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Caring for Landscapes of Justice in Perilous Settler Environments

2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19446489.19.1.06

1944-6489

Mishuana Goeman,

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies

indians are the "singing remnants" or "graffiti," in the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ("i am graffiti"). The forms this graffiti takes, our inscriptions on the landscape, are as numerous as our Nations, abundant as our ancestors who loved, lived, and passed down knowledge of our lands and histories. "You are the result of the love of thousands," writes Linda Hogan, who beseeches us to listen to the environment surrounding us (159). Deborah Miranda (Coastal Esselen and Chumash) reminds us that we are also the result of violent histories, in her tribal memoir Bad Indians, a book that relishes the tales of her ancestors who resist and act out to survive. This harm, genocide, and settler mapping of worlds also must be attuned to in our surroundings and in "our bodies [that are] bridges over which our descendants cross, spanning unimaginable landscapes of loss" (Miranda 74). Visual cartographic mapping has been part and parcel of the erasure of California Indians, relegated to the small, contained, and past temporal space of a romanticized mission.This paper centers on the NDN Collective's work and the photography of Cara Romero's project Tongvaland and the works of Gabrielino Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame. The setting of these projects is in the sprawling landscape of Los Angeles, or the homelands of the Gabrielino Tongva people, who call it Tovaangar. I will examine the anti-colonial aesthetics and care practices mapped out in the work rather than presenting a "true" Indigenous map or alternative map. Mapping a history of the landscape by creating a "new" narrative or "true" narrative is not enough. As Maori scholar Linda Tuhwi Smith states, "[w]e believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power. In fact, history is mostly about power. . . . [A] thousand accounts of the truth will not alter the fact that indigenous peoples are still marginal and do not possess the power to transform history into justice" (34). The Gabrielino Tongva, who comprise an estimated 2,300 people, do not possess the population power and cannot access the form of voting or democracy to make the changes needed just by telling their truth. Across California, people know about the raw deal, the embezzlement, the genocide, and the so-called lost treaties. In fact, under Eisenhower, recompense was paid out in small amounts to Tongva families of the dispossessed. Instead, to continue with the words of Smith, "[i]t is also about reconciling and reprioritizing what is really important about the past with what is important about the present" (111). What Romero and the NDN Collective—made up of numerous tribal leaders, scholars, and other artists—did was relay and prioritize how they wanted to be seen in their homelands. These billboards invite us in, in a gift of sharing, or what tribal cultural leader Craig Torres related to me as a spirit of Maxxa, a sharing, gifting, or swapping of knowledge. Dorame's beautiful and critical installations in public art spaces reflect Maxxa—they invite the viewers to think through land from her curious arrangements. As artists, part of their practice is not that of a Western version of a tortured genius but instead is energized by pulling in community and creating a collective practice. They undo settler space together and with us. The cartographic practices of these California Indians' creative arts exemplify communities of care that must be considered when we think through the unmapping of settler terrains. This question requires an approach of radical care. As Hi'ilei Hobart and Tamara Kneese make clear, the notion of care is "inseparable from systemic inequalities and power systems" (Hobart and Kneese 1).The work of the NDN Collective and Dorame counters a settler-based, commercial map of Los Angeles. Indigenous people, relegated by the settler state as expendable and erasable graffiti, confront capitalist and state ordinances at various scales. Rather than understand this as a subjugated positionality, I posit that graffiti is the critique necessary and valuable to understanding interlocking structures of oppression. In the following words of Leanne Simpson that inspired this work: erasing indians is a good ideaof coursethe bleeding-heart liberalsand communistscan stop feeling badfor the stealingand rapingand murderingand we can all move onwe can be reconciledexcept, i am graffiti.except, mistakes were made.(Simpson)These mistakes and this ongoing Indigenous inscription on American landscapes deny the permeability of settler-colonialism and expose the powerful maps of commerce and subjugation. Graffiti embodies memories and practices of gendered forms that undo the evidence of our subjugation, rupture land as mere property, and can undo the separation of humans and non-humans. Cultural production and everyday acts of resurgence have the force to undo a colonial unknowing, defined by Vimalassery et al. as "[p]roduced and practiced in concert with material acts of violence and differential devaluations" that are "striv[ing] to preclude relational modes of analysis and ways of knowing otherwise." Our art, bodies, and actions take on a colonial unknowing, upsetting that which is supposed to count as evidence of disappearing or devalued knowledges. Our art, bodies, and actions are embodied sovereignty on the settler landscapes meant to erase and eradicate the Indigenous forms of relationality. Like graffiti, the work of these public arts reflects the generative refusal of settler ordinances and cartographic practices.The cartographic art productions I discuss here provide a way of seeing Indigenous futurities and relationalities beyond the destruction continuously wrought in settler terrains. Dorame's work is nestled in a community of care and ancestral pull to lands across the L.A. urban sprawl; she creates new ways to see the landscape and, in doing so, our self-destruction. As Sandy Grande reminds us, "[g]enocide and slavery set the conditions for who was perceived and constructed as a legitimate subject of care" (44). Visual displays contesting this foundation have been part of art practice for generations. Upon receiving the NDN Collective's Radical Imagination Grant, Romero, a longtime Los Angeles resident, thought critically about absences in the L.A. narrative and landscape. As she writes in her artist statement, "[t]he imagery evokes the old AIM adage, 'We are still here.' But for these images, we must center the Tongva when we say this in Los Angeles" (Romero). This reference to the iconic graffiti image at Alcatraz, on California Indian land, significantly brings histories together in her work. The first billboard, Weshoyot Alvitre's iconic revisioning of the Hollywood sign to read Tongvaland, begins the series. Nothing says L.A. like the Hollywood sign's iconography. To reclaim the recognizable land and space of Griffith Park in this tongue-and-check graphic begins the larger reclaiming we see throughout the series. In Cara Romero's work, she takes this co-creation and consultation seriously.The history of Los Angeles and dispossession is significant to these cartographic art practices that reclaim space. Even before Tovaangar becomes subsumed under the State of California and the US federal jurisdiction, its history intertwined with international claiming of property and burgeoning US property law. In California, colonial entities would divide up Tovaangar into eight Spanish land grants, which, upon the death of a landowner, reverted to the crown and then later, post-secularization, into hundreds of Mexican land grants acting more as titles to property. After 1846, eighty properties were registered under the United States as property. This land transfer into property was all done without the consent of those who had and have lived on the land since time immemorial, following the settler structure of passing land between Christian nations. These settler property regimes continued with US aggression, and this new citizenry would perpetuate the registering of land claims in the US domestication of California. Again, American Indians did not consent, but the title was passed from Christian nation to Christian nation in accord with the Doctrine of Discovery. This race-making and dispossession form the foundation of the US Supreme Court law that relegates Indigenous peoples as domestic dependent nations. K-Sue Park reminds us thatThe center of US power is property rights, the legal policies that seek to legitimate conquest and violence. Mapping is an essential settler-colonial tool to domesticate land in Southern California and propel development.The 493 hand-drawn Diseños maps, filed with the Public Land Commission in 1852, are similar to the Buenos Ayres map in their rudimentary depictions surveying California Indian land with hand-drawn markers of water and tree lines that settlers would soon destroy. The Land Act of 1851 established the domestication of the California landscape under US governance, providing an avenue to legitimate existing Mexican land rights, and map out territory yet "unclaimed." Even within the history of these maps and the land claims process, the land relationships of California Indians in Southern California were denied legally, and the mapping process propelled ongoing violence against their bodily survival. Both violence and mapping ensured California Indian erasure in establishing new and ongoing commerce centers. The scratched-out land plots, marked by outlines of trees, rock formations, and water markers, are not the plotted lines of Cartesian accuracy. These colonial maps garner power through military might and brutal dispossession. The attempted removal of California Indians, their knowledge systems, and their way of seeing and being with the land are necessary to mass development across California and its ongoing snowball effect on the environment. These chicken-scratch maps are original property maps, continuing dispossession even as the plots have been subdivided repeatedly since this moment. The Diseños Buenos Ayres map, which is now the area of Bel-Air and UCLA, is the homeland of the Gabrieliño Tongva, who continue their relationship with the San Gabriel Mountains.1 Many of these maps depict regions that are the most expensive real estate properties in the United States. Newer maps may exist of these properties, and they may seem more "objective" and "scientific" with better models of scale or a more realist representation, but at the core, they still map dispossession. While the Tongva people currently do not have a federally recognized tribal land base or a place to launch their T'iats, they continue to have a deep knowledge of place and a commitment to protecting all their relatives—the human and more-than-human.Situated in the "Borders and Boundaries" section of The Map and The Territory exhibit at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Mercedes Dorame's "Our Land and Sky Waking Up—'Eyoo'ooxon Koy Tokuupar Chorii'aa" installation acts as a deep map that defies Western concepts of mapped territory held in colonial encompassing property logics. By creating connections to land and community that travel through time in the presentation of collected and stored cultural objects, she emphasizes the practice of making ongoing connections to place. The pieces in Mercede Dorame's installation are drawn from the archaeological collections at the Fowler Museum. In consultation with Wendy Teeter, Sedonna Goeman-Shulsky, and Miztla Aguillera, the Tongva artists went lovingly through the boxes where cultural items were stored after being disinterred through the violent development process. While remains have been returned, not all items fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and rest on the shelves at the museum on the UCLA campus. Dorame carefully considered the relationship between these items and placed them on a spiral pedestal. Many were from Playa Vista, a development that was to house and help build what is now referred to as Silicon Beach.Los Angeles developed this commercial area after NAGPRA. However, the disinterment could not be stopped as the Tongva, like many whose homelands are in the highest real estate zip codes, are not federally recognized. This removal from the landscape of ancestral presence, over four hundred ancestors, did not occur in the far past, but in 2007. They were only recently reinterred in 2018 with much community effort and work. Dorame prominently places pictures of her family that she took at the protest of the development of her ancestral lands. They overlook the spiral, watching and caring for the items we see on a spiral that connotes a portal, a technique often used by Dorame to bring and collapse time. She mixes mitten and star stones with salt from the ocean and pigments from the mountains. We do not have all aspects of the legend on the map she is creating in this piece, but what is experienced by the viewer is a pull toward critical thinking about museums, storage of cultural items, and the feeling of loss of knowledge and disrespect. On the same plane, however, is a remembrance captured in the photos and care of lovingly placing items and renewing connections. Dorame engages with traditional cultural items to remap a path back, despite the disinterring of cultural objects that continues to happen as development occurs and institutions are built. The physical landscape of her map highlights the unknown through the mysterious cogstones, what she refers to as "star stones," and the known through what remains. She keeps those lines of connection intact, represented in her trademark of red strings that flow into and out of the frame of the photos and installation. Salt, Earth, sky, and memory are powerful in creating this installation map of ongoing Tongva presence. It is an effective anti-colonial map juxtaposed against the simplicity of the Diseños map, and it asks us to question power and place.The settler architecture of Los Angeles created a landscape of immeasurable environmental destruction, propagating violent and racialized property regimes. A report undertaken by the US Commission on Civil Rights in 1973, Understanding Fair Housing, states that by 1940, 80% of properties in Los Angeles included racial restrictive covenants in their deeds (US Commission on Civil Rights 4), some of which remain on the deeds to this day even if not legal under the law ("Redlining"). The need for labor and expansion has always been part and parcel of how city officials and citizens used race to create an architecture of Los Angeles. In her book City of Inmates, Kelly Lytle Hernández clarifies how "caging" enabled the buildup of carceral systems that would be a source of labor. Lytle Hernández starts with the early foundation when Native people were legislated into criminality and sold at places like La Plaza, where they would be forced laborers. Making vagrants through erasure on the landscape was a fundamental way to build a city infrastructure.While the Diseños and subsequent titles, land leases, racial covenants, and legalities create a thing out of Tovanngar, they failed to sever tribal relationships to land. Cara Romero's large-scale project, spread out across the landscape of Los Angeles in "iconic Los Angeles neighborhoods," enables the viewer to make the scaled connections between erasing Tongva bodies, effacing tribal practices, eliminating tribal structures, and obliterating the original landscapes and that of mass consumerism. Romero states on her artist profile that "[t]he images in this collection of work, made in Los Angeles by both Tongva artists and myself . . . are a living dialogue between California Indians, urban Indian transplants, settlers, and diasporic peoples."2 Indigenous forms of graffiti, and indeed our very bodies, are anti-colonial tools crafting new cartographies in the wake of mass development. Graffiti is denying settler permanence. Indigenous graffiti is not just about marking territory but relationality.Romero uses the genre of billboards, so often overlooked for their high frequency and their familiarity across the cityscape, to jar the passersby into awareness. Gillian Cowlishaw argues that Aboriginal acts of social disruption, rather than being understood as the pitiable actions of a people without the capacity for agency, should be read as radical acts of refusal to accept the liberal promises of the settler state (105, 115). To understand the relationship between gendered violence and settlement, we must connect "the scale of the body," as I talk about elsewhere, to that of quotidian capitalist practices held up by the infrastructure of state capitalism (Goeman, "Disrupting"). Indigenous bodies, Tongva bodies, objects, and cultural items are prominently featured, not as a point of commercialism that one might see in a certain perfume ad starring Johnny Depp but in full regalia and sublime tones. In her billboard Miztla at Puvungna, Romero juxtaposes her in full regalia, wearing her traditional butterfly basket hat at the site of Tongva and Ajachemen's emergence with an airplane flying overhead. Romero and the NDN Collective are not returning us to the nostalgic past, which is frankly unattainable due to colonization's destruction, but rather claiming the still sacred space of creation. Miztla is a touchstone; she is present and past folding into the future. The billboards, particularly this one, are mapping a road to caring for a place despite the noise and reverberation of mass consumerism. These images tear back the gritty streets of L.A. to expose the beauty of Tovaangar. Freya Schiwy names this an "Indianizing" function that moves us toward transformative praxis.3 The public space works to unveil the colonial architecture, dismantling gender relations, cultural hierarchies, and settler-colonial frameworks. In this case, the place-based significance furthers the depth of dismantling.I turn to discuss the two other billboards in the series that are similar in palate to the Miztla at Puvungna above, which also name the Tongva women while placing them. Here, the method of rematriation used by Indigenous feminists, scholars, and activists alike should be addressed in Romero's work; rematriation is critical to an analysis of implementing cartographic art practices of care. As Rematriation Magazine founder Michelle Shenandoah (Haudenosaunee) states, rematriation is not just about changing ownership, but a return to the sacred. Steven Newcomb used this term in 1995 to talk about a more holistic approach to repatriation, to return a "living culture" to earth; Indigenous practices were all part of creating wellness in communities (3). Newcomb emphasizes that "[a]s a concept, rematriation acknowledges that our ancestors lived in spiritual relationship with our lands for thousands of years and that we have a sacred duty to maintain that relationship for the benefit of our future generations" (3). The relationship between land and us is crucial in creating wellness and return of land practice. The practices of survival depicted in the billboard are vital to the practice of rematriation from Weshoyot holding the basket close and lovingly, adapting to technology that we see in Miztla's frame, to plunging into sacred waters for renewal, to relishing our remnants from ancestors or returning to the sea. Each Tongva woman stands prominently in the monochromatic frame floating in trees or water.In Mercedes at Kuruvungna, Mercedes Dorame is splayed in a cross configuration, floating freely in the freshwater springs at Kuruvungna, a village site of the Tongva. When I first saw this image, I laughed, as outside the frame and above her is a majestic tree planted by the Spanish to mark and map freshwater sites. This tree provided evidence of the Portola expedition and thus enabled Dorames, Lassos, and Berhns to register the site as a historical place. A 501(c)(3) protects the place to this day as a foundation, and it is currently under Indigenous stewardship and has been a site of great connection in the Westside region of Los Angeles. The springs still produce tons of fresh water daily and are the only protected site under Tongva control in Los Angeles. They have a lease with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that has consistently been threatened by development from such entities as the YMCA, who sought to pave over the oak trees and medicine garden for a new facility in the far corner of the University High School campus. Mercedes's clear presence and relaxation in this spot is thus so meaningful in understanding rematriation as an embodied sovereignty or embodied practice where the connection with the water is a creative force. Mercedes's background as a ballerina and love of this dance form reveal her passion and creative force. The display of Mercedes in the water recalls the betrayed figure of Ophelia from Shakespeare. Most of all, we see the nourishing, creative force between Mercedes and the waters at Kuruvungna. Weshoyat, in a similar vein, presents elegance, peace, and a floating airiness as she rests over the assemblage of commercial L.A. Given the history of non-consent in all its forms—from Indigenous women's bodies to the exploitation and taking of land—the act of Miztla, Weshoyot, and Mercedes to so boldly place themselves overlooking large swaths of L.A. is courageous. "We accept being made invisible as a kind of Novocain rather than endure the constant grinding of historical traumas that directly targeted Native Women's bodies and our ability to express ourselves in language and literacy," says Deborah Miranda, speaking to a tactic of coping with the violence enacted on California Indian women (138). The refusal to be unseen explodes across the public sphere and demands a hearing for justice. Romero and the artists pictured in her photographs of Los Angeles lay claim to land and, most importantly, our relationship to it in the form of street art that is so public and moving.It was turning land into property by creating it as a commodity and severing the deep relations of the people that caused its desecration. Settlers followed the mass commercialization of Tovanngar with toxins polluting the land, water diverted under cement, and the ongoing commercialization in the landscape that is harming all, not just First Peoples. River Garza's billboard, a collage of images and graffiti inscriptions, reflects the harm of mass consumerism: disjointed images and the collage of commercial prints, with writing common to graffiti art. Street art practices signify Garza's form, and here, he questions commercialism and its bricolage of images that have created a simulation of the Indian, to employ Gerald Vizenor's coinage (see Vizenor). These commercial images are an absence of what he refers to as the "tribal real," that is, the grounded relationalities found in many communities that embody a different reality than that depicted through a simulacrum of commercial "Indian" images. River examines the Buffalo Nickel, Cleveland Braves, Washington R-word, and tobacco companies alongside the often-deemed American values, such as Blind Justice. Through imagery play, he points out the hypocrisy of manifest destiny through a rudimentary cupid angel with pointed arrows that draw attention to the written words. The angels reflect the famous John Gast Manifest Destiny painting of "American Progress" (1872). Los Angeles, the city of Angels, is also facetiously presented as a city of love by juxtaposing the angel next to high-polluting oil wells. Garza highlights the conception of America as a land of justice or law and order as anything but, as the viewer confronts the revolutionary figure of Toypurina in the image of lady justice.4 She wears a mask, with outstretched arms filled with a basket of acorns. Toypurina rebelled against the Spanish colonizers and paid dearly for the act. The written graffiti screams on the billboard, demanding to undo a romanticized narrative mapping and unmask as Toypurina does in the billboard's upper right-hand corner. It insists we understand that "If the Land isn't healthy, We aren't healthy" or "If the Land is compromised, We all are compromised." Bringing together the collage, Garza quickly notes next to the acorn basket: "NOTE: the wealth of the community is gauged by the health of the land." The road map is clear in the genre of the billboard—refocus, rematriate, and rethink the commercial relationships we have with land in the urban landscape. As Tongva archaeologists Desireé Martinez and Wendy Teeter remind those who conduct research in Tovaangar: An inherent practice within southern California Native American communities is reciprocity. In the past, reciprocity usually took the form of goods or food given to those in need, knowing that they would be returned to the provider at some future date. Reciprocity not only solidified cultural and social ties, but also ensured cultural and physical survival during times of stress, environmental or otherwise. Community members who had access to the most resources usually gave the most. (Martinez and Teeter 27)Reciprocity in making landscapes that advocate for the health of land and, thus, its people, is critical to mapping communities of care. What might mapping justice look like if we carefully considered what measures our relationship with land? How might re-envisioning a landscape beyond capital change our relationships with each other?Garza's image is not whimsical, which can be a trait of street art, but rather a complex presentation that unravels a generic Plains Indian landscape. Not only does he question the commercialism of such an image, but he is also precise in weaving in Tongva rock and sand painting images. These symbols and art forms are tied to the earth through story, practice, and imaging of the millennial intergenerational passing of knowledge. Rock art, in fact, shares in its inscription on hard surfaces similar qualities to the graffiti form that Garza's images take. It is the earliest form of visualization that often looks at relational modes of being of early humans while also asserting a presence and refusal of erasure. The visual aesthetics of hands or depictions of the cosmos or even a story in a pictograph provides the early evidence of what it means to be human—to feel, to desire, to be in relation with each other.Dorame's public art piece in downtown Los Angeles in the Chinatown district also addresses ancestral loss through the violence of colonization and the ongoing settler infrastructure that enable mass development in Tovaangar. This art piece was not a billboard, but an installation sponsored by Clockworks, situated in what is now a Los Angeles State Historic Park. While I do not have time to address fully in the limited page length the complicated history of spaces that create Indigenous belonging and their absorption into gentrification practices through ideas of public open space in the idea of the park, I would be remiss not to mention that there is a history of conflict and recent dispossession that occurred here, as well as the dispossession of Dorame's ancestors lands, waters, and sacred places.5 Dorame was taught to be a cultural resource manager by her father, Robert Dorame, and her family, who have fought relentlessly against powerful development companies in Los Angeles. Here, I return to Dorame to address her piece Pulling the Sun Back, a move that illuminates seasonal changes in the Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice. The sculptural form is a story of relationality. Dorame tells us that this "cosmology of possibilities" has three elements: "three elements of Tongva community structures, intertwining the traditional Tongva Kiiy (home), Shyee'evo (healing space), and Yovaar (ceremonial space)."6 In the red strings that mark places, in the loose pieces of the tarp, we see the ongoing struggle but, most importantly, a determination to maintain and imagine a landscape for future Tongva generations. The altar that Pulling the Sun Back creates is the center of relationality, made from bits and parcels, while all reflect on their place in the L.A. landscape.When I visited, people placed their offerings on the round platform, painted in a style similar to Tongva ceremonial sand paintings. The wind wafted through the park, and one could feel the breeze with a hint of ocean salt in the holes left in the batiked canvas, reminding me of the rock art and sunburst paintings in such important places as the Torqua Cave on Catalina. The piece creates a wonder and a point to reflect on the senses; it is also a place of shelter and contemplation. As I watched people place offerings in silence and without an explanation on the altar, from acorns to miniature Dodger baseballs, it became clear how important it was for strangers to make place and connections. This form of interactive art practice that Dorame offers to the public, to return to Hobart and Kneese, is why care is essential to connect to current struggles—care is a feeling with rather than for others (14). While it is too often that the Indigenous are relegated to loss or the lost, it became clear that the lack of connection affects all. Dorame's piece not only offers a reflection on the place of old train tracks—once neglected, then revived by the Indigenous community coming together and now claimed by the city as a gentrification project—but a place to process communities of care. It is at once on an individual scale while simultaneously overlapping with the past, present, and emerging communities of care in Los Angeles. As Dorame relays in her artist's statement: In Tongva beliefs, the Winter Solstice is not about focusing on being the shortest day of the year but rather on the phenomenon that on this day we pull the sun back into the sky, signaling the beginning of more light. This lens creates a space of positive potentialities and acknowledges the original caretakers of Los Angeles, the Tongva people, toward envisioning a more equitable future.As the California Indian artists reflect here, mapping communities of care in the Los Angeles Basin does not just begin with relating a past, but beginning to imagine new landscapes from that which remains. Indigenous communities of reciprocity and relationality continue to demand that institutions and governing bodies return precious items and rematriate land. In these small steps that have succeeded and spurred more imagining of future possibilities, I am reminded through this piece of the words of Deborah Miranda: "We think we are too broken to ever be whole again. But it's not true. We can be whole—just differently" (136). To reach this point of wholeness, we must begin to undo the afterlives of covenant codes spoken of earlier; we must map a new way to relate to land outside of plundering and respect water that we cannot live without in Los Angeles. We must continue to make public spaces with the care that undoes the visual terrains of destruction and creates landscapes of justice.