Unsettling Existence

Abstract

This article addresses land acknowledgement in contemporary Indigenous performance to illustrate how the invocation of Lakota cultural knowledge animates the contradictions of existence. The Native American Medicine Garden (NAMG) on the University of Minnesota campus, and Cânté Sütá-Francis Bettelyoun's (Lakota Oglala) pedagogy, informs the overarching conundrum with the ontological turn in academia, that is - how to ally with non-extractive knowledges in a way that isn't extractive? Through participant-observation at the NAMG, drawn from 2016-2019, I identify how Bettelyoun invokes Lakota cultural knowledge to set the conditions for participation by bringing attention to settler-colonial relations with the environment, and illuminate alternative modes of human-environment interactions. I ask how NAMG, surrounded by genetically modified organism (GMO) testing fields on a research university, unsettles logics of existence by applying pressure to the ‘agrilogistic' promise to ‘eliminate fear, anxiety, and contradiction… by reducing existence to sheer quantity’ (Morton).

I approach this inquiry by thinking from the political and philosophical horizons made possible by Cânté Sütá-Francis Bettelyoun (Lakota Oglala) to consider how the Native American Medicine Garden functions as a performance paradigm. To illustrate the idea of thinking from the garden I outline how the conditions are set for participatory and tactile engagements with place, juxtaposing theory with ethnographic vignettes. I then turn to a discussion of relationality within the garden and the only ever partial connections scholars of settler ancestry have to Lakota cultural knowledge. As I respond to Morton's thoughts on mono-culture and noncontradiction, the inquiry will circle back to the initial acknowledgement - the land on which I live, work, and study - to honour the Dakhóta and Anishinaabeg histories and contemporary actions allowing me - a settler of German and Polish ancestry - to be unsettled about where I stand.

Notes

1 It is important to note that while the article will refer to ‘Minnesota’, the Lakota practices that I’m engaging with name place differently. In doing so, these practices challenge the politics in place-names (that is, Minnesota marking a particular way of knowing the land) and intensify the ongoing and unresolved nature of place.

2 The Medicine Garden, founded in 2003 by Dr Barbara Graham (Sicangu Lakota), is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakhóta (Dakota) people ceded in the Treaties of 1837 and 1851. The Medicine Garden currently operates within budgetary limits set by the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS), and is located at the same intersection as the Bell Museum of Natural History and Gibb’s Farm, a living history museum that proclaims in its advertisement to offer ‘pathways to Dakota and pioneer life’.

3 Morton’s thoughts on agrologistics and non-contradiction also resonates with Patrick Wolfe’s thoughts on settler-colonialism and erasure. In ‘Settler- colonialism and elimination of the native’, Wolfe posits that settler-colonial identity is contingent upon the erasure of difference. In order for the settler state to secure territory and a claim to land (singularity and stasis), Wolfe notes that the Native has to be removed. In the state of Minnesota, the history of Dakota and Anishinaabe removal is one of epistemological violence and physical abuse.

4 Karyn Recollet (Cree) proposed a citational practice at the Indigenous Choreographer’s Gathering at Riverside (2018). Recollet’s call for a radical citational practice is of the utmost importance for scholars doing work in Indigenous Studies because it demands not only citing written scholarship, but citing what is seen, heard and experienced at conferences, cultural gatherings and practice-based scholarship.