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In Kinship: Archives & Performance Fellowship
A year-long, experimental research and performance process that follows the tradition of Wabanaki Guiding, connecting Native and non-Native people to place through experience, language, and story.
Penobscot River Watershed, Wabanaki Territory, Maine, ME, US
We're just past the halfway mark to our fundraising goal, and we couldn't be more thankful to all of you for helping us get there. We're writing with a few updates on the In Kinship Fellowship—what we've been up to this month, and some good news.
The Final Stretch/Matching Donations We have amazing news for this final stretch of In Kinship crowdfunding! A loving supporter has offered to match all remaining gifts for the remainder of our campaign. This means that every donation made, of any amount, will be doubled! All funds will be used to directly support the extraordinary artists and knowledge-keepers who are co-evolving this work for collective community care. Our campaign ends on Friday, January 24 at 4 pm. We have just over six days to raise $2,500. With every gift doubled, we can do it! This isn't an all-or-nothing campaign, but we do hope that we'll make it to our $5,000 goal (or beyond), so that we can ease up on the fundraising efforts and focus in on making something together to share with the public in June. Can you help us spread the word? Whether those who encounter the work can donate or not, it's helpful. This fundraising campaign is in a sense our first public sharing of our process, and we've been introduced to a lot of warm and curious new people as word of Fellowship spreads. The link to the campaign page is here: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/open-waters-theatre-arts/campaigns/2741
We're 2020 Kindling Fund Grantees! We also have an exciting piece of fundraising news: we've been awarded support from the Kindling Fund! The Fund is a statewide regranting program for artist-organized projects, administered by SPACE Gallery on behalf of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Network. If you're in Portland, come say hi at the awards ceremony this Sunday, 3-5pm at SPACE Gallery.
October 2019 Paddle Journal In the past handful of weeks, we've been at work on a co-authored, multimedia journal that reflects on our time paddling the Penobscot (and sleeping on Sugar Island, and building a temporary shelter, and meeting the plants, and weaving tiny baskets) with guides, mentors, and friends Jen, James, Chris, and Ryan. The journal format replicates ways in which Wabanaki guiding has been recorded and archived in the past. Its co-authorship honors the core values of our project and stretches historic and colonial archiving practices away from the singular narrative. We use contemporary modes of recording experience, from video blogging to iPhone notes, alongside older technologies like drawing and handwriting, because guiding isn't a nostalgic exercise—it's real, practical, vital, and evolving.
The journal isn't ready to share with the public yet, but here's one outtake—
Notations, a mapping-from-memory of memory. Generating a vocabulary between myself and the river.
I remember “the land beyond the gravel bar”, a Penobscot place name. This is where we began our journey.
I call the gravel bar “a place of rapid learning”. There’s a double meaning there. I remember that “there was a fish weir here”
In the places where I have not yet collected specific memories, I call them “a whole bunch of river”
I remember ”the place where the eagle devoured a duck”
What possibilities emerge when we look at social repair and environmental care as public, creative acts? The Archives & Performance Fellowship is a year-long research and creation process that follows the tradition of Wabanaki Guiding, connecting Native and non-Native people to place through experience, language, and story. In May 2019, four Fellows were chosen based on an open application process, and our collective exploration began. Fellows and facilitators embarked on an experiment with research and performance approaches to understand stories and histories of the Penobscot River and watershed. Over the coming year, we will collaborate to create new work, inspired by our learning, that addresses ecological recovery and social justice. Fellowship activities are led by Penobscot Nation partners and center indigenous knowledge and experience. Designed to be seeds rather than final products, project activities encourage Fellows to continue working together, working in the archives to which they've been introduced, and working in embodied ways with the Penobscot River well after the Fellowship year ends.
This fellowship has emerged from a year of conversation between Darren Ranco, Ph.D., Jennie Hahn, and Cory Tamler about how settler colonial individuals can ethically participate in shifting public understanding of our shared environments and histories, and how creative intersectional dialogue between Native and non-Native people might productively function. This project views a plurality of voices situated within Indigenous guidance as an approach toward, and modeling of, equitable cross-cultural practice.
The Fellowship Team visits the collections of the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine. Photo by Jennie Hahn.
RESEARCH AND CREATIVE APPROACHES
The year-long Archives & Performance Fellowship includes two research intensives that serve as opportunities to experiment with methodologies, learn from guides, gather material for projects, and workshop ideas with facilitators. One of these intensives familiarizes the Fellowship team with archival research, and the other intensive focuses on embodied forms of knowledge. During these intensives, Fellows and Fellowship Co-Creators have paddled portions of the Penobscot River in a canoe trip led by the Penobscot Nation Cultural & Historic Preservation Department, learning about river navigation and sharing in a history and present of Native guiding that preserves, transmits, and transforms knowledge about the river. We have stayed overnight on an island in the river, participating in hands-on learning about plants, Wabanaki artistic and storytelling practices, place-names and other forms of cultural knowledge, and issues facing the Penobscot Indian Nation today. We have visited library and museum collections and spoken with curators, archivists, and scholars about the complexities of archival knowledge preservation.
The fellowship year will culminate in a public performance/presentation of new work collaboratively generated by the Fellowship group in response to project learning. The final works will also be digitally archived and publicly shared in online formats.
The Fellowship Team paddles on the Penobscot River with the guidance of the Penobscot Nation Cultural & Historic Preservation Department. Photo by Jennie Hahn.
WHY GUIDING?
We understand guiding as a point of contact and exchange; Native guiding in particular is an exchange between Indigenous and colonial settler peoples, simultaneously cultural and economic. Records of such guided trips (such as, famously, Henry David Thoreau's trips guided by Joseph Polis and other Wabanaki guides as recorded in The Maine Woods) are rich and complicated historical documents that record Indigenous histories alongside colonial settler histories. The Fellowship group will follow a tradition of Native guiding both by reading the aforementioned kinds of archival materials (with and against the grain), and by actually enacting guiding practice with Wabanaki guides on the Penobscot River.
Your tax-deductible donation directly supports the people contributing time, creative resources, and knowledge to the Fellowship project. Donations to this campaign pay fees and honoraria to collaborating Guides and cover food, housing, travel, and other costs associated with our two research intensives. This campaign will also support the production costs of our final performance event. We are raising a total of $25,000 to fund Fellowship activities over the coming year, and we are dependent on the support of our community to reach this goal. Please help us fairly compensate the artists and knowledge-keepers who make this experimental collaboration possible.
We aim for transparency in the way we allocate funds, for open conversations with Fellows, facilitators, and collaborators about what resources (monetary and other) are necessary to support involvement, and for equitable compensation that’s responsive to a wide range of personal and professional conditions and levels of privilege. Our choice not to use a rewards-based crowdfunding model is rooted in our project’s core values around compensation and process:
The Fellowship project is centered on research and emergent processes and relationships, not products. Many elements of these processes cannot reliably be shared with a broad public if we’re responsible about cultural appropriation and our group’s need to be messy; to make mistakes as we work.
Producing rewards is creative and intellectual labor, and we’d need to divert crucial funds away from the central activities of the Fellowship if we were going to fairly compensate Fellows, Guides, or facilitators for that labor.
As a crowdfunding donor, you are also a part of In Kinship’s reciprocal exchange: we invite you to participate in all of the project’s public performances and events free of charge, and we will ensure that you receive digital and/or physical copies of published project materials (creative and scholarly) at the culmination of the Fellowship. If there are other ways you would like to be involved in the conversation, please let us know! For more information regarding our values around compensation of labor, please follow this link: In Kinship Overview
Archives & PerformanceFellows Devon Kelley-Yurdin, Lilah Akins, Tyler Rai, and Emilia Dahlin. Photo by Jennie Hahn.
ABOUT THE FELLOWS
Lilah Akins is an artist and filmmaker, currently working on her second BA at the University of Southern Maine's Geography-Anthropology program with a focus in Cultural and Natural Heritage Management. She was born and raised on Oahu, Hawaii, and is an enrolled member of the Penobscot Nation and also of Jewish, Cherokee, and settler-colonial descent.
Emilia Dahlin (http://emiliadahlin.com/) is a singer, songwriter, and teaching artist who's interested in what creates and sustains healthy communities. She garners great joy from collaborating and co-creating with young, budding music-makers to elevate their voices. Emilia believes that music and storytelling are are essential to our being and some of the most powerful tools to foster connection between people and to create positive social change.
Devon Kelley-Yurdin (http://www.devonkelley-yurdin.com/) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural organizer based in Portland, Maine. They were born and raised in Vermont and hold a BFA in Communications Design & Cultural Studies from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. They are grounded in the belief that creativity can be found everywhere and plays a deep role in holistic community care; play, curiosity, queerness, accessibility, equity, and skill-building drive their work, relationships, and life experiences. Their work spans traditional media (printmaking, cut-paper, installation), design/illustration/art direction, event production, arts administration, and community organizing.
Tyler Rai (https://www.tylerrai.com/) is an improvisor, dancer, and collaborative artist currently based in Amherst, Massachusetts (Nipmuck/Pocumtuc territory). Through performance and movement improvisation, her research questions how we embody kinship and relational empathy with the other/more-than-human-world. She is currently developing a body of research focused on grief and reverence for the glacial bodies of this earth.
ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP CO-CREATORS
Cory Tamler, Project Director and In Kinship Lead Artist
Cory Tamler (www.corytamler.com) is a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in theatre, performance as research, and community organizing. She has created research-based performance projects in the U.S., Germany, and Serbia, and is a core artist with civic arts organization Open Waters (Maine). Cory has been a Fulbright Scholar (Berlin) and a Fellow at the New Museum for Contemporary Art. As a Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, she studies open-ended artistic work from social practice to community-based theatre. She teaches at Brooklyn College and is a member of Commitment Experiment, an experimental performance collective.
Darren Ranco, Ph.D., Educational Coordinator
Darren Ranco is a faculty member with the University of Maine’s Department of Anthropology, as well as the Chair of Native American Programs and Coordinator of Native American Research. His research focuses on the ways in which indigenous communities in the United States resist environmental destruction by using indigenous diplomacies and critiques of liberalism to protect cultural resources, and how state knowledge systems continue to expose indigenous peoples to an inordinate amount of environmental risk. Ranco is a member of the Penobscot Nation, and is particularly interested in how better research relationships can be made between universities, Native and non-Native researchers, and indigenous communities. Ranco is also involved in developing mentoring programs for Native American students at the University of Maine and developing a statewide STEM education program for Native American students.
Jennie Hahn, Producing Director & In Kinship Lead Artist
Jennie Hahn is a civic performance artist working at the intersections of environmental stewardship, ecological arts practice, and public dialogue in her home state of Maine. Projects include Farms & Fables, an original play created in collaboration with Maine farmers, and a co-designed partnership to incorporate performance techniques into policy development practices with Stephanie Gilbert of the Maine Department of Agriculture. Since 2015, Jennie has curated In Kinship, a collection of collaborative civic performance works focused on environmental resilience and ecological recovery in the Penobscot River Watershed. Jennie is an MFA student in Intermedia at the University of Maine, Orono.
Video Acknowledgements
Opening: Lilah Akins, In Kinship Fellow, sings the Penobscot Water Song during a Fellowship Team Check-In Call Video footage was captured by members of the Fellowship team including: Jennie Hahn, Cory Tamler, Lilah Akins, and Devon Kelley-Yurdin. Video footage of In Kinship Fellow Tyler Rai and Fellowship Co-Creators Darren Ranco and Jennie Hahn is extracted from the Fellowship team's weekly check-in calls and represent in-process group dialogue. Video footage represents activities led by the Penobscot Nation Cultural & Historic Preservation Department on a three-day canoe and cultural trip that included building a traditional Wabanaki hunting structure and tiny ash basket making. Guides on this trip included James Eric Francis, Sr., Jennifer Neptune, Chris Sockalexis, Ryan Kelley, and Darren Ranco. Video footage includes a group visit to view wiwenikan: the beauty we carry, an exhibition of Wabanaki art in Maine that was co-curated by Jennifer Neptune and Kathleen Mundell at the Colby College Museum of Art. Closing: Led by In Kinship Fellow Emilia Dahlin, the Fellowship group sings "Standing Stone", a song written by Melanie Demore.
About In Kinship
This project is part of In Kinship, an ongoing community art and performance project that looks at how we connect and care for each other within Maine's Penobscot River Watershed ecosystem. The project has no predetermined conclusion or specified creative outcome; it is intended as a framework to support community-driven, arts-based environmental action.
The In Kinship Archives & Performance Fellowship is made possible, in part, through a grant from the Network of Ensemble Theaters’ Travel & Exchange Network (NET/TEN), supported by lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional funding support has been provided by a Doctoral Student Research Grant from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and by an Intermedia M.F.A. Research and Project Grant from the University of Maine.
