Indigenous Migrations: Performance, Urbanization, and Survivance in Native North America

Popular definitions of Indigenous identity as continuous attachment to ancestral territory make migrancy appear a vexed condition for Indigenous peoples. Recent scholarship, conversely, sees mobility as a constitutive feature of Indigenous modernities. This chapter examines performance in the Indigenous diasporas that have taken root in cities throughout North America. What dramaturgies serve those distanced from ancestral lands by choice or by the ongoing violence of settler colonialism? How does performance help make good relations in the deracinated, anomic spaces of urban North America? Examples considered include plays by Bruce King and Marie Clements and the performance work of Dakota Comacho and Emily Johnson.