In 2006 I was on my way to building a successful gallery artist career after having graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena California and exhibiting in places like Thinkspace, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and Roq La Rue. Very quickly, I felt the absence of community and the reality of polycrisis, a word I couldn’t name at the time which describes the compounding emergency points of social, economic, ecological, and political events in the world.

Twenty years ago, my daily grief for the collective (as extraction, incarceration, exploitation, pollution, oppression, etc.) led me into a series of existential moments that forever altered what motivates me.

Over the next several years I would take on odd jobs, mostly rejecting the traditional life script of self-maximizing success and went deeply into research and world-building around how I could use my creative skills in a way which a politician or scientist might not have access to. These creative capacities expanded into knowledge and skill sets I had no desire to market within a capitalist framework.

By 2016 I published the Regenerative Footprint site as a distillation of what I had researched over the years and knew was possible based on ecological theory and indigenous praxis. It is the stewardship of economy, ecology and society through an ancestral lens. The term “Regenerative” itself was extracted out of indigenous land management science without attribution to origin.

The ideas in that framework* were about the excavation of the possibility that indigenous land management was never intended to be separated from their living culture. This is like removing a grain from a husk that is discarded and in this instance the husk is indigenous praxis and the grain was turned into the pattern language and certification process divided from a relational ancestral lens.

Today, I am using the findings of that framework and research and composting it into personal collaborative action here. Here’s what is also in my world:

The nonprofit I co-founded ‘Anapamu’ Alliance is an all indigenous women led land trust which is working towards a cultural easement with a family in Santa Barbara county on 160 acres in the mountains. Our next steps are around a culturally informed survey process and entails listening to the land. If you have experience in grant writing and would like to volunteer your time with us [or exchange artwork for this], please reach out ;)

Currently I am also a project manager for Ocean Origins working on a California Ocean Protection Council Grant within the Tribal Marine Stewards Network on our coastline among five other tribes doing similar work of water stewardship and habitat monitoring.

Thanks for staying~

abp

*a synopsis of my Regenerative Footprint framework can be found in the book Creating Shifts: Decolonizing Spirit, Reimagining our World by Immanuel Solas, 2025