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Stories Take Place: A Performance in One Act
Editor's note: This is a written version of the address that Malea Powell gave at the CCCC Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, on Thursday, March 22, 2012.
Author's note: The text that follows is in script form with some inserted images so that it more adequately captures the genre in which this address was performed. I hope also that it allows you, dear reader, to make space for your own story in this web of relations.
MALEA: Aya eewee mila kakoki, Malea Powell ween_inki, myaamionkonci, ninti_iteehi teepahki neeyola kakoki.
Hello. My name is Malea Powell, and I come from the land of the Miami. I am glad to see you all today. Before I begin I want to take a moment and honor the indigenous peoples of this place, those from the Illini confederacy who are my relatives, along with the ancestors of the Missouri, Osage, Shawnee, Kickapoo, and Meskwaki peoples upon whose lands St. Louis and its suburbs are built. I've had a lot of help making this performance-folks who responded to my calls for feedback, for stories, to participate today, folks who gave me muchneeded words of encouragement and advice, folks who've been encouraging, supporting, advising, and teaching me for years. At the end of my forty minutes up here there will be a credits scroll on the screen to honor the contributions of all those colleagues, students, relatives, and friends whose practices of reciprocity and responsibility made these minutes possible.1 Finally, I also want to offer thanks and respect to my elders for their teachings and their encouragement: what I do well is to their credit; what I do badly belongs only to me.
This is a story.
When I say "story," I don't mean for you to think "easy." Stories are anything but easy. When I say story, I mean an event in which I try to hold some of the complex shimmering strands of a constellative, epistemological space long enough to share them with you. When I say "story," I mean "theory" in the way that Lee Maracle tells it.
DAISY2: This is Maracle:
Among European scholars there is an alienated notion which maintains that theory is separate from story, and thus...