Rostros IndígenasUn manifiesto Indio

Statement about the Portrait Series

Rostros Indigentas seeks to conserve and highlight the beauty and spirit that exists within the descendants of indigenous people. Framing them for future generations to see.

For many cultures like my own surviving colonialism, the idea has been embedded through institutions and society, that in order to save ourselves we must leave behind our ancestor’s languages and purify our blood by marrying through christ and having children with a white person. We have internalized that to be with a white person is to progress and succeed in life. “Asi vamos a purificar nuestra sangre.” “This is how we’re going to purify our blood,” my family would say.

It’s been more than 500 years since the western hemisphere started to be colonized. In this short period, many people of indigenous descent have silently lost their tongues in exchange for “opportunities,” “acceptance,” and most critically our survival within these societies. This has severed most of us from our ancestral connection to the land leaving us to have one reality, one which our purpose is to give our labor to maintain these colonial societies

Colonial societies will always define us according to our functions within them, instead of acknowledging that our cultures have the inalienable power to exist according to our locality.

Those in power don’t want us to exist on our own, so it’s foolish that we strive to have a better place in them by changing their laws, policies, and institutions whose main priority is protecting the homogenous, patriarchal, class-based society. In reality, we need to recognize that we don’t want to exist within these destructive societies.

Even though colonialism still reigns over our ancestral lands, it will be through the self-affirmation of our identities and our ancestral connection to the land that we can begin to heal ourselves in order to liberate the land from the power of coloniality and dismantle these destructive societies. We Have always been here and will continue to be here.

—This is not the end, it is only the opening statement—

- Miguel Akira Mar