Focused on the homelands of yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini and yakʔistʸonoistʸono village areas in Northern San Luis Obispo and Southern Monterey counties, routed through our land and kinship-based epistemology, this project traces a constellation of maps, watersheds, missions, militarization, allotment, and implications of petroleum in contemporary and historic contexts. Returning the presumably unidirectional gaze of settler imaginations, employed through processes of Federal Recognition and anthropological study, a genealogy of occupying wealth is offered in conversation with our long histories of connection. Rather than a chronological overview, research is grounded in patterns, placemaking, and relation existing within and between elements: tepuʔ (salt) as relational and reflective metaphor, tqiłhismuʔ (fat) as material manifestation of attempted bodily control through missions and cattle industries in California and Hawaiʻi; tspu (earth) signifying unratified treaties, homeland(s), enclosure, and privatization; tpismuʔ (brea) naming petroleum in its myriad avenues of continued extraction; toʔo (water) encompassing transit, travel, imperial expansion, trade throughout California and łpasini, the one ocean; and qšiqšismuʔ (many stars, many olivella) to synthesize our storied worldsense, futurity, and ways of being. Where settler colonialism imagines the disparate, a world in pieces, yakʔitititʸu use knowledges living as visual, poetic, relational and material forms to name long connections across łpasini wa yakʔitsputspu, implication in the dispossession of others, and kinships that gesture towards reparative possibility.
