will offer traditional drum songs honoring the healing practices and tribal members who have helped build a system of support for peoples impacted by the carcecal system.

Meztli Projects supports the creative development of Native and Indigenous Peoples by providing an ecosystem of support that helps strengthen and reconnect generations, cultural production, and knowledge building and transmission. Meztli Projects believes that their work needs to center and make space for the original caretakers of the lands we live on and build authentic relations with both the land & water and all living beings.

They have leaned into and encouraged an Intercultural approach that can coalesce resources around Peoples so communities can develop, relearn, restore, and propel their cultural practices into the future within an ecosystem that best serves their self-determination and journey forward. They uplift ancestral teachings and cultural practices, allowing them to activate the healing qualities of interconnectivity, kinship, Elders, ritual & ceremony in partnership with creativity and art-making to not only address trauma, violence, and the impacts of colonization to begin healing ourselves and our communities but most importantly to recode our bodies with resilience, ancestral brilliance.

And lastly, they understand that violence manifests in our community far beyond physical and emotional trauma. They see a spectrum of violences that prohibits their communities from fully thriving. Their work is rooted in creating spaces and approaches that embrace people, center the most marginalized, eliminate as many barriers to participation, and provide as many tools to shed the impacts of colonization and settler colonialism moving towards a harmonious and balanced life. These values have been a compass for our work.

Mass incarceration as we know it today began with the enslavement and incarceration of First Peoples, the Gabrielino Tongva, Tataviam, Chumash and Acjachemen Tribal Nations and communities here in Los Angeles, by the development and implementation of the Mission System. Native communities have developed systems of care for their kin, system and modalities that are the foundation for the many approaches used today to care for and welcome community members back into our circles. These songs honor that history, that work, those relationships, and Elders who has passed on such as Jimi Castillo, a Tongva/Acjachemen Pipe Carrier and Sun Dancer, and proud member of the Statewide Bear Clan Society.