 Sorry for everybody after me for adjusting the mic. Dotsha, Madagua. I'm Chinupahanska Lugar. I'm Awakhet, dripping earth clan, from the Mandan-Hidatsa-Rikara tribes. From northern plains, we're river people. I was born in a small town called Fort Yates, North Dakota, which is on the Standing Rock Reservation. And I'm a citizen of the Mandan-Hidatsa-Rikara tribes. I'm also a visual artist. I do a lot of mixed media. I started as a poet, drawer, painter, sculptor, the demand for digital content and the experience of a digital interface for artwork as a sculptor. I thought it was important to be able to navigate that space. And so I've moved into film and other kind of spatial ideas. The work that I wanted to kind of present today was a little bit on that I think is relevant for this is projects that I call Future Ancestral Technology. These projects are imagining indigenous futures, imagining us in these spaces. And rather than being opposed to the present, systematic world we live in, it's can you imagine something that makes it obsolete? Can you imagine something that rather than fighting against or relinquishing what little energy and effort we have presently to destroy something, can you create something? And can that creation of something actually be more effective dismantling the present situations that we live in? It's fiction. It's artifice. We make it up. And the reality of our present is there's a lot of violence embedded in it. And from that space of violence, oftentimes you hear words like drawn line in the sand. What I'm interested in is who is speaking for the sand? Who is going to be in right relationship with the land in which this idea and this notion and this violence of dominion and possession are removed from our thinking? What does it mean to belong to place? And how is that vastly different than a place belonging to you? Can we strive to move towards that, to understand what that truly means? And in my experience, there are cultures that exist. I'm from an indigenous community that are river people. And we have protocols. We have systems in place that have worked for time and memorial that are embedded in how to be in right relationship with place. It is not a unique thing. The species, the human beings, all of us, we have developed these relationships over time. We have memories. There are 14 dendrites, at least, in everyone's brain that remembers what it means to belong to a place. And I think we are hungry for that. And when you get an introduction into what that means, they grow and they expand. I'm alive presently. And I see what the rest of us see. And we know how this ends. I'm interested in imagining something different. And how do we do that collectively? I'm afraid that I will never be able to live in the place that I can imagine. But I am happy to put in motion and plant the seeds of garden for our future, our children, to imagine a place in which we belong once again to place. Because the reality is we do. We always have. This land, this globe, this planet, all of these unique environments, those edges of geography that we speak of, we are the greatest archive of that history. And it's not even us. It's our children. It's the youngest of us who are the greatest archive of the human experience. It doesn't live in institutions. It doesn't live in education. It lives in our relationships to our future and an accountability to our future. And that accountability spans in multiple directions. The only reason I am here presently is because generations before me recognized that they were borrowing this place from me. And so now, presently, my accountability is to generations' future. We are only borrowing this place. And it's from our very future that we're borrowing it. And so these are embedded in a lot of cosmologies around the world. These are embedded in protocols that take place to be in right relationship with the land. And my practice as an artist, it's a luxury to imagine something different. I have the safety and the comfort to do so. And within that position and that place, it seems like the most valuable thing that I can present for our future. It seems like in the world that we live in, it's the only occupation that I can think of that puts more in than it takes out. And I want to be responsible to that relationship. And so I pay attention to the materials I use. I recognize that I've never built anything alone in my life. I recognize that I presently gain the privilege of this individualistic system that the United States has kind of developed. But in doing so, I'm trying really hard to imagine something different for all of our futures. And to make it visually, to build it three dimensionally, to allow the audience to inhabit those spaces feels like the easiest way to plant that seed of imagining something different. Within the world of individualism and rugged individualism, which is the myth of the American creation, there's a notion of freedom that's embedded in an individualistic system, where it's I get to choose. This is my freedom. I get to choose what I'm going to do, for me, individually. But there's another sort of freedom, an older freedom, a freedom that you see in the forest, that you see in the grass, that you see in the rivers. There is a freedom of knowing what your purpose is for the whole. And to do that and to supply that gives you so much more free time, because you're not spending your entire day making ridiculous choices as an individual between this or that. And I feel as though there is a question that we all need to ask ourselves presently, which is, what is the cost of that freedom, of that individual freedom? We understand the value of it. We place a dollar mark on the value of it, but we have a hard time comprehending the cost. And the cost is far too high for any monetary exchange. And so I want to encourage all of you, and I love being in community with you all. I was a fellow in 2020, I believe it was. And so a lot of my exchanges happened online through Zoom. So it's nice to be in the room with everybody presently. It's nice to see everybody. But I'm also recognized that we are collectively building that imagined future. And I'm afraid sometimes that when you imagine futures, there is a inherent control in imagined futures that bottlenecks experiences into one idea, a homogeneous idea. What I'm interested in is how it spreads in the other direction. So the contribution of each of the people in this room are collectively building a future that is varied and important for us to understand what it means to value perspective shift. I can't know what it means to belong to the globe. I can know what it means to belong to a place. And in that place, I can share that knowledge to everybody who comes and visits and who moves on from that space. And I imagine a future where we value our complexity and our diversity and our perspectives as maybe the highest form of wealth that our species can contribute to one another. With that being said, I'm excited to hear and meet the rest of you throughout the next day or so. So we can imagine that collective space and find out where our belonging intersects and really understand what it means to be a citizen of the planet once again. So thank you very much.