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James Luna and Isaac Artenstein's The History of the Luiseño People: La Jolla Reservation, Christmas 1990 (1993) depicts Luna drinking, smoking, and watching TV while he makes phone calls to and receives them from his family on Christmas Day 1990. The History of the Luiseño People and the collaboration which produced it translate a theatrically-staged autobiographical performance by Luna to moving image media by Artenstein. Given its content, the mundane twenty-seven minute narrative seems to proffer the everyday and stereotypical in perplexing relation to the historiographical ambition of its title. In that perplexing relation, however, Luna and Artenstein fully exploit performance art and artisanal video's respective engagements with autobiographical life-narratives to embody and enact the fundamental problems of history and self-representation confronting Native people.
Funded by a Rockefeller Inter-Cultural Film/Video Fellowship, this video is the outcome of collaborative relations not only between the respective artists, but also across distinct media, conventions, and disciplines, and with corporate funding institutions. In Luna and Artenstein's collaboration, the performance artist's body is framed and visualized on video by the filmmaker's eye behind the camera. Here, Luna's performance and Artenstein's video of that performance rely on impertinent impersonations, manifestly trafficking in or collaborating with stereotypical representations of the identity group to which Luna belongs. This essay sets out to trace the productivity of the many forms of collaboration utilized in this piece. These collaborations produce, in the register of performative autobiography, meditations from a minoritarian perspective on the uses of self-narration for representing the relation of ethnicity to history.1 Luna and Artenstein locate this history within a structure of refusal and absence generated by a synthesis of indigenous and poststructuralist technique and thought, a synthesis fundamental to Luna's overall oeuvre. In an oft quoted article Luna wrote in 1991 on the place of performance art in Aboriginal culture, "Allow Me to Introduce Myself: The Performance Art of James Luna," he states:
It is my feeling that artwork in the media of performance and installation offers an opportunity like no other for Indian people to express themselves without compromise in traditional art forms of ceremony, dance, oral traditions and contemporary thought. Within these [non-traditional] spaces one can use a variety of media such as objects, sounds, video, slides, so that there...