The Fifth direction: performing the land of uncertainty in native American literature and performance : disertacija

ENThis dissertation proposes to explore Seminole scholar Anne Waters, "Land of Uncertainty," a Native philosophical concept analogous to "interstitial space" or "inbetweeness". I have chosen my title, "The Fifth Direction" to acknowledge and validate more clearly an expansion of what has been characteristically named the four directions in the Native context: north, south, east, and west. This work reappropriates these four directions to include Anne Water's notion of the interstitial space that resides in the betwixt and between. Furthermore I borrow from Second Language Acquisitionpedagogical bases of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and include performing as the fifth direction to the study of Native American literature and performance. I attach these pedagogical bases to the four directions, and to the fifth that I have related to Water's interstitial space. Performing helps to open the space,"Land of Uncertainty," and reveals the expansive nature of knowledges and transmission of knowledges toward the expression of liberatory concepts. This study reverberates with my own personal trajectory as an Anishinaabe. Therefore, the dissertation will have an autoethnographic component that is central to the study itself. [From the publication]