ABEER KHAN
“I Am Pride: Jessica McMann,”
I had the pleasure of speaking with Jessica McMann, a Two-Spirit Cree contemporary dancer, about her work. Dance is something that has the power to heal and connect people to each other and their cultures. I’m honoured I was able to tell Jessica’s beautiful story.
In the summer of 2009, Jessica McMann was in the middle of a routine, her hands planted on the studio floor as her legs moved above and over her body. As she followed the choreography, she realized this was something she wanted to continue doing for the rest of her life. Then in her early 20s, McMann was attending her first Indigenous dance training session with Raven Spirit Dance in Vancouver as part of Indigenous Ground Training Week. “They didn’t care that you weren’t flexible; they didn’t care if you were ‘too native’ or ‘not enough’ native,” says McMann. “They just wanted to share that Indigenous people can dance in this way and still honour their culture and traditions.”
McMann is a Two-Spirit Cree artist from Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan. She’s a Calgary-based musician, contemporary dancer and choreographer. She always had an interest in contemporary dance, but this training week made her realize that it was something she could actually practise. “Seeing other Indigenous people dancing in that way and doing shows and having big long contemporary dance careers and experiences, I felt like I could actually enter that world,” she says.
As a child, McMann tried ballet but eventually stopped after being told she was “too tall” and was bullied by other dancers. She also faced abuse when her legs were slashed with a ruler. Later, McMann threw herself into her music. She had started playing piano when she was in Grade 4 and eventually obtained a bachelor of music from the University of Calgary as a flutist. She also holds a master of fine arts from Simon Fraser University, where she studied contemporary dance and composition.
McMann was adopted during the ’60s Scoop, a series of government policies that removed or “scooped” Indigenous children from their homes, communities and families through the 1960s without the consent of their families or bands. These children were put into the child welfare system and many were adopted into predominantly non-Indigenous, middle-class families across Canada and the United States. By the ’70s, approximately one-third of children in care were Indigenous, and this overrepresentation in the system continues today.
Her adoptive mother enrolled her and her sister in powwow and hoop dance classes when she was in high school. When she was 17, McMann reconnected with her birth family, and the following year she took a Greyhound bus by herself to meet her aunties. During that trip, they brought her to her first powwow. It was there she met her (now late) nana for the first time. “She saw me dancing and she knew that I was her grandchild right away,” recalls McMann.
In all her work as a musician and a dancer, McMann has centred Indigenous and Queer voices and experiences. In IIKITAPIIT (2019), a CBC short film directed by Irina Lord, McMann explores violence against Indigenous women and Two-Spirit/Queer identities and examines those intersections through dance and musical composition. She also worked on NATOOWAPAKAA’KSIIKS alongside Elijah Wells, a Kainai animation and visual artist. The animated project is part of a larger work exploring the role Two-Spirit helpers have on Indigenous people struggling with their identity.
“You can’t have decolonization or Indigenization or anything without making sure that those marginalized voices are in the centre,” says McMann. “If you don’t have trans voices, if you don’t have LGBT voices, Indigenous voices, in the middle of your decisions and your programs and your boards, you’re not doing it.”
Centring these intersections is also
present in McMann’s dance classes, which she has taught with Wells on and off in the spring and summer since 2012. In these classes, McMann says they’ve worked to ensure people can learn any dance style they want, regardless of gender identity. She says this creates a space where folks can feel safe and express themselves.
McMann explains that pre-contact with colonialists, Blackfoot and Cree people each had a role in the community that was not determined by gender. “Everyone was needed,” McMann says. But with contact, a gender binary was imposed on Indigenous people. “So for us, it’s about bringing forward those pre-colonization and pre-residential school teachings to our dance classes.”
She says for many Indigenous people, having this space is important, but for others, who may be dealing with past trauma, body image or gender discrimination, these spaces are essential. “We try to really have a space that we can put everything in the past, and we’re there to dance and connect with our culture and our ancestors,” says McMann.
As she carries on with her career, her goal is to continue making dance accessible to all Indigenous people. “My hope is for Indigenous, Two-Spirit people to feel seen and respected and that they can do it, and that they belong,” says McMann. “For the non-Indigenous community that I teach, I just want them to understand and start to find a place of sympathy and understanding so that they can do what’s right.”