Bell, Christian2022-11-142022-11-142022-06https://hdl.handle.net/11299/243080University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2022. Major: Theatre Arts. Advisor: Sonja Kuftinec. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 256 pages.This dissertation addresses contemporary and historical Indigenous performance collaborations in the Upper Mississippi Region. Through archival and ethnographic research into targeted case studies, drawn from the 1930s to the present, the dissertation identifies how critical consciousness emerges through Indigenous engagements with place. I ask how the embodiment of past cultural knowledges disrupt homogenous narratives of place and reimagine activist performance collaborations. By thinking with Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota artists and activists through concepts of recovery and reclamation, this study focuses on how the transmission of knowledge critiques settler colonial narratives that privilege extractive culture.Selective case studies raise important epistemological questions about research methods and policies that have attempted to order Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota ecological thought throughout 20th/21st Century: 1) a salvage ethic that figured the researcher as savior to collect and safeguard Native American cultures; 2) the Morrill Act of 1862, a network of Land-Grant institutions founded on the settlement of lands and the extraction of resources; and 3) the University of Minnesota Extension as a model of education that has re-performed itself on reservations and in outstate Minnesota since its inception in 1909. Beginning from the University of Minnesota’s Native American Medicine Garden, the study centers ecological understandings animated through embodied practice. In the archive, I focus on the documentation of performances at the Minnesota State Fair to consider hidden acts of Indigenous resistance that elude homogenous narratives of industrial agriculture. In the field, I observe the work of artist-activists re-centering the materiality of the everyday to imagine futures beyond settler-colonial logics. The study thus moves between past and present animations of the ecological to offer perspectives on how cultural knowledge is produced.enThesis or Dissertation