 Docha, Marigua, Dishkagnu, Hurocha, and the way Hurocha. I'm Chinupahanska Luger. We want to have a conversation together. We planned nothing, which is perfect. So there's room for spontaneity. The question that floats above us is reimagining futures. Debra brought something up in this thing that I think is really important. The re-part. We're constantly reeing things, you know. And Debra's like, I prefer realizing futures. And I'm like, speak more. Hello, everyone. Good evening. It's been a long but wonderful day with so many really good conversations. And oh my gosh, you were fire. I loved everything that you said, Tracy. Thank you. I'm Debra Yeppa-Papan. I'm Hamas Pueblo and Korean. I am a co-founder and director of exhibitions and programs at the Center for Native Futures, which is a new native art space that just opened this past September. We were founded in 2020 during the pandemic, but we're a much needed art space that's been a long time coming. And talking about and going back to your conversation or what you were talking about this morning about imagining futures, not reimagining, but imagining futures. This Center for Native Futures was something that I imagined with my husband, artist Chris Papan, about 30 years ago. So after we graduated from IAA, the Institute of American Indian Arts, which you're alum also, and we came back here to Chicago, we had no opportunities for showing our art or building our careers as artists, as native artists. And so at the time I was imagining, you know, like what would it be like if we had our own art space that was led by us, by native artists, for native artists? And we're at this point and this moment in time now where we've realized it. So that imagining went to realizing, right? So you know, we talk about imagining futures. I really like to say, you know, we're realizing our future because I think that's more, that's real. That's like that's making the future happen. Not just thinking about what the future could be, but making our future. Yes, thank you. And you lived here in Chicago. This is a place that can be called home to you. This is my hometown. I grew up here. We moved to Chicago when I was just under two in the 70s. But I have a very strong connection to my ancestral homelands in New Mexico. So, hey, Ms. Pueblo is about 40 miles north of Albuquerque. And I still have a very strong connection to home and my family there. So that's home and this is home. This is where I grew up. This is, you know, this environment very much formed who I am. But you know, also still maintaining those, those native and Korean. I'm Korean too. And my mom raised me with Korean values. So those are all the things that make up who I am. Yeah. And Frank, you live here now. Yes, yes. My name is Frank Wan. I'm Sichangu Lakota. I just introduced myself in my language. I said my Lakota name is walks with the young nation or walks with the new nation. And I feel like, you know, I'm a bit of a bridge up here. I come from the Rosebud Reservation, which is like out by where Chinupa. He's from North Dakota. I'm South Dakota. Lori goes back. She's like family. And then when I moved to Chicago to attend Columbia College over a decade ago, just over a decade ago, Deb, I didn't know a soul out here. I was just felt like a res kid. I was going through a lot of culture shock. And Deb was one of the first native people I met, native artists I met that kind of took me under her wing. My first ever artist. She helped me get together. And, you know, now I make a living off of my art. So, you know, I'm just grateful what Deb was saying about, you know, imagining a better future. I was just smiling because she also created so much space for so many other native artists like myself. The reason I'm on this stage is I performed at the opening of her gallery and mega seen me, you know, so I'm just grateful to be here amongst these people. It feels like family, but I've lived here for about 10, 11 years now. I'm visiting. This is my second time here in 20 years. And the first time I was here in 20 years was like two weeks ago. So it's pretty wild. It's warmer than I thought it was in my head. I have on snow boots and I should not have on snow boots. I'm really excited about this conversation and actually like thinking of these places where we all come together because it does exist in that future. It exists in that place in our mind. We're here presently, but we are actively participating in creating that space, you know, listening to one another, hearing one another. I don't know. It makes me excited to think about where our values like come together. And I'm actually kind of interested in, once again, just like, I'm also multitudes. I'm Mandan, Hidatsa, Rikara. I'm Lakota. I have European cultures as well that I wasn't informed very well about Norwegian and Austrian, I believe. But I grew up on the res in North Dakota and my mother moved off of the reservation. Actually, when I was really young, after my parents divorced, and we moved to the Southwest and grew up in two places, you know. And this plurality of existence, I think, is something that we're all familiar with. We all have these experiences. And yet we get distilled down to these like simple identifiers. And that distillation process evaporates what actually is what makes us powerful, what makes us amazing is our ability to actually hold multiple things in our head at the same time, even if they're contradictory. Yeah, I don't know. I'm thinking about this in the sense of a center for Native futures here in Chicago. I heard these metrics about there being 100,000 Native people in Chicago from many, many different tribes. And I know customarily we would have practices where we would build community and culture. Like, our tribal names are literally just translations. Like if you translated our tribal names into English, it would be the people from a place, you know. But that identifier gets reduced to like, oh, no, no, you're not people. Like, this is America. You don't get to be people. You're that. You're that what you are. We had agency about developing who our community is, who our people are, you know. And it wasn't reliant on our genetics. It was reliant on our culture and the values that we produce in those cultures. And I'm thinking about that in the sense of a center for Native futures. Like, what is, do we have agency in our indigeneity to actually build culture, to build tribes so that we can say we are the people from this place? And I don't know. I feel like the center for Native futures can touch into that space. I think so. And I think the important word is agency. You know, and building the space, creating the space for Native people that's led by Native people gives us that agency and is taking it away from, you know, institutions defining, right? I think that that's an important thing too for us and our mission is that I think we're getting tired of non-Native peoples defining what Native art should be or who Native people should be. So, you know, I worked at the Field Museum for six years and that is an institution that is so grounded in that foundation of colonialism. It's a monument to colonialism. And they played a huge part in making those distinctions, right? In creating and contributing to racism, to contributing to just defining who we are and what we should be. And we're tired of that. And so, you know, that's why that's another very important thing in creating the center for Native futures and thinking about the future, right? Like, we have agency of our future or in our future and where we're going to go. And I want us to be unapologetic about that too. I, you know, like, I think the work that we're doing at Center for Native Futures and I joke too because, you know, we are trying not to be, and I, you know, I've had people come to us saying like, oh, you're building an institution. No, don't say that, please. We are not an institution. Yes, we are a nonprofit organization, but that's the structure that we selected just because we don't have money to start a business. And, you know, so nonprofit just gives us that opportunity to make sure that people are giving us money and that they're putting that money in the place where we know that we're going to do some good work with that. But I don't, I don't like calling us a nonprofit organization because we're not part of that, right? The NPIC, the nonprofit industrial complex. I don't want us to be a part of that. So I really push that we're a Native art space. We're a Native art space that's led by Native artists and we get to define collectively, right? Like, as a community, as a family, we can define and have an agency of, you know, what Native art is, who we are as contemporary Native people and where we're going to go in the future. Right, right. Frank, how is your, what's your contribution to the imagining of Native futures? Could you describe your practice and tell me where I can find those shoes? Yes, for sure. We'll start with the shoes. These are from Nike actually has a Native section called N7. They work with Native designers, Native people run the whole, the whole portion of the branch of Nike. So I performed out there in 2017 and they sent me these. They sold out, unfortunately. So if you ever want to get some really nice, you know, Native design kicks, N7's where to look. But I am a music artist. I'm primarily a music artist. I'm a music producer. I studied audio engineering at Columbia College. And I'm also your public speaker, somewhat of an educator. I do a lot of workshops and presentations. I have a couple of residencies at different universities right now. And I think, you know, whenever we talk about Native futurism, one of the things that just really sticks out in my mind, and it's very present in my work, it's present in all our work, is when it comes to Native art, it's not linear. Time is not existing in a linear fashion. That's a very western sense. And I think, you know, you could probably find examples in each of our art where for me, the past, we're invoking the past, the present and looking towards the future. And on the concept of futurism, another thing I'm thinking about is we've survived a genocide where over 99% of our people were lost, just numbers. We have nothing but the future to look towards whenever you're coming out of a genocide. So all everything we do is a futurism, I think, because that's all we've had left. Because everything that's our past, while we still have our past, but our reality has been so decimated because of colonialism. So I think about time existing in nonlinear fashion. And for me as a Native music artist, another thing I've done for those of you who are interested, through Deb, I've curated a music interactive exhibit at the Field Museum, centering around four of my Native flute songs. But you'll see in that exhibit that the past heavily influences my work, my culture heavily influences our work. And when Chinupa was talking about, you know, us not having the space to be our full selves, a concept I've been thinking about a lot lately as a Native artist trying to exist in a non-Native world, is I feel like we are playing chess and everyone's looking at us through a checker's lens. That's the only way they can, or we're like doing things in color and they only perceive in black and white. You know, when it comes to Indigenous culture and Indigenous art, because the genocide also dehumanized us and flattened our culture to a monolith and, you know, just so many things we're working against as Native artists. So how I contribute is through my music, through my performance, through my work, through my workshops and residencies. Also, awaking that future in everyone, because if you're black or brown, you came from a Native tribe and you probably don't have to go far that back in your family to find it. So these things that we're talking about in our art as Native artists also live in all of us, or in all of our DNA. So part of my job I feel like as a contemporary Native artist is awaking that in everyone through my work and showing that, you know, being Native comes down to just being a good human being and that goes back to our root, to our core, to our DNA. We're all human beings and that's what our ancestors were striving to do. So I'm glad we can come together and do it together and figure out a better future together. Thank you, Frank. I do really appreciate that. This notion of surviving a genocide, like, I like working in Indigenous futurism and once again, this is like a term that it's like, I don't know, a search, like a search parameter on the internet. But like, I don't know, futurism scares me. Like, anyism, honestly, scares me, you know. There is, it all ends up reducing itself to fascism, you know, like this idea that you control a, you know, authoritarian, like this is the way. I like opening up the paths to multiple ways. And I like that because we're all Native people, we have the room to contradict one another, you know. And in that space, I would like to bring a contradiction, which is we haven't lost anything. That we perceive that and we can live in the trauma of that loss. But simultaneously, those lives are here. They're on this landscape. They become the fertilizer because they were cut down early. But from that space, from that blood, from that loss, there was still the land. And this is trauma that I'm trying to like negotiate, which is this growing up with this sense of loss, mess me up, you know. Everywhere I went, I saw the absence of us in those places. And I think it's really important to understand that what we have here in this place is an incredible privilege, which is this belonging, you know. And that those lives are not gone, they're transformed, you know. Once again, this contradiction of power or energy, you know. The energy can never be created nor destroyed. The energy exists. And we can pull from that, you know, and remember those sorts of things. And I run to this because we're talking about the Field Museum. I'm thinking about some of the privileged spaces that I've been, you know, access to, which are like museums, right. These systems of where preservation is the model. And like the only preservation I'm really interested in is those pickles. Like that's the preservation I'm interested in. I think beyond that, everything else is maintenance, you know. How do we maintain that? How do we learn from that? And what is our responsibility presently to pull from those ethers, pull from those spaces? Even our relatives trapped in museums, whether it's remains or objects, in those objects, it's not the thing. It's the information. It's the story. And, you know, this information idea, when I see, I had the privilege of going and looking at Mandan pottery, which there's no one doing it presently. And seeing that material in those spaces, my impulse is like, how can I ever let this go? I need to take this home, you know. But what I realized was seeing it, feeling it, understanding it, understanding how it's made, that's why it exists. And I got stuck with the idea that it's an object. And it's not an object. It's a vessel for information. And those can't be housed in museums. Those can't be housed in institutions. Those are housed in us, in all of us. And that's the future space I'm excited about. So I noticed that we have just a few minutes left. But there is no loss. I mean, I think we misunderstand what that means. Because, you know, we have things living in our DNA. It's there. If we listen, I remember my uncle telling me once that if you just, like, if you stop, if you just really stop and you listen, the answers are there. And you just have to know what those answers, when they come to you, you have to know that that's the answer, right, for what you're looking for. So there is no loss. We just really need to listen. And we just, you know, we need to take that time. And I think we're just so always in a rush, in a hurry to do things, to get things done, that we don't take that time to stop and just like, you know, do that self-reflection. Because that's where it is, right? It's in that self-reflection. So language is not lost. You know, languages aren't endangered if there's even one speaker, right? That one speaker can still teach. And yeah, like, there's so much information in like, you know, these things that these museums have that maybe we don't need the object, the item. We just need access to that data that's within those items, right? So it's all there. Final word. Perfect. Lots of good answers. Thank you all. Thank you for this panel. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone for being here. It's been a long, intensive, extremely beautiful, inspiring day. We have really practiced something together. I feel very confident of that. And sometimes the thing about practicing is it's actually a jogging of the memory, a jogging and a recalling and a remembering that actually those of us for whom time is linear are actually the very, very tiny minority. Our people knew and know that time is cyclical and mycelial and all of these things. So sometimes it's a little bit of the remembering, the recalling. It's usually in the body. It's there. So I want to thank you all for doing this, for practicing with us. Between presenters and participants, there were about 70 people here today. So really, those are 70 seeds. It really feels that way. I heard it, the threads between the presentations. Tracy, you weren't even here earlier. There was a whole seed metaphor going on. It was there. You brought it. So something about this room, I have to say, it's self-selecting in the most beautiful way we needed to be here together. And we hope that those seeds will go forth and move and travel like dandelion seeds. Now we invite you to please join us. We're going to have a drink. We have dinner as well. And we will have the debut DJ set by Imani Olu, who's going to be performing something with us in this space here. So thank you so much again.