Where Are You in This Story?

Bvlbancha — the Choctaw name for the area colonially known as New Orleans — means “place of many tongues,” reflecting its significance as a place of cultural confluence. When the City launched its “New Orleans 300” tricentennial campaign in 2018, Indigenous community members countered with “Bvlbancha 3000,” challenging the City’s erasure and acknowledging the past, present, and future of Indigenous peoples in Southeast Louisiana. Land acknowledgements came into more common practice around this same time, and Indigenous community members in a heavily touristed conference city like New Orleans are frequently asked to lead these practices. Hali Dardar reflects on these asks in her conversation with Daniel Pruksarnukul:

“Everything should start or come from a perspective of relationality,” Hali says. “By inviting someone into your conference, you are beginning a relationship with the Indigenous community of that area, and that relationship — whether it’s between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations or a conference organizer and an Indigenous person — is incredibly important.

“Land acknowledgements have done a massive part to get rid of erasure. For a conference, when you do land acknowledgements you’re creating a place where Indigenous culture is able to be visible within your field. And then it also connects the Indigenous attendees from your field to the local Indigenous people here.”

Hali also shares some of the common pitfalls of the practice. “Land acknowledgments usually happen in the introduction time, when an Indigenous person comes up and says, ‘Hey, we’re here.’…. ‘We used to be here’ is the worst way to put it. ‘We used to be here and somehow I’m still standing here today. And thanks for just saying that we still exist.’”

The brief intro format often forces Indigenous people to choose between important layers of context, she notes. “You’re asking this person to come up on stage in front of a bunch of professionals and give a succinct version of the history of the trauma of their community, geographic references of locations and citations of what happened, and then also a cute little advertisement plug of ways people could do better. That’s a chaotic triumvirate to ask someone to do in five minutes.”

A colonial shout-out starts by focusing on the part that’s evergreen — the history — by offering “a succinct rundown of the process of dispossession over land.” Hali first encountered the idea for a colonial shout-out from Adriel Luis, a curator at the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center, who was doing a project in New Orleans in 2019.

Bvlbancha Public Access’s (BPA) Colonial Shout-Out is not just a story of local history, it’s a reflection of local aesthetics as well. As Hali explains it, “New Orleans is a jazz city — some things are planned and some are spontaneous. So we wanted to create something people can spontaneously riff with.” The written document of the Colonial Shout-Out is “a starting place for your own jazz score,” with eight pages of history and nearly 100 footnotes. BPA also created a condensed, seven-minute video version, filled with images, historical citations, and humor. “We are showing the receipts, and it’s very tongue-in-cheek!”