Closed captions are available by clicking the “CC” button on the video.

An accessible PDF transcript of the conversation is linked here. 

This Conversation Without Walls (CWW) was recorded on February 16, 2021 and first broadcasted on YouTube on Friday, February 26, 2021.

In this CWW, dance artist, dance educator, and choreographer, Angie Pittman, and dance artist, choreographer, bodyworker, and acute care and hospice nurse, devynn emory, continue a conversation on acknowledging land and site. This conversation was first sparked by research emory and Pittman conducted as 2019-2020 Kin & Care Research Group Fellows that continued during their Fall 2020 Research Group Fellowship. Their crystallized research titled “Acknowledging Grief and Rage Through Land and Site” was read during the Platform 2020 Kin & Care event and was published in the Danspace Project Platform 2020 catalogue, Utterance From The Chorus: Volume II. Pittman (Black, African American) and emory (mixed race, Lenape/Blackfoot) center and invite Black and Indigenous healing. They are friends acknowledging land and site through storytelling, ritual, and ancestral connections through time and space. These artists ask us all to consider how we take responsibility for the spaces we occupy? Where have we come from and where are we going?

Included in this CWW

People & Kin 

• Family Members of devynn emory:
  • Shirley Trostle, Maternal Grandmother
  • Mary Kroliki, Paternal Grandmother

• Family Members of Angie Pittman:
  • Joyce Pittman, Mother
  • Vinnie Lee Henderson, Maternal Grandmother
  • Lawrence David Pittman, Father
  • Carmencita Rosalita Pittman, Paternal Grandmother
  • Carmen Angela Pittman and Harmony Joy Pittman, Nieces

• Fellow Artists, Colleagues, and Chosen Kin:
  • Orlando Zane Hunter Jr., Choreographer, dance practitioner, and co-founder of the collective Brother(hood) Dance!

• • Emily Johnson, Choreographer, land and water protector, and activist for justice based in Lenapehoking/New York City. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation.

• • Joseph Pierce, Cherokee Nation Citizen and Associate Professor at Stony Brook University.
  • Alice Sheppard, Choreographer and founder & artistic lead of Kinetic Light.

Places, Lands, and First Nations

• Lenapehoking: The land of the Lenape people. This land spans from what is now widely known as Western Connecticut, to Eastern PA, to the Hudson Valley, to Delaware, with Manahatta (Manhattan, NY) at its center. The Lenape diaspora includes:
  • The Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma
  • The Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin
  • The Munsee-Delaware nation
  • Moravian of the Thames First Nation
  • Delaware of Six Nations in Ontario

• The Blackfoot Confederacy: The territory spanned the northern Great Plains of western North America and now have three First Nation band governments as well as a federally recognized tribe called the Blackfeet Nation, which is today known as Montana.

• Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Nicknamed “the atomic city,” was chosen by the US federal government in the 1940’s to be a site to develop materials for the Manhattan Project, which during World War II, developed the first nuclear weapons.

• Institutions on Indigenous Lands
  • Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (New York, NY) is situated on the island of Mannahatta and more broadly in Lenapehoking, Lenape homeland.

• • Montclair State University (Montclair, New Jersey) is situated on Lenape homeland.

Acknowledging Land and Site at Danspace Project

• Danspace Project Organizational Land and Site Acknowledgment.

• “Acknowledging Grief and Rage Through Land and Site,” devynn emory and Angie Pittman.

Music 

• Beyoncé, “SPIRIT,” The Lion King, 2019

• Lauryn Hill and choir, “Joyful Joyful,” Sister Act II, 1993