AHRC Indigeneity and Performance

Notes from Seminar Two: Orality and Transmission

Goodenough College, May 2009

Framed by readings from Diana Taylor on the distinction between the archive (stored, written memory and histories) and the repertoire (living, oral memory practices), the focus of this workshop was discussion on the ways in which the concept of orality shapes and informs an understanding of transmission of cultural knowledge in and for indigenous communities and performance. 18 participants from 7 countries included theatre practitioners, writers as well as scholars across the fields of anthropology, ethnomusiciology, historiography, film and theatre studies, and Aboriginal studies and each had been given a shared list of questions and invited to speak for ten minutes about some example or context for their work in relation to the topic and the questions. There were four chaired sessions with lengthy time for group discussion after each set of presentations. The evening session involved the group hearing a powerful and moving lecture from Alanis Obomsawin at the Origins Festival, Riverside Studios.

Morning Session One

Diane Glancy read a selection from her poetry and then spoke about the ways in which the 'holes in language' might allow for the 'intrusion of unseen worlds'. For Diane, the development of an indigenous literary theory was an important step towards understanding how structures of orality might be translated into written form. She spoke of the ways in which mythic structures might become 'wrapped in a spirit of play' or that 'performative silence' might enable indirect explanation of 'things that blow by' in the experience of indigenous people. In these terms, repertoire becomes clothed in the archive, which is a different conception of how language might function otherwise.

Tara Browner spoke about the struggle of indigenous communities with the legacy of texts within the anthropological archive that has shaped what is known about the pow-wow. She explained how early cultural anthropology (in the late nineteenth century) had 'chopped out bits of the story' when the performance practices did not fit the theory that was developing. Not only has this effected scholarly citation but it has also impacted upon how native American children learn and talk about oral traditions. For instance, the flute which appears prominently in pow-wow performances was a recent inclusion in the repertoire that came from the account of an amateur scholar. For Tara, there is today an anxiety about who or what has authority in relation to transmission of cultural knowledge about the pow-wow.

Ian Henderson used the recent Australian indigenous film Ten Canoes to reflect on the entanglements of authority or 'unauthority' structured into the film for its spectators, particularly the non-indigenous. Ian proposed that the textual organization on the part of Gulpilil, the film's narrator, cannot be translated because it relates to modes of teaching and learning, a certain desire in relation to the law, that cannot be easily understood by those outside an indigenous system of knowledge. Watching the film therefore requires the observation of unknowingness, from the intruder position, as a particular form of pedagogic practice. The film with its slow and long shots, its voice over and untranslated speech, thus differentiates between the embodied subjects within the film and its spectators, suggesting that a corporeal transmission is taking place at the border of what you cannot know.

Discussion:

Questions were asked about the multiple versions of pow-wow that are in circulation. In what ways the communication of a silence on Diane's terms might relate to the unknowingness Ian spoke of. Diane explained that these concepts are not static, but linked to fictive or imaginative writing. A discussion arose on how intergenerational transmission might communicate relationality, or spirituality effectively.

Morning Session Two

Colin Sampson explained some of his research with the Innu, who have been permanent nomadic hunters learning the necessary practical skills for survival by imitation, such as the building of traps, knowledge of the animals etc. Since required to become setllers in 1967, schooling had changed their way of life, and wage labour now produced a livelihood for the individual self without serving the group. Colin has spent many years recording traditional language and hunting skills in order to develop patterns of continuity; however he is aware that this process of documentation involves a reframing of the past. Colin showed an excerpt from a recent film recording which exposed the intrusions of the camera operator into the representation of an elderly man. He asked questions about the ethics of film-making in which the staging of film requires another kind of intrusion into Innu life.

Thomas Hilder described the Joik revival in Norway and the democratisation and dissemination of this form that requires the development of a theory of continuous knowledge. He proposed that a person's 'joik' was both a song and a name. He argued against Diana Taylor's definition of the archive, since this written record, that UNESCO defines as intangible heritage, is both a burden and gift that requires consideration of complex issues of copyright and subjectivity. Who owns the Joik is thus more than asking what is the name of a song.

David Milroy spoke of his role working as a young elder with his Aboriginal community in the Pilbara and explained the social and health statistics and the impact of mining. He proposed that we consider the concept of 'aurality', that is a listening in/from the womb which is part of indigenous culture. He contrasted the exhausting negotiation with political rhetoric and official discourse with the ways in which indigenous elders expect those who listen to also be given permission to speak. By rejecting the authority of paper 'milli-milli' and 'wheelbarrow words', he suggested that senior authorities in indigenous communities were trying to reclaim the damage done to their language, laws and structures by white society.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson gave a paper analysing an art work by Vernon Ah Kee called 'Cant-Chant' exhibited in 2007. For Aileen, this art-work represented a performative repossession of the beach on which the Cronulla (and Palm Island) riots took place in 2005. The beach is the territorial site of invasion and indigenous dispossession and yet it has become one in which '100% Aussie pride' is associated with the white male body. Ah Kee's depiction of surfboards as Aboriginal shields, of indigenous young men taking the waves, and of the powerful returning of the gaze by his Aboriginal grandfather in this exhibition therefore racialises the site of the beach as one of conflict and symbolic repossession. In retaking the beach from white Australia, Ah Kee appears concerned to identify and disrupt racism, to present the reality of indigenous Australia by constructing alternative knowledge systems that repudiate the white gaze.

Discussion:

Further clarification of the definition of a joik by Colin stressed the personal relationship between the song and the singer. Although a song can have permission to travel, the different routes of transmission for archived knowledge need further investigation. What then constitutes cultural memory, as the thing remembered or the process of remembering?

Aileen spoke of the difficulty of speaking with students about things beyond what you/they are seeing of indigenous culture. And that the production of coming to know intellectually within academic discourse can lead to the sense of conversing with oneself as you produce constructive, or explanatory, fictions for white knowledge.

Afternoon Session One

Lynette Hunter discussed how different rhetorics might assist to understand differences between the archive and the repertoire since cultural and performance studies ask different questions, the former of ideology and hegemony, and the latter of embodiment. The archive as writing belongs to 'the state' and therefore orality might require 'a strong objectivity' if we are to grasp the rhetorics of the document. She suggested a range of different rhetorics that might exist in documents of possession, and resistance. However rather than adopt a radical pessimism towards the document, she suggested we might utilise the relationship between writing and oral transmission as a means of interpreting everyday life. It can, for instance, provide access to community stories, and help to interpret everyday life: or it can show an understanding of gendered differences, and suggest the forms of an indigenous intellectual tradition. Rather than think of official discourse as a totality, it is useful to consider it as a rhetorics of partiality. This might then be contrasted with a rhetorics of the situated, that makes value from the limitations of its situated presence.

John Bradley showed us his recent work in making animated versions of northern Australian indigenous stories about the landscape in consultation with the community. The importance of these films is that they utilise an indigenous language that has very few speakers left. He talked about the effects of acute language loss, as an intonation of language and vision producing narratives of country, and belonging. As a result women are needing to act like men, in teaching the stories of young men in central Australia but it is hoped that the film will play some role in establishing the continuity and conservation of the language.

Helen Gilbert spoke of indigenous communities who have made self-conscious enactments in the theatre, e.g. the Maralinga project of the Spinifex people in South Australia. In these instances, theatre establishes a relational space in which acts of translation are working in two ways. The first enables a performance of retrieval to take place, because it enacts a linguistic memory and lived past for the performers. The second involves a pedagogic function for the audience since it demands an open-ness to the difference of experience that is revealed in the transactions and immediacy of performance. Given that many of these works resist translation, any reciprocity exists in the utopian performative of a social relation that allows for indebtedness and renewal between indigenous community and embodied witnesses.

Discussion:

The dynamics of the film raised questions about the role of the voice and its mediation of indigenous experience. Questions were also asked about how indigenous pedagogy produces obligations: what did we teach you for? and why does the misfit of document with oral tradition produce different emotional responses. Lynette explained that given that rhetoric is how you persuade people, the work of problematising writing can contrast with the repertoire which requires asking how modes of learning function to produce different understandings.

Afternoon Session Two

Henry Stobart explained his long-term research in Bolivia and the newly emerging overlap between digital recordings and oral traditions of song. While the cheapness of digital recordings has enhanced the extent of the archive, it has also ironically added to its ephemerality as the demands of popularity produce dispensible new trends. Old songs are taken and distorted for festival seasons, and plagiarism is permitted for commercial exploitation, as well as for rebellious, somewhat maverick new interpretations of the Tinku dance.

Sheila Rabillard gave a paper on Marie Clements’ rewriting of the Trojan women as indigenous epic in Age of Iron. She argued that by taking the Eurocentric tradition it can produce a new ethics of listening to oral materials and stories. The adaptation challenged the notion of founding a new Troy by telling the story of Native American residential schools. The logic of the schools was to construct a post-literate indigenous people; however this, like the Trojan horse, was a poisoned gift. According to Sheila, the play invited witness to the rape (of Cassandra) and her unheard prophesy of damnation on the land/dignity that had been lost; In this respect, the study of comparative literature remains a way of reading the words and spaces of damaged bodies.

Daniel David Moses read from one of his recent plays. He explained how he tried to 'build a vision around this story' and make it meaningful. For him the qualities of texture and interexture were things that he hopes will enter the performance of his writing. The play involved a 'birdsong' and a cast of fantasy, or kitsch, characters.

Discusson:

Helen asked about the power of iconic objects in performance. We talked about how translations can become negative traces. What is the role of palimpsests of knowledge that might appear as writing on the skins of animals? These writings cannot always be erased.

Closing discussion:

Rachel Fensham used the example of an image by a colonial painter to return to Taylor's distinction between the archive and the repertoire. Historian Inge Clendinnen's description of the colonial encounter in Australia had celebrated this picture of 'dancing together'; according to Fensham, however, using the archival document as evidence of white settlement, and thus of how white sailors dance, Clendinnen had excluded indigenous corporeal knowledge, as repertoire, evident in the same painting.

Aileen challenged Rachel, and the group, to think further about 'epistemological/epistemic violence' when we work with archives. She argued that we might reproduce the whiteness, or blindness, of the archive to the exclusion of indigenous knowledge and experience if we use that as our focus of knowledge or analysis. Diane acknowledged that many indigenous people still experience the pain and anger of dispossession, and that this continues to afflict many communities and individuals. And Lynette reminded us that rhetoric asks us to consider who is invited to speak and on what terms the exchange has been constructed. However, it is also possible to think of the subversive potential of orality and that its richness cannot always be translated into documents. Finally, Ian spoke again of difficulty of entanglement between cultures and traditions both indigenous and non-indigenous.

Many of these issues and the discussion questions of the day need further amplification and reflection beyond the seminar and in our ongoing research. The seminar ended with an invitation to attend the evening lecture by the Canadian indigenous film-maker Alanis Obomsawin and to continue the dialogue and discussions over dinner afterwards.

Prepared by Rachel Fensham, Seminar Chair

August 2009