Arch, Mound, Basket: The California Missions and Climatic Upheaval

In 2020, Christine Howard Sandoval (Chalon Ohlone) began making a series of large-scale, abstract drawings based on the architectural typologies of the California missions. These works establish an intimate interface, even kinship between the twin materialities of a genocidal project: paper, the smooth, white, often invisible ground of the vast bureaucratic system that anchored the Spanish invasion; and adobe, the cracked, brown, earthen walls of mission enclosures built by Native hands. The material substrates of colonization readily bond because both are fibrous, packed with plant bodies. Organized into spare compositions that evoke Indigenous mound building and basket weaving alongside Spanish architecture, the adobe drawings reimagine the multifarious ways in which Indigenous ecological knowledge was baked into the mission project and readied to outlive it. Thinking through Howard Sandoval's drawing practice, this talk proposes that the missions stand as a sensorially rich archive of climatic upheaval and Indigenous response. A growing number of scholars have traced anthropogenic climate change to the genocide of Native peoples and rapid suppression of customary land stewardship practices across the Americas. Howard Sandoval’s work enables visual, aural, and tactile ways of knowing what otherwise exists as a data-driven abstraction. She lends climatic theory a material and experiential weight that crucially privileges the embodied truths of Indigenous survivors.This historical investigation buttresses the ongoing potential for Indigenous arts to nurture livable futures inside the cyclic apocalypses of colonial modernity.