CURATORIAL ESSAY

BY KATHERIN CANTON & MARIANA MOSCOSO

Inhale, exhale—this is our offering to you, relative Ritual of Myth Making: Reclaim is a culmination of joyful and melancholic stories, rituals, and ceremonies of being an indigenous person (detribalized and reconnecting) in a society that either tries to pretend we do not exist or outright seeks to destroy us. From this perspective, to be alive is radical actualization and to reclaim our joy is to shape and manifest our liberation. This is a celebration of our living stories—it is a ceremony that weaves together the individual liberatory imagination into the collective physical world. To enter this ceremony is to embody the liberatory imagination where we reclaim our experiences to rematriate our bodies, our body which is the land. The land is our ancestors. We are inseparable, we are our ancestors. We are here as we always have been. Our collective body carries infinite stories, and as curators of this ceremony, we have chosen to model this particular ceremony through the themes of the Popol Wuj—themes that can be found in indigenous cosmologies around the world. The Popol Wuj we know today contains stories from the pre-colonial period. It is a text that was copied in approximately 1714 from phonetic K’iche, written in Latin letters from an oral account by anonymous K’iche storytellers in the early 1500s, on the land now known by its colonial name, Guatemala. The text is significant because it is one of four pre-colonial surviving texts of the Maya and it holds many interwoven stories and themes: it is a creation story, a metaphor for the life/death/rebirth cycle of corn and humans, a retelling of the K’iche lineage and history, and overall a story of interdependence and reciprocity between humans and the elements of the earthly, supernatural, and cosmic realms. This surviving text of the Popol Wuj, like us, is an ancient story (re) told under colonialism. It embodies indigenous futurism, regeneration, and reclamation that is in antithesis to the current death culture, as it catapults us into a culture of life affirming ways. Ritual of Myth Making: Reclaim intends to do the same through the power of the collective

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