This event brings together two emerging Indigenous dance theater companies in an exciting collaboration. The company Directors will speak about the companies they are building in Toronto and San Francisco, and then work with company dancers in the studio, demonstrating their choreographic processes. Following this event is a discussion with the audience

Location: Arts 100

Location: Arts 166 / Performance Lab

• Opening Prayer by Earl Sisto
• Welcome by Cliff Trafzer
• Announcement of DAYSTAR Dance Archives

• Short film "A Nation is Coming" introduced by Michael Greyeyes. A Nation is Coming (1996, Canada, producer/director Kent Monkman) resurrects a Ghost Dancer as a symbol of hope in a world threatened by new diseases and rapidly changing technologies.  Made in 1996, with the millennium then fast approaching, A NATION IS COMING draws upon Native prophesy to present an alternative to the (European) apocalyptic vision of the future.  Four separate dance sequences follow one man's journey through memory and vision to a spiritual awakening: a down and out urban Indian struggles with illness; in hope of a renewed world, a ghost dancer is transported to another realm; a colonized Indian searches for identity in an unstable world; then, finally, the dancer reclaims his traditions in a celebration of contemporary Native culture.

• "Miinigooweziwin...the Gift" by Kalani Queypo - Premiering at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, Miinigooweziwin... the Gift was a Contemporary Aboriginal Dance Show that was created with a company of over 17 Indigenous nations from all over the world, under the direction of Georgina Martinez. The story is inspired by an ancient Anishnabe story from the Lake of the Woods. Kalani Queypo is performing a piece that he has developed with Ms. Martinez, telling the story of Wabano Manito, the Spirit of the East, who appears near the Tree of Life with his gift of knowledge, kindness and generosity. With an offering of Miskwabiiminigohns- the Red Willow medicine, he gives the Anishnabe people, the gift of life. Restaged by Rulan Tangen for Earth Dance Theatre.

• Wichozani Dance Theater, performing on "Performance Slab" outside Wichozani Dance Theater is a Southern California based Native American theater company, directed by Vincent Whipple (Lakota/Navajo actor, dancer, and UCR graduate student). "Wichozani" is the Lakota word meaning health or healing and personifies the company's belief that the songs, dances, and stories are healing for the performers, audience, and all people inclusive. The company will present Plains Indian dances featuring men's and women's styles, including traditional songs, drumming, and flute music. Today's performance will also include Hoop Dancing by Terry Goedel.

• California Bear Dancers, dancing outside in Arts Quad California Bear Dances are a curative tradition with roots in pre-colonial California.  The contemporary practice was defined by Grampa Raymond Stone in the late 1970s.  Although notably different in methodology from the pre-colonial expression, the contemporary practice holds firm to the long-standing principles of its rich and ancient past.  Indeed one of the things that makes the contemporary California Bear Dance so vibrant and powerful a practice is its power of  change.  When Grampa brought the practice back it was maintained by a few Bears.  Now it is practiced throughout the state with members from almost every tribe, both federally and unfederally recognized. The California Bears are an ancient brotherhood of traditional doctors and spiritual leaders of all ages from throughout the state whose practice is centered around the power of the mother earth symbolic present in the presence of the Bear.  Many of the old ones throughout California recognized a divine relationship of power with the Grizzly Bear.  This presence is addressed in many California Indian cosmological models, and in many cases the mythological powers given to the Bear in oral traditions advocate a power of renewal.  The power of renewal is the power engaged by contemporary practitioners in the doctoring.  Though there is no written law, the Bear Dancers follow a strict ritual and ceremonial protocol.  Appropriately working within this protocol, they will open the conference.  This particular Bear group is led by Tony Serta, tribal Chairperson/traditional Head Man, and Steve Cesenas, tribal spiritual leader, and is comprised of descendants from the Ohlone village of Eeshlop in the Carmel river valley.

Reception, catered by the UCR Native American Students Association, on Terrace outside Arts 300, to follow.

Location: Arts 166/Performance Lab & Outside Arts Building

Welcome by Emory Elliott

Location: International Lounge, UCR Campus

Inventing/Improvising Traditions

This panel will address the topic of "tradition" and the issues of authenticity, purity and continuity that so often arise when "American Indian dance" is presented of discussed.

• Monte Kugel, Chair
• Susan Leigh Foster
• Zoila Mendoza
• Douglas Miles
• Michelle Olson
• Robert Perez
• Priya Srinivasan
• Tharon Weighill
• Vincent Whipple

Some questions the panelists and audience might consider include:

• What is "traditional" American Indian dancing?  What isn't?  What possibilities - and limits -- does a focus on "tradition"  bring up?
• How do histories of playing "Indian" and media representations constructing "Indianness" bear on these  questions of how "tradition" is defined?
• When dancing is reworked, improvised, reinvented, what kind  of political work does it do?  In what ways is inventing and  improvising "traditional" American Indian dance transgressive?  Dangerous? Liberating? Troublesome?  Taboo?
• How does improvising in a Native American context relate to  histories of improvisation in other artistic or cultural  contexts (contact improvisation, jazz, etc.)?
• How does dancing for different audiences - tourists,  students, community centers, paying theatergoers, hobbyists,  family members - inflect the meaning of "tradition" in Native  dance differently?

Location: International Lounge, UCR Commons

First Person/First People: Dance as Autobiography

This panel will focus on the use of story (family story,  personal story, tribal story) in contemporary Native American  dance, and its relation to other forms of storytelling and self-narration.

• Michelle Raheja, Chair
• Victoria Bomberry
• Stephanie Fitzgerald
• Daystar/Rosalie Jones
• Susan Manning
• Muriel Miguel
• Craig Womack
• Hertha Sweet Wong

Some questions the panelists and audience might consider:

• How might American Indian dance, and the stories it tells,  be considered forms of (personal, tribal, family)  "autobiography"? How might this conception provide understandings of "self" and tribal identity that are  different from those provided by literary autobiographies?  Does the way dance requires witnessing in the moment - and the  active participation of an audience - create understandings of  self and of autobiography that are different from those  created when life stories are written and read?

• Given the power and importance of dancing and witnessing the  dancing of personal, tribal, and family stories - who gets to  dance them? Who gets to witness them?  What protocol or  permissions are required to tell ones' own tribal stories; or,  to choreograph - or dance-- stories from other nations? What  is the relationship/implications of between telling one's  "own" story and telling the "others' " story?  Is there a  barrier between the two or is there a common ground of  understanding and acknowledgment?

• What issues of intellectual property, copyright,  authorship, and ownership of artistic and cultural practices  and material arise when attaching a choreographer's name (or a  dance company's or dance troupe's name) to a particular story  or dance practice?  How might copyright practices be used to  recognize collective copyright, yet still protect specific dances and practices from exploitation?

• What balance between protecting what is sacred or tribally  specific - and sharing among other Nations and peoples - does  there need to be?

• What are the implications of story/dance/telling to  teaching? Can the creative process be considered as a way to  retrieve (and preserve) stories, which might otherwise be lost  to the present generation?

• Could the creative process be considered a contemporary form  of preserving the art of "storytelling"?

• Has storytelling and story/dance changed from "traditional"  times to the present? Are stories told today different/similar  to stories told by our elders?

Location: International Lounge, UCR Commons

• Lunch Break

• Book Sale; Exhibit and poster signing by Apache artist Douglas Miles and the San Carlos skateboard team

• Showing of a rough cut of Apache Skateboard Documentary - Foyer, P.E. Building

• 1:00 p.m.

Outdoor performance by Coastanoan Humaya Dancers

The Humaya (humming-bird) Dancers are Coastanoan Ohlone dancers from the Carmel Valley in northern California.  The Humaya Dancers are both young and old as well as male and female practitioners of traditional Ohlone dance whose  thematic ideology is represented in a complex liturgy, which  recognizes the position of the human presence in relationship  to the rest of the divine environment. The Humaya dancers are led by Tony Serta, tribal Chairperson/traditional Head Man  and Steve Cesenas, tribal spiritual leader, is comprised of  descendants from the Ohlone village of Eeshlop in the Carmel  River Valley.  Like many of the traditional practices within  Indian country the Humaya dancers practice ritual and  ceremonial protocol.  The Humaya Dancers will negotiate this protocol for the conference.

Location: Grass by P.E. Building

• 1:30 p.m.

Performance by Michelle Olson: "An Evening in Paris"

An Evening in Paris is a response and reflection of the life of Molly Spotted Elk, an actor and vaudeville dancer in New York and Paris in 20's and 30's.  Images of her in a skimpy  fringed leather skirt and a headdress evoke curiosities of  identity, exploitation and agency. To what extent did she  believe the projected images of society placed on her, the  exoticism and eroticism of her brown skin? How did this  infiltrate her personal life? This work is also a rumination  of the life of my grandmother.  An Evening in Paris was her  favorite perfume.  I liked to think in the moments she wore  this perfume that she was transported to a place of beauty and  passion.  That the scent and the dark blue light that shone  through the glass bottle softened the hard living of her life.  And like Molly, she would find herself in Paris, an evening  where anything was possible and the power of spirit had no limits.

Choreographer- Muriel Miguel

Performer - Michelle Olson

Video Designer - Lina Minifie

Location: Dance Studio Theatre, P.E. 102

Dance as Prayer/Dance as Document

This panel will address the continuing, empowering practice of Native American dancing despite centuries of religious, military, and legal suppression, and explore this continuing dance practice itself as "document" of this history and this creative, vibrant resiliency.

• Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Chair
• Andrew Brother Elk
• Tara Browner
• Anita Gonzalez
• Tanya Lukin-Linklater
• Joel Martin
• Marrie Mumford
• Karen Pheasant
• Anna Scott

Some questions the panelists and audience might consider:

• What issues does recognizing much Native American dance’s relation to spiritual and religious practices raise?

• How has dance functioned historically to empower Native peoples, and how does it still?   What wasn’t colonized?

• What is the relation between stage dance, show dance, powwow dance, ceremonial dance, ritual? Can all of these dance practices empower? Create political change? Heal?

• What are different dance practices’ relations to specific lands, and how have they been affected by removal, colonization, and restricted access to federal land or other particular locations? 

• How have dance practices traveled?  What histories does the shifting of dance practices across geographic spaces and into different types of dance space (arenas, gyms, University campus’s, theaters,)– as, for example, with powwow dance -- document?

Location: International Lounge, UCR Commons

• Sherman Apache Dancers
• Rulan Tangen
• Gerardo Tristan Alvarado
• Geraldine Manossa
• Santee Smith

• Earth Dance Theatre:

  • Lyle Kochamp

  • Anthony Ch-Wl-Tas Collins

  • Quetzal Guerrero

  • Alejandro Meraz

• Daystar/Rosalie Jones
• Marla Bingham
• Alejandro Ronceria
• Belinda James/Divi Shadende and Dancers
• John Jaramillo and Sandra Hughes
• Raoul Trujillo

Location: Sherman Indian High School

Process and Production

This panel will provide a chance to discuss the stage dance showcase from Thursday night, and to address questions raised by production and performance of American Indian/Aboriginal dance, particularly in academic settings, more generally.

• Wendy Rogers, Chair
• Thomas Defrantz
• Hanay Geigomah
• Michael Greyeyes
• Alejandro Ronceria
• Santee Smith
• Rulan Tangen
• Raoul Trujillo

Some questions the panelists and audience might consider:

• What particular issues of production arise in American Indian/Aboriginal dance? · What kinds of training are/aren't available to American Indian/Aboriginal dancers? · American Indian/Aboriginal dancers often learn various dance practices from birth to elderhood.  What issues does this raise about how Indian dance and dance history might be taught in the academy? · How might you teach (or how have you taught) an American Indian/Aboriginal dance course at a university?  At a tribal college? In the community? · Is it important for Indian/Aboriginal dancers/scholars to possess academic degrees? What other forms of recognition for their expertise might there be?

• What are some of the financial challenges facing choreographers of American Indian/Aboriginal dance?  How do funding opportunities in the U.S., Mexico, South America, and Canada compare? · What are some of the challenges/problems/possibilities of staging a dance piece without (or with few) American Indian/Aboriginal dancers?  What are some of the challenges/problems/possibilities of staging a specific tribal dance/story/song without dancers from that particular tribe? · Can stage dance be used to connect to community as a part of continuing tradition?  What are its possibilities – and limitations? · How are choreographers employing a variety of forms--hip-hop, ballet, modern, powwow styles, yoga, contact improv, etc.--to stage Indian/Aboriginal dance pieces?  How does this multitude of forms influence the choreographing and staging of Indian/Aboriginal dance?

Conclusion of Conference