Braving the commute, numerous PAA members traveled to the Fowler Museum at UCLA for the May General Meeting. Benjamin Strauss, Director of Development, led members on a tour of the partially funded PAA exhibition Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art.  The exhibition offers timely insights into Indigenous fire stewardship, ecological resilience, and climate change. Developed over several years, Fire Kinship underscores the vital role of fire as a regenerative force and honors the ancestral knowledge of Native communities.

On view through July 13, the objects, images, and stories in the exhibition make a case for fire (kút in the Payómkawichum and Cahuilla language, ‘aaw in Kumeyaay, and cha’wot in Tongva) to be perceived as an elemental relative who creates a cycle that gives all living things a fresh beginning. The exhibition includes loaned object-relatives that Native communities used and continue to use in partnership with the land, place, and fire: baskets, ollas, rabbit sticks, bark skirts, and canoes. Fire tempers and hardens clay vessels used for cooking and storing food. It helps cultivate plant materials employed in the making of baskets, blankets, capes, and skirts—pánul, se’ill, súul, and sélet (yucca, juncus, deergrass, and sumac in Wanakik Cahuilla language): fire thins out juncus patches, allowing new shoots to grow. It also softens the tar that, when spread on cottonwood canoes, makes them seaworthy.

At this critical moment, seeing Fire Kinship with PAA friends provided reflection, healing, and hope for sustainable rebuilding.

~Shelley Sackett