----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Nya:weh (Thanks) to Tim Murry and Renate Ferro for inviting me to be a part of
the -empyre-soft_skinned space.
My participation in Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival is as convener in
collaboration with artists from the GAYOGOHÓ:NÓ or Cayuga Nation diaspora. As
noted by Tim Murry, Cornell is located within Cayuga homelands but does not
fully recognize it's obligation to 'territory.' The Cayuga were dispossessed
and forced from their homeland in 1779 by a systematic military campaign during
the American Revolution known as the Clinton-Sullivan Expedition. The Cayuga
sheltered throughout Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Nations for over 229 years and
have now embarked on the remarkable resistance of returning to their
territorial space.
The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the United States is
relevant but not at the core of the collaborative project with Cayuga artists.
This tentative assemblage of these artists will be the first time since their
forced removal that they will be coming together as "Cayuga" artists. The
process of conversation, reclamation of Cayuga space and history will be at the
center of a proposed installation at Akwe:kon, an Indigenous student residence
on campus. Marking space as Cayuga will be an important action in this
collaboration, but there isn't a distinct aesthetic Cayuga practice but their
relationship to place is richly detailed in their language. The term
'resurgence' can be applied to the robust recovery of Cayuga culture in this
moment as redress for the 'burnt earth' campaign waged against these peoples at
the birth of America.
I recognize that this emblematic experience of the relationship between
Indigenous peoples and settler states as a global condition. Indigenous peoples
have endured the modern epoch of colonialism and are emerging from an averted
erasure. But, at a moment when most have accepted the hegemonic blending of
culture, this artistic intervention seeks to reclaim a distinct culture space.
How will this return to Cayuga be read in an arts context insistent upon the
flattening of epistemological and ontological difference?
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