Hope & Dread Extra: Lulani Arquette

Hope & Dread Extra: Lulani Arquette brings you the highlights of our interview with the president and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, which is in the middle of an expansion into a new building in Portland, Oregon. 

Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman. 

Charlotte Burns:

Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.

Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week.

Today we’re bringing you more from Lulani Arquette, who is the President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation in Portland, Oregon. The institution is in the middle of an expansion. It recently moved into the former Yale Union building downtown in a process of rematriation, in recognition of the fact that the land was taken from Native peoples. Here, Lulani talks about the organization’s ambitions and its focus on healing and reconciliation. 

Lulani Arquette: 

I originally come from Hawai’i, the Islands of Hawai’i. My father's side of the family is the Kameeiamoku Waipa Parker clan on the Big Island of Hawai’i and my mother's family are the Lytle Gee family of mixed race, originally from Philadelphia and then moved to South Dakota, an Irish, Prussian and Black Dutch. I've been 12 years now running the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a national nonprofit that provides services and professional development in convening and a lot of other work for Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native and American Indian artists on the continent, Alaska and Hawai’i. 

One of the things that we really focused on was this idea of, what is Native art? Because there was stereotypical beliefs and kind of a romanticized version of what Native American art was and is, and so we intentionally wanted to expand that into really, what is the contemporary evolution of Native American art? 

Charlotte Burns: 

Is there a kind of community? Is it too big to be a community? Is it the landmass too vast to have that sense of community?

Lulani Arquette:

It's very big Charlotte, that's true. And that sometimes gets complex and confusing to the broader public because there's what—575 federally recognized tribes in Alaska Native corporations; there's about almost 600,000 Native Hawaiians across the continent. And then you have state-recognized tribes and other non-recognized tribal communities. So it is vast, and it's complex, and it's diverse. There's no one monolithic Native American culture. It's not homogenous. 

So it's complicated because of that. As you see, 575. There’s histories that are similar and threads that weave through those histories of the oppression in the genocide and the number of different kinds of challenges that we face and our ancestors faced in our communities, but there's also a lot of complexity and different languages, different art practices, and different ways of kind of living your lives and engaging. So it is complicated. 

Charlotte Burns: 

Yeah, it sounds it. How do you manage that? I was reading something you’d said, where you said, I learned that how we communicate matters, and developing emotional intelligence is critical when you're working in complex and diverse communities. And you also talked a little bit about seeking adequate information when making decisions, and that sometimes difficult decisions have to be made amid conflicting viewpoints. 

Something that keeps coming up on the show time and time again is this idea of how to sit in discomfort, how to navigate through a space that isn't comfortable, and may not land comfortably—that this may just be the space. So how do you do that? How do you make those difficult decisions through conflict?

Lulani Arquette: 

[Laughs] It's not easy. It really is about just doing it, and practicing it, and engaging that kind of a process. 

Many Native communities have this understanding because in our own communities there's quite a bit of diversity too, of thought and belief, but there's also practices that kind of ground us in certain values. 

In Hawai’i, we have a process called “ho'oponopono” and it's a kind of a healing and reconciliation process. Years ago, we brought that process into our judicial system in Hawai’i, which has been very effective working with adjudicated youth, and neighborhood conflict resolutions, and all kinds of other issues. 

It's a five-step process. There's a certain spiritual aspect to it, and about forgiveness and talking, and forgiveness and talking, and problem-solving through that. And you will sit sometimes 24 hours in a group until everyone can come to forgiveness and resolution. We bring that to contemporary modern life now.

Charlotte Burns: 

I think what you're saying is really interesting. And it's not a skill that's widely promoted, this idea of deep listening. 

Lulani Arquette: 

I agree with you. It's not, and I think it's something that should be though. The pace that we're moving now in society is so fast that often there's not encouragement or we use excuses that we don't have time, myself included, to engage in that kind of deep reflection and mindfulness, which is why in the building that we're doing, the Center for Native Arts and Cultures, we're intentionally building spaces of healing and reflection for this exact reason.

There's a creek that runs through the building and it’s stopped up in the basement, because that used to be a laundry facility around the turn of the century for the Women's Labor Movement, actually; it has a lot of history, this building. And what we're going to do is repurpose that water, where it can be a healing and reflective space for artists and creatives and guests, people to come and just be in that space. 

We need these spaces of healing and reflection. Where I come from in Hawai’i, we're surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the ocean is the healer. In many Island cultures, the ocean is the womb of Mother Earth and it's a powerful source of healing. But the urban environments are increasingly becoming battlegrounds, especially here in Portland. And there has to be spaces built into our urban areas for healing and reflection and that's one thing that's really important for this building. 

Charlotte Burns: 

I think it's really great, what you're doing is focusing very much on the generative possibilities of a cultural space which is a different model than the kind of big-white-box model that's more about entertainment and food and those kinds of things.

Lulani Arquette:

Right, and we are going to have obviously a little bit of that too. But you're right, it's more value-based in the generative aspect of it, so that it promotes creativity, and encourages the art-making. 

We're looking at a Black Box Theater; we have exhibition space also; there's community meeting space; there's social entrepreneurial space for creative industry business, Native-owned small business that are working out of their garages or in their kitchens, in may be in design work, graphic design, they may be doing clothes, they may be doing certain kinds of activities. So, we have that built into the plan but you're exactly right. It's not just this white box, where it's very much part of who we are as Native peoples and the importance of that space of healing and reconciliation and soul growth or whatever you want to call it.

You have a capitalist society that's not working I mean, just look at what happened this last pandemic here, with people that had the gains on Wall Street, really very high wealthy people in the billionaire category. They have increased 38% their fortunes during the pandemic alone. Most of the rest of everybody else is experiencing unemployment, the difficulty paying expenses, all the things—are they caught up on the rent, or their mortgage, food insecurity on and on and on. But when you look at all this, there's this idea of really needing to take a look at the infrastructure and the systems in America. We know that from the anti-racism work and racial equity work that many of us are working on in different ways. That capitalism doesn't work anymore in the way that it's currently structured, this market-based economy is not working. And so, we need to figure out better ways, and particularly as it relates to arts and culture.

I think that your institutions are trying but everybody needs to try harder. I worry that we may have a revolution in this country because we're, there's so many different viewpoints. 

You feel more sense of hope in our cultural spaces because we are singing and dancing and chanting and creating together, that's a place that's very powerful. 

Charlotte Burns:

You've already kind of addressed this, but I'm going to ask you in a slightly different way. When you look ahead at culture, do you feel hope or dread or both, or something else?

Lulani Arquette:

I'm actually a more optimistic person. [Laughs] So, I actually feel more hope but I think it's because I've conditioned myself to feel this way. I'm a real believer that we sort of create manifest our own destinies and to some degree in our thinking and our energy and actions have a lot to do with that.

So, I would say hope, and that's not to deny or exclude the real severe challenges we have in this country and in the world right now. I mean, climate change, racial equity, intergenerational understanding, on and on, they're all there, poverty…but the groups that I'm working with, the places that I travel to, people are doing hopeful things, they're focusing on what they can do in their communities with one another to create these pockets in urban, in rural areas across this country for inspiration, and helping one another. And in Hawai’i, we call it aloha kekahi kekahi.

You care for and you love one another, and that is huge and powerful.

Charlotte Burns:

For more from Lulani, tune into episode four of Hope & Dread, “Burning Down the House?”, episode six “Take Me To Your Leader” and episode 12 “Are You Sitting Uncomfortably?”.

Listen to Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts. 

Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. 

The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound. 

Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez. 

And our theme music by the inimitable Philip Glass.