Historic Treaties.” vi Katherine Pettipas, Severing the Ties that Bind: Government Repression of Indigenous Religious Ceremonies on the Prairies (Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 1994). vii Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. http://www.aadncaandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100014298/1100100014302 viii Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press). ix Sarah Stupar, “Professional Savages Book Review,” unpublished review of Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle by Roslyn Poignant x Sarah Stupar, “Reservation Reelism Book Review,” unpublished review of Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty and Representations of Native Americans in Film, by Michelle Raheja xi Stupar, “Reservation Reelism Book Review,” xii Tuahu Website http://tuahu.tetokiharuru.com xiii Tuahu Website xiv Tuahu Website xv Charles Koroneho, “MAI Wakahuia Workshop 2013: He Wakahuia: a performance treasure box.” Hand out for Tuahu, Choreographic and Performance Workshop xvi Charles Koroneho, “MAI Wakahuia Workshop 2013”, hand out. xvii Sarah Stupar, “This is a dream,” unpublished monologue xviii Charles Koroneho, “Tuahu. Choreographic and Performance Workshop” (workshop presented at the Centre MAI, Montreal, Quebec, November 18-23, 2013) xix Koroneho, “Tuahu.” xx Drew Hayden Taylor, ed. Me Sexy (Vancouver/Toronto/Berkley: Douglas & McIntyre), p1 xxi Gerald McMaster, “Post Reservation Perspectives” in Essays on Native Modernism: Complexity and Contradiction in American Indian Art. (Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2006), p 46 xxii Murray Foreman “Space Matters: Hip Hop and the Spatial Perspective” in The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip Hop. (Middle CT, Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p 6