Jill Carter
Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) works in Tkaron:to with many Indigenous artists to support the development of new works and to disseminate artistic objectives, process, and outcomes through community-driven research projects. Her scholarly research, creative projects, and activism are built upon ongoing relationships with Elders, scholars, youth, artists, and activists positioning her as witness to, participant in, and disseminator of oral histories that speak to the application of Indigenous aesthetic principles and traditional knowledge systems to contemporary performance.
Books (2)
Synopsis:
This meditation on the poetics of re-worlding follows the threads of Spiderwoman Theater’s Storyweaving practice back to its Guna and Rappahannock sources to illuminate its history, mechanics, and development for coming generations.
The Spiderwoman Theatre, the longest-running Indigenous theatre company in North America has heralded the revolutionary methodology of Storyweaving for generations of Indigenous artists. Storyweaving is a distinct methodology that governs the dramaturgical structure and performed transmission of the company’s plays on the contemporary stage. The practice of Storyweaving predates written history. It has been (and remains) specific to tribal storytellers across the continent.
The reclamation, then, of this aesthetic legacy by contemporary Indigenous storytellers is a crucial act of recovery. Jill Carter, an Anishinaabe-Ashkenazi theatre-worker and scholar, examines the process and development of Storyweaving. She studies how Storyweaving imagines and architects a functional framework that is being adopted and adapted by artists from myriad nations to create works (on the page and stage) that facilitate the healing, transformation, and survivance of their communities. Between the Layers pays respects to the teachers and visionaries that moulded this practice and encourages future generations to continue its legacy, while making a much-needed contribution to the study of Indigenous theatre and performance.
In its painstaking documentation of the Storyweaving artform, Between the Layers refuses the devaluation, erasure, and suppression of Indigenous culture, while contributing to the dissemination and celebration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
Educator Information
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Spiderwoman Theater: A Performance History
Introduction: Between the Layers
Chapter One:
Persistence of Violent Delights:
“It’s All the Same Bullshit Again”
Chapter Two:
“An Indian is an Idea a Man Has of Himself”
Chapter Three:
An Indian is More than Just an “Idea”:
By Their Acts Ye Shall Know Them
Chapter Four:
Towards a Poetics of Re-Worlding:
Becoming (and then Staging) the New Human Being
Chapter Five:
The Published Texts
Chapter Six:
The Three Sisters from There to Here:
Spiderwoman’s Issue and the Project of Re-worlding
Appendices
Works Cited
Additional Information
376 pages | 6.00" x 9.00" | 8 illustrations | Hardcover
Synopsis:
In 2019, a group of scholar-artists led by Jill Carter stood with their audience in a liminal space at the 'edge of the woods'—a space between now and then, a space between now and later. Together, they engaged in a survivance intervention: an Indigenous reclamation of territory, using Storyweaving practices rooted in personal connections to the land as a method of restor(y)ing treaty relationships.
Retreating to Re-Treat documents both their artistic offering and creation process, offered in the spirit of knowledge-sharing and enriching scholarship around collaborative practices. By revealing their unique and still-developing method for addressing a fraught and tangled (hi)story, the Collective Encounter invites readers to join them as we mediate those sites of profound experiences and renewal—sites in which the project of conciliation might truly begin.
Additional Information
144 pages | 5.37" x 8.38" | Paperback
Our logo reflects the greater Nation we live within—Turtle Island (North America)—and the strength
and core of the Pacific Northwest Coast peoples—the Cedar Tree, known as the Tree of Life. We are
here to support the building of strong nations and help share Indigenous voices.
