Blacklist Me
By Emily Clarke
The Chapter House is an Indigenous woman-led nonprofit striving to create space for Indigenous art, collaboration, and protest. The Chapter house believes that although protest is crucial to the fight for Indigenous rights, there are few off-reservation spaces for Indigenous people to form communities around protest and protest art, therefore their mission is to provide that space. They host Indigenous art events and performances, weaving and beading classes, and wellness workshops on the traditional Tongva lands of Los Angeles. There is always laughter, connection, and lots of piccadillies at every Chapter House event, and the “BlackList Me” performance and exhibit on October 20th included all of these things.
Blacklist Me is a virtual exhibit that will be showcased on The Chapter House website. It is inspired by themes of memory, censorship, and what music means to Native people as a collective. The Chapter House collaborated with popular writer, artist, and public figure Kinsale Drake (Diné) to create a series of events and programming for the Blacklist Me exhibit.
“The exhibit will be up for about two months starting in November, and there will be pop-up programming throughout the Los Angeles area,” Kinsale says.
The event on October 20th was the first planned programming for Blacklist Me and served not only as a celebration of Indigenous expression, music, and poetry, but also as a way to kick-off the Blacklist me show. Junior High LA, a local arts nonprofit, hosted the event in their beautiful Glendale gallery space. The exhibit and performances were inspired by Kinsale’s poem, “Blacklist me,” which she says is about “Native music, censorship and de-centering a Western canon of Native literature and music.” Kinsale handed out free Zines at the event which included her own work as well as poems, visual art, and musical playlists created by other Native artists all centered around similar themes and accepted as part of the Blacklist Me curation. There were also a handful of vendors at the event including set-ups by Moon Baby Medicine (tea, medicine, etc.) and Solange Aguilar (Zines, art, etc). One of the walls of Junior High was decorated with a beautiful, tactile art installation entitled “Big Wheel/Little Wheel” made by artist Rya Drake-Hueston as one of the many physical artworks accepted to the Blacklist Me curation. The highlight of the night, however, were the powerful performances by Solange Aguilar, Kelly Caballero, Nanibaah, and myself.
Solange Aguilar (Mescalero Apache and Yo’eme) is a queer, Indigenous, and Filipinx multimedia artist and poet working out of Qenepstin Chumash territory. Solange’s work focuses on the revitalization of Indigenous culture, uplifting and supporting kin, and celebrating beauty and intimacy. Solange is the author of various zines including “Alternatives to White Sage, Palo Santo, Cedar, Sweetgrass, and Copal,” which focuses around non-appropriative usages of herbs and plant medicine. Two of Solange’s poems were included in the “Blacklist Me” Zine, and they read a handful of poems about Indigenous reclamation, beauty, vulnerability, and culture to kick off the evening.
Kelly Caballero (Gabrielino Tongva, Chicana) is a poet and songwriter. Her work showcases Indigenous people’s relationship to place and land through her experience as a Native woman. Much of Kelly’s work is inspired by the land, the ocean, and Indigenous rights. Kelly gave a musical performance at the Blacklist Me event complete with original songs and ukulele music.
Kelly says, “Performance through music and poetry are some ways in which I share my culture and experience with others while also working to educate people on intersecting identities.”
I first met Kelly at a poetry reading and we continued to cross paths in the writing-world, so this was my first time hearing her music live. The audience seemed to connect to Kelly’s vulnerability and even Kelly herself noted that the performance felt more like an “intimate jam session” with friends.
I was the third performer of the night. I read four poems, three of which were works about Native rights, specifically the California Mission system, erasure, and the harmful effect of stereotypes. Much of my work in the past has focused on Native history and though these poems were often written from a personal perspective, they were not poems about “me” per se. Because of this, the fourth poem I shared at Blacklist Me was a new work about abusive relationships, violence, and specifically my experience interacting with men as a Native woman. I had a blast sharing with the audience as well as connecting with the other Native artists at the event and I know the future Blacklist Me programming will be just as exciting and meaningful.
Nanibaah (Diné), who was the fourth and final performer, is a Southwest based vocalist who brings a soulful sound to the stage. Nanibaah says it is her unique upbringing that inspires the blends of Jazz, Neo Soul, and Hip Hop of her music. She recently recorded an album with Earth Surface People and even performed a song from it at the Blacklist Me event. Nanibaah’s music seemed to command the space, and there wasn’t an audience member who wasn’t entranced by her sound. Nanibaah’s performance was the perfect ending to a night full of art, music, community, and Native expression, and afterwards, as more piccadillies and tea were passed around, the messages each performer’s work represented seemed to leave with the crowd and spread throughout the city of Los Angeles.
