Braided Identities: Indigenous Identity in Urban Spaces

This pop-up art exhibition focused on urban Native American identity, exploring how identity shifts across urban environments, diaspora, and mixed heritage. Showcasing how Native Americans balance their Indigeneity in urban, western dominated spaces where sometimes they are physically removed from their tribe(s) or reservation. Braided Identities is a compilation of personal histories and community memory that represent a people who carry more than one home or culture within their hearts. Presented are artworks representing the daily life of urban Natives. What spaces we take up or create, what objects we use, and how we present our Indigeneity in everyday life.

Native Americans are modern, contemporary, multicultural people. We have been here since time immemorial and are still here. We are the blood of the colonizer and the blood of the colonized. We are the blood of the invaders and the blood of the invaded. How do we contend with this? How do we as a people carry, sustain, and balance our Indigeneity while living in a multicultural, globalized world that is designed to control and define us?