A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

The Embodied Ocean project at UC San Diego is devoted to exploring the art and science of oceanographic and Indigenous maritime design and engineering, performed through work that is hands-on and collaborative. Navigating Seaways is an Embodied Ocean theme focused on the art and science of Indigenous canoe-making and navigation methods. Long a symbol and tool of survival and sovereignty, the canoe is a vessel through which tradition, identity, and sustenance have been navigated for millennia, literally as well as figuratively. We take our cue from Vicente Diaz, who invites us to ask "how the story of the survival and revival of traditional seafaring practices can provide an indigenously-ordered, anti-colonial praxis that an simultaneously furnish what we might identify as an indigenous oceanic critique of political programs that are centered firmly on nation-state based claims of sovereignty."

Our first object is a photograph taken by media artist Andrew James Pittman (Cahuilla/Iipay Kumeyaay) using a GoPro. It was taken while Pittman was rowing a canoe that is similar to the one powered by the women in the foreground of the frame. These are ha kwaiyo, traditional Kumeyaay vessels that appear in the frame along with a dozen others, visible in the distance. Twenty four of these boats were made over the summer of 2021 by Dr. Stanley Rodriguez (Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel Kumeyaay) with scores of collaborating participants from Kumeyaay Community College, the region's tribal nations, and many others school and community groups around the region, as well as participants in the "Navigating the Pacific" PST project who joined Dr. Stan, who is also a PST ocean art and science project artist and researcher. Ha kwaiyo are made from bundles of tule reeds gathered from the shores of inland lakes and rivers. These tule canoes were used for fishing and transportation on Southern California waterways for 12 millennia but fell out of use as the Kumeyaay were pushed inland on waves of settler occupation.

Pittman's photograph captures a moment in the historic row-out of the 24 boats led by Dr. Stan with the Boys and Girls Club of Kumeyaay Nation Wellness along with more than 70 members of tribal nations and others who came from all over the region, traveling from LA, the Baja peninsula, and the Inland Empire. The photograph marks the date on which, for the first time in 200 years, tule boats dotted the waters of the Pacific. The movement continues as Dr. Stan leads the production of more and more boats each summer.

Like photographic prints, these boats are ephemeral. Pittman states that, "given the historical underrepresentation of our people in digital media, it is crucial to reclaim dormant information while creating meaningful and accurate portrayals. Our goal is to guide future generations in continuing the legacy of our intricate heritages." On one level, Pittman's photograph documents vessels made of locally sourced materials that decompose back into the earth from which they came more quickly than a photograph, waterlogged after a couple of seasons of use. Ephemeral by design, tule boats, like photographs, must be made continually for history to be sustained. In keeping with Pittman's statement, the continuity of this ancestral form is inter-reliant with photography and the spoken word, through stories and images. Pittman's practice is immersed in this inter-media movement, evident in the fact that he took this photograph while in a boat, immersed in the rowout, as a member of one of the the 24 teams of navigators challenging US sovereignty over the region's coastal waters, occupying the Pacific with the living presence of Kumeyaay navigators.

For those who joined Dr. Stan in harvesting tule and building and rowing ha kwaiyo, tule boats have served as mediums of cultural as well as technical knowledge: craft and science go hand in hand. Participatory immersion in the process of learning how to make a boat was also immersion in the history and language of the region's Iipay and Tipay peoples, and a means to understanding how land sovereignty and stewardship must extend from the mountains and foothills of present-day reservation land to the Pacific, the coastal region where the Kumeyaay people lived for millennia.

The role of language and narrative in the mediation of Indigenous maritime histories and futures brings us to our second object, also an ephemeral work: the immersive reality media work titled Indigenous Stories Are All Around Us, a project, viewable on an iOS platform with AR, XR and VR, that connects us to the oldest maritime engineering designs and technologies in the Pacific and to the people who are reviving them. Produced by Kilma Lattin and Catherine Eng of Our Worlds, this work is one of a series of immersive media programs designed by this creative team to project tribal histories into the viewspaces of the present-day world, using the iPhone to insert historical audiovisual narratives, holograms, and other types of 3D renderings onto the landscapes and seaways of the regions from which these stories emerged. Our Worlds is a design company devoted to the production of immersive experiences that advance our understanding of the fact, captured in the title of this piece, that Indigenous worlds are all around us, not only buried in the landscape and under the waters of the Pacific where Native villages once stood, but also in the everyday worlds of our communities, where tribal members live and work. In early summer 2021, Kilma Lattin, a member of the region's Pala Band of Mission Indians, met Dr. Stan at a grunion run, a gathering called when the conditions of moon, tide, and weather bring to shore schools of spawning fish that are gathered and roasted on a fire at the Pacific shore while elders tell stories and bird singers perform. Over many months, Catherine Eng, the artist and engineering lead on the Our Worlds team, attended tule harvests and ha kwaiyo row-outs, learning from Dr. Stan as she helped to make boats while also documenting the process in 3D video that she and Lattin shaped into a lyrical historical narration spoken by Dr. Stan. This work, viewable through the Our Worlds iPhone app, dropped on Thanksgiving Day, 2022. In the photograph shared here, we see a frame from the media program visibel on the screen of the iPhone held in the hand of Catherine Eng on this national holiday in 2022, when people gathered at La Jolla Shores to summon a future in which Kumeyaay reclaim the unceded land of the Pacific coast. Wading along La Jolla Shores, where UC San Diego's Scripps campus was built on the remains of a Kumeyaay village, one can hold up one's iPhone and see ha kwaiyo navigators on open sea, symbolically returning them to the physical shore from which they were pushed back two centuries ago, while listening to Dr. Stan's account of the history of the shoreline on which we stand.

Exhibition page.