Wake

I think about capitalist greed as a root cause of our dire future, how this value system is embedded in our violent history, and how the ideology of Manifest Destiny—the doctrine used to justify the taking of land and killing Indigenous people—is a legacy of white supremacy. The brutality of warfare by the US military and white settlers against indigenous peoples was no less than a plan for genocide.

I see this country polarized and moving from a place of fear. I am drawing connections between all living things; women’s rights as human rights; white privilege part of every discussion; the climate crisis and people’s relationship to place; the Second Amendment and the epidemic of mass shootings; land as home; the intangible and the spirit. I am utilizing intimacy, humor, imagination, the heart, irony, material, urgency, and agency.

Thoughts explored while creating this installation were informed by reading On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope by DeRay Mckesson and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Both of these leaders shape the activist paradigm and speak to the importance of creating relationships that will have lasting effects.

As Mckesson states so clearly, “To recognize the original harm [of white privilege] is not the same as repairing it, though repair is, of course, impossible without recognition. The point is that active theft isn’t required for people to participate in and perpetuate the harm.”

Learning and listening has to take place to be a partner in the work for positive change—“accomplice” rather than ally.