Leonard Crow Dog, the recently passed spiritual leader of the Lakota Tribe was known to have called the Anhinga the most important symbol of the Native American Church.
The Anhinga, or Water Bird, is a symbol of the renewal of life, rainy seasons, rivers, distant travel, distant vision and wisdom. It is often also referred to as the Peyote Bird because of it's significants in the Native American Church Peyote meetings.
The Native American Church (NAC), also known as Peyotism and Peyote Religion, is a Native American religion that teaches a combination of traditional Native American beliefs and Christianity, with sacramental use of the entheogen peyote.
The Coahuiltecans, the largest Indian group living between the Rio Grande River and the headwaters of the San Antonio River, built the Alamo, and many of the missions of the Spanish Catholic Church. They imbedded their spiritual imagery like the Peyote Bird into colonial projects.
Bringing the symbols and stories of America's first peoples into the forefront of the new digital era. Our platform is designed to aknowledge their stories while also creating tangible financial assets.
Each implementation of Monumental restoration will involve a virtual sculpture project designed and directed by an artist representing the tribe or organization we work with.
The sculpture will be viewable in augmented reality, through your phone, geolocated to a specific location shosen by the artist and ogranization.
Visiting the location allows you to collect fusion shards: 3D NFTs placed in AR space around the sculpture. Collecting these NFTs grows the sculpture.
Arriving at the sculpture site on launch day, you will find a small bud of what will become a grand monument.
As soon as the shard NFTs are collected, the bud will begin to grow.
The communities activity and monetary contributions will be visualy realized in real time. Returning to the site each day will reveal a new aspect of the scene.
After all the NFTs have been collected and their value has reached the organizations goal, the sculpture will burst into its final form.
The inspiration for this project came from a discussion about land acknowledgment, which is often the final destination of honoring the displacement of Indigenous people-- but we knew more could be possible. Restorative justice must go beyond words and performance.
One of our team members on the project has been researching the history of their indigenous ancestors, their relation to their land and how it was taken from them, and contemporary movements to reclaim their place and culture. The visuals in our project represent the cultural traditions of this member’s ancestors, the Coahuiltecan people of what is now South Texas.
This project brings restorative justice to Indigenous people and other historically marginalized communities by inviting the public to find and acquire digital “fusion crystal“ shards, digital art objects minted as NFTs which represent fractional investments designed to activate the construction of massive augmented reality monuments. The funds collected directly benefit descendants of the original stewards of the land where the monument is located. As each shard is purchased, the monument takes form. Once a full set of shards have been acquired, the monument is activated, emerging from a geolocated quilt of these shards and appearing in it’s full and final form.