Dr Christian Bell, a settler of German and Polish ancestry currently residing in a city located on traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakota people, holds a PhD in theatre historiography from the University of Minnesota. His ongoing research foregrounds critical performance ethnography in order to address: 1) The legacies of settlement that continue to shape cultural and academic institutions; and 2) How practice-based scholarship might amplify the ethical and political stakes of Indigenous-led artistic interventions and the narratives marginalized by institutional legacies.
In addition, his ongoing creative collaborations with White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP) of the White Earth Nation aims to envision what mutually beneficial fieldwork might look like. His collaborative efforts with WELRP are working to discern potentially non-extractive ways of communicating ecological knowledge, that is ways that do not take Indigenous knowledges as a resource that can be removed from the community to enrich others, but rather return it to that community to strengthen and sustain its relationships.
Recent publications include “Unsettling Existence: Land Acknowledgement in Contemporary Indigenous Performance” (2020) and “Prompt for Acknowledging Relations” (forthcoming).
