Posters

MANIFESTO

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In my experience, identity has never existed in a single format.

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It has never been a checkbox or something that can be neatly contained within a single word. Identity is layered. It is inherited and constructed, remembered and forgotten, carried and reshaped. 

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Growing up away from my homelands in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, my connection to my Native identity was shaped not only by family and community, but by distance, separation, urban life, mixed heritage, and navigating spaces where Indigenous representation was limited. I grew up knowing that I was Native while simultaneously learning that the world did not always know what to do with a Native person who looked like me, lived where I lived, or existed outside of expectations of what an Indigenous person is supposed to be.

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I know what it feels like to wonder if you are “Native enough”. I know what it feels like to measure yourself against someone else's definition of authenticity. To question whether distance from your homelands makes you less connected. To wonder whether mixed heritage makes you less legitimate. To feel caught between cultures, communities, and expectations as though belonging to more than one place somehow means you fully belong to none.

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I wanted to create something for my mixed baddies. For anyone navigating what it means to carry more than one home, culture, history, or identity within them. For those who have been told, directly or indirectly, that they are too much of one thing and not enough of another. For those who have had to explain their identity before they were allowed to simply inhabit it. 

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My artistic practice grows from this tension: the space between where we come from, where we live, and all the places we become along the way.

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I’m an Ewksiknii (Klamath), Modoknii (Modoc), and Neme (Northern Paiute, Yahooskin Snake Band) artist and a citizen of the Klamath Tribes. I work across watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and even house paint to create a vibrant, illustrative style. Through bright colors, humor, recognizable imagery, and unexpected combinations, my work celebrates the strength and complexity of contemporary Indigenous culture. 

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My work refuses the idea that Indigenous identity belongs only in the past. Native people are not frozen in time. We are not relics, stereotypes, or characters from a history that has already ended. We are artists, stewards, dic’ii s?aaMaaqs (good relatives), students, organizers, professionals, romantics, weirdos, pop culture enthusiasts and everything in between. We exist in cities and suburbs, on reservations and across borders. We move through contemporary worlds while carrying histories since time immemorial. 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.

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We are still here. And we are becoming.

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Braided Identities explores the complexities of Native American identity while challenging narrow ideas of the “authentic,” “pure,” or “traditional” Native. These ideas are not neutral. They are often rooted in colonial systems that have attempted to categorize, quantify, police, and control Indigenous belonging.

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Blood quantum. Appearance. Documentation. Geography. Proximity to community. Language. Reservation status. Cultural knowledge. They can all become measurements used to determine who is “enough”.

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But Indigenous identity is not a mathematical equation. It cannot be reduced to a fraction. It cannot be authenticated by appearance. It cannot be erased by distance. And it cannot be made less Indigenous.

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Braided Identities asks what happens when we stop treating complexity as a contradiction?

What if being between cultures does not mean being incomplete? What if mixedness is not dilution, but expansion? What if diaspora does not represent disconnection, but another way of carrying relationship? What if belonging does not require choosing? 

These questions sit at the center of my practice. I explore belonging as an experience of living in the in-between. I’m interested in the ways we carry culture when we are physically removed from our homelands and in the ways culture continues to travel with us through family, memory, art, language, food, humor, stories, objects, relationships, and everyday life.

Culture does not stop at a border. Neither does identity.

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These questions have followed me across borders of my own. After growing up in Oregon, I moved to Sweden for love and began another chapter of navigating cultural belonging in a place far from home. I found myself experiencing another version of the in-between, learning how to build a life inside a culture that was not the one I grew up in, while continuing to carry the histories and cultures that shaped me. Migration made visible something I already understood intuitively; we can belong to multiple places without belonging to them in the same way. We can miss home while creating a new one. We can change without abandoning where we came from.

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This is what the braid represents. A braid is made from separate strands, but its strength comes from their relationship to one another. Each strand remains distinct while becoming part of something larger. Heritage, family, place, migration, language, colonial history, pop culture, memory, and personal experience are not separate components of who we are. They intertwine. They pull against one another. They overlap, knot, loosen, and strengthen.

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The braid is messy. So are we.

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And that messiness is not something I want to erase from my work. It is something I want to celebrate.

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At the heart of Braided Identities is a refusal to choose between the different parts of ourselves. It is an embrace of multiplicity not as something that needs to be reconciled into a single, coherent identity, but as something worthy of existing in its full complexity. Braided Identities is not an argument for a singular definition of Indigenous identity. It is an invitation to question why we feel the need for one in the first place.

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I believe belonging can be expansive.

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I believe our identities can hold contradiction.

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I believe Indigenous futures can make room for complexity.

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And I believe we do not have to untangle ourselves in order to understand who we are.

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We can remain braided.

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We can carry all of it.

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We can live between worlds without being divided by them.

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We can honor where we come from while becoming something new.

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We can embrace and balance our multiplicities for an Indigenous future.

 

-Lizzy Herrick

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