Yve Chavez - Böcker

Examines how Native artists kept their culture alive by creatively adapting under colonial ruleBetween 1769 and 1823, the Franciscans established twenty-one missions in California, colonizing the ancestral territories of many Native communities between present-day Sonoma and San Diego. In Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture, Gabrieleno Tongva scholar Yve Chavez highlights how these communities preserved their cultural practices amid colonial oppression. Rooted in Chavez’s ancestral homeland and the neighboring Chumash region in coastal Southern California, her book focuses on Mission San Gabriel, Mission San Buenaventura, and Mission Santa Barbara. Recasting these sites as spaces of Native cultural heritage, Yve Chavez examines how Indigenous artists resisted assimilation while accommodating foreign ideas into their established practices.Drawing on Indigenous knowledge and art historical research of performance and regalia, basketry, sculpture, and architecture, Chavez demonstrates how Native artists navigated colonial power structures, ensuring the survival of their customs during the mission era and beyond. Rather than replacing Indigenous identity, the missions became spaces through which Native people asserted their connection to the landscape and its resources. This analysis not only recasts mission art and architecture within an Indigenizing framework but also serves as a vital resource for understanding the ongoing significance of these sites for the descendants of mission survivors.

Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices.Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists. Contributors address indigeneity in the United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean in scholarly essays, poems, and artist narratives. Missions, cemeteries, archives, exhibitions, photography, printmaking, painting, installations, performance, music, and museums are documented by fourteen authors from a variety of disciplines and illustrated with forty-three original artworks.The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future. This powerful collection of voices employs Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial strategies, providing essential perspectives on art and visual culture.T. Christopher AplinEmily ArthurMarwin BegayeCharlene VillaseÑor BlackYve ChavezIris ColburnEllen Fernandez-SaccoStephen GilchristJohn HitchcockMichelle J. LanteriJÉrÉmie McGowanNancy Marie MithloAnne May OlliEmily VoelkerRichard Ray Whitman