Xiuhquilitl: Indigo, Ocean, Extraction   

Xiuhquilitl (indigo) moves across this installation as ocean, pigment and colonial violence. Shell, abalone, feathers, beadwork, azurite, textiles, and images gather on a Maya petate (woven mat), grounding Pacific relation in Indigenous land-based practice with bird and shell works by Māori artists Aroha Millar and Arawhetu Bardinner. K’iche’ Maya artist José Luis Fernando Morales crocheted azurite chachal necklace sits next to Cayuga artist Arla Lucia’s raised Haudenosaunee beading. Xiuhquilitl in Kuskatan also represents a pigment built through enslavement, toxic extraction, and the disappearance of entire communities across the land. Indigo dyed the wealth of the settler colonial state of El Salvador, even as it hollowed out Indigenous life. Wilber Salguero’s blue-and-white coffee image echoes the Salvadoran flag, marking the violence of plantation economies and national symbols imposed over stolen land.

Here, Pacific blue and indigo meet without innocence. Water, pigment, and trade bind Abya Yala and Aotearoa together, holding beauty alongside the memory of what extraction destroyed, and what Indigenous hands continue to carry forward.