By GiGi Buddie

Growing up in a whitewashed world, playwright, actress, and poet Yolanda Bonnell took on the task of searching for her Indigenous identity through the arts. Using the creative possibilities of theatre to navigate her way through uncharted waters, she has now emerged a successful artist that seeks to guide those on their own journey. White Girls in Moccasins is one of her works that does exactly that as it beautifully tackles an Indigenous search for identity. Drawing upon her own experiences, Bonnell finds comfort in art that tells stories that often go untold.

As a Queer Two Spirit Ojibwe and South Asian artist, Bonnell has explored and created many narratives on the stage, as well as been involved in works that call for Indigenous representation. Her acting credits include roles in The Breathing Hole by Colleen Murphy, directed by Reneltta Arluk, who I wrote about in my previous post, and presented at the Stratford Festival, and Two Indians by Falen Johnson, presented at Summerworks 2016, for which she was named one of NOW Magazine’s Theatre Discoveries and most exciting artists to watch. 

Bonnell and myself, like many others, grew up experiencing stereotyped depictions of Indigenous peoples and sadly, this has resulted in a barrier between non-Indigenous people and an accurate knowledge of our people and culture. Artists like Bonnell are breaking down that barrier to communicate and teach Indigenous traditions, culture, and narratives, and to expose those stereotypes for the blatant fiction they are and always have been.

Your show White Girls in Moccasins deals with the search for identity as an Indigenous person in a whitewashed world. How has art helped you navigate finding your identity?

I think that creating and writing truly helped me work through the confusion and the “lost” feeling I had, one that I still sometimes have, about my identity. So much was kept secret or buried or hidden when I was growing up. I mostly learned about the stereotypes regarding my identities. All of the things that make up who I am were ostracized, or attacked, or made to look like something that they weren’t. Once I finally used my art to lean into mining through all of the colonial bullshit, I was able to bring all of myself forward in a positive way. Telling my stories helped me navigate through all the positive reclamation work I was doing to discover myself.

You performed in The Breathing Hole, a story that uses the medium of theatre to talk seriously about climate change, at the Stratford Festival. In your opinion, what is the importance of addressing serious topics through art, especially the topic of our climate crisis?

I think it’s incredibly important. I’ve always said that I believe art is inherently political. We’ve been able to map our true history with our stories, no matter in which medium they’re told. Often those stories carry messages or truths that push back against oppression. Even our prophecies are stories. Many Indigenous prophecies warned about climate change and environmental devastation. 

As artists, we are either given or we build a platform for ourselves to engage and display great vulnerability and truth, which allows our witnesses to deeply feel something. To experience something. To watch and listen and laugh and cry and sing along. It’s an honor and a privilege to have that platform, as much as it is an honor and privilege to be a witness. For me, revolution is a duty, not a choice (I read that on a bathroom stall and have touted it ever since). As artists and storytellers, I believe it is our duty to use our gifts to bring forth truth and be political. It is our duty to remind people of what’s actually happening in this world, remind them what is happening in their “country,”  and in their backyards and neighborhoods. Then, once we show you, it’s your job as a witness to go and continue to do your part in making that change. We can be political and entertaining. There are intersections that have always worked. It’s like hiding the medicine in the pudding.

The West Coast of the United States is experiencing the worst and most devastating wildfires to date. For millennia, Indigenous people used flames to protect the land, but the US government outlawed the process for over a century before recognizing its value. Yet the Indigenous knowledge of the caretakers of the land is unmatched. As the climate crisis progresses, do you think experts will look to Indigenous people for answers on how to care for the land?

I want to say yes. I want to say that they’ll read Indigenous authors or look to our histories to see how we worked in rhythm with the land. I want to say they’ll put Indigenous land defenders, scientists, botanists, knowledge keepers at the head of environmental defense, but I’m not confident in those steps ever being taken.

We’ve seen this time and time again. We are at the precipice of irreversible climate disaster, and we have watched this happen before. From first contact, Indigenous people have been attempting to teach settlers how to live with the land and how to live sustainably. Yet here we are. The systems of government on Turtle Island do not see Indigenous people as people, they see us as a nuisance and they always have. You’re not going to ask the roaches in your house to dinner to negotiate survival tactics. No. I really do hope that the experts will do what is needed, but systemic racism is a deep root and many of those people don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.

In an interview for Muskrat Magazine, you said, “We (Indigenous women) don’t experience enough of seeing ourselves. There is power in representation.” What does Indigenous representation on stage mean to you?

Indigenous representation means that I’m not alone. It means that I matter, my story matters, and that my experiences as a Queer Indigenous woman matter. It means that I am seen, beautiful, and more than just a statistic. It means that I am more than just my trauma and pain. When I see another Indigenous person on stage, especially a Kwe, I am immediately moved. I grew up, as many of us did, surrounded by whiteness. White was the standard and it was considered to be the blueprint of beauty. Life only mattered if you were white. I was a stereotype, assimilated, indoctrinated, so I grabbed on to what I could. The Pocahontas, the Tiger Lily, the Isabel Two (who wasn’t even Indigenous), every noble savage imagery, anything to find myself, I grabbed onto. Even now, I’ve only felt seen and represented on stage three times. So when I do see it, it moves me to a place deep in my core because I understand that the feeling of being seen and not being alone is like nothing else in this world.

In closing, do you have any words of wisdom for our readers?

I urge you to read more Indigenous literature and learn about systems of governance that existed long before the Eurocentric systems we have now. Learn the true histories of this land and the land you come from. Decolonize. Stay informed. Use your privilege for good.

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Here is a list of 10 Books by Indigenous Authors You Should Read, written by Emily Temple for Literary Hub, as well as a Decolonization Reading List to further educate while decolonizing your mind and bookshelf. 

(Top image: Yolanda Bonnell performing in her solo show bug. Photo by Dahlia Katz.)

This article is part of the Indigenous Voices series.

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GiGi Buddie is an American Indian artist and student studying theatre, with an emphasis in acting, at Pomona College. Whether it be through acting or working in tech, GiGi has dedicated much of her life to the theatre. In the summer of 2019, her passion for art and environmental justice took her to the Baram River in Malaysian Borneo where she, alongside Pomona professors, researched the environmental crisis and how it has been affecting the Indigenous groups that live along the river. As a result of her experience researching and traveling, she student-produced the Pomona College event for Climate Change Theatre Action during the fall 2019 semester.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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By Peterson Toscano

Photographer, writer, and climate advocate Princella Talley tells us about the vital role of art in her life and her work. Her interests in visual art and storytelling started at a young age when observing dolphins in the ocean. After a successful career as a professional writer, Princella worked on a freelance writing assignment that ultimately drew her into the world of climate change and her role as Diversity Outreach Coordinator at Citizens’ Climate Lobby. In our conversation, Princella speaks candidly about the challenges of being a person of color in predominantly white climate spaces. 

Before joining the Citizens’ Climate Education team, Princella spent more than a decade working as a photographer and writer. She covered topics ranging from climate change and ecotourism to artificial intelligence and mobile app development for major news outlets with more than 60 million online visitors, independent publications, and tech startups in Silicon Valley. She has written for CBS Las Vegas, worked as a copy editor for a digital publication with 135,000 weekly readers, and created content for a GRAMMYs campaign. Princella is also the owner of Louisiana Food Fellow, a cohort of change leaders working within local food systems. In central Louisiana, she partners with community leaders to provide environmental education and implement sustainable and eco-friendly programs in economically disadvantaged communities.

Next month, I am talking with Jason Davis. Jason curates ClimateStoriesProject.org. The site hosts videos from people all over the world that reveal the impacts of climate change on their lives, and how they are responding. Jason takes some of these stories and composes music to accompany them. You will hear a moving and powerful testimony from John Sinnok, an Inuit Elder from Alaska. Woven around the story is Jason’s haunting and beautiful composition for the double bass.

If you like what you hear, you can listen to full episodes of Citizens’ Climate Radio on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean, Northern Spirit Radio, Google Play, PlayerFM, and TuneIn Radio. Also, feel free to connect with other listeners, suggest program ideas, and respond to programs in the Citizens’ Climate Radio Facebook group or on Twitter at @CitizensCRadio.

This article is part of The Art House series.

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As host of Citizens’ Climate Radio, Peterson Toscano regularly features artists who address climate change in their work. The Art House section of his program includes singer/songwriters, visual artists, comics, creative writers, and playwrights. Through a collaboration with Artists and Climate Change and Citizens’ Climate Education, each month Peterson reissues The Art House for this blog. If you have an idea for The Art House, contact Peterson: radio @ citizensclimatelobby.org

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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By Clare Fisher

ON NOT-QUITE THEORIZING INTERDISCIPLINARITY 
IN ARTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

In my last post, I talked about interdisciplinarity as an “and” through which students and researchers of arts and climate change can reach beyond the limitations of their disciplines in search of new and more sustainable ways of thinking, making, and living. In this post, I’m going to focus on the theories that hold such “ands” in place – although whether it is really possible to devote a post entirely to theory when such courses are constantly trying to resist the separation of one form of knowing from another is another matter.

Or perhaps I should put it this way: how do we theorize what does not want to be theorized? The collection of essays Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing – a highly interdisciplinary text that features on many reading lists – provides a useful starting point:

In the indeterminate conditions of environmental damage, nature is suddenly unfamiliar again. How shall we find our way? Perhaps sensibilities from folklore and science fiction – such as monsters and ghosts – will help. While ghosts … help us read life’s enmeshment in landscapes, monsters point us toward life’s symbiotic entanglement across bodies…. Against the conceit of the Individual, monsters highlight symbiosis, the enfolding of bodies within bodies in evolution and in every ecological niche. In dialectical fashion, ghosts and monsters unsettle anthropos, the Greek term for “human,” from its presumed center stage in the Anthropocene by highlighting the webs of histories and bodies from which all life, including human life, emerges. Rather than imagining phantasms outside of natural history, the monsters and ghosts of this book are observable parts of the world. We learn them through multiple practices of knowing, from vernacular to official science, and draw inspiration from both the arts and sciences to work across genres of observation and storytelling. [pp 3-4]

In the West, the Enlightenment tradition predisposes us to categorize all that cannot be categorized as monstrous. Tsing, however, reclaims the monster’s resistance to categorization as a vital tool in both critically engaging with the complexity of the climate crisis and imagining beyond it.

It is exactly this sort of “monster thinking” that underpins the Department of Environmental Studies at Wofford College in South Carolina, where Kaye Savage teaches an Art & Earth course:

We’re rooted in the notion that no environmental problems are single-faceted: it’s everything from who’s in the room to how we understand what the problem even is. How do we place our values in understanding how the problem came about?

Savage paints the tangled complexity of the problem as a source of intellectual and creative excitement, not the failure it might appear to be from a discipline-bound point of view. The courses in the department encourage students to investigate such questions by conducting research not only in the classroom but in the field and a purpose-built “lab,” thus transforming the interdisciplinary aspects of the course from something abstract – having to read different texts or search different sorts of databases, for example – to something they can experience with their whole body. The aim, says Savage, is to provide them with the opportunity to experience different modes of maintaining focused attention on a problem. 

This attention, argues Savage, is of crucial value in itself: “It could be going out in the field and counting trees, another way is to look carefully and sketch; it could be thinking about a problem broadly so as to include the global, social and economic aspects. This is something that is lacking in society in general, I think.” The attention, or noticing, that Savage’s courses foster crosses not merely from one discipline to another but from theory to practice; it is, then, a praxis.

Min Hyoung Song, who teaches Climate Fiction at Boston College in Massachusetts, and is heavily involved in their Environmental Humanities program, placed a similarly strong emphasis on what we do and don’t notice and why:

That conversation is often regulated by a lot of specific social rules. Teaching a course on climate change and the arts helps to shed light on these dynamics, to consider what these rules are, what happens when we break them, and what new rules might enable. The focus on the arts also helps to make a topic that feels far off and abstract more immediate and visceral, so that climate change is something that’s happening now and all around us. 

Noticing the rules that regulate what can and can’t be noticed is the first step towards reaching for new rules. In her oft-cited book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway advocates for “making kin” across species. Here, Song seems to suggest that making kin between abstract and intellectual knowledge on the one hand, and affective, bodily knowledge on the other, is what will foster both critical and creative responses to the contemporary moment’s climate-related blind spots.

Evelyn O’Malley, for whom the texts by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway are touchstones in her Theatre for a Changing Climate course at the University of Exeter, UK, encourages students to notice the difficulty of this sort of noticing: “I’m trying to get students to look at how we can keep on looking at and engaging with the trouble of the present, rather than getting lost in projected futures and either an Edenic or horrific past.” When she first started teaching this course, she thought that students not being able to grasp the scientific information would be a crucial problem. However, she quickly found this was far from the case:

I was confronted with a cohort that already had a decent grasp and was politically engaged. It became less a matter of trying to extract the truth of the data from specific plays or performances and more about learning to see how they function, as discourses, to impede or progress real world effects for people who are on the receiving end of climate change. Yet I also tried to constantly travel back to the science and ask whether it’s true or not. It felt important to have conversations with [scientific] experts about those things that touched at the edges of their roles.

O’Malley’s theory is a monster theory in that it is constantly breaking rules and boundaries and, in doing so, gives students a panoramic view of how change happens and the roles that each discipline, and its constituent theoretical underpinnings, play in such a change. 

For John Wills, who teaches on Inviting Doomsday: US Environmental Problems in the Twentieth Century at the University of Kent, UK, one of the main benefits of interdisciplinarity is that it highlights the fact that the rigid separation of disciplines is a myth. “The environment,” he argues, … “should be taught as part of history as a matter of course, but it’s mostly left out as a factor. I’m trying to decenter humans from the historical stage; we’re not the lead actors on stage. We need to broaden what history is.” 

The real monster is, perhaps, the Enlightenment itself. Willis’s course, like so many others mentioned here, seeks to illuminate some of the damage done by the Western intellectual fantasy of humanity’s exceptional separation from the rest of the planet – of a world that can be neatly ordered, controlled and colonized – which, paradoxically, has created all kinds of environmental destruction that is in itself quite monstrous. 

Interdisciplinarity, in its varied forms, is at once a dismantling and a reaching for something that can’t quite be named. How, then, can it be taught, particularly in institutions which are (perhaps necessarily) rigidly categorized and ordered? How can teachers help students to step into spaces of uncertainty and difference? These are some of the questions I will be asking in my next post, which will focus on pedagogy.

This article is part of our series on Arts & Climate in Higher Education.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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