Missing Indigenous is a seven-minute film which personalizes the heart wrenching epidemic of Native American women going missing. NACF is proud to support its first international screening.
Santa Fe, N.M. – November 18, 2016 – New Mexico musicians and bands Innastate, Native Roots, Joy Harjo, and Def-I have taken action to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline by creating a…
In Native communities and indigenous thinking, water is much more than a resource. Water is part of the “body” of the universe and Mother Earth. It covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface and also is the major make-up…
After eight years of creative visioning, planning and community engagement Postcommodity’s “Repellent Fence” (or Valla Repelente, in Spanish) goes airborne connecting the lands north and south of what is today the U.S./Mexico border. The installation, which launched October 10th, involved 26 scare-eye balloons tethered to the Sonoran Desert ground, that spanned a two-mile stretch and physically and metaphorically created a direct line of communication between communities and their many stakeholders. Repellent Fence is one of NACF’s Community Inspiration Program Pilot Projects.
I believe there is a benefit of arts and cultures that has not been written about nor studied enough in more intentional ways, although it has gained value in arts and philanthropic circles in the past few years. This is the value of arts and culture as a social change tool. The head of a social change organization and one of the national proponents of social change and the arts had this to say: “The single most powerful social change tool in the world is arts and creative expression. There is nothing that transcends barriers across language, economics, cultures, and place in a way that engages people and community like arts and cultures can. Nothing (emphasis) is that powerful.”
In my lifetime, I have not seen this level of racial discrimination and hatred in our country since the 1960’s and early 1970’s. As a very young girl, too innocent to understand what was going on, but intuitive enough to know that something very wrong was happening, I remember seeing on national television these horrific images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on the demonstrators in Birmingham, the violence at the Pettus Bridge in Selma, and the burning neighborhoods of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. These images from Alabama and California flashed on TV screens across our nation and stayed with me for a long time.
Art collective Postcommodity is completing three projects with the publics of the Tohono O’odham, U.S. and Mexico nations exploring experiences along the U.S./Mexico border, including the Tohono O’odham tribal boundaries which pre-date the political border that currently separates communities.
