Kate Cober, MA

Like all articulations of cultures, the intricately braided stories of the North American Indigenous Peoples exist in a multitude of performance platforms. It is often, however, in their oral traditions where definitions of what it means to be in this place are transmitted, anchoring the roots of identity deep into the spatial and temporal lives of their people. Understanding the world as a symmetrical cycle of past, present and future is an important element in the cosmology of many Indigenous Peoples connecting them to land, spirit and time in a reciprocal relationship of ecosystem maintenance. Interconnectability is built and reinforced through the art of storying where the voices of the land and ancestors teach lessons to those in the present how to live and how to be in harmony with all that surrounds them. This is the essence of being an indigenous person, living in equilibrium with land, spirit and time, in mind and in body. To understand what it means to be indigenous we must look to their oral traditions and discover how identity, landscape and time weave together to create symmetrical patterns of meaning.

… our 'Physick' and 'Anatomy' have embraced such infinite varieties of being, have laid open such new worlds in time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that the eyes of Vesalius and of Harvey might be dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of their grain of mustard seed… Thomas Henry Huxley, 1871 For hundreds, even thousands of years, in the name of discovery, we have exhaustively observed, altered, manipulated and displayed the dead human body in an effort to expose the living body's secrets so that we may ultimately control its processes and destiny. The exploitation of dead bodies, as systems of display and manipulation in anatomical exploration, have been crucial for the development of medical science. The cadaver-body's surrender to medical science has led to its ethical identification as a 'post-human research subject' a classification which sets the standards for its usage as a research object. Preserved against decomposition to prolong its 'life', the cadaver occupies a uniquely liminal space between life and death, no longer human but not yet consigned to the rot natural for dead tissues. Nowhere is this post-mortal liminality more evident than in the plastinated corpses of the Bodyworlds displays, a place where the human body has become a hybrid construct that defies epistemological classification, by consisting of an amalgam of organic and technological parts that are pliable, modifiable and manipulable.1 Held up as an indispensable educational tool, plastinated corpses have been positioned by designer Gunther von Hagens as 'living anatomy,' working objects that attempt to bridge the divide between form and function that has eluded anatomical pedagogy since its inception. By blurring the lines that surround human cadaver classification, plastinated people have rendered arbitrary, and archaic, categories like organic versus synthetic, object versus representation, fake versus real, replicated versus authentic and cadaver versus model.2 As a result, these post-mortal