Indigenous Festivals

It is late July , and I’m sitting next to Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) and Deborah Ratelle, both of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater and director and project manager, respectively, for Material Witness, the show we’re watching. The production is a collaboration between Spiderwoman and Nippissing First Nation, Ontario’s Aanmitaagzi, on stage as part of the Living Ritual Festival hosted by Kaha:wi Dance Theatre at Toronto’s Harbourfront. It is a searing revisiting of the serious subject matter of Spiderwoman’s first show,Woman and Violence in , and yet Miguel is laughing uproariously from the audience as her nonagenarian sister (and Spiderwoman co-founder), Gloria Miguel, mugs shamelessly and members of the cast don sparkling outer bras, aviation goggles, and ostrich feathers. This is not the sort of event where the audience, and especially the show’s director, observes traditional theatrical decorum. It is a show and a ceremony honouring the women who, in a ‘Pulling Threads’ workshop, literally wove their stories into the large quilt that hangs upstage like a fabric cyclorama, gendered female, in a materialization of Spiderwoman’s ‘storyweaving’ technique. And as the closing event of this festival of Indigenous performing arts, there is a celebratory feel to the evening, which is partly about witnessing. Like the Living Ritual Festival at which it was performed, Material Witness faced difficult truths head on, but did so as part of an ‘internation’ gathering, an affirmation and celebration of Indigenous resurgence globally. ‘Because it’s a ritual, and we’re living’, as Muriel Miguel asserted. ‘We’re living and sending things out into the world’ (qtd in Commanda). From long before recorded Western history to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the world have engaged in ceremonies and communal performance activities that could not without diminishment be called ‘theatre’, but might, from a Western perspective, be called festivals. Settler scholar Shawn Huffman opens his  article on theatre festivals in what are now Canada and the USA with an account of the birch-bark ‘White