Healing Through Grief: Urban Indians Reimagining Culture and Community in San Jose, California

Abstract

This exhibit is very informative; our Native peoples, “federally” recognized and unrecognized, full-blood and mixed-blood, from north, south, and central America, need to unite and free our minds from the colonial borders and governments imposed on our hemisphere.\n—An exhibitgoer reaction, May 1996\nThe American Indian Holocaust exhibit is a community project organized as part of the American Indian Alliance, a group of urban Indians, who first came together in the San Jose area in 1993. Rifts and tensions within the Indian community encouraged Laverne Morrissey, a strong, soft-spoken, articulate Paiute woman to form this group to bring the different factions back together. Al Cross (Mandan-Hidatsa), an American Indian history instructor at one of the local community colleges, and Roberto Ramirez (Indio/Chicano), a social worker for Santa Clara County, organize this annual exhibit. They lead a group of Indians and non-Indians who have put this exhibit on display—each year open to the public for a week or so— since its first showing in 1995 at the San Jose Center for the Latino Arts. This group uses woodblock prints, drawn by the colonizer, xeroxed from books and enlarged, in order to begin to heal the hurts caused by the American Indian Holocaust.

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