Though Susana Di Palma’s great-grandmother was Anishinaabe, it was never something her family talked about very much.
That’s not to say she didn’t hear stories of her grandmother, who it was said, married a Scot, with whom she had children. He, however, wanted the children to be baptized and educated in a boarding school and took them away from her. There, like many American Indian children, their hair was cut, and they were indoctrinated into the church, and lost their heritage.
Di Palma’s great grandmother was “always an impassioned woman,” Di Palma says. The story goes that she walked all the way from Hayward (Wisconsin) to Bayfield to retrieve her children, but they wouldn’t leave with her. “Nobody knows why the girls wouldn’t go with her,” Di Palma recalls. “Was it the law? Was it the school? Was it their decision?”
Di Palma heard other things about her great grandmother, who eventually re-united with her family. “She lived with them,” Di Palma says. “They kept her in the cellar. She drank. She would drink and curse everybody.” Once, during a fourth of July parade, as her prim daughters were dressed in their Sunday best, their mother followed them, cursing, with a whiskey bottle. Humiliated, they didn’t return to town for some time.
There were other stories too—that she always carried a pouch of herbs with her, that women from all around came to her to solve their ailments, including abortions.
Though Di Palma did hear these stories about her great-grandmother, the family’s Anishinaabe roots weren’t discussed often. “It was something to be embarrassed about,” Di Palma recalls. “They concentrated more on our European heritage.”
Di Palma, too, was intrigued by her European roots. She moved to Spain as a young woman, and learned Flamenco. She eventually returned to the States and has made Minnesota her home, becoming renowned as an acclaimed dancer, choreographer, and artistic director of her own company, Zorongo Flamenco Theatre and School.
In recent years, though, Di Palma has been thinking more and more about her great grandmother that she never knew, and that part of her story.
![Undergraduate choreographers at the University of Minnesota presented an hour-long showcase this weekend that felt breezy and enjoyable despite dealing with very serious issues. How serious? Oh, just HUMAN TRAFFICKING serious!
That’s right, Sarah Stokes’s Craigslist Stars had not only the deliberately tortured dancing of six performers to convey its humanitarian message, it also had a spoken passage (Samantha Tulin’s “The Hushed Empire”) describing the horrors of sexual slavery. Ambitious—and effective. Striking similar notes of captivity and frustration was Alexander Pham’s Anger En[gender]ed, which concluded with its five female dancers jerking spasmodically, trying to squeeze the conniptions out of their bodies like toothpaste out of a tube.
Lemon Dance, a solo dance performed by Emma Barber (a friend of mine) to original text that she recited as she danced, was captivating in a way you wouldn’t think a performance about a woman in love with a lemon could be. The piece concluded with Barber biting the lemon, to which the audience reacted with audible shock. Whether they were shocked by the act of biting the lemon or “the act of biting the lemon,” I cannot say.
The other dances were a fine sampler of varying styles including tap (MinnesoTAP’s Wishery) and hip-hop (Darrius Strong’s Changing Perspectives, a fairly literal reading of Drake’s “The Real Her”). Saturday night’s performance was followed with a meal catered by Afro Deli, something I would definitely like to reprise.
- Jay Gabler](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2wsi9rQTw1qbqiq4o1_1280.jpg)
