COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
INDIGENOUS CULTURES INSTITUTE
I am the Indigenous Cultures Center Coordinator for the Indigenous Cultures Institute, leading our multi-million dollar initiative to establish an Indigenous Cultures Center in Hays County, TX. This center would be the first of it’s kind, and would conserve our lands, protect our waters, and provide a permanent educational and ceremonial space for our community and future generations. The Indigenous Cultures Institute produces an annual summer camp which invites young people in Central Texas to participate in an indigenous arts-based learning environment. Through community-building activities and hands-on learning, participants learn about the arts of their ancestors and reconnect with their indigenous heritage. By the end of each week, participants have devised an original interdisciplinary event that highlights their newly learned indigenous arts practices, including Native flute, ceremonial dance, and identity performance.
I served as a teacher in the camp beginning 2012, then as camp director, and finally as Education and Outreach Director of the Institute through 2016. In this role, I worked with elders, teachers and artists to create a culturally-sustaining and creatively engaging curriculum for indigenous youth.
To learn more about the Indigenous Cultures Institute, visit:
Be sure to also read about our initiative to establish an Indigenous Cultures Center.
THE PERFORMING JUSTICE PROJECT
The Performing Justice Project (PJP) uses a performance-building process to devise original theatre that engages young people in imagining and enacting gender and racial justice in their own lives and communities.
During the summer of 2015, I co-facilitated a spoken-word performance workshop for incarcerated young women in the PJP program. The pieces that the women wrote and performed went on to be included in their final performance for the community.
Following this project, PJP invited me to create short informative videos to help articulate this work. The first video is a 2014 PJP project at a local Austin high school. The second video highlights the final performance that the 2015 ensemble created, using elements of their spoken-word poems. Given that the young women are incarcerated, I was asked to illustrate this project without revealing their faces, and thus, their identities.
DIGITAL STORYTELLING
This project combines two forms of art that I work within: Spoken Word and Digital Storytelling. As an applied theatre artist, I believe it is a necessary part of the community-building process to open up to participants just as I am inviting them to open up to one another. As a facilitator,I share my art with participants before I ask them to share themselves with me. Additionally, this helps establish the groundwork for participants before digging in.
The first video I'm sharing with you is a personal digital story that I created, titled The Color of Me. After creating this, I took this story with me to show participants for whom I would be co-facilitating a digital storytelling workshop. The participants, adult English language learners at Austin Community College, then created a group digital story which highlighted their unique journey into learning English. This digital story is called Snapshots From the Linguistic Borderlands, as each participant offers a snapshot into their lives.