‘Genocide is climate change’: a conversation about colonized California and Indigenous futurism

Abstract

This written conversation unpacks a phrase, ‘genocide is climate change,’ which co-author Christine Howard Sandoval wrote and featured in her video artwork, Niniwas- to belong here (2022). The authors discuss scholarship linking the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to climate change and contextualize the assertion within an expanded archive of the Spanish missions in California. They address Howard Sandoval’s multimedia work in dialogue with Indigenous women’s basket weaving and land care practices, including the cultural use of fire, in order to consider how Indigenous arts can illuminate the intertwined apocalypses of colonization and climate change.

Keywords:

• Archive
• baskets
• contemporary art
• ecology
• Native American
• American Indian
• weaving
• wildfire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The assignment, encoded in the state curriculum since the 1960s, was removed in 2017, but evidently teachers have continued to use it (Imbler 2019).

2 An enlarged version of this portrait appeared in Archival – for Rosario Cooper and my 10 year old self, a public installation at Yaletown – Roundhouse Station as part of Howard Sandoval’s solo exhibition, A wall is a shadow on the land at Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, 2021.

3 Smith-Ferri discusses the formation of yokaya or Yokayo Rancheria, xaabé maath’ólel or Middle Creek Rancheria, and Coyote Valley Rancheria (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Howard Sandoval

Christine Howard Sandoval is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Brazil), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), Designtransfer, Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin, Germany), El Museo Del Barrio (New York, NY), and Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY). She has had solo museum exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego (2021) and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (2019, as Mellon Artist in Residence at Colorado College). Howard Sandoval has been awarded numerous residencies including UBC Okanagan, Indigenous Art Intensive program (Kelowna, BC), ICA San Diego (Encinitas, CA), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), and Triangle Arts Association (New York, NY). Her artworks can be found in the Hammer Museum and at Forge Projects (NY), and also represented by Parrasch Heijnen (Los Angeles, CA). She currently lives in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations. She is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). Howard Sandoval is an enrolled member of the Chalon Indian Nation of California in Bakersfield.

Jessica L. Horton

Jessica L. Horton is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Director of the Curatorial Track PhD in Art History at the University of Delaware. Her scholarship confronts the interrelated devastations of colonialism and ecocide, a dire situation in which Indigenous makers can act as critical interlocutors and creative emissaries of alternative worlds. Her book Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (2017) traces the impact of Indigenous spatial struggles on artists working internationally since the 1970s. Her book Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973 (due 2024) examines how artists revitalized longstanding Indigenous cultures of diplomacy in the unlikely shape of Cold War tours, translating Native political ecologies across two decades and four continents. Her research has been supported by the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Research Center, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Warhol Creative Capital Book Award, among other honors.