Weaving Forward
Investing in Culture Bearers for a Shared Future
Kapena Gordon Alapai & Kassandra Laborde Khalil, ArtChangeUS
When the Constellations Culture Change Fund & Initiative invited ArtChangeUS to further their understanding and engagement of Culture Bearers for the development of their cultural strategy and narrative change grantmaking program, we produced Weaving Forward: Recommendations for Working with Culture Bearers. It is a report, with actionable recommendations for arts and cultural grantmakers, informed by the values and needs directly articulated by Culture Bearers themselves. The report is also shaped by insight from field experts including Lori Pourier of the First Peoples Fund and Amy Kitchener at ACTA (the Alliance of California Traditional Arts) whose teams have led these conversations for many years.
“Haitian Kreyòl is a revolutionary language… as you’re learning it you’re reconnecting with ancestral knowledge.”
Our research method was anchored in the ArtChangeUS practice of Visiting, Listening, Relationship Building, and Action, interrelated pillars in a process of equity. It brought together Culture Bearers from Indigenous, immigrant, and historic African American, Latine, and Asian American backgrounds, cutting across rural and urban geographies as well as artistic disciplines including weaving, heritage-informed dance, hula, kākau, fur and hide arts, master crafts of the building trades, and language revitalization practices.
In Weaving Forward, we describe Culture Bearers as artists and carriers of ancestral knowledge who weave past, present, and future stewardship of land, culture, community, and spirit.
To describe a Culture Bearer is to express a set of relationships to space and time, to land, and to community; and among individuals and groups of Culture Bearers. Culture bearing work, at its essence, is carrying creative expression and values with accountability to cultural origins and community-recognized excellence.
Image from Weaving Forward describing the dimensions and identities of cultural bearers.
In supporting artists and Culture Bearers at the center of catalytic change, we might consider accountability that is directed towards a specific justice goal – a named, visualized destination such as a policy change or shift in public opinion. At times, yes, it is. At other times, culture bearing is not limited to a targeted win, but embodies a much longer existential arc beyond the shared commons of our intercultural connection. It also includes the non-public practices that protect ancestral knowledge and sacred spaces and land, those deliberately non-visible wellsprings that nourish culture. For those who lead their cultural and creative expression in this way, it is a way of life that is renewing, healing, and sustaining. As described by Kalehua Krug, kākau practitioner and Ka Waihona charter school principal, their “transactions are about energies and relationships, not products.”
Culture bearing, as a continuum of the past, is concerned with the now for the existence of the future.
For grantmakers, this means supporting long-term work that uplifts a community’s holistic understanding of wellness. Culture Bearers and intermediaries who support them, expressed a version of community wellness as active, interconnected relationships between human and non-human relatives and our Earth. Culture Bearers envision long-term investment for their practices and innovations, versus supporting isolated projects. Their work reaches across generations building interdependency and respect. These values permeate culture bearing practices, allowing people to navigate humanity’s hurdles from a place of abundance.
Culture Bearers’ communities have faced a myriad of cultural and physical violence, including war, genocide, ethnocide, environmental degradation, colonialism, incarceration, and displacement. Yet these culturally-rooted approaches to inculcating living values, protecting the health of the planet, and supporting families prevail through people-powered strength. This work involves many, many hands! Artist, agriculturalist, and SippCulture founder Carlton Turner underscores the urgency and centrality of Culture Bearers, “The work that they're doing is not only about the artistic practice, it is literally fighting for the souls of their communities, which is at the community level, not just at the museum level, or at the performance hall space level…They are the front lines. They're the connectors to their communities.”
Investing in Culture Bearers offers the arts and narrative strategy ecology the opportunity to interweave with the historical fabric and future vision of communities. If done thoughtfully and with trust and humility, the potential for wide reaching cultural change becomes boundless. We begin shifting where we understand shared ideas and values to be expressed within and between communities — beyond the more visible, vocal, and institutionalized spaces of mainstreamed arts and media. We begin understanding how our fellow humans have stayed activated and engaged in expressive, impactful life-centered change in thoughtful, vibrant ways. And that’s a powerful thing, it keeps our realities open to exchange across worldviews, and allows us to learn from and join in collective work between many cultures for shared futures.
“Narrative Shift: Culture Bearers are the change. They represent an embedded presence in place, community trust and mutual support, intergenerational connection, and are wellsprings for community health and individual healing. They are embodied organizing hubs for critical issues including environmental regeneration, immigration, Indigenous sovereignty, food security, restorative justice, domestic violence and rebuilding of family, placekeeping, language restoration, and cultural identity.”
Decisive support for Culture Bearers also begins righting a field that has been part and parcel to various types of violences Global Majority communities have endured. This report represents only a portion of the dynamic group we describe as Culture Bearers. It offers an in-road to understanding the significance of advancing their ancient and heritage-grounded community work within the context of narrative change.
“It is vital to understand where you are - why your neighborhood is so full of art, where it comes from, and its meaning. This lets us answer: how do I settle into the layers of culture that came before me, that are here now, that are coming forward?”
As Culture Bearers answer the urgent call to steward community, arts philanthropy is called to consider a shift from a paradigm of inclusion, to a reorientation and a new alignment with the needs of the field. Listening deeply to Culture Bearers interviewed for our Weaving Forward report revealed clear barriers in philanthropy and specific recommendations for grantmakers interested in resourcing Culture Bearers — some of which you can find distilled in the What We Heard and Recommendations sections of the report.
Angela Cox, Inupiaq community member and Rasmuson Foundation’s VP of External Affairs asks, “When you call someone a Cultural Bearer, will it have the same standing? Will it open those doors? Will they be invited? Or is it just to feel good?...Do we take them seriously?”
Keya Kessler, Grandmother of the Little Big Medicine Sundance digs in, “Checking off the boxes of different philanthropy groups is not easy for us because we don’t have the same way of telling our story to them of what our needs are - we don’t fit into that box.”
Given this greater context, philanthropy has an opportunity to understand:
What if arts funders valued their investment in culture bearing in the same ways social justice funders are beginning to support investment in narrative strategy campaigns? And crucially, what if arts funders who are invested in narrative and cultural transformation also centered Culture Bearers as narrative change experts and practitioners?
What if arts funders valued their investment in culture bearing in the same ways social justice funders are beginning to support investment in narrative strategy campaigns? And crucially, what if arts funders who are invested in narrative and cultural transformation also centered Culture Bearers as narrative change experts and practitioners?
How can grantmakers be supportive of Culture Bearers and patient while learning about unfamiliar values and practices that have been excluded from the arts “mainstream”?
What would be transformed if Cultural Bearer values were centered in grant making for the arts?
Can Culture Bearers, arts funders and grantmakers working on narrative strategy be more deliberate about connecting joint goals for a just future — one that respects and honors ancestral knowledge to weave past, present, and future stewardship of land, culture, community, and spirit?
Can we embrace the idea of a continuous relationship between philanthropic investment and a community-driven pace of change?
“Cultural Bearers, they’re like centers of gravity…an investment in them, not one fellowship, not one grant, but an investment in that person, is creating jobs for the people around them, is creating visibility and platform for the people around them.”
Culture Bearers echoed that humility is key: a reverence for what we are privileged to know and an acknowledgment that there is much we don’t know beyond. Dr. Maribel Álvarez, founder of the Southwest Folklife Alliance, notes the importance of forefronting a community’s perspective: “We hold space for great things to flourish and bloom – but we are not the seed.” Developing a patient understanding of work that spans many generations radically shifts power relationships, asking us to consciously understand our own relationships with a community. From the perspective of Culture Bearers, their vital place in their community is one of mutual trust, understanding, and reciprocity. Culture Bearers offer an enduring strand to weave forward relationships grounded in trust and interconnection. This is something that narrative strategy work actively seeks -- the “beginning” of an interception point in order to advance perspective shift and influence future action.
The how of philanthropy in right relationship with Culture Bearers requires new skills and positioning. If you are an arts funder looking to learn more and begin investing in the narrative and cultural leadership of Culture Bearers, you can lean on our Weaving Forward report as a resource. In the Grantmaker Competency and Capacity section, you’ll find specific recommendations on administrative capacities, programmatic capacities, and cultural competencies for grantmaking and strategy teams. While originally created for direct application to the Constellations Culture Change Fund & Initiative, the recommendations in this report have wide applicability to any funder or intermediary organization interested in growing narrative power through the arts, and vitalizing the arts sector to directly resource Culture Bearers as narrative experts.
NOTES
Weaving Forward: Recommendations for Working with Culture Bearers was written by Kapena Alapai, Kassandra Khalil, and Roberta Uno of ArtChangeUS to inform the grant making program of Constellations Culture Change Fund & Initiative. Quotes cited are from ArtChangeUS interviews and listening sessions conducted from January through March 2022.
ArtChangeUS (Arts in a Changing America) is a national BIPOC- and artist-led initiative interrogating the role of creativity and cultural equity in this rapidly changing nation. ArtChangeUS is a medium for national and place-specific responses to pressing questions about our shared futures. The initiative generates thinking, arts-focused interventions, media, and training to reframe the national arts conversation by embracing the cultural assets of demographic change.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kapena G. Alapai is a Kanaka Maoli and mixed-White māhū living and working from ancestral lands of Kona ʻĀkau, Hawaiʻi, and is descended from, and in process of reclaiming, generational practices of paniolo, lawaiʻa, ulana lau hala, and ʻōlelo. He enters the field of arts and culture as a student of Hawaiian Language from Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻelikōlani at the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo, and as a trained arts and cultural manager from Pratt Institute in New York City. He serves as the Co-Director of Arts in a Changing America (ArtChangeUS). His passion for cultural organizing is rooted in reclamation of heritage based artforms and practices and intercultural solidarity. He co-leads the development of the Beyond Solidarity curriculum and serves as a primary facilitator of the program, and he leads the initiative’s collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts towards the development of the ArtChangeUS@ Kennedy Center National Conversation Series 2017-2020. He currently serves as Board President of the Kahilu Theatre Foundation in Waimea Hawaiʻi.
Kassandra L Khalil is a first generation daughter, artist, writer, and cultural organizer. She is the Co-Director of Arts in a Changing America (ArtChangeUS). Her work within cultural organizing focuses on equity practices and cross-cultural, cross-generational connection building through unique convening experiences. Kassandra has led the development of the Beyond Solidarity Training and manages the scope of ArtChangeUS’ foundational programming and continued vision. As a visual artist, Kassandra’s drawings and sculptures explore how movement, matter, and gestures evoke personal and collective memory. Concentrating on her heritage, Kassandra channeled her studies on Caribbean communities and the culture of resistance into organizing arts programming for her Haitian Diasporan community in New York. She currently serves as an executive board member of Brooklyn-based Haiti Cultural Exchange, through executive and curatorial leadership, strategic planning, and resource development. She was the assistant editor of Contemporary Plays By Women of Color (Routledge, 2018), edited by Kristen Calhoun and Roberta Uno, and a contributing assistant editor of the forthcoming FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in A Changing America (Duke University Press, 2023), edited by ArtChangeUS colleagues Daniela Alvarez, Elizabeth Webb, and Roberta Uno. Born in Queens and raised in Tampa, Kassandra considers herself a returned New Yorker living in unceded Lenape and Canarsie lands.
