Indigenous Curation in LA

The 2018 exhibit “The People’s Home: Winston Street 1974” represented a seminal moment in the history of the urban American Indian experience in Los Angeles. Staged in the same historic Winston Street location that housed the original United American Indian Involvement social service program, ¹ “The People’s Home” was a statement on the ability of a multitribal alliance to once again speak to its constituents, but in a language that reflected deeply personal stories that were suddenly “let loose” again into the public consciousness. The manner in which the curators struggled to articulate the beauty and also the traumas of the photographic evidence depicted exposes the ethics of display in source populations that have experienced historic and structural racism. In this essay, we consider the politics of social remembering when histories and narratives are unearthed while simultaneously building new alliances.