Sarita con Soil image by Lauren Morrell Tabak
I am thrilled to begin my series of interviews here on my blog by introducing you all to Sarita Doe! Sarita is a steward of the School For The Ecocene, an incredible artist, educator, student, parent, visionary, and more! Please keep reading to learn more about Sarita and to learn more about her incredible offerings and upcoming projects!
1. Please introduce yourself and let us know what you're currently working on and/or excited about in your life!
I’m Sarita Doe ~ a parent, painter, student, and steward for the Ecocene ~ an emergent geologic era of relearning reciprocal life in ecosystems.
Right now I’m excited to be sharing new works in the show: Of Seed, Soil and Stars: Meditations on Land, Body, Resistance, and Regeneration, curated by Joy A. Anderson and Robin Garcia. The exhibition and performances bring interdisciplinary artists together who collaborate with earth and communities, using soil, rainwater, and natural pigments as material.
One of my contributions to the show is a painted story-map of the Run4Salmon, created in collaboration with Michael “Pom” Preston and the Winnemem Wintu tibe from a spring at Buliyum Puyuuk, known today as Mt. Shasta. The legacy of water in California includes the Winnemem Wintu creation stories where salmon offered to help humans.
Chief Caleen Sisk is guiding broad coalitions to organize, hold ceremony and revitalize some of the most engineered water systems in the world. For those of us who are settlers in major urban centers in California have so much to learn about the California Aqueduct, its systems of dams preventing the salmon from coming hoome, and how we can help to bring back healthy habitat and nur, or Winnemem Wintu salmon back to Buliyum Puyuuk. I encourage folks to support their efforts through education, amplification and donation, and check out the painting Salmon Home: Waterways Repair and Winnemem Wintu Cosmovision of Care, amongst the other great works and performances at the show!
Of Seed Soil and Stars is on view June 2–July 9, 2023, Fridays through Sundays 12–6pm at the USC Roski Studios Building, 3001 South Flower Street (entrance is on 30th Street) in Los Angeles, Tongva Land, California.
2. How do you see art and spirituality intersecting in your creations, and what impact do you hope your work has on viewers?
In a ritual at the beginning of my DIY PhD, I gave my art to Pachamama, the Andean deity of our home planet. Earth-based spirituality has been set as my compass since the time I went to graduate school at UCLA. When I would ask myself who my work was for, Pachamama would come to mind and ask me to learn more about living systems, habitat care, and offerings to restore balance to myself, to planet. If we want to relearn these practices, we can step outside, mak a little offering, and ask to be guided towards the teachers, plants, communities and practices that can help us humans right now.
I hope that viewers are able to receive the Earth medicine transmitted through the portraits with places whom I’ve begun building relations with. The painting is created in offering, and the plants reveal stories for us that can bring us joy, calm, and comfort as we relearn our nature.
I’ve learned these spiritual practices mostly in circles with Queen Hollins of the Earthlodge for Spiritual Transformation and Olivia Chumacero of Everything is Medicine. As Olivia reminds us, all humans have the memory of being in collective Earth reverence in this way. For many of us from mixed/colonial descent it’s buried deep in our blood memory.
3. How do you connect with and honor your ancestors, and what role do they play in your creative process?
The majority of my ancestors are from European settlers during different eras of the colonization of Turtle Island: Cajuns, Celtics and later Italians from largely working-class farmer backgrounds on my Father’s side, and mixed-race Indigenous Andean, Spanish colonial, and Scottish royal backgrounds on my Mother’s side.
Sometimes when I sit with them or meditate with them at the altar, they give me directives: like my Aymara bisbisbisbisabuela whose unconditional love asks me to love myself and know myself as a divine expression of our planet. Or the Celtic deer tribe ancestors from County Donegal in Ireland who asked me to paint deer flags and hang them alongside my art in a traveling exhibit. Turns out deer are a symbol of fertility, and our moonegg child Lidagat came through not too long after. They were responding to my prayer for a little family.
I’m still learning a lot about my ancestors, their path and impact on the world, and the stories they carried that give way to paradigm-shifts through me. Both psilocybin mushrooms and Black Sage (externally) have supported me in uncovering and transmuting their legacies in my body. I also work with chosen ancestor Frida Kahlo, who continues to inspire so many of us through gender fluidity, hybrid cultural identities, and embodied experience as an artist making sense between worlds.
Salmon Home: Waterways Repair and Winnemem Wintu Cosmovision of Care, created in collaboration with Chief Caleen Sisk’s son, Michael “Pom” Preston, natural pigment and gouache on board, 2023, 36” x 48”
4. Can you tell us a bit about the mission and vision behind Ecocene School, and how you came to start this project?
Our School for the Ecocene is an offering to Earth. We are creating this school in service to sharing skills, practices and play to curious and seasoned Earthworkers alike! This year, the School transitioned from being my DIY PhD Dissertation-inspired project into a collaborative cooperative school council of eight stewards: mbgenerator, Yoli, ink, champoy, Chayo, Johanna and Dongyi plus our elders Olivia Chumacero and Queen Hollins. Our coop has sprouted thanks to so many magical mentors, students, sponsors and supporters!
I came across the word Ecocene as the focus for my DIY PhD after giving my 6-year program to Pachamama in ritual. The Ecocene is an antidote to the Anthropocene, or industrialized human- dominated geologic era we are currently trying to get out of.
As the Anthropocene has impacted communities differently according to race, class, religion, gender, geography and ability, so the Ecocene must address the revitalization of all Earth’s living systems from an intersectional perspective of mutual aid, reparations and land back.
5. How can folks get involved with or support Ecocene School, and what steps do you encourage people to take to prioritize a more ecocene future in their own lives and communities?
We share seasonal loveletters that interested people can sign up for, to sprinkle inspiration amongst all you brilliant human stewards, educators, activists, artists, and healers. These loveletters share our ecooperative values and as we uplift Earthlings in these deep transitions and reorientation towards connection to body, mind, spirit, community and habitat.
We are currently raising seedfunds to bring our elder Queen Hollins’ manuscript, Earth Doula., into publication! Her wisdom, rituals, and actions are a balm for the imbalances making our Earth and communities sick. We welcome Earth Angels and Sugar Zaddies to consider supporting this work through a tax-deductible donation. We have mostly been volunteering to create the cooperative, and your investment in our Earth Education Cooperative means everything to us continuing the work!
Olivia teaches us to find a time and place where we can go to make an offering (spoken, sung, water, gift) to the Earth, or habitat / ecosystem, water, mountain, ancestors, etc near to where we currently live. We can sit and listen. Lie down, and witness what the wind, trees, plantitas, water, ancestors, stones, animals want to share with us. We can ask them what next steps we can take towards their care.
6. Finally, what advice do you have for other educators and activists who are looking to create accessible, intersectional resources for social and environmental change?
Learning from local tribal movements near where we are living is a gift. We can learn the names of the Indigenous people where we live, as well as the plants and ecosystems. We can follow, amplify and support Black Reparations, Indigenous Sovereignty, and frontline communities’ environmental activism where we live. Listen deeply, dream, and ask what are the unique medicine and energies we can offer. We ask our spirit guides and the land that holds us what we should focus on in the DIY PhD, and upon increasing our comfort in communication, these deity-beings, including our own deity intuition, will show us paths of ease and fulfillment that want to unfold.
All our tendrils of wonder, intention, action, self-compassion ripple out to make social and environmental changes beyond our wildest collective dreams. All this exchange is available in our bodies, spirits, creative collaborations and habitat!
You can experience Sarita Doe’s works along with Jackie Amézquita, Jess Gudiel, JEM, LaRissa Rogers, and a closing performance by Maria Maea at Of Seed, Soil, and Stars from June 1st to July 9th, at LACE’s Emerging Curators exhibition at the USC Graduate Fine Arts Building, 3001 S Flower Street near downtown Los Angeles.
Follow Sarita on Instagram at @saritadoe
Learn more about her and all of her offerings by going to her website: https://www.saritadoe.com/