UCLA

This dissertation takes an emic approach to understanding collaborative processes between Native and Indigenous peoples and neoliberal institutions such as universities, design-studios, and museums using arts-based research and production methods and modalities of expression. Qualitative analysis of four auto-ethnographic examples represents an emergent interdisciplinary phenomenon that can be considered art (Clifford 1986: 3-4). Each chapter includes stories embedded within the auto-ethnographic account which reflects attributes of decolonial de-linking (Mignolo 2007) that Indigenous aesthetics perform through axiological innovations (Bang et al 2015). I analyze the embedded ethnographic data in which I am a participant, collaborator, ally, and interviewer, utilizing a decolonial framework to understand how aesthetics are expressed, understood and transgressed by Indigenous peoples to proclaim past, present and emerging worldviews (Topa & Narvaez 2022). As a critical and reflexive ethnographic methodology, I begin with a feminist standpoint theoretical analysis to account for my position as a Xicana Indígena (Zepeda 2022). Thus, I propose an embodied and distributed ethos for collaborating with Native and Indigenous people that I term rightful relations. Building on the framework defined as rightful presence (Calabrese Barton & Tan 2020) that is a justice-oriented political project, focusing on the processes of reauthoring rights towards making present the lives of those made missing. I emphasize the “rights,” that people have to assert themselves as Native and Indigenous peoples through the pursuit of aesthetic sovereignty. It is this pursuit of aesthetic sovereignty and self-determination that bears the potential to be transformative–it is this transformative power that rightful relations illustrate a dynamic within aesthetic systems that is integral to Indigenous peoples’ kinship-based worldviews and embodiments.