On Location: Peñasco Theater Youth Podcast Workshop

The Peñasco Theatre is a crucial community and performance space located in Northern New Mexico. Last year Broken Boxes was invited to host a podcast workshop with young people from throughout the area who participated in an annual week-long summer arts intensive. This episode is from the podcast workshop themed 'The Alternative Archive' and presents a collection of stories, poems, teen led interviews, and reflections. This podcast episode also features introduction information about the space and teen camp and self guided interviews by and between artists/educators Freyr A. Marie and India Davis who were project leaders for the intensive. Special thanks to Rebekah Tarin, Alessandra Ogren and the entire Peñasco Theatre Collective for all the important work you continue to do!

Here is the content recorded through the youth podcast workshop:

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More about the Peñasco Theatre Collective summer arts intensive:

The Peñasco Theatre Collective hosts a week-long summer interdisciplinary arts intensive for teens.  2016 was the 3rd year of this overnight workshop comprised of 8 multi-ethnic Northern New Mexico teens ages 13 – 16.  The intent of the process oriented intensive was to provide opportunities for self-discovery, storytelling, skill building, dialogue and empowerment through visual arts, embroidery, zine making, aerial arts, body mapping, examining archetypes and podcasting. Under the guidance of Collective artivists and their collaborators, participants looked at the ways art can inspire, direct and inform movements for community empowerment and transformation. Multi-disciplinary exercises served to create community through deconstructing differences, finding commonalities, and developing tools to translate their ideas and emotions into creative action. 

More about the Peñasco Theatre Collective:

"For the past 16 years artists and performers working through the Peñasco Theatre have dedicated their time, creative energies and unique visions to community building, collective empowerment and social transformation through the arts.

The Peñasco Theatre Collective is committed to lateralized, non-hierarchical leadership centering Xicanx, Indigenous, and queer people of color.  We are committed to creating alternative systems of organizing and ways that actively fight against the capitalist white supremacist system that is at war with the planet and the people attempting to thrive in harmony with it.  We strive to be a true collective that supports and sustains the artists/activists that are part of it, and to be a resource and a refuge for the broader community.

We are humbled by and in awe of all the many powerful movements standing together to shift the narrative – despite the sacrifice, the backlash, and the  uncertainty.  Art has played a vital roll in every social movement on the planet.  Artists are the architects of that collective vision.  And youth artists in particular possess the courage to question, challenge and innovative."

Conversation with Artist Freyr A Marie

This episode of Broken Boxes Podcast features conversation with non-binary trans* multidisciplinary artist Freyr A Marie.

Here is the conversation with Freyr A Marie:

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Music featured on this episode: SWARM Freak Band, Freyr A. Marie: Not the Moon or Sun, Whodini, YNOT & Cosmo Klein, Janelle Monae, Street Sweeper

More About The Artist:

G/^/L/^/I/^/T/^/C/^/H/---*_*---/P/^/R/^/0/^/F/^/I/^/L/^/E

I'm no authority:::: but making things for me is a practice of doing and being*** My critical minds lives there/^/my politics/^/mybody/^/my questions/^/my love/^/my creativity/^/myself in change/^/my ability to sooth myself--*_*--> that Xspirit that cannot be pinned down with-*_*--> that quality of resistance that is joy and peering through cracks/^//^/-*_*---> that is turmoil and violence:::::/bashback/graceback/talkback/makeback/rageback/loveback/::::::::::::::There's grace/^/grit/^/fight/^/imagination/^/preservation of::::I am not just alone/^/ my doing/^/ art/^/creativity/^/craft/^/ what ever-> the name/^/is connected to others /^/a non linear/^/ lineage of people/^/ related to me by blood or by another intersection of thinking-*_*->being-->place-*_*->displacement--->practice or identity/^/that impact my sense of these things/^/whether is shows up overtly in what i make or doesn't-*_*-> whether it is in celebration of a quality-*_*->a way of doing/a way of relating -*_*->or in resistance to/^/ or both/^/neither at once:::: it shows up::::in the code::::it is intentional/^/or free/^/or random::: i suppose theres an ethic in there::: how i understand those relationships and interpret them in my practices of doing and making-*_*--> or don’t---*_*-->Its tactile/^/ it is need/^/ is safety/^/ its risk/^/ it is technology/^/needle/^/thread/^/but mostly it is a kind of doing that helps me-*_*--> hold a space--->wake up and be in the world with others/^/ and communicate--*_*->and thats certainly not all of it/^/only so much you can say in the code/^/in the logic/^/::::::glitching out loud::::::::never enough/^/always too much:///:///:///incare/^/in/dignity//////

Collaborations with ORCHIDD. Freyr A Marie

Collaborations with ORCHIDD. Freyr A Marie

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger Talks Standing Rock, ND

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) was born not 30 yards from the Missouri River in a small town known as Fort Yates, ND on the Standing Rock Reservation. For the past year, the Dakota Access Pipeline (ETP) in collaboration with the North Dakota State police force have been trampling upon the constitutional, human, and civil rights of his people.

In this episode Cannupa shares through childhood memory, what Standing Rock means to him as a place where he simply goes home to. He also shares the story behind the namesake Standing Rock and the complexity of all Indigenous story which is overlooked in our popular culture. Cannupa speaks about the organic nature of the water protector camps, the evolution of the movement and the relationship of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to this now global movement. Cannupa also tells us about his experience as artist and water protector, participating in what ways he is able to create collaboration and empowerment for his people through artwork and actions such as the mirror shield project.

Here is the conversation with Cannupa Hanska Luger:

Subscribe to Broken Boxes Podcast on iTunes HERE to stream and download this episode

Learn more about the work Cannupa Hanska Luger and crew are doing in relationship to Standing Rock at cannupahanska.com/nodapl

Image: 'Thanksgiving' day at Turtle Hill. The Boston Globe.

Image: 'Thanksgiving' day at Turtle Hill. The Boston Globe.

Conversation with Land Defender Kim Smith

Kim Smith is a Todích'íí'nii (Bitterwater clan) woman, artist, organizer, activist, water protector, and board member for Honor the Earth. In this episode Kim shares a whole system approach to sustaining Indigenous life practices and reasserting our conscious participation to living on this planet. She talks about the many layers of her work as centered from solution based community organizing, and reminds us the importance that women and youth have as voices in contemporary movements, such as Standing Rock. 

Music featured on this episode by: Nahko and Medicine for the People and Rebel Diaz

More About the Artist: 

Kim Smith is a Todích'íí'nii (Bitterwater clan) woman from St Michaels Arizona. As a woman of a water clan she holds her responsibilities to water dear and has dedicated her life to protecting water & her homelands from resource extraction. For the past 10 years her organizing efforts include art activism, raising awareness about resource extraction on the Diné Nation, water rights, food sovereignty, permaculture & indigenous empowerment in efforts to uphold many inherit responsibilities. As a young Diné woman looking at personal and political choices she makes efforts according to her cultural teachings and values; thinking and behaving in a way that is consistent to the teachings of ancestors and with the laws of nature. In an effort to restore balance to the land and community. 

Kim is also a board member for Honor the Earth & Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment ( Diné CARE) two pioneer indigenous environmental organizations. Kim is also the curator for a national traveling exhibition called, "The Art of Indigenous Resistance". 

WARRIORS WANTED: COME IN A GOOD WAY: Standing Rock, ND. November 26, 2016

This is the 7th episode featuring a collection of audio from live feed Facebook posts of water protectors, providing first hand accounts and information regarding what is taking place as of November 26th 2016.

LISTEN: Rebroadcasts from Standing Rock, ND November 26, 2016:

Subscribe to Broken Boxes Podcast on iTunes HERE to stream and download this episode

"On December 5th, 2016 the Army Corps of Engineers has announced that they will begin evicting water protectors at Standing Rock from the Oceti Sakowin Camp. 
What they failed to acknowledge is that this movement is filled with passion, dedication, prayer, love, and a refusal to give up on what we all know to be right, and to be true. 
If you've been thinking about coming, but have hesitated, come and protect clean water. Stand with us and for mother earth. There is strength in numbers, there is strength in prayer and community, there is strength in marching with your fists open and head held high. 
The hearts of water protectors are the strongest and most powerful that I've ever known and it is an honor to be able to stand with them--join us." -Courtney Cronis

Material rebroadcast here is from the Facebook pages:

Urban Native Era
Prolific the Rapper
Christi Belcourt
Isaac Murdoch
James Uqualla’
Lakota People's Law Project Emergency press conference with Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II

This rebroadcasting is an attempt to allow this information to reach further than the one media forum of Facebook, to share this story in the way the water protectors creating these live broadcasts have asked us all to. To get the message out into the world, and break media blackout. We are the media. We are all connected. Not one single person can live without water, we are Standing Rock!

Listen to all the Broken Boxes Podcast #NODAPL episodes here: