echolocation for way-finding

healing with the places and personas we inherit and inhabit

Breathing Room, 2025, natural pigment and gouache on board and paper cut-outs

So many of us on Turtle Island are hybrid creatures with DNA from all over the world. While people have always migrated, forced or forcing marks our blood. What are the paths and reparations we inherit as settler colonial descendants, indigenous colonized descendants, and/or both?

Living in-between cultures, homelands, and eras complicates our sense of self. In cosmic time, we overlook an abyss in understanding where we belong.

Painting place is a practice of echolocation to understand where I am and what I am. Bats and sea mammals send bio sonar for feedback. While sitting on site in offering and witness, place teaches me before pencil or paintbrush mark the surface. There are physical, spiritual, and emotional presences with knowledge to share, should I quiet enough to listen.

Spirit and beauty impress their effects on me, I become still. Spanning time, separation is suspended and perception of the energies present reverberates within and all around. The body takes in the trees through the ground, the pain in the soil, the sensuality of a curved leaf.

I paint sites not to know them but to deepen awareness of relationships that nurture, maintain, or deplete; and to know my position therein.

Painting place helps me understand my place. Some aspects of identity become more simplified with time, while others become more complicated.

White Latinx Sarita Doe, photographed on Ohlone soil with mugwort and a satchel of hierbas by Crystal Gwyn for Artist as President, 2020.

I first began painting en plein air in 2003 at Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence, Italy. A Saint of Reparations? In a city that’s been painted so many times; I wondered what would I have to contribute to the history there.

My Garbarino ancestors on my paternal grandmother’s side migrated from Genoa, Columbus’ birthplace, several centuries after his destructive voyage made way for their immigration. They married some Cajuns and made their way down to Louisiana as rice farmers.

I painted my room in Florence because I figured that was the only original piece I could make in a city that’s been painted a million times. What was my relationship to this colonial country of origin?

Room Portrait 1, 2003, Florence Italy

Oil painting professor Gene Baldini had us observe light on stucco walls and the subtle shifts in grey on the streets. I scratched onto the boards we painted for ease-of-transport; a surface that stuck for me as I never went to canvas.

As porous cells, we are constantly recreated by and recreating the places we inhabit. What settler energy influences me to colonize space? What Earth medicine practices can I call forth from all bloodlines - Celtic, Irish, Cajun, French, Mohawk, Spanish, Aymara, Italian, British, Scottish, etc - to release the legacy of control?

We navigate varying levels of privilege according to perceived and embodied genders, ethnicities, classes, cultures, ages, abilities, sexual orientations, responsibilities, etc.

So much has been lost in the imprint of forced Christianity, Western schooling, industrialization, economy, law, and agriculture. The weight of this grief is enormous and imprints us differently according to the positions we hold. We must periodically reflect, process with those we feel safe with, and release to continue finding our way.

I see Latinx people centering our Indigenous roots, an understandable desire since so many of our family members and ancestors couldn’t do that.

At the same time, we must work with the colonizers in our bloodlines who otherwise act out in real-time.

Whether we like it or not, the curse of supremacy that possessed them still lives in us and acts out when unchecked and untreated.

Exorcisms are possible through plant healings. Our spectrum of belonging is nurtured by the ancestral practices we can uncover, and the localized ones we have permission and protocol to participate in.

When we aren’t sure where to start, we can make offerings to the spirits of the land and speak intentions to learn and heal.