Joel Garcia (Huichol) is an artist and cultural organizer who uses Indigenous-based frameworks and arts-based strategies to raise awareness of issues facing underserved communities. Joel’s inquiry will reimagine indigenous and settler relationships through healing. His inquiry is an expansion of his work exploring healing and reconciliation, memory and place.
Fellowship Summary:
A Tool Still Sharp
There remains a festering wound in every city and town that represents the first displacements and forced removals of Indigenous Peoples. Through genocide, abduction of children & women, incarceration, and enslavement, First Peoples have been removed from their ancestral homelands. Settler Colonialism is the tool that continues to be used to occupy the ancestral homelands of Indigenous Peoples. While both colonialism and settler colonialism involve domination and exploitation, settler colonialism is a specific type where colonizers establish a permanent, replacing population and society, aiming to supplant the Indigenous population and culture, unlike colonialism, which focuses on resource extraction. And to some degree, we all become complicit in that process.
Settler Colonialism manipulates good intentions with the sole purpose of masking occupation. In what is temporarily known as the US, it has replaced Indigenous Peoples with enslaved Africans and Indigenous Peoples from Mexico; it replaced those populations with incarcerated peoples, primarily Black folks and the descendants of Indigenous Peoples from the Americas. The trickery of Settler Colonialism is vast and deep, such as in the case of the Climate Crisis. In many cases, here in Los Angeles, I have seen how organizers replace Indigenous Peoples (specifically the First Peoples of Los Angeles) with Indigenous Peoples from faraway places such as Brazil, as a way to talk about the issue but not really. And right now, the California Indian fire technologies, previously banned and criminalized, are being usurped by private and public entities that mean well, but will ultimately result in grabbing more land. More development masked by “ethical” approaches.
My inquiry focused on reimagining Indigenous and settler relationships through healing, expanding on my work exploring reconciliation, memory, and place.
Creeping Cost
Right before I began this Stanton journey, the collective efforts of Indigenous artists, Tribal Leaders, Elders, and many others started to bloom.
Apologies from government officials were given, government-led efforts to reconcile with the impacts of colonization were underway, parks and roadways were being renamed, land was being returned or in the process of increasing access for First Peoples, now there are some tribal liaisons in LA county and city departments, and a handful of other great things. But unfortunately, the extraction continues. Sure there’s an increase in awareness and support for Native and Indigenous issues and artists –– the inequities continue, you have non-Native arts organizations encroaching on Indigenous topics accessing funding, yet Indigenous artists remain underfunded, you have Indigenous artists sprinkled all over the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, many asked last minute, tokenized, box checked, etc.
All these good things came with a cost. There is a significant level of cultural taxation to endure, and every time a new opportunity emerges, we become the “experiment” to figure out that entity’s DEI strategies. We’re expected to leave our communities at the door, among many other taxing and harmful issues that build the creative, political, and social capital of these non-Native entities, but at the expense of Indigenous Peoples.
Pivot on the Path
In the middle of all that, I experienced what it is like to work with partners and allies like Oxy Arts, the teams at the Los Angeles Historic State Park and El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument, Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, and other partners who created space for various projects to be Indigenous-led. To align their approaches with the needs of our teams. Doing this work with a similar support system that I try to cultivate in my work and at Meztli Projects caused a pivot for me.
This pivot in my inquiry came with the realization that no matter how strong a bridge is built between these two respective communities, ultimately that bridge sits on top of The Land, a living archive, and a stark contrast in resources. On that side of the bridge lies resource after resource, and on this side our capacity is stretched beyond comprehension.
Inspired by this inquiry and fellowship, Meztli Projects, the organization I steward as its director and co-founded, launched the Cultural Worker Fellowship in the Fall of ‘24, a cohort-based opportunity to support Native and Indigenous artists. Initially, we imagined this program to be project-focused, given all the harmful experiences Native and Indigenous artists have had. So we decided to amplify the well-being component of this program and tend to some wounds. Our approach has always focused on creative practice, not productivity, on nurturing our forms of cultural production, knowledge-building, and regeneration.
This new fellowship, birthed from this experience, will be a refuge for cultural workers, a place to regenerate and bloom.
