(gro - [Announcer] Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(groovy music continues) (audience applauding) - [Christina] Welcome to the P My name is Christina Hamilton, the series dir Today we present "Somi Se'k, The Land of the Sun and the River of Spirits" with visual artist Carolina Caycedo, who will be joining us remotely from Portugal.

And together with us in person, guest filmmaker David De Rozas, and Tribal Chairman of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, or the Esto'k Gna people, Juan Mancias.

Today's event is presented in partnership with the Stamps Gallery and the exhibition, "Blessings of the Mystery," which will open this evening and with support from the Arts and Resistance Theme Semester and the U of M Arts initiative.

And of course, our series partners, Detroit Public Television, PBS bo and Michigan Radio 91.7 fm.

I also wanna welcome, we have a special extending a warm welcome to Stamps School alumni who are joining us in the house.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us here.

For some of you, this is to your time at school, for others, th when you were at school.

But thank you for your contin in the creative community here at Stamps.

You always have a seat in the house here.

We will have a Q and A today, but not here.

Instead, you can join our guests for Q and A and the opening reception of the "Blessings of the Mystery" This is directly following the stage presentation here.

The Stamps Gallery is just down the street and around the corner on Division.

So exit the theater to the right, go to the next corner and take a right and you will find yourself, be at the Stamps Gallery.

So please do remember to sile And to introduce our guest today, we do have Stamps Gallery director Srimoyee Mitra, gosh, wow, my pronunciation is off today.

Srimoyee, I'm sorry.

Srimoyee Mitra who will join u But first, we are going to take a moment as recognizing that we are on the territory of Anishinaabe people.

We will take a moment for a sp Please join me in welcoming Native American Studies Alphonse Pitawanakwat.

- Morning.

Bonjour.

(Alphonse speaking in foreign language) - [Srimoyee] Hello, everyone.

My name is Srimoyee Mitra and I'm the director of Stamps St amps Gallery is a public center for contemporary art and design at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.

At Stamps Gallery we work with contemporary artists and designers to explore ideas and projects that catalyze social change.

A commitment to social justice and social movements, informs our work and shapes our work, developing exhibitions public programs and publications with a goal to inspire new ways of looking, making, and thinking.

It is my honor today to introduce you to three incredible people.

Carolina Caycedo, a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally across venues Her practice and research focuses on the future of shared resources, environmental justice, energy transition and biocultural diversity.

David De Rozas, an award-winning filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist also based in LA, whose research and practice explored the politics of memory to conjure forms of collective resistance and restitution through cultural amnesia.

For a period of four or five years, Caycedo and De Rozas, starting I think in 2018, I made multiple visits from their home based in LA to Western Texas where they met Juan Mancias, the Tribal Chair of the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe of Texas.

Juan is the eldest born to a lineage of hereditary chiefs of the Carrizo Comecrudo.

His current work is invested in building resistance to the fossil fuel industry and border wall construction, on organizing efforts to assist asylum refugees and reclaiming and protecting his tribe's ancestral lands.

Over the past five years, Carolina, David and Juan have co to develop a paradigm shifting body of work entitled "The Blessings of the Mystery," which is currently opening tonight, this evening, at Stamps Gallery after making stops at Ballroom Marfa, the University of Texas at Austin, Ruben Center for the Visual Arts and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the University of California, Santa Barb This exhibition examines the colonial and extractivist economies through Somi Se'k cosmological consciousness and resistance against ongoing forms of exploitation.

So please join me in welcoming Carolina Caycedo, David De Rozas, and Juan Mancias.

- Hello, everyone.

Thanks so much for being h My name is David.

Thanks so much Sri Also, thanks so much the university for organizing this event.

And I'm not sure if Carolina is already with us.

- I am.

I am connected.

Oh, here I am.

- Hello, Carolina.

- - Maybe, I dunno, maybe you want to start the conversation - Sure, sure.

Well, thanks for organizing this, for everyone at the Stamps Gallery for installing and taking care of our work.

Thank you, Juan, and thank you Krista for being with us tonight and accompany in this proces And David, hi.

Thanks for being here too.

So my name is Catalina Caycedo.

I'm a Colombian vi I am based in LA and today I'm joining you fr So excited to be here in conversation with Juan and with David.

And perhaps we can start with the first slide.

I wanted to start sharing a little bit about David and myself's process.

We are partners and we support each other's work.

I have collaborated and supported David's film work in different capacities and the same from his side to me.

David is a filmmaker, but has also a artistic And we have collaborated a number of times.

However, a number of years ago we were invited to visit Somi Se'k, which is the Esto'k Gna name for Texas, for their territory, for their ancestral homelands.

And we started a conversation with David.

And one of our first impressions by visiting the Semi Se'k was to learn that it is mostly in private hands.

So the State of Texas is, if I'm not wrong, approximately 95% it is in private hands.

And coming from a State like California or even from Columbia where I'm from and even in Spain where David is from, from the Basque country where there's kind of a free even through public lands to access, sorry, through private lands to access public lands or you know, like one of the first things they told us in Texas is like, "If you're in the highway, stick Don't even think about crossing a fence or like roaming into private property because it's not safe.

It's not the custom here."

And suddenly we found ourselves kind of secluded to the highway and driving, you know, through these roads and in this amazing territories, but not able to walk through it or visit it or be close to it in the way we wanted.

And that as a first impression started our curiosity about how this had happened.

And maybe you can move to the next slide.

And started learning how processes of serving, mapping, cartography, and eventually land division and the selling of these plotted lands had been and continues to be instrumental in land grabbing processes, privatization of the natural world.

And kind of became instrumental also to contemporary processes of land extraction.

And we understood that processes thinkulated to the oil industry such as the construction of oil wells, the construction of what?

Liquified natural gas, it's called, the construction of pipelines across the territo and even the construction of the border wall, you know, are contemporary ways of colonial unfolding, right, that coloniality in this territory and in whole territories really has n but continues to unfold in these different ways.

And so out of these experiences, we started visiting and kind of triangulated the project and the body of work that you will hopefully see at Stamps later tonight around three locations that we understood as key places in this territory of Somi Se'k where ancestral knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge and settler colonial knowledge is produce continues to be produced and clashes.

One of them is the McDonald Observatory in Mount Dav the other is the Amistad Dam over the Rio Grande, and that functions as actually a border infrastructur not only as a water infrastructure, but it's a border.

It's a binational infrastructure between Mexico and the United States.

And that dams waters of the Rio Gran the Pecos and the Devil's Ri which is the largest oil field and gas field, in the United States and one of the largest in the world.

So in this drawing that you will see in the exhibition called " is a very, very personal cryptography of David and my experience in whi and this field work and these visits to Somi Se'k territories.

And you can see the mayor bodies of water, these three locations too.

And also some of the historical industries that have extracted this land from cattle ranching to the construction of the dam, to the oil fields, to the pipelines construction.

But in this drawing, there is also traces and representations of the contemporary resistance to this extraction, but also the ancestral resistance to this extraction in the form of the biodiversity of the region and also in the form of the very, very old pictographs that you can find along the canyons of the Rio Grande River or the River of Spirits and the Pecos and the Lower Pecos and the Devil's Ri So this territory is one of the largest repositories of mural, pictographs of rock paints, some of them thousands of years old, all the way to contact that hold very old languages and very old messages and very old teachings.

And we will talk about these teachings further down the talk, but I don't know if David wants - No, I was thinking that perhaps Juan, you would like to speak about Somi Se'k and Somi Se'k relationship to the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe and yourself.

- Being born and raised in the lifeways of our people, we recognize that there's a lot of connection with the extractive oil that's happening, even with the so-called wall of water, because the Rio Grande is the water and they can build So in some places about three miles away.

And the impression that they are trying to stop and this war against drugs, especially with fentanyl, I keep hearing all of that stuff happening.

But there's so many places that, they're actually just coming across the bridges because of the corruption there is with the law enforcement that's there.

And I think they're even setting up an area to where we're calling now no man's land, that's the only jurisdiction will be under the Homeland Security and the CBP.

But at the same time they're going through some of these sacred sites and we're from coming through these areas.

And then if you can see where th through that area now that we've got, I've been doing this for a long time, fighting the incinerators, fighting plastics, fighting the protection of the wildlife in the area in some areas.

And it's important because we have a connectedness to that.

What I believe is, not what I believe, what what I know is how they, and I have to say this real slow, disanimate.

And that means that they take the life out of things so they can go and do whatever they want.

And that's exactly what they're doing with what's happen who refused for a long time to get federally recognized.

And now that they're wanting to get us federally recognized, we're looking at issues with the disconnection that they have to everything that is, you know, that belongs in Somi Se'k along the Esto' We call ourselves the Esto'k Gna which means the human persons.

And as you go up and down this river, you'll find that we had connections all the way to the only one place that was sedentary along the river.

It was called Punta de Sol.

And that's where the three, where Devil's River and, up in this area, where Devil's River and the Pecos and also the Rio Grande, where they flow into the Rio Grande.

So now with all the extractive stuff that is happening out there, fossil fuels, we got three major oil deposits or petroleum deposits.

One is the Permian Basin and the other one is the Eagle Ford Shale, which is further toward San Antonio and runs right by Houston in between those two places.

And then we have the Bartons, the Shell, the Bartons deposits up in East Texas.

So you have a lot of extraction going on in Texas where they completely voided everything that was there because they've waived a lot of the laws.

And some of these companies, fossil fuel companies, go in there and they say, "We're gonna build an intrasta And all they gotta do is get a permit from the Texas Railroad Commission.

And there's no IES, there's no EAS, there' that are filled out, no historical thing that is done.

So they continue to do this without permission of the public and the people even in private lands.

And they call, that they can do it by imminent domain, at least Texas does here.

But I think there they can't It's gotta be something that the federal government has to giv but they're not getting those permits.

And these EISs and EASs to me are very imp because they actually have an environmental impact study and assessment study that makes them do, the history behind all of what's going on here.

And these are all, - Juan?

- Juan?

- Yes.

- Sorry.

Can you for those that maybe don't know what that is in th - EIS is an environmental impact study and EAS is a environmental assessment study.

And they all have to do with all of this that's going on.

And with the wall, when they put up the wall, started putting up the wall in 2005, they waived at 26 laws.

Now, they're up to 48 laws that they've waived.

And two of 'em were directed mainly to the Native American communities.

And that means all across, you know, not the Southwest.

And that was the NAGPRA, which is the Native American Graves Prote and also the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

So they were directed right at the native people again, trying to void out and make 'em like they didn't exist.

And so that's- - Can I interject really quick?

And Juan, and maybe this can take u to kind of the next theme that I wante and it's the way that we actually met Juan.

And we met Juan when he came to Los Angeles to a community center that doesn't exist anymore in East LA on Boyle Heights neighborhood called La Concha run by a group of feminist women, Latinx women.

And I had the opportunity and the blessing really, to attend this talk where Juan, together with other members of the tribe, were sharing with the community the protection that they were embodying against the border wall construction along the Rio Grande Valley at that moment.

And that must have been 2018, if I'm not wrong.

We had already conducted a number of visits with David to Somi Se'k but we didn't know about the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe or about the protection and the actions and the direct actions that were taking place along the border wall.

And in this talk Juan explained how they were claiming the land and liberating the land, or at least that's how we call it in Latin America, (speaking in foreign language) holding the ground where ancestral villages of the Carrizo have been along the border, along the Rio Grande, sorry.

One of them Jalui Village, which I understand mea And especially this one was a very important because it is the site of ancestral sacred sites and burial sites and also contemporary burial sites.

So maybe Juan can share a little bit about this direct action and these protections, how it took place, how long it took place, and what were the results.

I know you were tell and kind of ignored and trashed while this border wall construction was happe But maybe you can tell us more about how these actions developed and the results of these actions.

- Well, we were able to recognize that these places existed here along, what is Eli Jackson Cemetery, which is a state historical park.

And we were aware that this was also a Freedman Cemetery, but some of our people were buried in this cemetery here.

So we occupied this land for a year and a half, and we were there for a year and a half holding off the CBP until the funding ran out and we couldn't do anything else but just sit there and wait for them to come.

But we made them go around and we were able to file a lawsuit against CVP and Homeland Security to where the point that they have to report to us at least every 30 days of where they're going with this r While they were doing that, they found 16 down from where we were in Penitas and those other lands that my grandfather had told me to go and recover because those were our lands.

When he told me that, I though And the deed was that we were from that area.

And so as you go up the river, you find a lot of the Carrizo And now we just found another, a mountain that's called over by Sierra Blanca.

But all of this is still The CBP realized that they can't just run over our, so we won that NAGRA issue where they had to go around and do whatever they had.

We wanna stop them.

We don't need that wall ther because even now the S is trying to put those barriers in the river.

And just the other day another young baby died that got caught into that barbed wire that was there.

So this has been one of our main thoughts.

But we know that once they set up that wall, they are already planning to put up pipelines with CO2 two that will run up river to try and get more gentrification out of the area.

And of course they're always attacking the path of less resistance.

And that's where we find ou r people are not that well educated to what's going on there.

So they're buying into the An d the system right now is fossil fuels.

And their marketing is atrocious.

They lie all the time.

They are l those are false solutions.

And that's why we're looking at the false s that the government gets involved.

And I keep bringing it And I just wanna make sure that And they say, "Well, they have to get a permit from us for anything like that."

Right now there's two pi that are waiting to be put in.

One of them is the Rio Bravo that will go under that that barrier.

And don't call it a border wall 'cause it's not a border wall.

It's not at So it's gonna go under that and It's called the Saguaro Pipeline.

And that's the only time FERC or the federal energy, the federal regulatory, oh, I'm sorry, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gets involved in.

And they waived a bunch of questions and EIS information that needed to be used to stop one of the LNGs down there.

And now we've got a lawsuit against them as well.

But we're still in the fight and we're not gonna let anything happe And Garcia pastures right in that area as well.

This is all sacred land.

This is where people would Th ere is an inherent right to migrate among the people that lived along this river and they're being denied that inherent right.

- David, do you remember?

- Yeah.

- When we were, Oh, go ahead.

Go ahead - No, sorry.

I was th when the previous administration was building the wall, at the same time some individuals were also like building an additional wall in the private land.

It was kind of like a, I mean, well not crazy, but it was like a strange environment.

I was thinking on moving on with a presentation - But I wanted to add something re - Yeah, I wanted to add some For anyone that has been around that in post border, no, because the river under my understanding is not a border, is a connector, right, and has always naturally b between one side and the other and has been a and it has been a nurturing and a source of life.

And when it's a border is imposed, a geopolitical border is imposed over the river between the two countries to the extent that, for example, in places like El Paso, the river has been straightened to actua the visualization and the construction of the border, of the wall or of barriers.

And I remember very well being with Juan and with other members of the tribe in the village when the holding of the ground was happening, how it is really a completely militarized area.

Now you have all sorts of helicopters, you know, you have the DEA, you have the Border Patrol, you have the Texas Rangers, you have militias, just surveillance, you know, you have drones, you have, - Surveillance balloons, yeah.

- Balloons.

It's like so militarized.

But also to understand that this infrastructure is not only a security infrastructure, that is what, you know, kind of the general rhetoric about this infrastructure, is a security infrastructure so that unwanted people don't cross the border.

But it's actually also an oil infrastructure as Juan was explaining because there is an erasure and there's like to construct the wall, which is how Juan says, not taught completely at the border, which is the river.

But you know, some there's a completely grazing of the land to militarize the zone and you know, to put this crazy towers of cameras and surveilling and like very, very heavy flood lights.

And so this becomes a perfect place to build along these and to plan these pipelines, you know, because of the heavy surveillance.

But it's also water be cause a lot of the, what Like pumps that control and to give access to the water of the river for all the agriculture happening in the Rio Grande Valley also ar within this kind of militarized zone now.

So I think it's important to make a point that these infrastructures are not just a security one, this border wall, this wall construction, excuse me, you know.

And ther there's a Bush wall, there's an Obama wall, you know, every president has built a little portion of that fence, you know, is also an oil infrastructure and is also a water infrastructure.

So there are extractive infrastr And just to understand that the same pillars that hold extraction over the land are the same pillars that hold the extraction over our bodies, which is, you kn mechanized view of the world, kind of rape culture of like pillaging, and taking, and taking, and taking, and of course a patriarchal structur - Yeah.

Another of the while we were doing these project is learning about the many pictographs, Native American pictographs and murals located in Texas.

And I would like one if you would like to speak about them as part of your language and how these connects with prophecies.

- Well, so there's a long story on a lot of the pictographs that are there Like this one that you see up here right no it's called the, that's the You can't see it very well.

That's the moth man.

You can't see it ver But it's got wings there to your left, right there.

It looks just like that.

And you find these drawings only in Te I haven't seen them anywhere else.

There's three of 'em.

And one But if you count a lot of these things have teaching So you can see that there's five little stripes down at the bottom and showing the number of fingers that we have, which goes back to that teaching of the hands.

And you can see the sections in 'em as well.

And then you can look at this drawing and recognize the fact that we had kind of an entity with with a deer, which is Kedewe in our language.

And we made sure that even our blue deer woman who came and brought us the medicine in a way to survive, there's a story about the blue lady that the Spanish, you know, completely mistorted it.

But this is important for us here because there's a blue deer that brought us a way to And there's also the medicine wheel, not not the 16 spoke medicine wheel, but there's actually the four spoke or the four directions medicine wheel that you can find in several places in Texas.

And they denote our harvest dance.

And there's, all of this is connected to who we are as a people and to the dances that we have and how we're trying to fight this extraction.

This here is a lot, looks a lot like Houston, Texas or San Antonio or some of the large cities where they have torn away what is paradise and built these things that are massively destructive to e Everybody wants to be secure enough so they build, they live in these big large cities.

And to me, I always tell 'em this is garbage because it used to be paradise before in 530 years ago.

And I always tell people 530 years ago, our land was invaded.

And I just wanna know what where your science went wrong and ours wasn't working 'cause apparently we were surviving well and living well on the land?

Being part of the creation.

Not above it or below We didn't have dominion over it.

we weren't here to multiply and subdue.

We were here to live in balance with what was around us.

And I think people don't recognize that because we always give life to everything that's around us.

And we've taken that life out to destroy this.

And this is one of the other reasons that I've struggle with the SpaceX program and the guy Jeff Bezos up in Van Horn and his rocket program because I want to have an IES, Impact Environmental, sorry, Environmental Study and also an Environmental Assessment Study for Mars.

(audience laughing and applauding) Right?

- That's so interesting what, yeah, what you bring up because in a way, and for us, one of the things we grapple with in the body of work is this idea of the frontier, you know, and the portal to New World, to the unknown, to the wild, to the untamed, you know.

And it's Southwest very much has, you know, in the imaginary built also of this idea of the Wild West through film, through literature, through even art, you know through practices of eminent domain, but also, you know, of colonial settler practices.

And oh, it's, I can't remember.

David, give me a hand here.

- Manifest destiny?

- Manifest destiny.

Thank you.

- Yeah.

When the going out there into space and those life forms that better watch out 'cause we're comin that says a lot about the mentality of colonization of this country and the way that we think about things.

You better watch out 'cause I'm gonna take it anyway.

And it's all about me, me, me, I, I, I, and it's not about the group.

When we say about, W who are the people talking about?

What people are you because it's not i And I think that we need to look at And that's what's happening he And here you can see the flares that the fracking is doing.

And I welcome you to Texas and we'll be more than glad to take you on a week long toxic tour of what's really happening in Texas because you kno this is what's really happening where I grew up, where I used to go hunt, you know, and just be out in the wil And this is, a lot of the fracking flares that are there.

And you can see it, it was in the painting.

And that's us on the bottom.

That's the men doing that we do during our harvest dance.

And at the top is the woman's dance, whi And then you have the clans on the right side, on the far side.

Those are clans.

And you you can see everything that ke ep alive to survive.

- Yeah.

But how the site for this portal to and this towards the unknown, the wild now the outer space.

And you will see how this exploration that now these rockets and all these SpaceX and like launches into Mars, happening from Texas today, has its roots in processes of surveying, of cryptography, of land division, of halving and quartering.

And you know, and how those technologies, those western technologies of measurement, of land division and of land selling have been instrumental in land grabbing and extraction, not only in Southwest Texas and in Somi Se'k, but of course continues to be now even towards outer And these images, yes, go ahead.

- Even the place that where they call it they call it star base down there in Boca Chica at the mouth of the river, that's our c And he's tearing it all up, burning it with all his testing.

And he just put up a new rocket pa And on the other side, he has an what they call Resaca, which is a oxbow lake.

And those things is where he wants to throw and contaminate the earth in that area.

So that means that a lot of that water's gonna go out to the river.

And a lot of people go fishing, - So sorry.

- And that the poor man's beach b you don't have to pay to go out and sit in the beach or fish and be on that area.

And then of course the other one's gonna be affected is South Padre Island.

And if you've ne just wait till spring break.

Everybody wants to go to South But it's gonna be destroyed by these new LNGs that they're putting in there.

And hit SpaceX is always, you know, It makes a lot of noise, you know.

- Sorry David, can you go back to the slide where the pipeline is please?

And maybe David, you can tell us what we see in that image and then maybe, David, if you wanna tell us.

- Yeah, well basically this how the land looks like after a pipeline was or has been a placed or installed.

I dunno what is the specific word.

But you can tell that basically the land i and affecting well everything that is there.

But also as you can imagine like a pipeline that is carrying oil and gas, it is also like extremely dangerous.

And I know Juan, you're like,.

- Yeah, this is the Trans-Pecos that was put in by, yeah, Energy Transfer Partners.

And we took a stand there and several of our people were arrested before they even passed a no protest law.

I was at the Capitol when they were trying an d started singing while they were voting.

And I was escorted out of course.

But these are things that are important because right through there, they went th and they didn't care.

And then the and they would going under the river.

A lot of the subcontractor people were out collecting artifacts and 'cause a lot of peyote grows in this area.

So they really tore up a lo that a lot of the people that do the Native American Church all the way up here go down there to get this medicine And that's our way and it's legalized in Texas and to be able to do this, the Native American Chur And that's important to know.

But there's so much to misinformation out there that we have to start telling the story of what really happened in Texas.

And in Texas right now, they wanna get rid of the critical racial theory thing and making sure that people realize that they had nothing to do with the genocide of the Native Americans in Texas.

And we're to attest that we've been fighting th for that long on this kind of stuff.

They changed the names, they killed us, they moved us and they threw us across the river.

And whatever they wanted to do just to accommodate the lands that they wanted.

And this is - And Juan, maybe this can take us into your current protec I know you are protecting the land against two mega pipelines that are being p You're doing protection, land water protection, against these pipelines also about against the LNG harbor that we saw a little bit and space exploration.

So maybe you can go through the next slides and you can share a little bit w these three kind of spearheading activities.

- Also, yeah, I wanna thank you for not using the word protest 'cause w We're actually protecting our lands and preserving who we are in our life ways.

I don't call ours the culture 'cause culture is misused a lot.

This is the way I live.

We still live this w We still speak our language.

Ou So we try to fight these people according to our l and what we know because you can learn the language like I was telling Alphonse, but will you ever understand it?

And to understand it you in what's really happening.

And this is what's happening You have to immerse yourself And none of the other so-called trib are able to immerse into what's going on because they don't know those sacred sites or have a connection to it.

But this here is one of the bi 'cause the last rocket that he blew up, I've got pictures where he burned up quail eggs, a poor bobcat was killed from the flames.

And there you see the explosion that happened.

And in his contract with the government, he said that if there was an explosion, the diameter will only be three miles large.

And it ended up being over 12 miles, that even some of the lands that we have bought down in that area were damaged with deb And there was a lot of falling particles that fell into Brownsville area, the city of Brownsvill And of course is Port Isabel was there and South Padre Island are there.

They got pretty much a lot of the mess.

But again, it's not stuff that you hear 'cause they control that media.

And that's why he bought out Twitte But I'm on there all the time.

- It's like this, this radius of explos you know, within where these LNGs are planning and perhaps some of these pipelines.

Is that how I understand it?

- Ye - So, you know is once this othe oil infrastructure is there, if there's gonna be an it could be a major crime.

- Well, you see the containment tanks that are on here, imagine one three times as big as that.

They got two of those planned for liquified natural gas, LNG.

One is the Rio Grande LNG and the other one is the Texas LNG.

And Texas LNG is actually in to one of our sacred sites.

It's called Garcia Pastures.

It's a 32 village site.

All that area was a fishing area for us.

And the way we know that it's because the Sotol is growing in clum and that's where the people were making the nets.

'Cause if you know anything about Yucca or Sotol or Agave, they're very fibrous.

And you can make rope.

You cord And so that's one of the things that's important that people don't know about.

Because like myself, I grew up havi do some of that cordage and learning some of those things that were there.

And how we used that cordage even to make our homes to live in.

They were not permanent homes, they We never stayed in one place longer than a month.

And it was from one moon change to the other.

That's why the moon so significant.

And that's why in the story of t it's important to know that you have 28, you know, little joints on your hand and that counts for 28 days of the moon cycle, but there's more to that teaching.

So I think that when you see those hand prints in Texas, it's not saying that this is my signature, it's telling you this is how long I'll be away, this is how long I'm gonna be here.

And so that's one of the things that we rec about what's, what's happening with the things in South Texas right now.

But the one to your le The one to your left is we're gonna see a pasture, is in the Bahia and the one to your right is what they're planning to do on that area.

But just two features, - And can you tell u and kind of the protection that you are embodying there?

I understand you have bought part of the land.

You're in the process of sec which is absurd, you know, because like I know, and I've heard you talk in some of the teach-ins is that, you know we cannot be owners of the land.

Perhaps maybe the land has claimed to us, you know.

But the fact that we have to like buy it in order to preserve it.

Maybe you can speak more abo - Well, one of the things is being abl I think that what they wanted to do with a lot of our people was take our children, put 'em in their boarding schools and re And a lot of our people were hurting because of what happened there, especially th And in Texas, it was the mission schools.

Catholicism was one of the big things.

And it changed a lot of the ways that that we saw things.

And it colonized us to the point, I call it a missionization because that's really what happened, is they would look down on you because you were the person that had to cut feet or they would cut your hands off and you were always marked for the rest of your life as somebody that would not convert.

And it created a lot of the problems with how we see the land today.

And 'cause it's hard to talk about for me sometimes because it really bothers me and to the point where what is happen right now with Enbridge in Texas is that, they're trying to come in again through a pipeline called the Rio Bravo.

And they already put one up called the Valle And nobody's fought 'em except us because they went right through our lands.

That means that nobody else there understands where th I'm trying to remember the What was the question - No, go ahead, David.

- No, I think Carina was asking about these two new pipelines that they're like planning to build and how you are like resisting and protecting t - We've been very well in resisting it by shutting down four of the banks to the one that's called the Rio Grande, LNG.

They were all foreign banks from France and they all pulled out.

There was Macquarie still and there's one Japanese one that's And we're trying to get them out.

But the thing is, the four banks in might've pulled out of any kind of financial advisement to the LNG that's there that we wanna shut down 'cause it's the big one that's rea Their stocks have gone down a lot and basically because they don't have the backi But with Enbridge offering to put the pipe through there and offering them like $50,000 extra to try and get it going, we filed a lawsuit against the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission to stop them from doing anything else.

Because waived all the laws to give them the permission to do it.

'Cause they're trying to expedite i through the IRA of, you Th e Inflation Reduction Act.

So that's what we're trying to do is, we're not taking any other money for clim because they're also expediting more exporting LNGs and more extraction for fracking up in Texas.

So Texas is a, I don't know if you guys have ever.

Have you ever seen the new one with Wes Studi?

It's an old one now.

But if you get a chance, watch Robert Duvall in there.

He says they that have been massacred and he says, "It must have been Texans."

He says, "It is the And I'm going, "Oh, I don't know, you're right."

Because they wanted to get rid of us, they They don't want to recognize anybody in the State of Texas that are native because then it gives us native miner And so, it's kind of a strange thing that we have to deal with every day in Texas, especially when people are just ready to own their own culture.

But ours, we're still living in, so.

- And just wanna point, like for the Permian Basin, which is located is the one of the biggest oil and gas fields in the world after the ones in Iran and Iraq.

- And this is our reason is to protect our water.

There's an important part in Texas.

There's a couple of laws that prote and these guys are just taking the water because the property owners who have mineral are selling the water under their land to do the fracking.

There's no way to stop that because there's a law.

It's their minerals.

They can do whatever they want to.

So they're selling the water.

And because of the farming th ey have water rights, the rest of us don't.

So we have to get whatever's there.

So we're trying to change th So it's about changing the narrative of how people see things.

The other one was before it blasted.

That's the one that blew up.

Sorry.

(audienc - Well, we're about to meet our time.

So Juan, I'll let you give these final remarks or David, if you wanna add something.

- I just want, - so that folks, sorry, go ahead.

- I just that goes on a lot, but also i of the law enforcements in the area.

And one of the young ladies, her name was Claud got shot in the back of the head.

She was 20 years old She only wan and she was unarmed and she was running away from and they shot him.

The guy They didn't do anything, they did They just moved into So these things are happening in Texas as we along with babies being drowned.

- I would like to say like a thank you again for coming.

Let's continue the conversation at the Stamps Gallery.

Just to briefly introduce the exhibition, that you're going to find a centerpiece that is a film projection narrated by Juan And then surrounding that film, there's going to be like some pieces, different artworks, more like a drawings, a sculpture that kind of expand on the ideas Juan talks about in the film.

So, thanks again.

And we look forw (audience applauding) (audience chattering)