ABSTRACT
The political urgency and potency of Indigenous public reenactment as an embodied form of protest in the face of ongoing injustice within settler states, combined with new analyses offered by the affective turn, means that it is a subject of intense interest and scholarly inquiry. There is growing interest in Indigenous reenactment as a subversive form of performative political action deployed to force social change. Contemporary forms of Indigenous reenactment can be subversive and unpredictable, they can both rewrite and interrupt entrenched historical narratives and remake them. Public cross-cultural performances of reconciliation brokered by state are a utopic form of politics and can offer hope for a future built on the foundations of a sense of honor, obligation, and togetherness. Indigenous reenactors therefore both refute and revision reconciliatory performances in order to assert and re-enliven the historical and cultural dimensions of their sovereignties and work them into new forms of political action in name of peace-building and counter-colonial resistance.
