This article takes up ecological science and literary scholar Kyle Keeler’s term ‘Kleptocene,’ a neologism fusing the Greek, kleptein ‘to steal,’ or ‘act secretly,’ and ‘-cene’ from the Greek kainos, signifying ‘recent.’ Keeler terms this intervention a ‘more honest story about the current epoch,’ naming ‘centuries of violent colonialism and the theft of Native land,’ to propose a cultural formation centring colonisation in the long history of ecological crisis (Keeler 2020). Desire for gold and silver very often drove colonisation in the Americas.Footnote 1 Yet appetites for fish, fins, fur, and crafted shells also spurred the emerging seventeenth-century trans-marine markets and colonisation of Turtle Island (North America). This article observes dance in premodern colonial archives, long before settler nations’ borders came to be drawn, marking their interrelationships with land and ritual in discourses of colonial acquisition and settlement, as well as in shifting epistemes of enslavement across the Atlantic world.

Baroque ballets of the first half of the seventeenth century, while often associated with European metropoles, intersect with this period of premodern globalisation and participate in its discursive matrices. Their discourses can be glimpsed across a spectrum of colonial writings in and beyond North America, revealing their contours in cross-cultural description embedded within explorers’ documentation and often cartography. As dance historian Margaret McGowan observed (2008 and 1963), ballets’ conflation with elite performance is at least in part an effect of print records’ neglect of popular practices. Mark Franko emphasizes that baroque embodiment, gender, and masquerade steep through ballets’ considerable print and political history in the long seventeenth century ([1993] 2015). Such print histories’ extra-European contexts have largely been ignored in the story of the medium, however. These colonial vectors expand what Noémie Ndaiye and Lia Markey identify as the emergence of a racial matrix preceding Enlightenment paradigms. Extra-European ballet references in writings by missionaries and explorers in the Americas illuminate the uses of danceways in the early history of colonisation.

Dance writing claimed cultural insight and shaped kinaesthetic discourses of geographic representation and possession. Dance references, even the term ‘ballet,’ made regular appearances in French colonial writings in northeastern North America. Marc Lescarbot’s History of New France (1609) called for the transmigration of the academy of the arts to the new settlement, weighing the alleged lack of violins, masquerades, palaces, and cities against the ‘glory’ of participating in the Christianisation of a ‘New France’ (Lescarbot [1609] 1907, 15). The Journal of the Jesuit Fathers records a marriage of settlers on June 18, 1646 at which ‘five soldiers dance a ballet’ (Thwaites [1645–56] 1898, 28:15). This glimpse of soldiers dancing ‘ballet’ in 1646 Québec, within decades of their 1608 settlement, precedes without transition or comment the report that ‘Indians from Tadoussac’ brought furs to the post, making ‘complaints of their treatment by De Launay, a French trader.’

Despite their brevity, such fleeting records establish key critical insights. They serve to defamiliarise, and certainly also trouble, dance histories of this medium centred on European metropoles and timelines. Pointedly too, they shape scripts spatialising discourses of trans-marine settlement and trade. Ballet appears here as a more popular medium than is usually supposed, albeit one recorded by priests who also state they did not attend such performances.Footnote 2 This kinaesthetic form in the colonial archive unfolds side by side in French documents with Indigenous criticism of abusive treatment, traders, and high prices. Adjacent passages of this kind illuminate the extent to which colonial record-making invoked artistic and cultural forms to archive place and presence by means of danceways. Here I employ the term danceways to emphasise real and imagined movements across lands, seas, and fresh waters. This usage invokes the terms foodways and folkways to emphasise situated ontological pluralism from communities’ knowledges to practices of silence. Such silences are multiple, differently motivated, and differently compounding. Some protect communities’ practices of Protocol, ceremony, honour (Younging 2018, 116). Others trace the wake of epidemics, enslavement, forced displacement, and genocide. Still others mark dances’ emphatic devaluation in many settler and European epistemologies.Footnote 3 To present dancing as a way of knowing as well as of doing here attends with care to the complexity of formations beyond specifically theatrical records to medicine and healing, being, economy, diplomacy, and protocols of relationship.

As writers studying colonial histories observe, lack and plenty are recurring axes of such colonial representation. In this essay, I look to Mark Cruse’s study of the ‘appetite’ of acquisition in medieval narratives of extra-European travel alongside the engagements of Stó:lō Nation Indigenous sound studies theorist Dylan Robinson. Robinson (2020) observes colonial extraction and desires as scripting, and also scripted by, settler-colonial appetites that he terms ‘hunger.’ Both scholars draw readers’ attention to sensorial and kinaesthetic scripts as persistent formations of settler art and music—as well as spectacular formations of value constituted in vast distances (Cruse 2020, 219, 223; Robinson 2020).Footnote 4

Yet as Robin Bernstein discerns, scripts flexibly bridge cultural forms’ creation with those who receive them (2009, 68–69). My call here foregrounds these early dance writings’ relationships to land and water. This work attends to the interventions of Indigenous dance artists and writers on movement and sovereignty, as grounded in Rosy Simas (Seneca) and Ahimsa Timotéo Bodhrán’s edited special issue ‘Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance’ in Movement Research (2019) and the special issue ‘Indigenous Dance Today’ in Dance Research Journal (Shea Murphy, ed., 2016).Footnote 5 Settler scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy further foregrounds complex inheritances of dances’ appropriations and bans (2007 and 2022). Emphasizing land’s critical underlying of these doings and writings alike, Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s critically influential article ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’ (2012) serves as a necessary foundation to this focus on land in relation to motion.

Critical new work by Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews cites an ‘Indigenous turn’ in medieval studies (2020) while Australian settler scholar Helen Young (2020) shows how legal structures in the Doctrine of Discovery, terra nullius, and Crusader figuration insinuated medieval legal constructs into early modern imperial expansion. These scholars’ approaches foreground historical research methods honouring Indigenous ways of knowing. Both study antiracist and decolonial attention activated in the global turn, the burgeoning fields of premodern critical race studies (Smith, Jones, and Grier 2018; Seth 2020; Thompson 2021; Ndiaye and Markey 2023), new materialisms, and renewed attention to long histories. With these currents come new means for studying dance, as well as performance, theatre, and music, in expanded conceptions of practices that move towards decolonising and rendering ontologically plural conceptions of doing and law (Robinson 2020; Werry 2020; Bloechl 2008).

As a settler writer, scholar, and dance practitioner, my approach in what follows investigates traces of techniques in which I was first trained (including ballet)—with which I have broken. Yet the aim of this analysis is not to centre, or reinscribe, European cultural forms. Instead, I observe colonial sources’ patterns of dance theorisation. Quite unlike the spectral femininities of later balletomanic obsession, seventeenth-century invocations of military and even artillery force resound with more explosive valences. These inhere in the term ballet’s hypothesised Proto Indo-European root word (*gwelə-, or *gwel-, ‘to throw’ or ‘reach’) shared with terms like ‘ballistic.’Footnote 6 Such martial trajectories of danced presence are conspicuously absent from hegemonic histories of the medium. Their formulations in this period’s book history, moreover, precede rather than follow large-scale arrivals of settler populations.

Many essays in this present collection point to long histories of antecedents in discourses of colonisation and discovery. This contribution invokes a continuum of materials, techniques, and temporal markers between medieval and early modern contexts. Mark Cruse and Kathryn Dickason observe extraction and plunder as motifs of early extra-European travel narratives, citing examples such as the Book of Marvels of the World (ca. 1410), an illuminated, French account of Marco Polo’s travels.Footnote 7 Adorned, luxurious objects and texts mediated contact with ‘people, objects, and animals from across Eurasia and Africa’ (Cruse 2020, 218, 229; Dickason forthcoming). Such displays rendered distant places by means of the documents’ lavish thingliness, while artists in the course of their commissions ornamented such travel narratives with lapis lazuli, coral, pearls, metals, and precious stones of distant provenance. This structure of accumulation likewise intensified circles of patronage peopled with travellers returning from distant voyages.

Objects and materials used in performance also translated such sensorial possibilities into French stagecraft. Daniel Rabel’s drawings for the Ballet du Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Great Ball by the Dowager of Billebahaut, 1626) which depict ‘Ameriquains’ performed by French and European dancers, enacted discourses of extractive mining in colonial Cusco in South America that glittered with gold and silver inks evoking the movements of costumed bodies (Preston 2018). French performers, sometimes costumed in theatricalised shackles, played the roles of the parts of the world in these ballets, as kings and leaders as well as enslaved figures, precisely as initiatives for French settlement accelerated in competition with other European powers. As Ndiaye (2022) underscores, the political satire of these performances appropriated Indigenous resistance to colonisation as burlesques. In the period of ribald baroque performances of the 1620s in Paris, trans-marine dance theorisation in colonial archives stirs together the discursive and festive presence of ballet in North America with the early history of Europeans’ settlement.

French cultural production in early ballets’ documentation sheds light on current public and scholarly reckoning with the long history of this period in works such as Nikole Hannah-Jones’ (2019, 2021) touchstone public history, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, and the quadricentennial of English Puritans’ 1620 arrival at Plymouth Rock.Footnote 8 Also within this decade four centuries ago, a child given the name of Olivier Le Jeune, commonly thought to have been from Madagascar or Guinea, who was likely trafficked to Québec in 1629, appeared in the settlement’s records as part of a 1639 court case. The first documented enslaved resident of African descent recorded in so-called ‘New France,’Footnote 9 Le Jeune was embroiled in a protracted legal trial with the father of the only named member of the audience at the ballets discussed in the Jesuit documents. This little girl from the Marsolet family attended this dance for ‘mercredy gras’ [‘Fat Wednesday’] at the Québec storehouse of the Jesuits on February 27, 1647. Le Jeune was imprisoned as a result of the trial, while a monument to him was raised last year in the courtyard of the Jesuits’ seminary. The surname by which he is known, Le Jeune, is that of Paul Le Jeune, the seminary’s founder and the author of ballet references cited in the course of this article from records of the religious missions in New France.

A verse from Le Ballet du naufrage heureux (Ballet of the Happy [i.e., Felicitous] Shipwreck, 1626) identified tobacco burned on stage in Paris as petun (de l’Estoile 1626, 5), naming the fragrant smoke filling the air between performer and spectator with terms drawn from the Tupi-Guaraní languages of Brazil. The French, however, re-used this term in the 1620s to designate Indigenous communities in North America’s Great Lakes, the Tionontati or Petun Nation, with the performance text likening the smoke to trickery and desire.Footnote 10 A ‘dialogue’ for the same performance staged the immolation of Moors (Mores) (de l’Estoile 1626, 11) as an Alchemist character ‘melted’ these characters in his furnace. Such burning references suggest that the French and Italian performers dancing these characters might have darkened their skin for these roles to enact cross-racial as well as cross-religious masquerades (de l’Estoile 1626, 12). These dances enacted race and mercantilism on the early modern stage yoked to the theatricalisation of pre-modern material cultures and marine markets’ expansion (Franko [1993] 2015, 69; Smith, Jones, and Grier 2018; Ndiaye 2022).Footnote 11

European records claiming to witness dances, locations, and dates in northeastern North America are not taken as reliable, informed accounts in what follows—they are not. Their methods vehicle direct as well as epistemic violence participating in the underwriting of religious and territorial expansion. To take these up today requires unpicking the codes of their scripts. In counterpoint with such French sources, this essay turns to artist, researcher, and marine biologist Elizabeth James-Perry (Âhqunah Wôpanâak/Aquinnah Wampanoag) whose trans-temporal 1620–2020 wampum belt troubles a four-hundred-year span of European settlement in North America. Hand-made by traditional method from quahog shells, James-Perry’s wampum marks Indigenous techniques traversing the time of British Puritan settlement with the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620. This coastline was also surveyed by the French at the turn of the seventeenth century just north of James-Perry’s community’s traditional lands of Noepe, Aquinnah, today also known as Martha’s Vineyard. James-Perry’s beadwork, which Keeler invokes in coining the term Kleptocene, centres Wampanoag community asserting doing that contests, remembers, and reshapes history as well as enduring public memory.

Entangled geographies and genealogies

Like his accounts of Cape Cod in 1605 and 1606, French geographer Samuel de Champlain’s third book, Voyages and Discoveries (1619/1620) codified spatial references with details of latitude and longitude. As he measures rivers, jumps or rapids (sauts), and the shorelines of the Great Lakes in North America, by what is today known as Georgian Bay, Champlain described women and girls lining up ‘as if they wanted to do the entry of a ballet or a masquerade’ (Champlain 1619/1620, fol. 98v, emphasis mine).Footnote 12 ‘Ballet’ appears directly beside the term ‘masquerade’ in this passage, invoking a practice skilfully analysed as a historiographical and critical conceit in the work of Dakota historian Philip J. Deloria ([1998] 2022). As a form appearing in French records of this period, masquerades also enacted related constructs of ‘playing Indian’ in francophone colonial histories preceding and traversing contemporary settler-state borders (Deloria in Bellin and Mielke 2011; Greer 2010; Welch 2013 and 2011).

Champlain’s dance narratives move quickly from ‘ballet’ and ‘masquerade’ to further, incommensurate cross-cultural comparisons. Opening with the subjunctive mood, ‘as if,’ a declension associated with performativity in theoretical writing, the voyage’s accounts of Indigenous dances descends a hierarchy of practices. These valences move from ‘ballet,’ to ‘masquerade,’ then ‘tintamarre’ (rough music or ‘din’) (Champlain 1619/20, fol. 100r), ‘singeries’ (monkeying imitations), and ‘conjurations’ (fol. 101r). By likening the latter to idolatry led by an ‘Ocqui’ (or healer) whom Champlain likens to the devil, he shows not only Europeans’ preoccupation with more- and other-than-human beings but also with increasingly infelicitous European imaginations of unruly and nonhuman ontologies. While Champlain’s debated religious denomination may gleam through this anti-dance valence—so does his publishing of a dancerly practice: ‘[t]hey have only two kinds of dances with measure,’ he continues, ‘one of four steps, & another of twelve, as if we danced the Trioli in Bretagne’ (fol. 98v).

This citing of the Trioli, seemingly a popular dance, solicits evanescent kinaesthetic familiarity with the Voyages’ readers. To date, I’ve found no further reference to it. Soliciting readers’ embodied knowledge by invoking rhythm, Champlain imagines a corporeal commons of motion mirroring his techniques for situating land by means of steps, time, and measurement (Champlain 1619/20, fols. 72 r–v).Footnote 13 This comparison operates in turn as what Randy Martin terms a kinestheme (Martin 2013), a ‘cell’ of descriptive motion that bridges the distant reader across the Atlantic. As Martin observes, dance ‘provides a scene for the production of knowledge and its limits that can inform how movement happens in other domains.’ Dances recorded on paper, deployed here with the measuring of geographical space, did cultural work to bridge the patrons of a ‘new France’ with proximal kinaesthetic orders.

The account of this journey situates this country as ‘Attigouautan’ (Huron-Wendat land) at 44.5 degrees latitude and 230 leagues longitude. By situating this ‘ballet’ on the southern shores by what is today known as Georgian Bay, on what are today Great Lakes shorelines in Ontario, Champlain equates measure with cultural familiarity across a bridge of dancing, writing, and practice that likely violated Indigenous Protocol or authority to describe such a gathering. These passages appear precisely among the narrating of coordinates of French maps, measuring land within the project of future French settlement (Champlain 1619/20, fols. 77r–v; Montgomery 1991). Champlain’s turn to dancing, moreover, appears in descriptive title on the book’s front page: ‘in which are described the mores, customs, clothing, methods of warfare, hunts, dances, celebrations [festins], & burials […] with […] the beauty, fertility, & temperature [of the country]’ (1619/20; trans. mine). This descriptive approach composes felicity for settlement against a foil of ‘unmeasured’ sound counterposing land with motion.Footnote 14

Seeta Chaganti (2018, 182) deftly renders ‘unmeasured’ steps or ‘strange footing’ as undexterous relationships between poetic and embodied rhythms. Such footing links affordances of time and rhythm with a prioritising of familiar cosmologies. Metres of poetry and bodily motion share rhythmic measure, she writes, as choreographic patterns and forms of memory that exceed ‘the subtle complexity of reciprocal reaction in situations where sung verse accompanies dance’ (2). Dancing, Chaganti argues, operates as an aesthetic and social practice, ‘conditioning an audience’s perceptual and aesthetic experiences of textual objects whether or not that audience is, at the moment of textual encounter, physically engaged in dance’ (3)—while also participating in perception informed by motion within textual and material cultures. Such ways of knowing have never been monolithic. Participants co-create relational meanings as they gather together, remember, look towards futures, and transform practices. All such acts modulate movement’s epistemologies as well as evidentiary formations.

Significantly, references to ballet (as a colonial production of knowledge) were also deployed by female, European patrons of missionary ventures. Madame de la Peltrie, persuaded by enthusiastic readings of the Jesuit relations—annual reports penned from 1632 to 1672 by Jesuit missionaries in northeastern North America that were published for readers in France—chartered her own ship to North America to invest her fortune in the colonial settlement. The stone foundations of Fort Ville Marie appear under glass floors a short walk from my apartment, at the time of writing, alongside white plaster miniatures re-enacting the missionaries’ first mass.Footnote 15 De la Peltrie allegedly bankrolled this ritual foundation of the colonial settlement in 1642—at Tiohtià:ke, in Kanienkehaga, and Mooniyang, in Anishinaabemowin, today also known as Montréal—she also reportedly decorated the altar for the occasion (Sandham 1870, 24).Footnote 16 Of the fervour of founding such missions, de La Peltrie is reported in the Jesuit relations of 1639 to have exclaimed: ‘Alas! How many souls could be saved in this country with what is spent for a single repast in Paris, or for a single ballet that lasts but two or three hours!’ (Anderson 1994, 89; Thwaites [Le Jeune 1639] 189815:233). Her outburst conjures imagined temporal and economic equivalences with performance and consumption, deploying a familiar rhetoric of plenty and lack between eternity and brevity, expenditure and savings, and the soul’s salvation and bodily pleasure. The author of this account of de la Peltrie’s statement is Paul Le Jeune, the Jesuit for whom Olivier Le Jeune was renamed at baptism.

References to ballet in seventeenth-century colonial accounts of Turtle Island disrupt lay understandings of this medium and its history. Moreover, they implicate danced imaginaries in the structure rather than the event of settler colonialism. Far more recently, Prime Minster Trudeau’s much-criticized gift of an edition of the Jesuit relations to Pope Saint Francis in 2017, containing the passages penned by Paul Le Jeune attributed above to de La Peltrie, indicates how recently this period’s books and transcribed manuscripts, as material and symbolic objects, have been used as gifts to assert diplomatic reminders of Catholic ties with early colonisation (True 2022). Problematically, Trudeau’s gift symbolically extended the formation of these settler-nation states by several hundred years, maintaining a project of imperial historiography embedded in religion for which, in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), it was soundly criticized.Footnote 17 As art historian Gloria Bell (Métis) emphasizes, the Vatican’s museum collections’ undisclosed provenance renews attention to the practice of labelling cultural items as gifts amid growing calls for repatriation, shining light on the histories of force and unfreedom in which many were taken (Stefanovich 2022). French collections, as well as those more local and worldwide, have instead been called to engage the repatriation of tangible and intangible inheritance traversed by plural systems of knowledge.Footnote 18

Scrutiny regarding processes related to the acquiring of material culture and land today acts to dismantle the ritual construction of past claims (Frichner 2010). When Pope Francis prepared to perform mass in Québec City during his July 2022 ‘penitential pilgrimage’ on a visit later acknowledging the cultural genocide of the residential schools (Deer 2022), Indigenous activist and Anishinaabe filmmaker Sarain Fox and her cousin Chelsea Brunelle of the Batchewana First Nation unfurled a banner on July 29, demanding ‘Rescind the Doctrine’ (Gollom 2022; Winfield 2023). In press photographs, the cousins hold their sign aloft in bright red letters in front of the Pope at the national Catholic shrine at Saint-Anne-de-Beaupré (fig. 1). The Pope and priests face the camera with unease, seeming to reflect the felt time of protest.

Figure 1
figure 1

Protest banner raised by activists Sarain Fox and Chelsea Brunelle as Pope Francis celebrates Mass at the National Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, Canada, on July 28, 2022. Photo by Vincenzo PINTO / AFP via Getty Images

Full size image

Decades of this sustained demand recently led first to an apology from the Vatican and more recently to the Pope’s April 2023 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, citing the ‘political manipulation’ of fifteenth-century papal bulls and the ‘ideological’ use of this medieval past (Beaulieu 2021; Miller 2010; Povoledo 2023). Indeed, law faculty member Tamara (Baldhead) Pearl, Nēhiyaw (Plains-Cree) from One Arrow First Nation, argues in national press coverage that the foundations of what she terms white supremacy in Canadian case law remain tethered to this contested principle of discovery (Hantiuk 2023).

Embodied eloquences

What, in this light, do ballets in Champlain, the Jesuit chronicles, or Madame de la Peltrie’s statements do? It matters to mark their anti-dance rhetorics. Céline Carayon’s recent study, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (2019), observes the complexity of writing on corporeal expression in early decades of French transmarine colonisation. Her insight on sign languages studies extensive recordings of movement and gesture in early colonial texts to suggest that trade and navigation languages of the Americas and Atlantic world were interwoven through gesture and communicative hand signs with the textual record of territorial expansion as inter-cultural attention to embodied encounter.

If gestures could report consent in colonial documents, as Carayon suggests, the dovetailing of language, record, and movement has compelling implications for what Diana Taylor termed the archive and the repertoire.Footnote 19 Most broadly, this ‘rift’ between tangible, material remains and putatively intangible practices, i.e., songs, dances, and other cultural forms of transmission, expands the evidentiary and bodily terrain of ‘acts of transfer’ (Taylor 2003, 2-3). Rebecca Schneider’s critique of a binary distinction of archive and repertoire, however, marks the mingled interdependency of practices and material cultures, or ‘inter(in)animations’ (2011, 7). Doing persists in archives’ legal fictions even if such records are conventionalised and misconstrued, moreover, underscoring the critical importance of approaching colonisers’ accounts of dance or movement with epistemological and ontological caution.Footnote 20 Dancing cited as an artistic or dramaturgical form in colonial documents can clearly enact epistemic rifts as well as impose cultural constructs (see de Sousa Santos 2018; Robinson 2020; Simpson 2017; Werry 2020).Footnote 21 Danceways, foodways, and folkways all offer movement as well as memory and material culture—imbricating culturally distinct and relational knowledges of embodied practices in precisely situated contexts.

Evidentiary bodies, both human and nonhuman, served as ties and lures to patronage. Daniel Rabel, who designed and recorded costumes for French ballets (whose textiles do not survive though the artist’s drawings do), also made renowned engravings of plants from the king’s gardens. Among these prints are the ‘Tiger’ or Liliomartaguae Canadense in his Theatrum florae (Theatre of flowers, 1622; Fig. 2). The spotted yellow or orange flowers of this northeastern North American plant grow wild today along sidewalks and highways in Montréal, as well as across the Atlantic coast, yet their relative’s seeds clearly travelled on ships’ Atlantic crossings by the early 1620s. The blooms share an expansive ‘theatrum’ (or theatre) of knowledge in such engravings (Blair 1997), framing a brief glimpse of the Anthropocene’s inter-continental movements of seeds, plants, and animals as well as their uses as gifts and medicines.Footnote 22

Figure 2
figure 2

‘Liliomartagum canadense’ (F90) in ‘Recueil de fleurs et d'insectes dessinés et peints sur vélin’ by Daniel Rabel (1624), watercolour copy made by the artist following the publication of his Theatrum Florae (1622). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Full size image

Lilies’ more-than-botanical significance in France was associated with angelic gifts. These blossoms linked France’s monarchy and church to conversion and kings’ future rule from twelfth-century heraldry onwards. French associations with kings’ lineages, and ultimately conceptions of empire, nation, and sovereignty, adopted the symbol across mediums, from flags and coins to markers of possession and coats of arms, drawing tangled medieval roots into genealogies of the emblems of colonial ethnic identities in North America. This abstraction of the flower, the fleur-de-lis (also convincingly traced to the iris), symbolised Christic meanings in this tradition, yet it also embodied the tears and favour of the Virgin Mary and functioned as signs within iconographies of French territorial expansion.

North American lilies nonetheless had significant Indigenous medicinal and foodways relevance in the northeast. Knowledge of lilies’ uses in Indigenous medicines included snake bite and menstrual treatments as well as abortifacients.Footnote 23 They were also significant as food sources recorded by Jesuits as part of a subsistence diet in times of famine in the Great Lakes (Aller 1954, 63; Black 1980, 138). Yet transposed to the page, the flowers’ and stems’ presentation within the frame of Rabel’s theatrum voids such relation to land, isolating spotted petals, stem, and leaves within an abstract, rectangular frame as a taxonomized imaginary of terra nullius in artistic and scientific rather than legal guise. Enclosure’s grammar traverses colonial networks and media in conceptual formations like this ‘theatre’ that includes all things at once and extends across the ocean as an ontological form of enclosure (Coulthard 2014, 12; Sevilla-Buitrago 2015).

Place and protest

Passages from Champlain continue to be widely cited in public histories of the settler capital, moreover. Champlain described dances and tobacco offerings ‘at one place [where] the water falls with such violence upon a rock, that, in the course of time, there has been hollowed out in it a wide and deep basin, so that the water flows round and round there and makes, in the middle, great whirlpools […] mak[ing] such a noise that it can be heard for more than two leagues off’ (Champlain 1613, 23).Footnote 24 Many of these public histories and chronologies committed to decolonial practices nonetheless complicatedly begin with these timelines with Champlain’s 1613 descriptions of the Akikodjiwan or Kana:tso Falls (see Crosby 2021; Gehl and Lambert 2018; Free the Falls; St. Denis 2016). Walking tours of the unceded lands and shores reveal striking terrain.Footnote 25 At the time of writing, official signage declares ‘No public access’ as industrial decontamination projects seek to cleanse the toxic legacies of the industrial past as ribbons in the colours of the medicine wheel flutter on chain-link fences closing off the islands.

The Chaudière or ‘Kettle’ Falls, locations of ongoing sacred significance, are today cut through by the Québec-Ontario border. As late Chief Harry St. Denis (Wolf Lake First Nation) writes, however, Algonquin communities claim ongoing rights, title, and stewardship of these unceded islands and waters (St. Denis 2016). Victoria Island and this archipelago shot to national and international prominence in the past decade as the unceded location from which Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Theresa Spence began her 2015 hunger strike. Spence’s protest declaring a state of emergency sparked the quick-moving Idle No More movement and with it widespread reimagining of reciprocal treaty relations and history.Footnote 26 In the wake of her action, crowds of thousands crossed this sacred site by bridge into the capital on a 2015 walk accompanying the report of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Calls to Action on the final leg of its journey to the settler seat of government.Footnote 27

Activism over these enclosures and industrial projects has also collided with questions of performance. In 2017, the Montréal cultural industry juggernaut, Moment Factory, illuminated the sacred waterways with spectacular lighting in Mìwàte: Illumination of Chaudière Falls (see Duffy 2017; Moment Factory website).Footnote 28 The contentious intervention, a looping ‘reveal’ of waters concealed by industrial facilities for a century, met in turn with mixed responses to displays of electric light playing over the sacred rapids and falls at night. Such acts of choreographic hypervisibility continue to be eclipsed as the energy company Hydro Ottawa, again closed the site during the Covid-19 pandemic, citing public health and offering digital footage of the falls to be viewed from home during lockdown (Morgan 2021).

Though the islands face the present-day Parliament, their enclosure underlies the region’s economic history. So too the company’s claim to be the first capital to light its seat of government, a year before Washington’s White House, with electric light.Footnote 29 Aligning with Indigenous oral histories, journalist Randy Boswell and archaeologist Jean-Luc Pilon examined evidence of thousands of years of Indigenous presence and ritual life at this location, revealing histories of desecration at these sites of settler industry by re-examining newspaper stories in nineteenth-century settler media. Their work exposes the omission of archives over the passage of years that corroborate unbroken histories of the site’s sacred, ceremonial, and diplomatic significance.

Boswell and Pilon’s jarring study details the probable destruction of burial grounds, settler dispersion of evidence of Indigenous presence into the river, and sand extraction that the authors link to nearby construction. These include the bridges crossing the river and possibly also the nearby Parliament buildings (Boswell and Pilon 2015). Moreover, grave goods from these islands and shores were disinterred for the formation of important national and regional museum collections, the authors continue. Criticism of reconciliation rhetoric at this site continues in many forms, including public-facing and critical timelines of industrial enclosure, environmental degradation, extraction, deforestation, and Indigenous communities’ displacement (see Gehl and Lambert 2018).

The Kleptocene’s partner: pandemics past and present

Thinking with dances on contested land and water inherits long histories of the limits of ‘cultural performance’ (see McKenzie 2001, 7–9)—as well as the durational performativity of settlement itself. The Journal of the Jesuits records a 1646 ballet in what is today Québec: ‘On the 18th occurred the marriage of Montpellier, a soldier and a Shoemaker, to the daughter of sevestre; they danced there a kind of ballet,—to wit, 5 soldiers.’ The passage continues without pause: ‘On the 22nd, 3 Canoes of Abnaquiois [sic.] arrived, who said that a malady which caused vomiting of blood had destroyed a good part of their nation; that there had been a great war’ (Thwaites [1645–56] 1898, 28:203–205).

This outbreak of ‘malady’ in Abenaki communities glimpses swift-moving epidemic illness and warfare then devastating communities across North America.Footnote 30 These diseases reshaped the continent, its atmospheres, and ultimately geology at global scale (Davis and Todd 2017; Lewis and Maslin 2015). Matthew Patrick Rowley, writing of New England’s past epidemics at the outbreak of Covid suggests pointedly that some Europeans of the early seventeenth century associated their scourge with divine acts. ‘Plague,’ he bluntly argues, ‘was used to procure land’ (Rowley 2020). Its outbreak was sometimes viewed by the settlers as divine favour, Rowley continues. Red River Métis artist-researcher and anthropologist Zoë Todd, whose scholarship forcefully addresses Indigenous ontologies beyond the human, maintains that silence on such losses in settler historiography constitutes a form of dissociative amnesia. Arguing for the date of 1610 as a decolonial possibility for engaging with the Anthropocene’s periodisation, Heather Davis and Todd situate this chronology as that of ‘the problem of colonialism and its power differentials’ extending through the ‘damming of rivers, clear-cutting of forests, and importation of plants and animals’ (Davis and Todd 2017, 771).

As artists, scholars, and cultural workers across disciplines reappraise this period, transnational narratives from the early seventeenth century have much to offer to the cultural reconsideration of dancing’s epistemic and ontological pluralism. A global turn in art history and performance research, reasserting culturally specific and situated contexts (Robinson 2020; Werry 2020), now firmly reflects the rise of racial and industrial capitalism alongside the theorisation and creation of cultural forms. Baroque expansionism in these archives is striking in its extended preoccupation with performance, ceremony, and ritual observance. These sources also critically disclose recurring dance and performance tropes entangled with long histories of colonisation’s legal claims’ fictions and foundations.

Thinking transnationally with dance and ecology: concluding thoughts

I first encountered Keeler’s term Kleptocene when artist, researcher, and marine biologist Elizabeth James-Perry (Âhqunah Wôpanâak/Aquinnah Wampanoag) connected with my classroom over Zoom to discuss her work revivifying traditional methods of making wampum beads from quahog shells.Footnote 31 The artist’s brilliant engagement with undergraduates shared how she makes these beads by hand, discussing wampum’s multivalent significance for Wampanoag ways of knowing, water, and story. With this account of tactile intimacy, James-Perry’s artist talks then moved into histories of forced industrialization, addressing the rise of standardised beads made from quahog as an early form of North-American currency made in conditions of enslavement and coercive extraction—while also shedding light on long histories of Indigenous women’s labour and knowledge. The drilling of shell with metal awls produced harmful dusts that, when inhaled, transformed traditional practices into injurious and dangerous work. Such transformations of work with shell, enslaved and exploited labour and health to make of far earlier practices and memory systems a European currency system that would later also be starkly devalued (see also Gentle 2016; Price 1996).

James-Perry’s trans-temporal wampum belt of 1620–2020, depicted in the artist’s hand in this photograph of her work (fig. 3), was commissioned to complicate the complex span of Puritans’ arrival. Its cross-temporal record marks the ongoingness of the Atlantic community from whose language the term wampum emerges.Footnote 32 As these events come to be retold in James-Perry’s arrangement of gleaming white and polished purple shell over the digital projections of her Zoom feed in our classroom, the artist produces a startling imaginary of the archive in relation to forced labour and resurgent practices, as well as of her own watercolour maps, as mnemonic interventions in the embodied work of transmitting histories. James-Perry’s conversation with students, which took place while the settler-colonial border was closed in September 2020 and soon after its reopening in 2021, emphasised these transnational stakes of colonial violence as well as the late construct of settler-state borders and the need to deepen the relationship of teaching to ecological as well as genocidal formations. Of these Heather Davis and Zoe Todd write, ‘[t]he story we tell ourselves about environmental crises, the story of humanity’s place on the earth and its presence within geological time determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to do’ (2017, 763–64).

Figure 3
figure 3

1620-2020 Wampum Belt woven of quahog shell beads on linen warps by Elizabeth James-Perry. Photo courtesy of the artist

Full size image

James-Perry’s 2020 wampum belt rippling with deep purple and cream striations activates deep interconnections of history and mnemonic forms. Her background as a marine biologist, and her ongoing work with water and shorelines, centres ecological as well as epistemological interventions with this labour. The artist’s work illuminates the devastating climate outcomes with which we are collectively confronted today—not least of which is the survival of the animal whose shell transmits these long histories of adornment as well as of treaty, law, capital, enslavement, and cultural memory. More precisely, her accounts of shores and shells bear stories of labour and the effects of colonisation upon Indigenous ontologies, practices, material culture, as well as internationalisms (see Simpson 2017). By contrast, inscriptions of French presence in the mapmaking addressed in colonial records reveals a representational strategy of French footing entangled with relationships to land, law, and temporality. The different status of this past across contemporary state borders also marks its cultural fashioning within the uses of the past (Greer 2010).

Settler-colonial danceways that filter through these documents cannot be overlooked in their critical distortions or indeed their relationships to the history of these lands and waters. A 1911 translator of Champlain’s early travel writings observes of the explorer’s 1605 account of Massachusetts Bay, near the present-day city of Boston, that whole paragraphs had been moved from different years’ journals ‘to make the exploration of this coast a continuous narrative’ (Champlain 1911, 106–7, n12). Stitching accounts together from different voyages, the published version repeatedly references Indigenous dancers, as well as agriculture, cartography, negotiation, and armed conflict. These include the geographer’s account of Indigenous and European interlocutors sketching of the coastline on tree bark, handing a charcoal stylus back and forth to add the contours of distant bays that the French had not yet visited, and using pebbles to map communities’ locations (Champlain 1911, 106). Despite such overt recording of the role of Indigenous interlocutors within the co-creation of geographic representations used to buttress European legal narratives of possession and discovery, these texts’ references to dances connect European epistemologies of reception to the geographic and legal project of expansion.

Attention to embodied practices has long subtended colonial record-keeping. The rhetorical presence of ballet in the archive of French colonial formation in North America is possibly surprising for readers familiar with studio-based, concert-based, or academic transmissions of ballet history in European capitals. The formulation of ‘ballets’ in extra-European texts nevertheless linked settlement and surveying land within the colonial project. In such scrutiny of danceways, ‘embodied movement appears at the very base of social experience, a space conventionally reserved for economy’ (Hewitt in Martin 2013, 73). Danceways entangle knowledge with practices, and they flourish across cultures and geographies, drawing out renewed and critical possibility. As Vanita Seth observes of contemporary currents in historiography, moreover, such currents of method offer alternative modes of historicizing that reveal the alterity of the past (Seth 2020).

Extra-European dance narratives inflect a different course through dramaturgical expectations of conventionalized forms. Such approaches provide critical genealogies of land, assembly, gathering, and cultural transmission that can also render movement within a drive to disrupt uninterrogated cultural histories. Here these intersect with current and popular protest, migrating across cultural formations to insist upon reconsidered narratives of past events. If past is prologue, the magasins in which French settlers performed the early dance and theatre recorded in their early accounts also stored military supplies such as gunpowder and firearms. Addressing danceways and accumulation alongside food, furs, and trade goods moves towards critically engaged accounts of Indigenous contexts of land, protest, and history as well as settler colonialism’s foundational cultural constructs. Movement practices can contribute towards a decolonial reckoning against the grain, discerning motion within histories that are strikingly embodied and near while also reconsidering the inheritance of cultural forms and hierarchies of knowledge.