DEFINING CRISIS IN A COLONIAL EPICENTER
Erin Genia examines how Boston responds to the invisible emergencies it was designed to ignore.
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
The City’s swift and systemic response to the virus opened a line of thinking for Genia: What if less immediately perceivable crises were to receive similarly concentrated and immediate responses? Over the course of her residency research, she had numerous conversations with City officials across departments about their strategies for addressing the Boston area’s needs and the nascent COVID response. This resulted in an eighteen-page Cultural Emergency Response manual, accessible on the MOAC website. According to Genia, a cultural emergency is “a state of instability and danger converging across a broad range of people, places, and events, that stems from the cultural practices and philosophies prevalent in societies.” 2 Strikingly concise and matter-of-fact, the document examines the role of American settler-colonial and neo-liberal capitalist cultural values in urgent issues around the world today, situating greater Boston and Massachusetts at large as historically “an epicenter of colonization [and the cultural standards that drive it] on this continent.” Genia builds on the work of generations of organizers, intellectuals, and artists in the manual, with the hope of better equipping the City and its communities to address cultural crises through emergency management and grassroots organizing procedures. By “[focusing] on cultural organizing strategies,” she aims to “create long-term health and safety for diverse communities.”
While the effects of pollution and climate change are increasingly apparent in Boston’s neighborhoods—with hazardous superfund sites built near residents, record-high temperatures, and routine coastal flooding—Genia is thinking about the intangible cultural norms that perpetuate and normalize these dire circumstances: “historical amnesia,” “toxic individuality,” and “competition over cooperation,” to name a few. It is one thing to address the logistical problem of a glut of pollution, but another to address the underlying systems of belief that brought it about in the first place. Genia observes that “social rules, or social contracts, are governed by the cultural values we hold together. A cultural emergency response goes deeper to target and transform those underlying values.”
Genia felt her task was not to precisely deconstruct and respond to each issue, but to provide a practical framework for observing, reflecting, and organizing. She takes care to outline prompts—questions such as, “What tools need to be collectively developed?” and possible responses like, “Enact truth and reconciliation processes”—that communities can customize and build upon to address particular needs. In her model, a spectrum of constituents, from individuals and community groups to government and social justice organizations, hold the power and responsibility to recognize harm and leverage their unique influences to affect a change in culture and activity.
While Genia’s cultural values inform the guide, she does not want those values to be decontextualized and exploited. Organizations, from universities who fund wind and solar farms to for-profit energy companies, tend to develop yet more extractive strategies when relying on Native knowledge and lifeways to solve settler-colonial-wrought issues. For example, green and renewable energy corporations across the continent and beyond have taken ideas like Genia’s push to “recognize the rights of the natural world” in greenwashing directions, exploiting Native people and their land for non-fossil fuel energy without input from Native nations. Without advancing the policy changes and accountability structures needed to address ecological destruction, many Native nations still have to contend with its immediate effects, including displacement, biodiversity loss, and disruption of cultural resources. Genia implores us to instead engage in cooperative and creative processes to build meaningful systems that support all life.
During her time as an artist-in-residence, Genia also started creating an object that symbolizes this project, titled Cultural Emergency Vest. Made of glass beads on a vest she sewed herself, the resulting garment almost looks like a typical safety vest, borrowing its fluorescent color and patterning from the iconic orange, reflective silver, and yellow vests seen in hazardous contexts. Beaded over the course of three years—from 2021 to 2024—the vest was a means for Genia to “do something out of frustration with all of these different emergencies that were happening around the time that I was making it,” including the spread of COVID-19 variants, weather and climate disasters, censorship and book bans, and numerous instances of genocide. This work thus reflects her deep emotion in a persisting state of alarm: “Doing something with my hands felt like a good response,” she continued. “I wanted to make something that was eye-catching and undeniable—you have to look at it. And then you look at it again: ‘Is that beaded?’”
What if less immediately perceivable crises were to receive similarly concentrated and immediate responses?
The materiality of Cultural Emergency Vest brings together many threads of Genia’s own identity and perspective as a Dakota artist, which inform the ideas she expresses both in the project and in her broader efforts. She builds on the concept Mitakuye Oyasin (“We are all related”) that asserts that we are connected to the Earth and everything in it, and that we cannot arbitrarily separate ourselves from it. This concept sustains not only the vest, but the various seminars, presentations, and other extensions of Genia’s residency. For centuries, beaded vests in Native cultures have reinforced Native presence and contained responses to the complex and violent circumstances arising from the European colonization of what is now called the United States. The vest shape is an adapted form of Western European attire that nineteenth-century Native artists and makers used to create new types of garments both for themselves and for their participation in trade with settler groups. The vibrant surfaces of these vests also signified important links to land, community, and place, depicting abstracted medicinal plants, figural battle scenes, and significant places such as mountains, hills, valleys, and water. The act of decorating a hide also honored the animal from which it was derived, further emphasizing relation. The practice of beading vests continues today, with many Native artists and communities sharing their histories and values through this form.
While Genia has shown the vest publicly to galvanize and emblematize the project for a wide range of audiences, she made it to measure for her son Samuel, the familial gesture mirroring the multigenerational work that this cultural crisis requires. She shared that the vest has other lives beyond display: “Sam is a musician and he will wear it while he is performing. I wanted it to have a personal and family touch as well.”
Indeed, relationships continue to sustain Genia’s work, as shown when she expanded the project in 2021 with the Cultural Emergency Kit Giveaway. Gathering recipient nominations directly from residents of Boston, she highlighted and gave back to those doing the hard work of social and political organizing for the good of their communities. The kits consisted of Native-made health resources: organic food, tea, plant seeds, and copies of the manual. Genia has also further organized several projects around the Boston area that are explicitly or thematically tied to Cultural Emergency Response. These include her installation at Boston University titled Unktehi (2021), a sod-and-grass sculpture representing a Dakota and Lakota supernatural being overseeing water and flooding; Tuȟmaǧatipi (Beehive) at the Rose Kennedy Greenway public park in Boston, a 2022 project that provided sculptures as bee habitats; and her curation of the Boston Center for the Arts’s twenty-seventh drawing exhibition, Yušká: Uncoil (2024), in which she focused on the role of artists and our collective responsibility to untie ourselves from the impulses of capitalism and free natural forces from instrumentalization.
The seemingly-simple question that came to Genia in 2020—“What is an emergency?”—has evolved into a web of values, relationships, and further questions, which she will continue to explore in new roles. In 2024, Genia became the MOAC’s first Indigenous Public Art and Cultural Spaces Consultant. In this role, she will research the histories of Native representation in Boston’s public spaces, report on depictions of Indigenous peoples in the city’s visual culture, propose best practices for commissioning public art projects, and advise on the City’s further engagement with Native artists. Genia’s overarching concern in need of address is that “Boston has been working for four hundred years to keep Native people out. It is hugely awful to see the many ways that’s been encoded in public policy and procedures. So many monuments and public arts are geared toward praising colonization.”
It is only with dogged effort, community-wide self-evaluation, and organized resources like those Genia is compiling that we can gradually assess and change the United States’ harmful cultures—which continue to evolve with widespread consequences. For her part, Genia says, “I’m excited to do this work because it could provide a framework for other places.”
A cultural emergency response goes deeper to target and transform those underlying values
3. Genia, Erin. Cultural Emergency Response. Boston: Office of Arts and Culture, 2021. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PHyhda6rUR8cGJtSVlf69_Zb-u7uw2nc/view?usp=sharing.