yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective
2017-2023
co-finding and -running an organization
Photo by Sunita Martini
In 2017, a colleague named Asia Tail (Cherokee) and I, with Tracy Rector (Choctaw, Black) (who served as co-organizer from 2017-2019) started an organization called yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective. An urban Native and Indigenous women-led arts nonprofit, our mission was to help improve Indigenous mental and emotional health outcomes through art-making, community building, and equitable creative opportunities for personal and professional growth.
Photo by Jenny Crooks
yəhaw̓ was initiated as an arts pop-up project with over 20 regional sites and 50 events that culminated in a inaugural exhibition at Seattle’s biggest gallery: King Street Station, in 2019. Using an “everyone’s in” curatorial ethos, we invited all Indigenous creatives living in the region to participate, holding countless application workshops and doing outreach on reservations and in urban areas for two years before closing the application to ensure we could get broad representation of Indigenous artists in our region. Everyone who applied using the simple, universal application was immediately accepted not just to the show, but was also considered for paid mentorships, paid residencies, and other opportunities that I had assembled by calling in every favor and expending all the social capital I had garnered in my years in the Pacific Northwest art scene. At the end, we gave 50 artists paid residency opportunities, had a fashion show, got art supply gift cards for hundreds of artists, did three paid mentorship cohorts in three different cities, and drove a Uhaul around the state to pick up artwork for those who couldn’t afford to ship it. The main exhibition at King Street featured artworks from over 200 intergenerational and multi-tribal artists, the youngest being 3 and the oldest being 94. We had Whitney Biennial artists showing alongside traditional jewelry makers from the reservation. It was an expansive, beautiful, and groundbreaking exhibition, as evidenced by an opening that had a record breaking attendance of over 3,000 people.
Photo by Jenny Crooks
After the show, we continued the work by partnering with every organization that approached us and responding to every email we received from an Indigenous artist asking for help. Our inboxes were flooded, and we were busy. Between 2015 and 2020, we gave out over $2 million worth of funding and opportunity to almost 500 Indigenous artists. It was deeply rewarding but also exhausting work. We weren’t paying ourselves, we weren’t taking breaks, but I felt an obligation to continue to make space for global Indigenous and Native artists in our region.
Photo by Trevor Dykstra
On top of this work, I had a new full-time job at the City of Seattle, I was often adjuncting at institutions like University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts, and I had my own arts career, with solo presentations at Open Engagement in Chicago (2017), The White Pube in the UK (2019), and Oxbow Gallery in Seattle (2020). In short, I was running myself into the ground and in complete denial about it.
But even then, I knew I needed something to give. Remembering that the outdoors was always an entity that had encouraged me to slow down and made me feel healthier and stronger, I proposed a change to the organizational structure. In 2020, in the height of early Covid longdowns, as I began many years of suffering with severe symptoms from what I now know is long Covid, with the help of co-organizer Kimberly Deriana (Mandan and Hidatsa) I became obsessed with the idea of buying undeveloped land within Seattle city limits where artists could meet on a sovereign, easily accessible parcel.
Photo by Trevor Dykstra
I imagined that it would serve as a low-risk place where Indigenous artists could easily begin a conversation with the earth and feel a sense of kinship with land. My long term goal was to cultivate a strong network of artists that were invested in reciprocal care (both between each other and the land) within an environment of trust and self determination. I also imagined myself on the land, creating trails, weeding for hours, being amongst the bugs, the trees, the birds. My co-founder wasn’t convinced. This was something so radically different from what we had been doing thus far. Our initial idea had originated with the thought of making space for Indigenous artists within institutions that we had historically been denied access to. What I was proposing was a complete turning away from the institutional model to lean into a model of art-making and -showing through a lens of Indigeneity.
To my co-organizers, who came from more financially and educationally privileged and institutionalized families, this turning away seemed to feel mostly unfamiliar and scary, if also exciting. With my own background, which I increasingly see as a strength, it felt natural. More importantly: it felt like something I needed, that my mind and body was craving. So I ignored the hesitations and doubts of those around me and, between 2020 and 2022, I applied to dozens of grants, outlining all of my programmatic ideas for the land purchase while simultaneously visiting over 20 parcels within South Seattle that were vacant or for sale. In this time, I was awarded a Roddenberry Fellowship (2022), had an exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery (2022), and exhibited an artist book at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2021).
Photo by Sunita Martini
Somehow, through all of this, I was able to identify a parcel and, miraculously, raise $1.96 million for its purchase. This process involved fighting off developers for ten months who wanted to clear the land and build ten luxury homes in the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in South Seattle, getting community support through handwritten letters and door-to-door knocking on foot, and getting the help of some rich white hippies who didn’t want to see trees cut down. It was a long, arduous process that taught me more than any other experience in my life, but it also came at a high cost.
Balancing a full-time day job with nonprofit work and a robust arts career, while continuing to mostly ignore my health issues finally came to a head. Over the course of a year, I got several diagnoses of chronic autoimmune health conditions, including c-PTSD. I had surgery to get my endometriosis excised after the pain became debilitating and disabling. Two weeks after we finally closed on the land and signed the documents that made it ours, one of my doctor told me, “If you continue down this road, you will probably die.”
Either the work that we were doing needed to dramatically shift, or I did. But despite our mission being about uplifting Indigeneity, we had managed to model our organizational culture after imperialist capitalism. We worked too hard and paid ourselves too little while, in my opinion, not prioritizing open and honest communication with each other or our constituents. Now that we had the land, the organizational sense of urgency, the idea that we needed to work even harder to prove that we were worthy of stewarding this land, was strong, and I could not change it.
At this point, I had lived most of my adult life in a way that ignored all of my own bodily and emotional needs, partially due survival, and partially due to my belief, deep-seated since the days I had to pick things out of the garbage to make art, that I did not deserve to just make art. That it was not enough.
I didn’t want to live this way anymore. If the organization couldn’t change, I had to. And so I left, and I did.