“I Guess It Was Unsettling”: Indigenous Performance, Nationalist Narratives and Conciliation

Abstract

In 2017, the Kika’ige Historical Society, an Indigenous women’s performance troupe based in Guelph, Ontario, created Tabling 150 in response to the mainstream celebrations of Canada’s sesquicentennial. In Tabling 150, a group of twelve Indigenous women imagined how their grandmothers might have wanted to present themselves, had they been invited to Confederation balls, and to consider what their ancestors might have “brought to the table.” In this article, the members of the Kika’ige, a settler ally performance scholar and research assistant highlight the discomfort this performance created for its settler audience and the ways that such moments of unsettling through performance can prompt settlers to reflect on the roles they need to play in conciliation. The authors consider the importance of the role of space-making in performance specifically and in reconciliation efforts more generally and conclude that challenging colonialism requires creators to offer spaces in which audience members confront their past and process the discomfort associated with inverting nationalist narratives.