Antikoni in a Settler Classroom on Kumeyaay Land: Storytelling “in the Meantime” to Imagine “Beyond” It

Abstract

This article documents the process that led two groups of students enrolled in a course at UC San Diego to enter into a deeper and more reciprocal embodied relationship with the play Antikoni (a Nez Perce adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone), its author Beth Piatote, and with UC San Diego’s fraught history related to the repatriation of Kumeyaay ancestors. Building on Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang’s urgent invitation to think “beyond land acknowledgement” and to invest time and energy in creating a world beyond settler colonialism, this article examines how being entrusted with a story—Antikoni in this case—can serve to activate settler accountability and, potentially, usher in the relational shift imagined by Stewart-Ambo and Yang. This article documents how the students chose to reciprocate the gift that is Antikoni in tangible ways in the form of two staged readings and offers a reflection on how this experience can extend beyond the classroom and lead to lasting transformative work among larger campus communities.