Native artists are at the vanguard of performance art practices and discourse, using humor as a strategy for cultural critique and reflection, parsing the relationships between objecthood and agency.

This reader centers performance and theater as origin points for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Alaska Native artists. Song, dance and music are also posited as a basis for collectivity and resistance and a means to speak to a time when Native traditional ceremony and public gatherings were illegal in both the United States and Canada. 

Featuring excerpts from the 1969 document Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, this illustrated reader also includes four long-form essays by leading Indigenous scholars, nine artist contributions, oral history interviews and a selection of key texts from the fields of Native contemporary art, art history and theory.

With newly commissioned essays by asinnajaq, Candice Hopkins, and Dylan Robinson; oral-history interviews with G. Peter Jemison, Rebecca Belmore, Spiderwoman Theater; Theo Jean Cuthand; as well as contributions by artists.

Edited with text by Candice Hopkins

Design by Santiago da Silva and Ana Cecilia Breña

Published by Dancing Foxes Press, Forge Project, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Mackenzie Art Gallery, and SITE Santa Fe, 2025

Softcover, 560 pages, 180 color images, 6.5 × 9.5 inches

ISBN: 978-1-95-494711-5