Abstracts
Abstract
This article documents the process that led two groups of students enrolled in a course at UC San Diego to enter into a deeper and more reciprocal embodied relationship with the play Antikoni (a Nez Perce adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone), its author Beth Piatote, and with UC San Diego’s fraught history related to the repatriation of Kumeyaay ancestors. Building on Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang’s urgent invitation to think “beyond land acknowledgement” and to invest time and energy in creating a world beyond settler colonialism, this article examines how being entrusted with a story—Antikoni in this case—can serve to activate settler accountability and, potentially, usher in the relational shift imagined by Stewart-Ambo and Yang. This article documents how the students chose to reciprocate the gift that is Antikoni in tangible ways in the form of two staged readings and offers a reflection on how this experience can extend beyond the classroom and lead to lasting transformative work among larger campus communities.
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Appendices
Biographical notes
Julie Burelle is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. She is the author of Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec (Northwestern University Press, 2019) among other publications. As a dramaturg, Julie has worked with Native Voices at the Autry, Sledgehammer Theatre, and many others.
Beth Piatote (Nez Perce) is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale, 2013) and the mixed-genre collection The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint, 2019). Her full-length play Antikoni will premiere at Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles in November 2024.