Conscious Spectatorship

Yesterday I woke before the sun to attend the Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Ceremony on Alcatraz Island, an annual sunrise gathering that honors the traditions of Native American tribes as well as indigenous people the world over. Blessed with a gorgeously clear morning, the event, which included guest speakers, musicians, drumming, and dancing, was a powerful way to celebrate an ever-problematic national holiday.

The event made me very aware of my own spectatorship. Descended quite literally from settlers who appropriated land from indigenous people, my participation in the ceremony is colored by a sad awareness of my own implication in our current cultural scenario. As an ally to oppressed cultures, I watch and listen with reverence, bearing witness to the traditions that remain vibrant in Native communities. My gaze is attentive, appreciative, and also, I hope, ultimately generative. Rather than watching with the hungry eyes of a tourist or the analytic eyes of an anthropologist, I try to watch in a way that is simultaneously aware of the past yet looking imaginatively towards the future. How can my work as an artist and scholar contribute to the flourishing of intercultural dialogue? Can I, through conscious spectatorship, learn from and help further the vibratory movements of embodied knowledges of cultures that are not my own?

As the sunlight hits the crumbling barracks on the top of Alcatraz, I can't help but think of the rise and fall of cultures. Despite the attempts of the dominant power to control and subordinate any elements that threaten that power, nothing that is built by human hands lasts forever. Sometimes I feel comforted remembering that everything, given enough time, crumbles.