James Luna’s multimedia performances are largely rooted in his culture
and daily experience as a Pooyukitchchum (Luisen˜o) Indian living on La Jolla
reservation north of San Diego, in Southern California. Informed by a polyphonic
style, they interweave, converse and collide with various personal, collective, fictional,
and non-fictional stories and discourses. This fluid and yet fractured approach
incorporating visual, aural, written, and body language directly engages contemporary
viewers through the resonances and dissonances of present and past, the
physical presence of the artist’s acting body, and through the immersive environment
they are invited to share with the artist in the here-and-now of the performance
site. This article is based on the performance Native Stories: For Fun, Profit & Guilt
that James Luna presented in October 2014 in San Francisco during the Litquake
festival featuring Sheila Tishmil Skinner and followed by a spoken-word monologue
by Guillermo Gomez-Pen˜a. It aims to highlight how Luna senses today’s
native people’s experiences and how he mediates California’s present and historical
past. The play with metamorphosis, distortion, and dissonances, the slippages in
various personae, along with the combination of technology-mediated devices, are
some of the strategies he uses to trace the complexities of contemporary indigenous
people’s realities.

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• California Forgets. Luna Remembers: Sensing contemporary Native American realities in James Luna’s performance Native Stories: For Fun, Profit & Guilt