Have you ever wondered about the ways you, or your organization or business, can get involved in the movement for Indigenous liberation? I can help steer your resources and vision into actual Native hands and communities.

Artivism is the intersection between arts and activism, and is a political praxis for people the world over. As Indigenous people we are inherent artists and culture weavers. How can we use the arts as a tool for Indigenous liberation and social justice? My organization, Three Sisters Collective, deftly uses artivism as a means of culture shifting in Northern New Mexico.

This is the method commonly used by most tribes to quantify enrollment/citizenry. It was in fact, modeled after White Supremacist notions of racial superiority and predicated on the false `notion that our blood is “pure.” I assert that this enumeration of supposed “Indian blood” is inherently fraudulent and an ongoing sanctioned genocide against Indigenous people. We should look to our original kinship/clan systems to determine who is a member of our tribes.

Since the inception of America, and across the Americas as a continent, Indigenous people have been subject to countless impositions to our sovereignty, land, health, and overall lifeways. Pueblo People and all Indigenous tribes in America have continually adapted to these ongoing impositions in the form of federal policies meant to eradicate our very existence, from the creation of reservations, to boarding schools and relocation programs, we continue to adapt and thrive in spite of.

A federal program aimed to assimilate Native people into the dominant culture through employment and educational opportunities that required moving to established cities to contribute to the burgeoning industries of the mid 20th century. This was an attempt to circumvent investing resources into tribal reservations and communities to upgrade their quality of life based on the deplorable findings of the state of tribal communities in the government funded Meriam Report of 1928. This Native diaspora into cities accounts for why so many Native people live in urban areas and contributed to the social justice movements of the late 60’s and 70’s, i.e. American Indian Movement, Indigenous Occupation of Alcatraz (1969-1971).

Virtual tour of the exhibit I curated at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM

reLocated: Urban Migration, Perseverance, Adaptation

This is the counter narrative to the dominant culture’s efforts to erase us from existence through ongoing genocide in the form of blood quantum, land theft and environmental contamination in the name of resource extraction, femicide, etc. Indigenous Futurisms works from a baseline of Indigenous Excellence, asserting that we have survived to fulfill our divine purpose on this land and one day we will resume our rightful place as original caretakers. This is the vision we as Indigenous peoples should all be working towards now, whether we live to see the fruits of our labor or not.

Indigenous ReMatriation is born from the original understanding that the earth is our mother and that we are in relationship with our original mother through that sacred connection. Indigenous Rematriation is the counternarrative to Western Feminism. In the early establishment of America, White women had no legal identity in and of themselves. Married white women had no legal right to their own possessions or property in most states, they couldn’t vote, had no guardianship of their own children, or autonomy over their own bodies. Native women were the clan mothers and agriculturalists of their tribes, and from North to South America. Their responsibility for the survival of the Nation, through the creation of life and the food that sustained life, gave women a position of equality in their society that White women could only dream of. Indigenous ReMatriation is an effort to reclaim these systems that suffered during the impositions of Western Imperialism and Colonialism.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service (IHS) and collaborating physicians sustained a practice of performing sterilizations on Native American women, in many cases without informed consent of their patients. In some cases, women and even minors were misled into believing that the sterilization procedure was reversible. This is not surprising in light of the ongoing non consensual relationship that exists between extractive capitalism and our original mother, Mother Earth. Indigenous people are well aware that what happens to the land, happens to the people, as we disproportionately suffer the impacts of colonialism and it’s the legacy of violence against against our land and bodies. The movement towards Indigenous reproductive justice seeks to reclaim our body sovereignty and the matriarchal knowledge taken from us through violent colonialism. We demand the right to live free of harm from a culture of violence that doesn’t afford Indigenous women bodily autonomy. Furthermore, the revoking of Roe vs. Wade will have larger impacts against the most vulnerable communities who already lack adequate reproductive justice access/care.

What began as a hashtag, is now a political framework for the re-acquisition of our original homelands. The farm I helped establish, Full Circle, along with Three Sisters Collective and Alas de Agua Arts Collective, is an example of this theory in praxis. How can we create and mobilize relational networks to work collaboratively with city, state and federal entities, as well as NPO’s and businesses to return land back to the original peoples?

Speaking from a Pueblo perspective, we have been imbued with original instructions that model a lifeway that lives in balance with Mother Earth and all living beings. How do we return to these ethical frameworks in spite of the multi-generational impacts of settler colonialism rooted in a western culture of violence?

The state of New Mexico has the highest rate of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives. Albuquerque and Gallup are amongst the top ten cities in the nation with the highest MMIWR rates. Violence against Indigenous women is endemic to violent settler colonialism and the evidence continues to grow linking MMIWR to extractive capitalism. What happens to the land happens to the people and Indigenous people are mobilizing in vast numbers to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! We will no longer be the expendables in your capitalist machine!

Lecture for MMIWR Awareness Day, University of California, American Indian Resource Center 5/5/22

For too long Indigenous communities have been viewed from a deficit paradigm that seeks to pathologizes our differences rather than acknowledging our giftedness/ exceptionalities as well as our spiritual, cosmological and land based connections and relationality. I seek to expand notions of Indigeneity and scholarship to account for the inherent excellence we demonstrate daily via our adaptability, intellect, artistry, resilience and love.

If we operate from a basic understanding that “American Indian” is a socio political construct established and maintained by the U.S. with a liminal criteria for inclusion that requires our “buy in,” we should be adamantly working to dismantle these systems that keep us in an ongoing state of unrealistic respectability politics, cultural erasure, dehumanization, land theft, environmental racism and genocide. What does a post-”American Indian” identity look like for Indigenous people in the U.S.?

What does it mean to be truly sovereign as Indigenous people in the U.S. Have we been duped to believe we are sovereign when we are still reliant on federal funding and the misnomered label of “American Indian”? When we are still subject to disproportionate assaults on our homelands in the form of environmental violence; when our health outcomes are dismal; when our women and relatives continue to go missing and murdered, so much so, there is a movement to protect our very lives, are we truly free? Let’s talk about it.