In many disciplines where it has become apparent that scholarship has been one of the key technologies of colonization, complicit in the exploitation and decimation of the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, there has been a (re)turn to ways of knowing that are not about power/knowledge—naming, disciplining, categorizing, objectifying, and isolating elements—but about relationality, reciprocity, respect, and what Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson discusses under the principle, shared across many Indigenous cultures, of “relational accountability.”Footnote ²

At the same time, over the past two decades and around the world there has been a resurgence of Indigenous peoples and of Indigenous scholarship in almost all fields.Footnote ³ But Indigenous knowledges are holistic and relational, tending to eschew disciplinary compartmentalization as antithetical to the epistemologies and cosmologies of most Indigenous nations. For such peoples, knowledge is not best acquired in laboratory conditions and is not always congenial to the established methods and institutional protocols of the Western academy.Footnote ⁴ I understand from Indigenous colleagues, in print and in person, that for them knowledge is seen not as something that is owned or “discover”-able (like the Americas), nor as static, universal, or “extractive.”Footnote ⁵ Rather, it is personally and territorially situated (“wisdom sits in places”),Footnote ⁶ nation- and place-specific, processual (provisional), performative (active), and shared for the reciprocal benefit of the researcher and the community. Much of this work is presented by Indigenous scholars and artists at Indigenous-studies associations and in their associated journals, and some of it has to do with theatre, performance, and related issues. How might our fields and associations such as ASTR, ATHE, IFTR, PSi, CATR, and ADSA, together with the major theatre and performance studies journals, be proactive in promoting Indigenous scholars and scholarship and Indigenous ways of knowing? This is not about Western scholars appropriating Indigenous methodologies but about Indigenous and settler scholars alike actively working to decolonize the field, the academy, and ourselves.

Accompanying this resurgence in Indigenous scholarship, a considerable and increasing body of Indigenous work in theatre, dance, and performance on Turtle Island and around the world has emerged in recent decades. In theatre alone in the land now called Canada, twelve Indigenous artistic leaders in 2014 compiled a “body of work” (they resisted calling it a “canon”) that consists of 288 new Indigenous plays produced over the previous thirty years.Footnote ⁷ This is only a partial list from a very small part of the Indigenous world, and many of the works on it challenge or expand formal aesthetic and political boundaries.

What would it mean to start locating this scholarly and creative work more centrally than it has been to date? What would it mean for students of theatre history to approach theatre and performance through an Indigenous lens, through Indigenous understandings of time; of history, story, and memory; of space, place, and territory? How might theatre history be reconceived through Indigenous understandings of time and story? What might theatrical touring look like for peoples whose sense of self is intimately tied to their home lands and territories? What would it mean if theatre and performance scholarship were to draw on Indigenous conceptual frameworks such as survivance,Footnote ⁸ tribalography,Footnote ⁹ visual sovereignty,Footnote ¹⁰ and transmotionFootnote ¹¹ as well as on those of European theorists? This, I suggest, is the work of the next decade.