shapeshifting Lineages

While not much visible evidence is left of the Church Rock uranium disaster, the catastrophe resurfaces every time the wind blows and sends radioactive particles to the homes and corrals of local residents.  The wind speaks to the forgotten and diminished stories of the land and people. It is invisible, constant and unrelenting.

The last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason,  the text Flesh and Ghost, as well as a series of etched photographs.  

We’re the children of a great love, and a great violence.  
We’re the grandchildren of a great love, and a great violence.  

A letter to a sibling, reflecting on our pasts and ourselves, and the parents and grandparents we knew and could never know.  Told in three channels, the voices and the texts overlap and are distant, where a return to the road is a return to solitude as the memories of our grandmothers shape a present loneliness and a gathering of futures.

The last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason,  the text Flesh and Ghost, as well as a series of etched photographs.  

We’re the children of a great love, and a great violence.  
We’re the grandchildren of a great love, and a great violence.  

A letter to a sibling, reflecting on our pasts and ourselves, and the parents and grandparents we knew and could never know.  Told in three channels, the voices and the texts overlap and are distant, where a return to the road is a return to solitude as the memories of our grandmothers shape a present loneliness and a gathering of futures.

The last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason,  the text Flesh and Ghost, as well as a series of etched photographs.  

We’re the children of a great love, and a great violence.  
We’re the grandchildren of a great love, and a great violence.  

A letter to a sibling, reflecting on our pasts and ourselves, and the parents and grandparents we knew and could never know.  Told in three channels, the voices and the texts overlap and are distant, where a return to the road is a return to solitude as the memories of our grandmothers shape a present loneliness and a gathering of futures.

Dollhouse Longhouse imagines life in the year 2100, when people have reclaimed the near-forgotten custom of extended family living together in a longhouse.  Based on a story written by the artist called Lest We Remember, the piece is composed of a 90-second machinima that is projection-mapped onto a structure that recalls a traditional Haudenosaunee longhouse in miniature.  Drawing on notions of play, as well as thoughts and hopes about Indigenous cultural and language revitalization, the piece evokes a sense of childlike wonder as well as nostalgia for the future. 

This video series highlights Native Americans that are not in their original homeland Natives that have been disconnected to their Land Identity and or inherited belonging.

Tribal and Federal policies, that have contributed to life in modernity have led Native people to migrate to places that aren’t their original lands.

In this case Fannie Lucero, (my mother) is from Jemez Pueblo, She married a non-tribal member from her tribe of Jemez Pueblo. The Tribal policies of the tribe is that she is no longer able to live within the reservation because she chose to marry somebody that’s not from there. (the fragility of the matriarchal man). Male dominated Tribal governments crating unfair and unreasonable policies on top of the federal government’s genocidal policies aren’t sustainable for our people.

So this photo video installation is a stacked video collage of Fannie Lucero placed in the Gila River reservation of Arizona and her heart is in the Pueblo of Jemez where you see this image, vibrating off the screen in a way, calling her home and she’s unable to go because she Married outside her tribe.

I don’t know the Woodlands part of my heritage. I don’t know Anishinaabe songs, I don’t know Anishinaabe language, and I don’t own any Anishinaabe clothing. The way I know Anishinaabe is through artist friends that embrace me as being Anishinaabe. My Anishinaabe friends that share with me Birch bark baskets, Birch bark biting, bead work, and language. I know I’m extremely disconnected from the Woodlands culture.

I feel a longing and a wanting to know my grandmother’s people. There has been only one time I’ve experienced my fathers’ original lands. It was the winter of 2024, I can truly say, I felt a familiarity in the damp cold air, the crisp of my breath was refreshing, and the evergreen life of winter was a visual glimpse of desire, I felt a comfort in the crunching of ice beneath my feet as I walked on the frozen lake. I have a calling to understand my Anishinaabe Land Identity.

There are many reasons that a Native leaves there community education, job, mix curtal family ex. Education, and job opportunities are the dominant reasons for leaving ones community. In many of these cases young people don’t return to the Native community’s they are from.