Page Title
Peggy Choy performs Wild Rice
Flowing Stand on Water
just as the Anishinaabe Way is indigenous. That’s how the dance came into being. And then I asked a young woman
Shannon Davis who is in the MFA directing program in theater and drama here — she is Native American — to read
the poem. And we recorded her voice and T.W. Rodriguez who is also in the theater and drama department composed
the music, the electronic music that accompanied Shannon reading the poem.”

The dance was incredibly moving as Choy danced while the poem was read with the musical accompaniment. Choy
incorporated eastern and western dance movements in the dance which serves as a warning to humankind.

“If you really hear the words of the poem, it is a cautionary poem,” Choy said. “It’s trying to alert people and wake them
up to this impending crisis. Ruth is talking about remember in heart/mind. You can’t separate thinking from feeling.
The Anishinaabe actually have those two connected. It’s alerting us to remember that. But then there is a personal
struggle in the poem that Ruth was speaking about what you do in a situation of threat like our earth is being
threatened; our water is being threatened. It’s a complex poem and there are many levels of understanding. On one
level, there is this understanding that the earth has a wisdom that we as humans have to listen to.”

The use of the white scarf in the dance also reflected the meeting of eastern and western thought and beliefs.

“The white scarf is from traditional Korean dance,” Choy said. “The white cloth is similar in many cultures like Hmong
culture in terms of healing. The roots of that white cloth in Korean dance is the Shaman tradition of healing. But I’ve
learned dances that use that white cloth that isn’t part of the Shaman tradition, but it incorporates that element from
Shaman tradition. So it does have the flow of water. What is really interesting is that a woman told me that it reminded
her of the Anishinaabe term kegon that means the winding of the river. And she felt that the scarf had that energy in it. It’
s interesting. That’s what I mean when I say the art has its power to bring things together, to promote cross-cultural
understanding. That’s what is so deep. She also said that the yellow of the costume is exactly the yellow of the wild
rice flower. The costume is for a completely different act. It’s for a dance called Yellow Rain from Vietnam, this whole
controversy about acid rain.”
By Jonathan Gramling  

Art is a revolutionary force in society, often times synthesizing complex issues and
ideas into movements of visualizations or sounds that infuse our emotions and our
imaginations with an understanding that no textbook can provide.

The Bad River Band of the Ojibwe is currently locked in a struggle to prevent Gogebic
mining company from building an open-pit iron mine in the Pocono Mountains whose
runoff water flows into the Bad River watershed where the sacred wild rice, an
important element of the Ojibwe’s cultural and spiritual life. A by-product of the mine
would be an acid that would leach into the watershed and destroy the wild rice.

Peggy Loew, a UW-Madison professor and member of the Bad River Band of the
Ojibwe, talked at a conference on water that Peggy Choy, a UW dance professor had
organized in 2013. Choy was so inspired by Loew’s talk that she collaborated with
Ruth Margraff, a poet who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to
create Wild Rice. Margraff wrote the poem Wild Rice and after talking about the issue
with Choy and then Choy choreographed a dance called Wild Rice as well that
reflects the similarities of eastern and Native philosophies.

“I was inspired to do this dance called Wild Rice,” Choy said. “At the time, I was
reading about Chinese poetry that had Daoist roots, meditational roots from as early
as 6-7th Century BCE. At the same time, we were discussing creating this piece
about wild rice. Those two things came together for me. I was feeling the urgency to
be active around this issue. But at the same time, I was thinking about this
philosophy of nature and how nature is not separate from humans and Dao energy is
related to things that grow on this earth, the quality of the water and people living on
the planet. All of that came together in the poem that Ruth ended up writing. And that
is what I used as the basis for the creation of my dance.”

When Choy listened to Mike Wiggins, the Bad River chair, discuss the mining
controversy at the conference the Workshop on Land, Water and the Environment:
The Politics of Rights at the UW Law School on November 7, she more clearly
understood the synergies between the philosophies.

“Having heard him speak about the Anishinaabe Way, I know there was some
overlap,” Choy said. “He also mentioned the Dao. He was acknowledging there are
other ways to think about nature and his relationship to the earth. It resonated with
me. It’s really the resonating of indigenous knowledge because Daoism is a
philosophy, but it is also an indigenous way of looking at the world and the universe
According to Choy, Wild Rice is a work in
progress. When she performed at the
Workshop on Land, Water and the Environment:
The Politics of Rights, it was the third time that
she had performed it and it is always evolving.
And she dreams of performing it on the Bad
River reservation.

“Patty Loew is suggesting that we go to Bad
River and dance the dance and have her youth
group film the dance near the wild rice,” Choy
said. “It’s part of the evolution of the dance. The
creation process is key to what is going on.”

Wild Rice is also a part of the state of
Wisconsin’s evolution of thought as it relates to
the mining issue. Are we watching and
listening?