{Adaptation}
Her face is Spanish lace. {Adaptation} is in conversation with complex post-colonial identity. It
represents familial connection to cultural practices of white washing that stemmed from overt
violence against personhood and place in the Southwestern United States. Governmental systems
of indigenous disenfranchisement such as Presidios which were supported by the forced
indigenous labor of the missions. What I call the colonial apparatus in function, as closed loops
of detrimental control. The work is in critical conversation with the construction of race in the
united states due to forced Eurocentric ideas of personhood and place.
My great great grandmother was born in Raton New Mexico in 1881, her daughter my great
grandmother was born in the same town in 1908. My grandmother was born in Raton 1934. We
are Diné, Spanish Colonized Jicarilla Apache women. My mother and I were both born in
California. We as a collective female whole are complex contradictions. The work speaks to this
contradiction of self and the generational trauma that the colonial apparatus has burdened us
with. I make this work in hopes of finding healing as I reclaim what was lost and speak to
families survivance.