“What is public space on stolen land? Especially when the land is doubly stolen – from Native people who have called it home for countless generations and by the concept of ownership itself, which is intimately bound up with chattel slavery, anti-Blackness, and policing Turtle Island. . .”

-Karthik PandianIn The River 2022

On Saturday, September 24, 2022 hundreds of river & art-lovers joined LA River Public Art Project for “Returning the River: A Joyful Intervention” at the 2022 Frogtown Artwalk. Developed over six months of an ongoing creative engagement with local Indigenous artists and Tongva leaders, “Returning the River” responded to the difficult questions, “How can the people heal when their river is hurting?”, “How can art heal a river and her people?”, “What does it look like to be in community with the river?”. 

Didier curated this critical intervention, foregrounding three Tongva leaders as LA River Public Art Project’s “Artists-in-Residence”: Tina Orduno Calderon, Tongva and Chumash Culture Bearer, Kelly Caballero, poet and Jessa Calderon, author and singer/songwriter. Listening to and honoring their cultural practices and goals led to a day of action on the river. This included mounting a 40′ long x 6′ tall sign of the river’s name in Tongva: initiating a process of reclaiming this waterway for the Indigenous People who have been the river’s caretakers for thousands of years.

Kelly Caballero, Tina Calderon and Jessa Calderon on the concrete bank of Paayme Paxaayt (aka the LA River). Photo by Liz Getz

Naming is the power to create, lay claim to, own, distinguish, merge, separate or destroy.

PAAYME PAXAAYT, (pronounced Pi-mé pah-hīt) meaning “West River” brings the river back within the power of the Tongva People. Fabricated of individually cut letters from heavy cardboard sourced from sustainably forested trees and coated with a biodegradable tempera paint, Didier and her team mounted the sign along the main pathway along the river at the entrance to Elysian Valley Gateway Park. Nearly 4,000 festival-goers saw this sign – and for the curious, a QR code was stenciled on some of the letters linking to a translation of the name and further resources. At night, kinetic lighting illuminated the sign and a lone sycamore tree in the park with rippling blue hues.

A DAY OF ACTIONS

Activities during the day included river-focused poetry writing with Kelly Caballero, basket-weaving demonstrations by Jessa and Tina Calderon, coloring with friends from the International Indigenous Youth Council, Native seed bomb-making with the Regenerative Collective, and the opportunity to see a Tule boat – fresh from the sea after the Moompetam Festival.

Participants walked in a group led by the artists through Gateway Park, past the PAAYME PAXAAYT sign to the side of the river. There the artists discussed ongoing concerns with the river’s health: a primary source of life bound up with our own health and the wellbeing of our communities.

Healing the river and the systemically oppressed are actions that must be taken together. The artwork and artistic interventions of the day call upon everyone to act as advocates for the river and the Tongva. In an act of mutual aid extended to the river, participants flung seed bomb after seed bomb into the vegetated shoal nearest the bank where the crowd stood. Soon, those balls of river clay containing native seeds will germinate and grow plants that clean the soil and water, provide habitat, and support the Tongva way of life, welcoming them once more as caretakers of this vital waterway.

To learn more, visit LA River Public Art Project. Click HERE. 

Special thanks to Sunday Ballew, Bernard Rene, Joe Calderon, Mercedes Dorame, Scott Froschauer, Joel Garcia, Liz Getz, Stephen Linsley, Le Ngyuen, Libby McInerny, Esmi Rennick, Amy Sampson, Laurie Steelink, Art in the Park, LA River Public Art Project Board of Directors, MPA and Theodore Payne Nursery.