2018
2017
Susto and Limpia :: decolonizing trauma narratives
In an attempt to escape self-blame and find a reason for their “aberrance” under colonial systems, Indigenous people have succumbed to the narrative that they are sick, (traumatized) that pathology resides in their personal psyches, and can be treated such that they become normal (resilient) individuals. Drawing on the recent work of Indigenous and postcolonial scholars critiquing trauma theory as it has come to be deployed as yet another tool of colonial perpetuation, I attempt to further trouble the location of trauma in the individual not only by asserting an oppositional socio-cultural focus, but rather the need for a return to Indigenous healing ceremonies. From there I consider Indigenous philosopher Ann Waters’s work on language and holistic dualism and on Eve Tuck’s call for a third space Research of Desire that breaks down irreconcilable binaries to replace damage-centered research processes. I propose that when desire is conceived as the irreconcilable opposite of damage, no third space is necessary. This corresponds to Waters’s understanding of Indigenous ontology of holistic dualism. Drawing on the rich legacy of curanderismo, I offer an interpretation of Susto (soul loss) and Limpia (spiritual cleansing) that is at once restorative and generative. I employ a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on Xicana and mesoamerican trauma-healing practices, in order to begin to understand how restoration of Indigenous healing ceremony might be possible after the trauma of colonization. As a way of embracing transcultural possibilities for restoration, I review a selection of western marginal healing paradigms. These include James Hillman’s Archetypal psychology, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellation processes and Diane Taylor’s Trauma Driven Performance Protest. I argue that together these modalities resemble, or approximate, an Indigenous paradigm that holds potential for meaningful transcultural sharing and transformation beyond borders.
The Earth is my Elder :: an indiginist
In my recent travels tracing family migration stories, being an uninvited guest on my own ancestral homelands in traditional P’urhépecha territory, I took great pause to process and integrate the liminal space of home-not-home through my presence during traditional Juriatikua Uariri (Day of the Dead) ceremonies. As a member of the Xicana diaspora my connection to Indigenous land, language and culture has been broken over generations of migration arising as necessity from colonial structures. My greatest resource in cultural recovery, of finding belonging even in the liminal space of home-not-home, has been my own body-as-earth connection and awakening. Finding home in my own brown body and listening to ancestral-earth intuitions allows me to participate at the site of my flesh as a we rather than an I. Juriatikua Uariri an Indigenous ceremony of the P’urhépecha people, honors the recently deceased ancestors and calls on them to visit our table, our altar, our home. The altar bread, now imbued with the threshold wisdom of the dead, visits our bodies and beings as we ingest it and it becomes a part of us. I offer a multi-media performance of my respectful embodied interpretation of this sacred tradition of my ancestors. I ask them to bless and assist me, and us all, as I offer and imbibe, with potluck guests, the bread and tequila and tobacco from my first Day of the Dead ceremony on ancestral lands in Patzcuaro, Mexico.
June 15, 2017
Puebla Mexico
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Eating our ancestors: Indigenous place, diasporic space and the always uninvited guest
In my recent travels tracing family migration stories, being an uninvited guest on my own ancestral homelands in traditional P’urhépecha territory, I took great pause to process and integrate the liminal space of home-not-home through my presence during traditional Juriatikua Uariri (Day of the Dead) ceremonies. As a member of the Xicana diaspora my connection to Indigenous land, language and culture has been broken over generations of migration arising as necessity from colonial structures. My greatest resource in cultural recovery, of finding belonging even in the liminal space of home-not-home, has been my own body-as-earth connection and awakening. Finding home in my own brown body and listening to ancestral-earth intuitions allows me to participate at the site of my flesh as a we rather than an I. Juriatikua Uariri an Indigenous ceremony of the P’urhépecha people, honors the recently deceased ancestors and calls on them to visit our table, our altar, our home. The altar bread, now imbued with the threshold wisdom of the dead, visits our bodies and beings as we ingest it and it becomes a part of us. I offer a multi-media performance of my respectful embodied interpretation of this sacred tradition of my ancestors. I ask them to bless and assist me, and us all, as I offer and imbibe, with potluck guests, the bread and tequila and tobacco from my first Day of the Dead ceremony on ancestral lands in Patzcuaro, Mexico.
June 15, 2017
Puebla Mexico
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Stitching Stories: a ceremony of cross-cultural psycho-narrative restoration
This panel will be a collaborative and decolonial performance-lecture between presenters Kamee Abrahamian & Krista Arias and those who are present and interacting with our work. We will draw on the overlap in our research and creative praxis surrounding the themes of textiles, stitching, cultural memoria and restoration as expressed across/between performative earth-based ceremonial space and transmedia. Our shared work centers the psyches and stories of diasporic women, queers, mothers, and communities who are remembering, decoding, restoring and restorying after lifetimes of colonialism, displacement, intergenerational trauma, oppressive patriarchy, imperialist wars, migration, and genocide. We exist in racialized bodies without access to traditional knowledge keepers, healers or culture bearers. In this participatory performance-lecture, we invite participants to collaborate with the spirits and stories of their own ancestors and lands, as we do with ours in our respective work. Krista is a diasporic Xicana Indîgena-Anglo mixie. Her commitment to interdisciplinary research is rooted in the intersection of arts-based and Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies, social justice, creative praxis, phenomenology, depth and liberation psychologies. Her current research centers on the re-indigenization of birth and mothering practices through community land-based performative ceremonial activism. Kamee arrives in the world as a queer woman and a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors, who were displaced from the SWANA regions and migrated to settler lands (Canada). She works as an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator, and writer, and her current research focuses on integrating psychological and herstorical aspects of traditional weaving and textile from family and ancestry with elements of transmedia storytelling and biomythography. Together we co-create a way forward into ancestral healing, creative reclamation and diasporic futures.
June 21, 2017
Ottawa Canada
Stitching Stories: a ceremony of cross-cultural psycho-narrative restoration
PANEL: Invoking Ixchel, Goddes of Medicine and Maternity:
Bringing Indigenous Paradigms to the Center of Academic Discourse
Krista will dialogue about a restorational method for recovering temazcalli earth-medicine for urban Split Feather –Xicana girls, women, and mothers working to preserve traditional Indigenous birth and mothering practices, that she applied in response to her own Eldership as an Indigenous woman and mother. She created a year-long performance ceremony titled, The Earth is my Elder: An Indiginist Methodology for Re-indigenizing Women, Mothers and other Lost Relatives. In this ceremony, Krista lays the earth in a relational restoration of land based epistemology. This performance also included four residencies, titled The Indígena Project: Remembrance, Recovery, Restoration as a means for reindigenizing girls, women, and mothers who have lost connection with their ancestral people, land, language, and culture due to colonization. As a facilitator-participant-collaborator, Krista conducted these residencies that culminated in a public trauma-driven performance protest in which earth based ritual of maternal restoration was ceremonially offered. Krista will demonstrate how the first performance titled: Grandmothers Sitting in a Circle: The Pace and Posture of Permission was a ceremonial expression of our collective request for permission from our ancestors to engage in the work of cultural reconnection and restoration. The ceremony culminated in a community temazcalli (Mesoamerican sweat house) as a resource for reindigenizing Split-Feather and Xicana girls, women, and mothers.
June 21, 2017
Ottawa Canada
Development of Racial Justice Values for the Classroom :: Panel Presentation
In response to conflict around racial issues in communities and on campuses nationwide, as well is in our own classrooms, two voluntary student groups, one for students-of-color and the other for those White students who were willing to be Racial Justice Allies, began meeting monthly in the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology and Ecopsychology specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute. For the students-of-color, finding a space to discuss perceptions of race and coloniality at Pacifica, and their own struggles to deal with it successfully, created a haven for open strategizing. Meanwhile, the basic question put forward for the Allies Groups was whether White students could recognize when their classmates were feeling assaulted by Eurocentric or racist ideas, and could then work out how to be supportive and stand up for the values they shared. The Racial Justice Allies group allowed them to develop new sensitivities while discussing the fear of making mistakes, as well as their feelings of disruption and discomfort at the questioning of normalized assumptions and the inherited need to appear proper and good.
Through a collaborative and participatory process, came up with the set of values and goals that will be presented as part of the roundtable.
We invite discussion about the process of developing the values and goals and are interested to hear about how people in other institutions and organizations navigate these similar concerns.
Bread, Flesh and Ink: Consuming the Other in Tatua Ometeotl, Juriatikua Uariri and the Activist Potluck
Studio 111, unceded, ancestral territory of the Syilx people, Kelowna BC
Lindsay Harris, Krista Arias, Juana Ochoa, Skye Keeley-Shea
We open ourselves to the possibility of see ing-through the troubled state of relational hospitality within the current reality of othering across borders. Invoking the traditional reciprocity of Indigenous mesoamerican tattooing praxis, the P’urhépecha Juriatikua Uariri (Day of the Dead) ceremony and the Activist Potluck, we consider the intimate gesture of hospitality. We invite graduate students, artists, and activists to our “potluck” ceremony that considers the importance of sharing food across boundaries of guest-host relations (invited/uninvited; living/dead; human/non-human; masculine/feminine; embodied/parasitic; inscribed/fluid) while consciously situated in multi-layered roles of guests/hosts. Among the multiplicity of these relations, as co-conveners we acknowledge our role as uninvited guests on colonized territories, and following Haraway (2016) we consider how “offering ourselves up on the menu” may generate more palatable and sympoietically rich guest-host relations. This gathering welcomes participants to share food with the living and the dead while considering their own travels onto and off-of home-place territories whether on land or across bodies, our own or each other’s.
This work will begin prior to arrival at the Convergence, with research into the recovery of black copal, a tree resin, as ink offering in tatua-medicine as well as the planting of Day of the Dead flowers, Cenpasuchil, in a Kamloops community garden. This will segue into multi-media creative collaborations across our various experiences of displacement and home-coming as we envision and manifest the possibilities contained in healing tatua inscriptions on body and earth. Just as food security advocates organize around the potluck to build community and mobilize grassroots efforts for sustainable food systems, we invite workshop participants to consider the possibilities for the ceremonial potluck to unsettle the categories of guests/hosts and consider the potential this might bring back to our community, creative and activist efforts. Our goal is to create an open, well-composted space of regeneration, for negotiation, connection and engagement – for bringing our hearts and minds together as one with each other and with the geographies that claim us all as we ceremonially offer and imbibe food, drink, smoke and ink.
2016
Temazcalli :: crying, bleeding and the psycho-politic of water, womb and woman
This presentation traces the psycho-political properties of water as witnessed at the intersection of water womb and woman in my performed re-search journey of re-membering the Mexican Indigenous sweat house, the Temazcalli. It is also a personal and process-based contemplation on three Mexica Goddesses, Cihuacóatl, Tlaltecuhtlé, and Xochiquetzal, not as “traditional elements” per se, but as starting points for Indigenous epistemic and ontological recovery of the non-binary holistic dualism that contests heteropatriarchical systems of knowledge production. I offer a contextualized performative emergence of the neo-Indigenous, or Indiginist, Temazcalli where I explore water, womb and woman as a decolonial and (re)Indignenizing process of healing trauma in a global age of colonization and genocide. Drawing, and building, on the work of Susy Zepeda in “Queer Xicana Indigena Cultural Production: Remembering though oral and visual storytelling” and others, I employ the methodology of dream-time, body as earth, elder epistemology, writing from the margins and de-centering Eurocentric cognitive imperialism. I also draw on embodied and community embedded interpretations of traditional culture and story as articulated by Leanne Simpson as Biskaabiiyang in “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellions transformation” as well as a methodology of refusal that reverses the Eurocentric gaze on water, land and people and directs it back at the perpetrator as a creative artist/activist subversion. This reversal ultimately segues into a borderland approach that includes psychoanalytic interpretations, in particular Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Light in the Dark, as well as Anne Waters’ Indigenous philosophy, to offer a model for decolonizing water, womb and woman as it relates to radical creative subversion of colonial patriarchy. This article uses the place where blood, tears and milk emerge within the body of woman and earth (temazcalli) to propose a theoretical framework and methodology for considering the larger context of the psycho-politics of water. I argue that the emergent decolonial-feminist psycho-politics of water re-members grief, wounds and relationships within a dynamic holistic dualism rather than the repetitive discursive frameworks of market scarcity, supply and demand, evidence-based models, technological solutions and national security that perpetuates the current colonial center of rupture and slow violence.
Decolonizing Birth Conference
September 2016
Brooklyn, New York
The Indígena Project I :: remembrance, recovery, restoration
a series of 4 day gatherings / residencies for self-identified Indigenous girls, women, mothers and birthkeepers of Turtle Island / Anahuac (aka: the Americas) who want to restore and revitalize their connection to ancestral ways and wisdom of birth and mothering.
This is of particular interest to women who have lost connection with their lineage – and who want to restore what has been broken for their children and ancestors. Many of us are diasporic Indigenous people who have lost contact with our lineages and Indigenous Eldership as a direct result of the The Indian Relocation Act, corrupt Indian adoption policies, Indian residential and boarding schools, military recruitment of Indigenous people, forced migration, borders, mestizo consciousness, shame and hiding etc…
We come together seasonally in residency gatherings to re-create ceremony that has bee lost. We turn to each other relationally to remember, recover and restore who we are as Indigenous women who have lost connection with ancestral relatives, lands, language, and culture of Turtle Island.
We will gather and connect using the gentle tools of Indigneous storywork, laying-on the earth, community theater, dream work, appreciative inquiry, Somatic Experiencing, constellation ceremony, Myth Mending, Earth-Womb medicine, the mesoamerican sweat house (Temazcalli), Susto and Limpia (soul loss and spiritual cleansing) and trauma-driven performance protest – which we will present publicly for the creative representation and restoration of our people.
August 2016
Portland, Oregon
Xochiquetzal's Bed :: a union of feathers and flowers
Artist Statement
Xochiquetzal’s Bed is a part of my year long performance ceremony The Earth is My Elder :: listening to earth as Indiginist methodology for restoration of birth and mothering. I lay on the earth as a decolonial/Indiginist act of restoration at the generative edge of lineage repair and remembrance of stories emergent in body-earth relationality. My laying-on place will be presenced in the gallery as one of its many installations through the year. More than a space or site, it is a place, an alter, an offering, a piece of ceremonial regalia. It is a gesture of public home-place making as a way of involving a greater community in the performance of a very personal and process-based ceremony. It is a multi-media presence centering Xochiquetzal, goddess of birth, mothering and female sexuality, and my life story of diasporic identity as a mother. I position my story in relation to Xochiquetzal’s gesture of holistic dualism as it relates to the dual-process of decolonizing and Indigenizing birth and mothering as we recover from the traumatic age of colonialism and genocide.
Alternator Center for Contemporary Art, Intermission Series
April 2016
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
The Earth is my Elder :: listening to earth as ceremonial methodology for re-indigenizing Xicana women, mothers and other lost relatives
“You need to lay on me for one year… I will absorb your pain. I will take it, as nourishment, like food. I need your pain like a mother needs the pain of her weeping child across her lap.”
I lay on the earth, enacting an assigned phenomenonlogical experiment, when these words emerged in my psyche. In this me-earth relationality, something was asked of me. More than a year later I am still asking myself, “how can I possibly lay on the earth for a full year?”
After my intensive search for my paternal Indigneous lineage of 2015, and in preparation for this ceremony, I began to learn about Mexican Indigenous oral history. In my research creating this event I came across the story of Tlaltecuhtli, the hungry goddess who demands our pain and blood, and was moved by the relation of the oral tradition and what I received directly from the earth.(1)
As a Split Feather and lost relative(2), I have listened for an Indigenous Elder-teacher since childhood. Though I have received teachings and direction from different Elders, the very things the Elders have asked of me has been difficult to live into. “Learn the traditional ways of your people,” I have been told over and over again.
Since I did not know my father, the Edlership to my ancestral Indigenous lineage has been so broken that I have felt for decades that I have nowhere to turn. I bring all the support of Elders I have received with me to my supplication of Earth.
Now, as I take seriously what has been asked of me by the Earth, I see that she, the land and trees and water are calling to me and promise to teach and initiate me.
In my ceremonial/performative exploration and surrender to the Earth as my Elder. I will lay myself across the lap of the earth and offer her my pain. I will offer her my physical, psychic and spiritual wounds, not abstractly, but relationaly and somatically. I will listen for the noble speech that arises in the context of this connection and communicate i
The Earth
March 2016 – February 2017
Portland, Oregon, USA
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico
The Earth is my Elder :: listening to earth as ceremonial methodology for re-indigenizing Xicana women, mothers and other lost relatives
“You need to lay on me for one year… I will absorb your pain. I will take it, as nourishment, like food. I need your pain like a mother needs the pain of her weeping child across her lap.”
I lay on the earth, enacting an assigned phenomenonlogical experiment, when these words emerged in my psyche. In this me-earth relationality, something was asked of me. More than a year later I am still asking myself, “how can I possibly lay on the earth for a full year?”
After my intensive search for my paternal Indigneous lineage of 2015, and in preparation for this ceremony, I began to learn about Mexican Indigenous oral history. In my research creating this event I came across the story of Tlaltecuhtli, the hungry goddess who demands our pain and blood, and was moved by the relation of the oral tradition and what I received directly from the earth.(1)
As a Split Feather and lost relative(2), I have listened for an Indigenous Elder-teacher since childhood. Though I have received teachings and direction from different Elders, the very things the Elders have asked of me has been difficult to live into. “Learn the traditional ways of your people,” I have been told over and over again.
Since I did not know my father, the Edlership to my ancestral Indigenous lineage has been so broken that I have felt for decades that I have nowhere to turn. I bring all the support of Elders I have received with me to my supplication of Earth.
Now, as I take seriously what has been asked of me by the Earth, I see that she, the land and trees and water are calling to me and promise to teach and initiate me.
In my ceremonial/performative exploration and surrender to the Earth as my Elder. I will lay myself across the lap of the earth and offer her my pain. I will offer her my physical, psychic and spiritual wounds, not abstractly, but relationaly and somatically. I will listen for the noble speech that arises in the context of this connection and communicate i
The Earth
March 2016 – February 2017
Portland, Oregon, USA
Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
Patzcuaro, Michoacan, Mexico