 We're moving fast and furiously. How are you feeling, guys? All right, good. Well, get ready for a great friend, theater director, activist, performer, and the new director of arts in a changing America, the fearless and incomparable Roberta Uno. A little short, sorry. So whenever arts in a changing America is invited to a new place, we always ask the question, whose land are we on? So do you know? Can someone raise their hand? Does anybody know out there? All right, I see one hand. So I would like to start by just acknowledging the historical, contemporary, and future presence of the Lenape, the Nayak, and the Canarsie people on whose land we stand today. This isn't just a performative gesture or a PC kind of nod, but it actually is a paradigm shift if we follow that by beginning to build some relationships. The US Department of Arts and Culture, which is a grassroots action network whose head is based in New Mexico. Adam Horowitz has just published an incredible guide to native land acknowledgment. I highly encourage you to go to their website. And so that's what I want to talk about today. Best practice and strategies that I've been learning about from places not just on the two coasts but across America. So as most of us know, I'm going to just put up this map. The United Census Bureau has projected, by the year 2042, people of color in aggregate, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans. We will eclipse the white current majority. And that has already happened in many places across the United States. I really love this time lab map because it shows kind of the future optimism. It shows us as America's future. The states in blue have already made that shift. And the states in orange are still living demographically in America's past, which is kind of why we can see the political overlay and the gap, the divide between what James Baldwin called another country or what many of us know kind of were living between Octavia Butler's Kindred and Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tales scenarios. So just a show of hands, who was born in one of these future states? Great. Well, I was born in possibly, I think, the most future of all, the state of Hawaii. Because it's the only state that never had a Caucasian majority. Think about that. Which may explain why it has been so progressive. It was the first state to recognize same-sex civil union. And it is the only state in the United States that has two languages officially, a dual language policy, English and an indigenous language, our indigenous language, Ollelo Hawaii. Hey, kupa Hawaii, all. OK, O'Neill. Ka kuhi heva kuhu aina hanao. I'm going to just ask you, who recognizes these female icons? Somebody want to shout out a name? And? Pat Cheney. All right, so Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink. Shirley Chisholm, born right here in Brooklyn. Patsy Mink, born in Hamakua, Pokol, Maui. These long before, these two women, long before Hillary Clinton, long before Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign, long before Barack Obama's, they were the first two women of color to run and people of color to run for the president of the United States. Patsy Mink, as you know, was the first Congresswoman of color and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman congressman. So I want to go back to this map. Who here originates from one of these orange states? Raise your hand. A really good number of you. Please go register where you were born. So I just came back yesterday from a week on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where my team and I were invited. We were there and in Rapid City. And I'm not great at geography, but you probably are. You can see that. We just came back from 1959. And it really is like time traveling in America. I'm often struck by how we live in parallel universes, largely due to our history of settler colonialism, slavery, and racist immigration laws. And in the arts, these kind of separate worlds have been maintained by the enormous disparity in arts funding. So it bears repeating that the majority of arts funding goes to large institutions whose budgets are greater than $5 million. And that those institutions represent only 2% of the arts sector. These organizations focus primarily on Western European arts and serve primarily Caucasian and upper income audiences. I really want to commend the Brooklyn Museum. It is one of the few museums, an encyclopedic museum, to be headed by a woman and to really applaud and pasternak for her leadership, which really started with reinterpreting the American collection to tell a truly American story. But the fact is only 10% of grant dollars go to supporting arts that explicitly benefit underserved communities, including lower income populations and communities of color. But we're not barbarians waiting at the gate, as Che-Yu has said. And I've seen this in my travels across America, in the Pacific Northwest over a huge geography, the resurgence of the canoe journeys, in the stepping traditions that emerge from the divine nine black fraternities and sororities that have now gone trickling into high schools and drill teams across America. There's a new documentary on that. In Dia de los Muertos, celebrations, in festivals and parades, these all represent aesthetic accomplishment, tremendous organization, and self-reliant models. So here's another map. This is a great paradigm shift in mapping. This is from the website of City Lore. So instead of a conventional arts map, which generally is about real estate, museums, theaters, galleries, on City Lore's site, they show both this kind of map of community memories and also a map of cultural anchors. So again, for example, who here has been to the West Indian Day Parade? OK, yes. So this enormous parade, on the map, it shows not only the parade, but also the places where the costumes are made, the places where people rehearse and practice their dances. So it flips what is normally just seen as an event listing into evidence of a huge activity beyond scale. So I want to talk for a moment about other practice that we have seen in other places in America. For example, we were invited to the Twin Cities by Pangea World Theater, by Mina Natarajan and DePonker Merkaji. And when we met with them, they first introduced us to their first nations and diverse board members. And then we later visited native organizations and went to sacred sites, the most sacred being the Bedote, which is the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers. It's the place of Dakota creation, and it's also a place where there had been brutal mass detention during the US-Dakota War of 1862. And we learned there about community members' memories of the hanging of the Dakota 38, the largest mass execution in US history. The workshops that we offered in exchange laid the groundwork for over a year of planning a project together. In Rapid City, where we just came back from, we learned about the sculptor, Yuki Nagase, who won a national competition there to reimagine their town square. And his work was picked by a committee that was headed by the Lakota artist, Mary Bordeaux. She told me that his was the only submission that actually thoughtfully engaged with Lakota cultural history and their land. And when he learned that there was no public art in the Rapid City schools, he donated back $15,000 a year over five years, so $75,000, to start public art education in the Rapid City schools. He also gave $10,000 of his own money and helped to organize a Native American arts market in the new public space that has become an annual event. We're going to go to Detroit now for a second. We were invited to Detroit. And in our planning process, we kept driving by this massive steel girders. We had no idea what it was. If it was the future or past, was it going up, coming down? And when we asked at a community meeting, the place just erupted, people were angry about this stadium, which had no community benefits in place. And rise together, Detroit organized 5,400 signatures, a community benefits ordinance on the ballot that would ensure benefits, including environmental protections, small business and employment opportunities, affordable housing, et cetera. So we've been working with our Detroit partners to create a toolkit that actually draws from that community benefits ordinance and applies to how we might organize in the arts. And if you want another resource, go to the Allied Media Conference site. They have an amazing zine. So we've been working with Cezanne Charles, Halima Cassell's, and Il Weaver on this. Our practice is both values-driven and practical. You know, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, $0.96 of every dollar had to be spent outside of the reservation for gas, groceries, et cetera. And now, and over the past several years, activists there are really fighting to create local business. So we ask ourselves, how could we all do that in the arts? How could we both program from our local community? What would that change in national conferences? And then also shuttle buses, hotels, catering, et cetera, how can we buy from community anchors? And I think this map kind of tells a story about why community anchors are so important. This is the City Lab map showing the area surrounding this museum. The red map shows where the African-American population is decreasing, and the blue map shows where the white population is increasing. According to City Lab, the African-American population has declined in 25 neighborhoods in Brooklyn between 2000 and 2015, particularly in the gentrifying neighborhoods of Crown Heights in Bedford, Stuyvesant. Of course, these maps could be downtown LA or San Francisco or the Woodward Corridor in Detroit, post-Katrina New Orleans, anywhere where displacement and gentrification are re-segregating neighborhoods and erasing people. So in addition to finding out whose land you're on, you could ask, was I invited? It sounds so simple, but many arts projects are about an interest, not an invitation. And if you're not from or of a place, then how do you enter? How do you build a relationship? How can you work at connecting to local ongoing efforts like the Brooklyn Anti-Gentrification Network or similar efforts where you live? And are you intentional in bringing others to the table and uplifting deep local knowledge? So my last slide I want to close today with this photo of Pomaikai Crozier. He's a cultural practitioner on the island of Maui. The Hawaiian islands were remapped by agribusiness, by big sugar, and by the pineapple industry. And those agribusinesses diverted local waterways, which caused traditional taro farms and fishponds to dry up. And there's a whole movement of sustainability, food sustainability in Hawaii to reestablish those waterways. So Po tells the story of starting with stewarding one acre, his Hawaiian homeland, and then restoring 10 acres with formerly incarcerated men in a rehabilitation program. Now he stewards 10,000 acres at the peak of Maunaokea Halawai. Maunaokea Halawai is a vital watershed and one of the wettest places on earth. I asked him when we met about cultural and social practice, and he answered, practice, we don't do practice here, we do the real thing. Thank you.