Visibility Through Art
Art and Social Change
There are many different windows through which to know and understand a place. Take my home town for instance, the place where I was born, where I call home. You can know it through name, Nevada County, or the topographical doodles and letters on a map of the Sierra Nevada in northern California. Or as Gold Country with a famous history and reputation of riches in the past. However, it is also much more, it is the watershed of the Yuba River, it is rocks, forests and land, a complex ecosystem… it is alive and it has seen much death and destruction. The history of this area goes far beyond the Gold Rush of the 1850s.
In my time at The California Institute of Integral Studies in my undergraduate program I learned the importance of story and narrative, especially in regards to history, power and oppression. This eventually led me to the work I have been doing the past few years around art and awareness. Two summers ago I wrote and researched an Anthology or “Field-Reader” if you will, about “Artivism” or arts utility in activism. In this I focused on specifically arts ability to impact and shape narrative, to be a cultivating tool for culture, activism, informing, and advocating for change. Over the past two years I have been working with the nonprofit CHIRP and the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan to organize local artists to create an art show each year for the Art Reception for Nisenan Heritage Day. This is a very special opportunity for local artists to learn from the Tribal Council Spokesperson and Secretary, Shelly Covert, about the land they live on and the history of the original peoples of the area. To me this show is about how we as a community can show up creatively and collaboratively in support and in recognition of the Nisenan and of this land that we are all calling home. This is an indigenous led project, and as such, the primarily non-Nisenan artists that are involved are asked to engage in deep listening and respectful collaboration throughout this process. The show is centered on honoring and generating visibility for the Nisenan to our broader community. It also stands as a starting point to interact around some delicate social topics and generate discussion and awareness about past and current issues in our community.
The importance of this work reaches far beyond Nevada County because the history of Indigenous people around the world has been routinely obscured from public mainstream knowledge. Creating the false notion that many peoples who are still alive were completely wiped out. This further leads to their obfuscation, marginalization and mistreatment by governments and other peoples. Most indigenous communities have lost their homelands and territories due to colonization, experienced numerous genocides, been abused and robbed of not only their rights as living beings, but at times of their cultural heritage as well. My home town is one example of this legacy of colonization. Descendants of this area’s first peoples still live here, and continue to fight for their rights, territory, and recognition. This is why I believe involving local artists and community in creating art that honors and acknowledges the Nisenan is so important. America was founded on the genocide of First Nations people, and as long as this issue remains unaddressed there can be no true justice.
I think about this meaning making through art as a re-authoring of the world that takes place through the creation and sharing of art. The ultimate intention and purpose of this project is to create dialogue. To be involved in learning and shaping the narrative of the area that I live. For many of the reasons previously mentioned, this means educating myself, and involving others in the process of learning the history of the first peoples of this area. How is this going? If I were to try to make this a one-liner, I would say it is about decolonization through art and dialogue. Truly, in the course of bringing this show to fruition I have spent at least a third of my time in dialogue and this is the most important piece of art we are making. This is the whole point, to get people talking about these topics, real history, colonization, and oppression. I am fascinated, excited and passionate about the idea of Artivism, especially by the idea of Art shaping change and being a driving force for insight and communication. After all, Art has a way of touching a universal place in all of us, acting as a metaphor and a bridge to understanding. I recently read The Little Book of Dialogue for Difficult Subjects and I was particularly taken by the discussion in chapter 7 about the ways in which dialogue can lead to the progression of social change as illustrated in the diagram bellow.
This is through, like the example above, the creation of new relationships that define our understandings of the world in new and transformative ways, which can lead to greater awareness of social issues and eventually to balanced power.
The collaborative aspect of this show is truly the most important aspect of it, because without this sharing and discussion and check in process that each artist goes through in coming up with and executing their piece it would not be a socially ethical project.
Why is this?
A while ago, I read an article in The Atlantic, The White Savior Industrial Complex, in which Teju Cole outlines the way in which privileged white peoples can cause more harm with their so called “help” if they do not consult and collaborate with the people they want to help. His comment, “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” Cole In this discussion, it is important to address the inauthenticity of trying to participate out of guilt or a savior complex. In many ways I am implicated in everything I do, by the networks of oppressive practices that inform my lifestyle as a white woman. The only way to authentically do this type of work is to position and situate myself here. Acknowledging my privilege, I have because of this privilege, like many other people, been ignorant to the horrible history of my home town up until a few years ago, and I have no excuse for this. There is truly nothing innocent about this not-knowing, because it reflects white supremacy in our education system, in history and in my culture. It reflects the ways in which historically indigenous peoples have been routinely obscured. It reflects erasure, there’s no excuse for this, it is a huge social and historical injustice.
As I learn, I don’t want to get caught up in self-righteousness as I have witnessed a lot of socially active people can, or get confused by the idea of “making a difference” to assuage my “white guilt” or privilege. So I continuously need to ask myself and others:
How can I take responsibility for the place that I live, and for the legacy of injustice here?
How can I be active in my community and how can I participate with the skills that I have and am learning?
How can I do this with humility, respect, care and love?
This project has brought all issues home. Colonization, white supremacy, power struggles, inequality, poverty, violence, genocide, cultural appropriation, and racism: systemic and institutionalized. I deeply believe that you cannot know something until you feel it, experience is within yourself, and in a very real way this project has been a synthesis of the feeling/knowing/experiencing that was missing in my studies. There are a number of ongoing struggles that I have experienced through this process and that I witness others experience as well. A fear of being wrong, a fear of being implicated, a fear of not doing enough, and a fear of being disliked or solely responsible for the injustice in the world. These are feelings that do not go away, but rather they are a part of my and others journyes' of looking at and coming to terms with our privilege. And with that, what does it mean to serve as an Ally? As a final thought the quote below adds to the meaning I am looking for, because we all share this planet, and we are not separate from one another no matter how many physical and internal barriers we try to build, no matter how far we try to disconnect.
“If you come here to help me, you’re wasting your time. If you come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” ~Lilla Watson~
This year the art piece that I made for the show was inspired by a deep contemplation of the impact of the Gold Rush on the environmental landscape and the Nisenan people. And the ways in which ecosystems are destroyed and exploited for profit. Primarily, what stands out is the epistemologies that have condoned and supported these injustices. I gained a deeper understanding of these in reading The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant. She explains in her book that image of the Earth as a living being and nurturing Mother served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings in many cultures for millennia. The Nisenan are one such culture. One does not readily slay a mother, or mutilate her body, digging into her for gold. The anthropocentric worldviews and culture of colonizers justified the exploitation of nature, animals, and other human beings. In this piece titled Mother Earth I wanted to explore this clash of beliefs regarding the Earth. I incorporated real gold leaf into the baby to represent the precious metal that is in many ways like the unborn child of the Mother.
I want to offer here, three of the best resources that have been insightful guides and teachers to me in my own learning about decolonization, oppression, allyship, and social justice: