This collaboratively-written essay explores manaakitanga —a Maori term referencing reciprocal hospitality and connectivity—both in a dance piece/practice called Mitimiti that Jack Gray is making for the concert dance stage, and in this essay itself, with its exchanges between Gray and dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy. Both the dance, and the essay, suggest that stepping forward in connection, in relational and mutually beneficial exchange, is itself a process of indigeneity.

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To even begin to talk about "Indigenous Dance Today" trips the tongue before the mouth opens. What is Indigenous, 1 and how do we discuss it (whatever it is) in attentive awareness to complex and ongoing histories of location and dislocation, of seizing and selling, of invisibilization and incorporation, of trashing and taking, of treaties and translations and no treaties and no translations, of desire and disdain? What kinds of "Indigenous dance," and where? When is "today," and how is what's happening "today" in relation to "Indigenous" histories (in which colonizing violence first constituted "Indigenous" in the first place 2) and futurities? These are all old and new questions, in constant shift. Who is asking, and who is answering? Who is listening to the questions and answers, and who is not? How to begin, and to continue, without shutting up or shutting down? This journal issue has been taking shape over the past two years, in dance studios and board meetings and airports, around conference tables and coffee tables and dinner tables, on walks through gardens and up mountains in the Riverside region, in conversations and back-and-forths over email and Skype and phone. It is a delight to present it, and with its multiple voices and various kinds of contributions, to the field of dance studies. I have been working in the field of Indigenous dance studies for nearly two decades now, first focusing on the history of Indigenous dance in relation to modern dance history (Shea Murphy, 2007), and then for the past decade focusing an academic lens more intently on choreography being created and staged by Indigenous choreographers. That work is clearly ongoing. Along the way, I have seen the need for more scholarship, particularly by Indigenous scholars, on the topic of "Indigenous dance." That need is what sparked this issue. It was also sparked by a desire to support a focus on Indigenous dance as vibrantly alive today-not lost (despite narratives of loss), not absent (despite narratives of erasure), not colonized (despite narratives of colonization), but moving through, with, and beyond these narratives and also activating in layers outside of them: to cite Karyn Recollet, "jumping scale" out of them into other realms (and you'll have to read her essay, "Gesturing Futurities: 'Jumping Scale' through the Remix," herein, to find out more about what "jumping scale" can mean). So a desire to focus on Indigenous dance "today," not (only) as something that happened in the past (with the recognition that "today" and "the past," and notions of time in them, have their own reverberations: as Tanya Lukin Linklater writes in her Statement in this issue, "time can operate simultaneously in Indigenous ways of being-that past, present and future operate simultaneously"), propelled the issue as well. As one of my favorite writers, Leslie Marmon Silko (who seems to appear every time I sit down to say something about this all), writes, "That is the way it was back then, because it is the same even now." 3

This chapter discusses the work of two Native American dance makers, Emily Johnson/Catalyst and DANCING EARTH Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations, directed by Rulan Tangen. It argues that these choreographers access, strengthen, and enact Indigenous intellectual discourse and knowledge as artistically and politically generative: one, by making contemporary dance that is not always foregrounded as “Indigenous”; and the other that insistently is. Each, in different but related ways, creates work that reflects contemporary conditions, challenges ongoing settler colonization and the federal legal requirements for “recognition” that seek to sustain it, and asserts the import of its own creative intelligence—on its own terms. This dance work, the chapter suggests, draws from specific genealogies of Indigenous peoples and practices to produce a vibrant, contemporary, Indigenous present and future. The piece addresses ways this is both simple, and a radical act.

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