Afro-Indigenous Futurisms
The kidnapping and enslavement of indigenous African peoples to build the European settler states on Turtle Island as it was being stolen from those indigenous to its lands through a mass genocide is one of the greatest atrocities in human history. In academic texts, museums, galleries, and the collective memory of Afro-Indigenous peoples, the knowledge of our pain and suffering are commonplace. We utilize art to extend our understanding, to explore the traumas, to pivot and escape them, and to heal. However, it is less common for us to be aware that at every step of the way of our people being brutalized, that we fought back.
Our ancestors did not docilely board slave ships, work plantations, and have their lands stolen and colonized without fighting back. Not only did we resist, there were times that we triumphed, be it for a moment, a day, a week, a month, or that we established thriving, self-sustaining maroon communities. In the Caribbean and South America, Africans who resisted enslavement were able to cultivate independent communities and self-governance, be it for a village (San Basilio de Palenque or Veracruz) or the establishment of a complete nation (Ayiti).
(en/de)coding resistance is an exploration of how our ancestors, Afro-Indigenous peoples, utilized their advanced knowledge of cosmology, symbols, mathematics, spirituality, war strategy, herbology, economy building, and more to not only survive enslavement, colonialism, and mass genocide, but to resist and construct thriving communities that lay the foundation for the lives we live and the work we currently engage in. Their ingenuity, brilliance, resilience, and cleverness produced the unfathomable: us. And in the continuum of their work, as their living legacy, we will produce a future for our peoples brighter than our wildest imagination.
This installation is a draft of a community of youth artists who dare to dream of a world where we are free. Using the tenets of Afro-Indigenous futurism, which sample the past and present to dream of our liberated futures, we explore resistance through a modern lens. How can we apply the patience and strategy of Tula as we combat gentrification? How can our resistance, in the words of Frederick Douglass, be both moral and physical? How can we answer the calls of Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka for Black Art, for poems and paintings and music that kill oppression? How can we engineer, design, and code our resistance to render counterrevolution and system resets less effective?
How do we use Afro-Indigenous Futurism to teach our community histories that have been erased?