L. Frank Manriquez
L. Frank Manriquez
CREATED BY ADAM LOFTEN & GARY YOST 11:15 mins 2020
“Since the beginning of time our people have been making and doing. For 200 years we have been interrupted.” In the face of extinction, native artist and activist L. Frank Manriquez from the Californian Tongva/Ajachemen tribe examines the subjugation of artifacts and the importance of cultural continuity in serving her ancestors’ legacy.
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Discussion Guide:
L. Frank introduces herself in her language and shares her tribal and place names. She then goes on to say that you may have never heard of her because her tribe (Tongva/Ajachemen) has been declared extinct. The Tongva tribe has been Indigenous to the Los Angeles basin for 7,000 years, yet within the current population of Los Angeles it’s likely that most people never heard of them.
Do you know the names and the histories of the Indigenous people in your area before it was occupied by the Europeans?
How much other information do you know about customs and lives of the people native to your geographical area? Have you been told that your own area’s Indigenous people are also extinct?
In the first scene in the museum, L. Frank shares. “I’m in an archive room. Drawer after drawer after drawer of the lives of people. They’re artifacts, artifacts to be studied. Scientifically studied. And quite often I want to know the results of that science…. But they treat it as non-living things.” She sees these as more than objects, essentially trapped parts of hers and other Native people's culture. She sees them as personal tribal belongings instead of artifacts for study and exhibition.
Many museum’s collections are filled with objects that were taken from far away places in the name of science and preservation. Have you ever considered this while visiting a museum? How would you feel knowing one of your great, great ancestors' personal belongings was locked away in a basement?
L. Frank shares “For about 200 and some-odd years, we’ve been interrupted. This little thing… genocide, holocaust, slowed us down in our connection. There’s a great many Indigenous people around the world, including us here, that work very hard at knowing who we are through who we were and what we did.”
L. Frank is working to understand her relationship to the world and heal the connections to culture that were interrupted by colonization and genocide. Do you still have a direct connection to your ancestor’s culture and history? If so, does that connection help you to understand who you are today?
As L. Frank carves a stone canoe she tells us that “The act of making stone pieces again… it completes the picture. It gives us information you can’t get from a book or from somewhere else because you have to feel the stone under your hands.”
Do you have a practice in your life that cannot just be explained but has to be felt?
“The canoe to me, sincerely, and to many other Indigenous peoples around the world is the vessel that contains the culture. It holds the people. It holds language and basketry, all the knowledge. This is something that holds all of that, which means it holds the people together.”
What vessels does your culture use to carry its unique knowledge and traditions?
While sitting in one of two Tongva canoes built in the last 200+ years L. Frank shares “Indigenous people around the world recognize that there is a great flood coming and everyone get your water gear ready.” This can be seen as a metaphor for Indigenous people being prepared for a changing world but it also directly alludes to reacting to sea level rise created by human-caused climate change.
What do you think we can learn by listening to the wisdom of Indigenous people’s historic connection to place as a way to become more resilient in the face of the climate crisis?
L. Frank and her peers feel that they are stewards and protectors of their ancestral places. She states “We have a job to do. We are not special in that job, it’s just a job creator gave us. We just have a job to do... that's to care for the planet. For where we come from.”
Do you feel a responsibility to your current or ancestral home lands? What is yours to do?
Links to discover more:
Wikipedia page about L. Frank Manriquez
Video: Interview with L. Frank conducted by Malcolm Margolin on 2020-11-07.
Article: Santa Rosa canoe project symbolizes cultural revitalization for Native Americans.
Website: L. Frank’s artwork.
Video: Bioneers opening ceremony.