Decolonize Dallas is a month-long series of art installations designed to draw attention to issues around cultural equity. The project is organized by members of Michelada Think Tank, and

funded in part by the Embry Family Foundation and the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs. Art&Seek invited the organizers and artists to share context and commentary about specific works and their thoughts about ongoing efforts to make art and arts opportunities available to artists and communities of color.

Today, Jodi Voice of American Indian Heritage Day In Texas,  is up. Her group is partnering with Ash Studios and Trans.lation Vickery Meadow on “Water of Life.”

The opportunity for American Indian Heritage Day in Texas to partner with artists and organizers surrounding the topic of Decolonization in Dallas and have the work blossom in Vickery Meadow is powerful, to say the least. All indigenous people in the world are tied to the land and water despite physical separation from creation sites and ancestral lands. Dallas, our “relocation” and “transplant” site, is home to generations of survivors. Survivors passing down traditions, facing racism, ignorance and inequalities at every turn, but breaking through colonized mindsets with powerful every day acts. Through these acts, we are unapologetically being us.

American Indian Heritage Day in Texas strives to educate the world with every break of silence. That is decolonization. The indigenous communities in Dallas standing in solidarity with communities fighting for clean water within occupied Indigenous lands in the United States and beyond is not a political act, it is merely a means of survival. It is how we can teach others to decolonize.

Jodi Voice
(Oglala Lakota, Mvskoke Creek, Cherokee)
American Indian Heritage Day in Texas

A previous American Indian Heritage Day in Texas event at Oak Cliff Community Center. Photo: American Indian Heritage Day in Texas.