番茄社区

Area of Expertise:     

• Northwest Coast First Nations and Alaska Native Performing Arts
• Northwest Coast First Nations and Alaska Native Visual Arts
• Indigenous Language Revitalization
• Dance Studies
• Museum Studies

Brief Biography:

Born and raised in Metlakatla, Alaska - Annette Islands Indian Reserve, Sm Łoodm 'Nüüsm (Dr. Mique'l Dangeli) is of the Ts'msyen Nation. She is a dancer, choreographer, Sm'algya̱x language learner/teacher, and curator. Her work in Indigenous visual and performing arts focuses on protocol, sovereignty, resurgence, decolonization, Indigenous research methodologies, critical curatorial studies, repatriation, and language revitalization. She is an elected board member of the Native American Art Studies Association. Her current book project focuses on the work of  Ts'msyen photographer Benjamin Alfred Haldane (1874-1941), who opened a studio in Metlakatla, Alaska in 1899. Haldane is one of the first professional Indigenous photographers in North America. Using community-centered Indigenous research methodologies and archival research, her work bring to light the complex and subversive ways in which Indigenous peoples throughout Alaska and British Columbia utilized Haldane's photography to challenge and resist colonial oppression of their cultural practices. Mique'l's deep historical research of the people in Haldane's images and the sociopolitical time in which they lived forms the basis of the repatriation claims in the US and abroad that she is now working on with members of her community.

            As one of the youngest advanced Sm'algyax (Ts'msyen language) speakers and teachers, Mique'l is devoted to teaching her language in community-based and university-accredited classes, curriculum development, and mentoring learners and educational staff in their process of language acquisition and co-creation of pre-K to high school curricula and programs. From 2016-2021, she taught Sm'algya̱x at the University of Alaska Southeast, the University of Northern British Columbia, ‘Na Aksa Gila̱k'yoo School (an independent First Nations K-12 school located on the Kitsumkalum Reserve), Kitsumkalum/Kitselas learners group, and in other programs in Northern BC and Southeast Alaska. She has also organized and facilitated Sm'algya̱x grammar intensives for advanced learners with fluent first-language speaker Velna Nelson and linguist Dr. Margaret Anderson. Mique'l is an active member of many online Sm'algya̱x learners groups and is one of the founders of Raising Sm’algya̱x, a nursery rhyme and early education-focused online group for parents, grandparents, and caregivers to learn and sing in their language together with their little ones. She also served as a Sm'algya̱x Mentor for the First People's Cultural Council's Mentor Apprenticeship Program. Mique'l's most recent Sm'algyax project, she is co-creating Sm'algya̱x curriculum with speakers and teachers, Shu Gayna (Donna May Roberts) and Ahl'lidaaw, using the Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling Method (TPRS).

            Mique’l served as the Director of the Duncan Cottage Museum (DCM) in Metlakatla, Alaska from 2007 to 2012. A historic house museum, the DCM is the former home of a missionary who brutally oppressed Ts'msyen cultural practices in her community. The methodology Mique’l co-created with community members to empower their people, language, and culture while supporting their healing through decolonizing the DCM was featured as a “Museum Success Story” by the Alaska State Museum in 2011. Mique'l also designed and implemented the strategic plan to aid DCM's recovery from decades of collection mismanagement, which led to its grand re-opening ceremony in August 2010. She organized and facilitated the museum's first public programs. She continues to work with and for her community as the curator of the Healing Art Collection—the largest collection of contemporary Ts'msyen art in Alaska—on permanent display at the Annette Island Service Unit. She has also served on curatorial teams for exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of History, Minneapolis Museum of Art, Newark Museum, Idyllwild Arts, Bill Reid Gallery, American Museum of Natural History, Columbia River Maritime Museum, National Museum of the American Indian, and Museum of Ethnology in Geneva, Switzerland.

            Mique'l's life-long immersion in the dance practices and ceremonies of her people and neighboring Nations along the Northwest Coast is foundational to work as an art historian. For over twenty years, she has shared the leadership of the Git Hayetsk Dancers with her husband Mike Dangeli, who is a carver, singer, and composer from the Nisga’a, Ts'msyen, Tlingit and Tsetsaut Nations. Git Hayetsk means “people of the copper shield” in Sm’algya̱x. They are an internationally renowned dance group specializing in ancient and newly created songs and mask dances. Their dancers are from diverse northern Nations including Ts'msyen, Nisga'a, Gitxsan, Haisla, Haida, and Tahltan. All of whom live in the unceded territories of Coast Salish peoples, colonially known as the Greater Vancouver Area, the Fraser Valley, and Victoria. Working collaboratively, Mike and Mique'l taught three generations of dancers and created a large body of new songs, dances, masks, and regalia. Git Hayetsk performs at private ceremonies and public events in urban and rural communities throughout Canada, the US, and abroad. Some of their major performances were held at the Gibney Dance Center in New York, the National Art Centre in Ottawa, the National Museum of the American Indian in New York and Washington DC, UBC's Museum of Anthropology, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Hobiyee T'samiks edition at the PNE Forum, the Coastal First Nations Dance Festival at the Anvil Centre, among other events and venues. Their international engagements have included Austria, Malaysia, Germany, Japan and Australia. 

            In her art historical dance scholarship, Mique'l critically examined the processes through which Northwest Coast First Nations dance group leaders, composers, and choreographers create new songs, dances, and collaborations while maintaining their inherited repertories. Through this research, she founded the theoretical framework "dancing sovereignty" to engage with the ways in which sovereignty is embodied in their creative processes and performances through complex and strategic negotiations and assertions of protocol (bodies of law which form Indigenous legal systems) affirming hereditary privileges and territorial rights among diverse audiences and collaborators. She expanded upon this research through her work as a performing arts curator and dance artist. From 2014 to 2016, she served as the Protocol Consultant for the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance in Toronto. During that same period, Mique'l was an artist-in-residence at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver where she curated "Ancestralizing the Present," a major dance event focused on building allyship that supports Indigenous resurgence, self-determination, and sovereignty through Indigenous-led and protocol-based collaborative practices. In 2023, Mique'l was an international dance artist-in-residence with Marrugeku, one of Australia's most critically acclaimed Indigenous and Intercultural dance companies. During her monthlong residency in Gadigal Country (colonially known as Sydney), she shared her choreographic process in practice-focused dance labs with international dance artists from across the pacific and gave several presentations on Git Hayetsk and dancing sovereignty. She was also a scholar-in-residence at the Powerhouse Museum where her collection research focused on First Nations dance histories. Her scholarship has gained significant currency among dance artists and curators in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia, which led to the University of Sydney's Power Institute inviting her to a keynote on Dancing Sovereignty and the role of Indigenous dance in Art History. This can be viewed at:

Other Selected links to performances and talks:

Invited Keynote and Performance, University of Lethbridge, February 3, 2024
Presentation title: Dancing Our Archive

Invited Presenter, School of Art &Design, University of New Southwales, Sydney Australia July 2023

Invited by Dr. Erin Brannigan, Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance at UNSW
Presentation title: Dramaturgical Process and Dancing Sovereignty in the work of the Git Hayetsk Dancers
 

"Learning Sm'algyax with Dr. Mique'l Dangeli," UBC's short film (2022)

Invited Speaker, University of Northern British Columbia, Northwest Region, March 2019
Presentation Title: Canada’s Indigenous Border Wall: An Examination of the Ways that the Canadian Government’s Lack of Reciprocation of the Jay Treaty Infringes on First Nations Rights.

Invited Speaker, University of Northern British Columbia, Northwest Region, February 2018
Presentation Title: Re-Developing the Work of B.A. Haldane, 19th Century Tsimshian Photography

Keynote, Advancing the Dialogue and Practice in Indigenous Research Methods Conference, Cornell University, May 2016, Presentation title: Dancing, Witnessing, Gifting, and Writing: a Potlatch-based Indigenous Research Methodology

"Mique'l Dangeli on Dancing Sovereignty and First Nation Protocols," Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage, Simon Fraser University, (2014)

Git Hayetsk youtube channel:
Instagram: @githayetsk
 

Selected Publications:

“Belonging,” in Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael, Kleinberg, Ontario: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, p. 114 -117, 2023.

Co-Authored with Tammi Gissell, “Groundswell in the Gallery: North and South Pacific Indigenous Dance Histories in the Remaking,” Australia New Zealand Journal of Art, Vol. 23, no. 2, p. 174-187, December 2023.

“B.A. Haldane: Inspiring Resurgence through Images of Resistance,” in In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1980 to Now, edited by Jo Ann Reece, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minneapolis Institute of Art get page numbers and publisher, p. 75-92, 2023.

“Dancing Sovereignty: Reclaiming the Grease Trail Through Protocol, Movement, and Song,” The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada, edited by Heather Igloliorte & Heather Taunton, New York: Routledge Publishing, p. 30-42, 2023.

Co-Authored with Lara M. Evans, “Indigeneity and the Posthumous Condition,” In Posthumous Art, Law, and the Art Market, edited by Peter Karol and Sharon Hecker, New York: Routledge Publishing, p. 200-214, 2022.

“Survivance during a Pandemic: Virtual Potlatching and Socially Distanced Totem Pole Raising. E-Flux Architecture Journal, Special issue on Survivance, in Collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, May, 2021.

“The Newark Museum’s Unique Northwest Coast Collection,” In Seeing America: Native Artists of North America, Edited by Adriana Greci Green and Tricia Laughlin Bloom, New York: The Newark Museum, p. 111-126, 2018.

“Dancing Our Archives: Bringing to Life B.A. Haldane’s Photography,” In Native Art Now!: Developments in Native American Art 1992-2012, Edited by Veronica Passalaqua and Kate Morris, Seattle: University of Washington Press, p. 262-281, 2017. 

“Dancing Chiax, Dancing Sovereignty: Performing Protocol in Unceded Territories,” Dance Research Journal, Vol. 48: Issue 1, p. 75-90, April 2016.

“Dancing Our Identity: Four Fundamental Aspects Necessary in Generating a More Complex Understanding of Northwest Coast First Nations Dance,” in Dance Central, pg. 7-13, March/April 2016.

“Bringing to Light a Counter-Narrative of Our History: BA Haldane, 19th Century Tsimshian Photographer,” In Sharing Our Knowledge: The Tlingit and their Coastal Neighbors, edited by Sergei Kan, 265-297, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

“Old Image/New Views: Indigenous Perspectives on Edward Curtis,” in Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema, edited by Brad Evans and Aaron Glass, 251, Seattle: Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art and UW Press, 2014.

Selected Exhibitions:

Co-Curator with Lucie Monet, "Smoogyit Niishluut: Chief Sidney Campbell" module in the exhibition"Remember Geneva in the Colonial World,"  Museum of Ethnography Geneva, Switzerland, March 5, 2024 - April 1, 2025.

Co-Curator with Dr. Jennifer C. Vigil, Mother Tongue: Indigenous Languages and Art,  Idyllwild Arts, Idyllwild, California, June 25 - July 21, 2018

Co-Curator with Dr. Adriana Greci Green, "Seeing America: Native Artists of North America," Newark, NY, Permanent exhibition, 2017 - Current.  

Curator, "Honoring Our Heroes: Metlakatla's Salute to Our Veterans, Servicemen, and Women," Annette Island Service Unit, Metlakatla, Alaska, August 6, 2012 - October 5, 2024.

Curator, "Looking to the Past to Inspire Our Future: A Photographic Exhibit of Metlakatla's History," Annette Island Service Unit, Metlakatla, Alaska, May 7th, 2007 - December 5th, 2011. 

Curator, "Healing Art Collection," Permanent Exhibition. Annette Island Service Unit, Metlakatla, Alaska, April 2006 - Current.