“Beneath the towering buildings at the intersection of Columbus and Lincoln Avenues in New York City last December, I found myself thinking about scale: of structures, institutions, and time.
Inside Lincoln Center, one of America’s most prized performance spaces, Mark Denning (Oneida Nation), the cultural consultant and dramaturg for Skeleton Canoe, asked the audience in a pre-show speech to measure time not in years, but in inches. He added that if Indigenous peoples’ time on this land now called America were counted in inches, it would stretch the length of three football fields.
As an Anishinaabe woman, I felt the weight of Denning’s question as something physical I could walk on and feel under my feet while watching the show for the second time. The first was when this full-scale iteration of Skeleton Canoe premiered at the Chicago International Puppet Festival in January 2025. Whether on the Council of Three Fires (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi) land in Chicago or on Lenape land in New York City, hearing the same story while feeling different land under my feet showed me that Indigenous people and stories can survive distance measured in either years or inches.”