Indigenous-led Placemaking: Envisioning Possibilities for Healing and Collaboration
Indigenous-led Placemaking:
Envisioning Possibilities for Healing and Collaboration
Panel featuring Emily Johnson (Yup’ik) and Mona Smith (Dakota)
Moderated by Dr. Jeani O’Brien (Ojibwe)
Thursday April 15th - 5:30-7:00 CST
Click here to join the Zoom Meeting
How does placemaking and ongoing Indigenous-led performance practice draw on relational frameworks to envision possibilities for healing and collaboration? Join a panel featuring Emily Johnson (Yup'ik) and Mona Smith (Dakota), moderated by University of Minnesota History Professor Dr. Jeani O'Brien (Ojibwe), as they elaborate on the radical potential of performance to animate the often contentious aspects of home, displacement, and belonging. The panel will be an opportunity for each of us to reflect on our role as guests on Dakota homelands and to spark conversations about coalition building through performance.
Creative practice is never neutral. How might we imagine an ethics that's in conversation with communities that have personal, collective, and ancestral stake in the protection of place?
This virtual panel features:
Mona Smith (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Oyate) is a multi-media artist, educator,-founder of Allies: media/art and co-founder of the Healing Place Collaborative. Her media work includes art projects for the web, and multimedia installation work, most notably, Cloudy Waters; Dakota Reflections on the River (Minnesota History Center, 2005 and permanent audio installation at the Mill Courtyard at the Minneapolis Riverfront 2011 and Science Museum of Minnesota, 2015), City Indians (Ancient Traders Art Gallery, Minneapolis, 2006-2007), MniSota Dakota Home, (Form+Content Gallery), Presence, a multimedia/performance event, (Mill City Museum, 2010 and 2011, and BV Studios, Bristol, England, 2011), Between Fences, (The Box Studio and Performance, Galway Ireland, 2012), A Dakota Place, (Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, 2012) and the Bdote Memory Map (with the Minnesota Humanities Center). She was selected as one of three artists for public art at Bde Maka Ska (producing the website, bdemakaska.net).
Her artistic and educational work use image, sound and place to work ‘between,’ the place of healing, of relationship, of meaning, where spirit and physical, life and death, fear and strength,night and day intersect.
Emily Johnson (Yupi'ik) is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based in Lenapehoking/New York City. Emily is of the Yup'ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment - interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
For Johnson's complete bio, see www.catalystdance.com.
Moderated by:
Jean M. O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Northrop Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Her most recent book is Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (with Lisa Blee). Her edited volume (with Daniel Heath Justice) Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press (January 2022).