RSVP Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/short-film-screening-poetry-tickets-676895782507

Join us as Samantha Morales-Johnson and Isaac Michael Ybarra offer insight into the work they've been doing through the Cultural Worker Apprentice program around issues of Tongva visibility and the protection of plant relatives.

Samantha's work centers on the @protectwhitesage and cultural appropriation and will be followed by a screening of Saging The World.

Isaac Michael's short film Ooxono (from here), reflects on what it means to be from the First Peoples community in Los Angeles amongst other Indigenous communities battling erasure and exclusion, as well as kinship with the land.

Samantha Morales-Johnson (Tongva, she/her) is a science illustrator and ethnobotanist with a BA in Marine Biology from CSU Puvungna as well as a certificate in Science Illustration from Cal State Monterey during which she started the Protect White Sage digital campaign, alongside her mom, Kimberly. At the moment Samantha is the Land Return Coordinator of the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy where she has been adapting her ecological knowledge to work with Tongva ethnobotany she grew up with to handle advanced ecological problems that come with land return from non-native species to native species in the midst of climate change.

Isaac Michael Ybarra, a visual artist and storyteller, is Tongva, Chumash, and Xicano. Grounded in his ancestral cultivation, he utilizes film, photography, and poetry to amplify decolonization narratives and reclaim Indigenous pedagogies. Through his art, Isaac seeks to challenge the dominance of the human experience and instead honors the interconnectedness of all beings. He embraces the values of Indigenous Futurism to retell the past and present, envisioning a future guided by his community's stories, visions, and desires. As a steward of Indigenous cultural conservation, Isaac Michael weaves together diverse mediums, crafting evocative narratives that honor his ancestral homelands and uplift his communities.

This exhibition is part of the Cultural Worker Apprentice program and partially supported by the California Arts Council, the Union Pacific Foundation and the Constellations Culture Change Fund.