-One of the things that I love about your work in the scale is the way in which you fuse this ancient, artistic medium of ceramics with technologies and digital bells and whistles.

-You got it.

-What are these almost horn-like looking things, but it looks like a piece of headgear?

-They're cyborgs, so half human, half machine, so they have a lot of the communication that are stuck to their heads.

I'm just thinking about the headdresses that we have in as far as regalia, interpreting that as a feature look.

With all the different shows that I do, we try to release a storyline.

I try to incorporate as many mediums as I can just to envelope the viewer and help them understand more of what my message is.

Bringing in video aspect of it, I always think of it as a storyboard for the end result, which is a feature film.

-I love being in this space.

It's both sort of relaxing, and energizing at the same time.

-Right, right.

-There's a great and intriguing mixture of imagery that you see as you're flying over the earth.

-The sites are chosen to paint the beauty, to paint the aftermath of humanity, and also to frame the fact that the earth will continue spinning.

When I think of a future, I think of all the layers of past, present, history, culture, spirituality, government, war.

I think about sifting through all of that to demand the right to exist.

[music] -When the Art & Science Collide theme was announced for the next PST, it really seemed like a fantastic opportunity to do a show focused on Indigenous futurisms.

Contemporary art is one of the most exciting ways to do cultural preservation because it makes it seem relevant.

-I've always been a sci-fi fan since I was maybe six or seven years old, just being influenced by the first Star Wars trilogy.

That influenced a lot of what I do, how I do my work.

-I love The Mandalorian, Star Wars, anything that creates a world beyond one planet.

-All the new Dune movies are very exciting to us.

-Science fiction is a language, I think, that we all can understand and that is widely appealing to people of all ages.

It's using the universalizing powers of science fiction to tell an important story in a way that makes it seem powerful today while holding lessons for the future.

-Let's go see if we can just drape this on really quick.

Let's just do like a side, here's half of it.

A lot of my costuming and the ready-to-wear clothing, we manufacture in downtown Los Angeles.

Then we can just mimic the drape of it, bring that side back over.

Within my exhibitions, I always try to mix sci-fi with the historic work that I do.

Each specific design has a meaning behind it.

This is the pattern that we're working on for the Recon Watchmen characters.

The background, what you see... all the characters at the Sirens & Sikas exhibition, you'll see them that we're making them out of silk chiffon and also out of pure silk.

This is how we start.

This next design is called the V-Maze design.

I made it look like a maze, and it's also a huge prayer that I incorporate it to all the different garments.

We're going to start making the garments with using a muslin fabric before we cut the actual material.

-Regalia itself is also a cultural art form that morphs.

It is itself something that is constantly evolving, responding, adapting, and conforming to new situations, new worlds, new traditions.

It also is important to have regalia for the future.

Indigenous people are going to be in the future.

Why would they not have a future for fantastic regalia?

Indigenous people have been written out of the present by art for so long that futurism is an especially powerful way of constructing a more just and sustainable future.

-I paint with pixels, and I deal with a lot of post-humanity in my work.

In the installation Glitch in Perpetual Time, there's a spaceship called the Nebula Rave Cruiser.

-Step on board the Nebula Rave Cruiser today as we enjoy one last ride.

-Which is essentially a dance club that travels around the Earth and throughout the solar system, soaking in the beauty of the planet and giving humans and humanoids an opportunity to experience it one last time before it becomes unsustainable for humanity.

-It pushes back against the idea that “apocalypse is a world-ending scenario” because of course, indigenous peoples have been, living in a post-apocalyptic world since 1492 in many ways.

-Our art is often tokenized through this historic lens.

For me, the use of emerging technology is integral to my practice of challenging those tropes.

I shift between mediums that can articulate a reality.

I don't even consider myself a video artist.

It just happens to be the medium that tells the story.

The slogan for the Nebula Rave Cruiser is “One Last Ride”.

It's up to the participant, up to the viewer to take part, this one last dance party.

I really wanted to play off of the imaginary and paint an immersive reality, where you could be placed into the story and be the main character.

My two daughters are dancing in jingle dress, their actual regalia that they dance with, in prayer, and in their dancing, really painting the fact that the story goes beyond my generation.

It goes beyond their generation.

I think we're at a precipice.

I think we're at a point of no return.

As an artist, I'm grappling constantly with the notions of what futurity looks like.

When you start to think about this notion of a point of no return, then you start to think about what you're doing presently, every single step, every breath, how you are contributing to our ultimate demise as a humanity on this planet who are trying to create portals of hope.

-I feel there's two reasons in my life why I'm here, and it's to educate globally about the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, but also to make sure that our clay work does not die out.

It's a dying art form at the moment.

Maybe there's like maybe five families at Cochiti left doing this type of artwork.

I'm trying to revive all the clay works that our people in Cochiti Pueblo do, utilizing the same methods and materials that we've always used, but also bringing in the storyline of our 1680 Pueblo Revolt.

It's not taught in schools.

It's not in our history books.

It's trying to educate globally about what happened to our people, the invasion by the Castilians to indigenous lands.

-One of the other things I love about this installation is the landscape.

This immense, vast, super dramatic setting.

-Growing up in the Pueblo, you definitely know what your favorite places are on the Pueblo, and I want to introduce the people who see any of my exhibitions to the clay mother.

You can feel the power of it, whether it or not, but that's a lot of it of the actual clay mother coming through and speaking to a clay piece.

-At the root of everything is a story.

The stories vary depending upon the artist's lived experience.

-I specifically designed 19 groups of characters that represent the 19 different Pueblos that are in New Mexico.

The pieces that are in this show are the Sirens & Sikas and also the Recon Watchmen.

The reason why I designed this type of work is just to reach out to the next generation, make it exciting for them.

I think I'm lucky as an artist because storytelling is really huge within the Cochiti community.

Our language is not written, it's only we learn it by just speaking it and being on the Pueblo.

-The stories, of course, are not necessarily new.

They speak to the past as easily as they speak to the future, and in fact, the past is an important component of indigenous futurisms.

It's really art that channels the past to reimagine the future.

New technologies are very effective at that.

-Our apocalypse happened, and that we were able to survive, we were able to remain here.

That in itself gives you a lot of power as a people.

-I hope to see the world acknowledge who we are as indigenous Pueblo people, acknowledge us, who we are, we're still here, living, thriving, creating.

We were here then, now, and forever.