During World War II, a prolific Kiowa composer named Lewis Toyebo initiated a new choreo-musical genre called War Mother songs for the Kiowa War Mothers Chapter 18 as a means of encouragement while their sons deployed overseas. This article examines how these songs simultaneously evoke pre-reservation and post-reservation chronotopes of Kiowa martial motherhood. Through ethnographic research with Kiowa Elders, singers, War Mothers, and descendants of Kiowa composers, I analyze how War Mother songs express these chronotopes through musical (War Journey drumbeat), functional (preparing warriors for deployment and honoring returning veterans), and linguistic means (blending “Old Kiowa” and “Modern Kiowa”). Analysis of these chronotopes reveals how Kiowas creatively responded to settler colonialism to maintain gendered roles and personhoods that were important to their cultural identity. This article provides an ethnomusicological perspective on how chronotopes of gender are expressed through dynamic forms of music and dance.

This article explores Vancouver-based multi-media collective Skookum Sound System's Ay I Oh Stomp's (2012) mobilization of “decolonial gesturings” as they create a future imaginary attentive to the past, critiquing the present, and venturing into the beyond. These gestures activate Indigenous futurities through traditional style Kwakwaka'wakw dance and choreographies of sea travel, popping as a “street dance” of holds and releases, and the mobilization of digital polychromatic shifting and looping. I illustrate how the video is a form of radical imagination tantamount to social change, and how it remixes dance, movement and gestures that “jump scale” out of colonial cartographies.

This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago.