&
“every american flag is a warning sign”
– Demian DinéYazhi’
my ancestors will not let me forget this, 2019 Neon, aluminum, insulated wiring, mechanical components 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow
Museum purchase from the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship 2019
“This is the way settler-colonial trauma settles into the body of the colonized We unconsciously re-live the genocides and brutalities inflicted against our ancestors
The shame the rape the beatings the enslavement The white bodies with their killing machines and unholy structures of
torture and discipline
The distrust the disease the disgust the deceit the miseducation and
immoral fixations
The flamboyant uniforms
My ancestors will not let me forget this and every american flag is a warning sign
Even the one my grandfather was given as a Code Talker.”
-excerpt, “An Infected Sunrise”
by Demian DinéYazhi’
In addition to a career in visual arts, DinéYazhi' is a spoken word poet, who in the fourth grade, fell in love with writing. Exhibited at the 2019 Honolulu Biennial, my ancestors will not let me forget this, references Diné Yazhi''s childhood hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, which is less than twenty miles from Church Rock, New Mexico. United Nuclear Corporation milled uranium in Church Rock, which borders Navajo reservation trust-lands. In July 1979, its disposal pond for tailings breached its dam, causing at least eleven hundred tons of mill waste to spill into Puerco River. Today, Church Rock is the largest recorded radioactive spill in U.S. history and is an EPA Superfund site.
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 