Returned home on Sunday after spending two weeks in residency @shinstitute. Sharing this woven work in-progress and my thesis research with my home community was one of my longings and priorities since the conception of this project almost 3 years ago. My time with old and new friends, distant and immediate family, and getting my feet into the mud at the end of the day was a potent medicine — I’m blessed with an epic life, absolutely.

Yet, being in a fishbowl to support cultural tourism was trickier than I’d anticipated. My mom demonstrated weaving for both her people and tourists during my entire upbringing and until the year she passed; it was part of the process, entwined with the artform in my eyes. It’s only been as of recent that I’ve been made aware of how contemporary systems of erasure and oppression are reinforced through the fetishization and performance of Indigeneity by/for the Western gaze.

When Indigeneity is staged for consumption, it not only reduces art to spectacle, but it interrupts our sovereignty. The hunger to watch, collect, or ‘experience’ Indigeneity feeds desire while displacing our lived realities. What gets consumed as fascination can feel like another form of extraction, one that fractures our practices from the power and autonomy they carry.

So, I’m moving through that discourse in an embodied way right now.

📸 Deep gratitude to @konrad24 for being present with me in that dim-lit space, and for attuning to the atmosphere I was moving through. He witnessed and reflected the essence of that visceral moment with sensitivity, as I chose to keep the lights low — maybe as a form of care, certainly as a mirror of my inner process.