Kahayatle 2025

“The Everglades means kahayatle— a bright lit place. Water that is bright— that’s lit up and clear.” Miccosukee elder Michael Frank

Over the past several months, I have had the opportunity to engage in an ongoing collaboration with the Miccosukee Tribe’s Archives Department. During this time, I have educated myself about the Miccosukee’s history of resistance, sovereignty, and their relationship to land. The Tribe’s rejection of New Deal-era government assistance, symbolized by the historic marker reading “just leave us alone,” exemplifies their enduring ethos of self-determination. Their distinction as the only tribe to never sign a treaty with the U.S. government, along with their strategic use of international sovereignty to gain tribal recognition through Fidel Castro’s Cuba, further underscores their resistance to assimilation and erasure. I’ve been situating these narratives within the physical and cultural landscape of the Everglades, the homelands of the Miccosukee Tribe, while also exploring how wilderness itself has been mobilized as a colonial concept, often disconnected from its indigenous histories. 

In collaboration with the Tribe’s Archives Department, I have partaken in their larger effort of creating an archive of the present to preserve the histories and sounds of the Everglades. In one initiative, I filmed and documented the Tribe’s biannual Everglades Research Trip; in another, we captured field recordings on the reservation, preserving the sounds of this fragile and ever-changing environment. As an artist, I have been reimagining how archival practices and oral storytelling can challenge dominant historical narratives.

I was invited to produce an exhibit to share some of our collective efforts for Earth Day 2025. This exhibition is an active, work in progress and a growing collaboration between myself, Sofia Valiente, and the Miccosukee Archives Department— Hannah Jancosko, Raven Osceola, Desiree Billie, Troy Sanders, Edward Ornstein, William Osceola, and Jason Daniel. @miccosukee_archives

This exhibit was supported by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.