Indigenous Dance and the Academy

Julie Burelle
Theater and Dance
UC San Diego

Jacqueline Shea Murphy
Dance
UC Riverside

This working group developed projects around Indigenous dance that had been taking place on three separate UC campuses. It supported these projects and discussions around the vastly different worldviews embedded in Indigenous and non-Indigenous performance cultures; the isolation faced by Indigenous artists on mainstream art circuits and by scholars researching Indigenous dance in academia; the lack of institutional support for Indigenous dance; and the difficulties of having to educate audiences, students, and scholars, in a context in which Indigenous dances, bodies, and forms of knowledge have been rendered invisible by the effects of settler colonialism. The project connected related work happening on different UC campuses; built relations with more local Native American community members; supported and mentored Indigenous graduate students working in the project area; and created an interactive digital platform for continuing connection, discussion, and sharing of materials.