In this concluding section of the book, I turn away from space’s Westernized abstractions and back toward the land, as material and mythological space that has been colonized—which is to say stolen—from thousands of Indigenous nations across the globe by imperialism. How might theatre artists, researchers, and theorists take more seriously the urgent need to return sovereignty over this stolen land to the ancestors and their children? What would it mean to treat the stage as a space requiring active decolonization, and therefore to treat theatre making itself as a practice of decolonization? Using the landmark work of Stó:lō musicologist Dylan Robinson as my guide, I advocate here for ways that we might reconceive theatrical space from an Indigenous point of view: using Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies to (re)create at the theatre the spaces in which Indigenous lifeways may be practised, rehearsed, and remembered, in a project of cultural “survivance” (rather than settler edification). After defining settler colonialism for those readers not yet familiar with the term and explaining Robinson’s provocative notion of “hungry listening,” I relate my experience of participating in Evalyn Parry and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s 2017 performance lecture Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools.
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