Summer Vibezzzzz

It has been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy and not busy. A few big projects in the works, but also some time to visit with friends, see some shows, and take lots of naps.

I wanted to note a few things that have come out recently:

1. My dear friend Giulianna Zambrano interviewed me for Crónicas al borde, a podcast (in Spanish) based out of Ecuador that is really doing some amazing work with experimental sonic storytelling. My episode (here) is called “Hay una sombra en forma de mujer” (There is a shadow in the shape of a woman), in which I tell the story of meeting my grandmother for the first time and coming to terms with what that meant for my identity—becoming Cherokee, making relations, and finding a different way to describe myself. I have written about this in other places, and I am actually working on a memoir (!!!) about this, but the podcast was the first time I told the whole story in Spanish, which, I am hoping, allows for more dialogue across the Americas about our shared, but also distinct forms of Indigeneity.
2. I was on In the Thick podcast with another friend, Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle (of This Land), to talk about the Supreme Court ruling on the Indian Child Welfare Act. Rebecca is so smart about these things, and was really able to condense a lot of complex information into a form that allowed people to grasp the stakes. I feel like I, as ever, was more of a “let’s make it complicated” guy. But I also was able to talk about my personal experience with adoption—my father’s adoption, that is—and its intergenerational effects. My dad listened to it, and told me he enjoyed it.
3. I have an essay out in the Issue 4 of Protean Mag, one of my favorite independent literary/culture/politics reviews. They published a few of my early essays on cultural appropriation (remember Elizabeth Warren?), and I’m really happy that the print issue has a new, really intimate reflection on why there are no pictures of my ancestors. I took the opportunity to write about not what photography represents, but what we desire in the absence of photographic documentation. You can order it in print or as a digital file at the link above.

Which brings me to a few things that I’m working on and toying around. I was invited by Ginger Dunnill (of Broken Boxes podcast) to create a multimedia work based on some of my research about Indigenous presence/absence in photography for an exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum in 2024. It is going to be rad, and I’m humbled to be part of the cohort of people Ginger is curating in the show. But I have mostly a text-based practice, and though I was a bit hesitant, I have agreed to make a short video work, based on the essay that just came out in Protean. (I knew I wanted to keep thinking about this, and the essay has been done for several months now).

The cool part is that my friend DB Amorin is going to work with me on creating the video (is it a film?), using the text of the Protean essay and footage of me using the double exposure setting of a polaroid camera to create what I hope are haunting, spooky, kind of disconcerting images. So I have been toying around with the polaroid for a bit. Some of these are better than others. I have to keep good notes of my process because I’m still learning and experimenting. But some of what has happened is really cool, and I’m grateful to be able to work with someone I trust.

I have already recorded the audio—me reading the essay, Instant Ancestors—and I have a lot of photographic material that I’ve accumulated. And in fact, this weekend DB and I are going to be shooting the “process” video, some B roll, and hopefully that will be enough to create a coherent film about having and not having photographs of my ancestors.

In other news, I wrote something for the Boffo Performance festival 2023 program, though I’m not sure when/where it will be posted. The luminary Tavia Nyong’o is curating it, and the theme is “fugitive intimacies,” so I let myself run wild with that topic (for just 500 words, don’t worry).

I also have a little text coming out in the Danspace Project journal, though, again, I’m not sure when and where. But the topic is the shifting stars, and I got to revisit Brenda Mallory’s idea of The North Star Changes.

More summer collaborations include a dialogue between Jodi Byrd and me, called “Settler- Colonial Elimination and the Dobbs Decision: Relationality, Indigenous Kin-making, and Queer Responsibilities” about the Dobbs and ICWA decisions, queer studies, and Indigenous studies that will be coming out soon-ish in GLQ as part of a new series called Q2.

K’eguro Macharia and I wrote something together for October that will be coming out next year—essentially we transformed some Twitter dm chat musings into a dialogic meditation on diaspora and modernism. It was very fun. (If you aren’t subscribed to K’eguro’s beautiful substack, you should be).

OK, I think that’s all for now. There are a couple other things in the works, but I need to stop. This seems like a lot, and I think it is, but most of this has been really fun. And I’m grateful for all the inspiring people and dialogues I’ve been able to have this summer.