When Fire Fell from the Sky
When Fire Fell from the Sky is a three-channel animated video installation that reclaims suppressed histories of Indigenous resistance during the California Mission period. Each channel animates a distinct episode: the Kumeyaay uprising at Mission San Diego (1775), the Chumash Revolt at La Purísima and Santa Inés (1824), and the Suisun refusal to convert (1817). Against the romanticized imagery of Spanish Missions as places of peace and salvation, the work reveals their function as carceral sites of spiritual conquest, forced labor, and cultural erasure. Blending poetic text, archival research, and visual storytelling, the installation honors these acts of collective refusal and reframes the mission system as contested ground. When Fire Fell from the Sky asserts that these uprisings are not distant past, but living histories that continue to shape Indigenous survivance and memory.
1824 Chumash Revolt
Animated video installation (no sound), 2025
This work bears witness to the 1824 Chumash Revolt—one of the largest Indigenous uprisings in California’s history. Reframing the California missions not as sacred relics, but as carceral landscapes—sites of forced labor, cultural erasure, and spiritual conquest.
The narrative follows the revolt’s ignition at Santa Inés and its coordinated spread to La Purísima and eventually to Mission Santa Barbara. What emerges is a memory, a resurgence in motion: six hundred Chumash rising with purpose, ancestors stirring in breath and wind, the land and sea bearing witness. This is not simply rebellion—it is a reclamation of memory, kinship, and cosmology.
This work is part of Decolonial Cartographies: “California”, a multichannel video installation presented as animated visual stories—part map, part memory, part invocation. Each channel centers a site of Indigenous uprising during the mission period, collapsing the divide between document and dream, witness and world.
The 1817 Suisun Refusal
Animated video installation (no sound), 2025
This work honors the Suisun people’s refusal of Spanish domination in 1817. While the Spanish mission system advanced across the region, the Suisun remained a fierce sanctuary for those fleeing captivity—offering refuge to Ohlone, Miwok, and others escaping Mission Dolores, San José, and Santa Clara. For years, the Suisun resisted forced conversion, labor, and land seizure.
When Spanish forces returned with violence, Chief Malica made the ultimate act of refusal: setting fire to his own village rather than submitting his people to captivity. What followed was not mass suicide, but an act of tragic defiance—a collective decision to protect dignity, memory, and kinship even in the face of annihilation. Survivors fled to the hills or were forced into the mission system. Yet from the ashes rose new leaders, like Sem-Yeto, and the Suisun people endure.
The Kumeyaay Revolt, 1775
Animated video installation (no sound), 2025
This work bears witness to the 1775 Kumeyaay revolt at Mission San Diego de Alcalá—the first major uprising against the Spanish mission system in what is now California. Framed not as a footnote to conquest, but as an act of collective refusal, the revolt challenged the violence of spiritual domination, forced labor, and cultural destruction that defined the early mission era.
This animated sequence portrays the coordinated efforts of Kumeyaay warriors from nine villages who targeted the mission—one they never chose to build. The burning of food stores, the restriction of ancestral land, and the assault on kin and culture became the conditions of uprising. Rather than revenge, the revolt was a declaration of survival—of autonomy reclaimed through fire, movement, and memory.
This work is part of Decolonial Cartographies: “California”, a multichannel video installation presented as animated visual stories—part map, part memory, part invocation. Each channel centers a site of Indigenous uprising during the mission period, collapsing the divide between document and dream, witness and world.