Restoration and ReVOlution: Decolonizing through Art

Abstract:Cochiti artist Virgil Ortiz's Revolt 1680/2180, is an epic futuristic narrative about the 1680 Pueblo Revolt (Revolt), an uprising planned by the Pueblos after they were subjected to approximately 80 years of colonization and genocide. Ortiz reimagines this battle in Revolt 1680/2180, by resituating the storyline in the future, 500 years after the initial uprising. Ortiz's sci-fi rendering of the Revolt reclaims Pueblo history and roots his story in tradition; yet he imagines new symbolic meaning of the uprising for a future that focuses on justice, contestation of oppression, and restoration. Guided by Pueblo scholars' conceptualizations of restoration and critical Indigenous and Chicana feminist approaches to decolonization, we demonstrate how Ortiz's screenplay and other artwork reclaims Pueblo knowledge, traditions, and methods through Native science. We also identify how Ortiz subverts heteropatriarchal conceptions of gender identity and representation that rupture settler colonial understandings of the Revolt and Pueblo culture through Indigenous futurism. We follow Eve Tuck's (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang's definition of decolonization, as "an elsewhere," that "specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life," to demonstrate how Ortiz's work situates "Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone."