Eleanor LeBeau

Eleanor LeBeau
Trickster Plays: James Luna Performs (Post)Indian Survivance
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For the past 25 years James Luna’s provocative performances and multimedia installations have revealed the daunting challenges of contemporary Native American life. He once played a dead American Indian in a museum display case. Audiences watch him guzzle Budweiser and inject insulin. He belches and begs for money and offers wise medicine to white people. Using the shape-shifting strategy of the decentered postmodern subject—or perhaps the Trickster, a central figure of Native American legend—Luna performs multiple identities to interrogate the ways in which cultural misperceptions, and five centuries of genocidal colonialism, affect the bodies and minds of living Native peoples. His characters are also double mirrors: While non-Natives discover the alternately sacred and profane stereotypes they project onto American Indians, Natives may see in Luna’s reenactments the unattainable or pejorative  stereotypes of Indians they internalize as parts of their identity.

Luna’s latest work does more than deconstruct a violent colonial history. Emendatio (“Emendation”), his performance and installation at the 2005 Venice Biennale, explores how Native Americans have adapted and survived despite governmental policies of assimilation and extermination. In Renewal Ceremony, a four-day endurance performance, Luna created a sacred space in a courtyard garden where he danced in the guise of numerous characters to ensure the health and survival of indigenous peoples. While Emendatio’s story of 21st-century post-Indian survivance is poignant and much needed, it reimagines only male Native American identity. Unlike the gender-bending trickster of legend and some non-Anglo postmodern performers (such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Arigon Starr), Luna does not explore opposite-sex identity. Instead, Native American females make cameo appearances in Emendatio as childbearers and food providers. While essential to the survival of any culture, these traditional roles limit the potential of female identity. This study examines the dominant place of Luna’s oeuvre in the Native American performance scene while at the same time imagining how Native women’s new stories and new identities also need to be recognized as necessary to post-Indian survivance. That said, the critical discourse on Luna’s practice is stuck, like a broken record, in the groove of  “Indianness”; I also offer a new reading of Luna’s work that explores its ongoing dialogue with American and European performance art, thus framing it in multiple and sometimes colliding points of view.