Jessica L. Horton
Jessica L. Horton is an associate professor of modern and contemporary Native North American art. Her scholarship confronts the intertwined devastations of colonialism and ecocide, a dire situation in which Indigenous makers can act as critical interlocutors and creative emissaries of alternative worlds. Her forthcoming book, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2024) examines how artists revitalized Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth itself at the center of international relations.
It is June of 2023. I stand in a storage facility of the British Museum in London, my outstretched palm resting inside the coiled top of a wide-brimmed Chumash hat. The scent of dried plant bodies spans more than two centuries since these beings were harvested, woven, and worn in the vicinity of Old Mission Santa Barbara.
