Culture Creators and Interconnected Individualism: Rulan Tangen and Anne Pesata's Basket Weaving Dance

This article meditates on the interconnectedness of the making and meaning of an Indigenous contemporary dance work that draws on intergenerational Jicarilla Apache basket weaving practices. Rulan Tangen choreographed the piece, performed by Anne Pesata, which is inspired by Pesata's lived experiences as a Jicarilla Apache woman and fifth generation basket weaver. Tangen—who identifies as mixed culturally, including Native, Polynesian, and European heritages—founded and directs Dancing Earth: Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations, an intertribal company which originated in 2004. Tangen created the piece in February 2014 to honor Pesata and other Indigenous women leaders. The choreographer's commitment to undertaking projects that respond to Native elders' contemporary concerns and dancers' interests also guides its themes. Alongside music, the piece uses recorded voiceover that Pesata created and spoke. The voiceover makes transparent Pesata's familial connections with basket weaving and other Jicarilla Apache epistemologies and practices. The dance also elucidates relationships between basket weaving and Pesata's movements throughout, culminating in the creation of a figurative basket. According to Pesata, the dance “tells the story of the journey that you go through in making a basket from start to finish.”

Jicarilla Apache

Jicarilla Apache is an Eastern Apachean language, a member of the Athabaskan family of North American languages. The speech described here is that of one of the authors, Merton Sandoval of Dulce, New Mexico. The Apachean group is comprised of Western Apachean (Navajo; the Western Apache dialects Cibecue, San Carlos, and White Mountain; and Chiricahua and Mescalero) Eastern Apachean (Jicarilla, Lipan) and Plains Apache (formerly called Kiowa Apache). The other major groups of Athabaskan languages include the northern group of languages spoken in Alaska and Canada, and the Pacific Coast group spoken in Oregon and California. While the western Apachean languages have a well-documented member in Navajo, the eastern group is less well known, being best documented so far in the works of Goddard (1911), Hoijer (1938, 1945, 1946a, 1946b) and Jung (1999). Differences between the western and eastern groups concentrate in consonant development and the evolution of stem shape, and, to some extent, in the lexicon; however, Jicarilla resembles all other Athabaskan languages in bearing a close morphological relationship to all its relatives.