For the love of Oyate — Indigenous Resistance, Resurgence & Reclamation Thru Public Art

American History, Chicano, Civil Rights, Community Art, Cuerpo-Territorio, Grafitti, Indigenous, Lakota, Los Angeles, Murals, Oceti Sakowin, South Dakota, street art, Turtle Island

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7.24.2026

Credits: All photos courtesy of Derek “Focus” Smith and Oliver Cortez, YouTube Video produced and edited by Sylvia Marina Martinez

I’m back after a year and a half away from writing on this blog. I really felt like I needed to do some healing and work on my mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being as the events of 2025-2026 in Los Angeles (the Altadena and Palisades fires, ICE terrorism, the chemical fire).

Collective Healing & Community Education

Now I realize that healing from trauma is more like a way of life. The reality is that we live in an inherently traumatic culture and society in which the neo-colonial-imperialist violence continues to terrorize innocents. How can we heal in a profoundly unwell culture? One aspect of healing is through personal narratives and testimonies, another through ceremony and through collectively shared music and art. Art is resistance. Public art is necessary and a salve for the cultural and spiritual survival of indigenous communities.

Community and Public Art as Indigenous Resistance

In early 2024, Rapid City, SD based Lakota artist/community Derek “Focus” Smith came to Southern California to collaborate on a mural in Anaheim, CA with local Anaheim Chicano artist, Oliver Cortez (@Gard1857). This mural project in Anaheim was a sacred collaboration between generations and communities that, while having much different histories, still struggle under the weight of the colonial legacy of manifest destiny and white supremacist ideology.

I wrote about the work of Focus Smith in 2023. Most of his murals are outside of my local area, so when I found out he was working on a mural in Southern California, I knew I had to go see it myself. For decades Focus has been bringing mural art to South Dakota and the surrounding areas to tell the story of the Lakota people and history. His work is infused with Lakota spirituality and cosmology of history, honoring elders and ancestors, which brings healing, hope, and pride to his community.

Derek “Focus” Smith over the years integrating community education and organizing thru graffiti and mural art.

The artist Oliver Cortez in front of the many paintings and murals in the Orange County area he has created.

Oliver is also using his art to make a positive impact in his community.

Oliver Cortez is one of the most influential people in Orange County, bringing art and education and pride to the community for years now. As a young kid growing up in Anaheim, Oliver was exposed to community art in the form of murals as he walked to the store with his grandmother. It was this art that fascinated and inspired young Oliver as he took art classes in high school.

The mural is a community art piece creating sacred space in an alley in a predominantly Mexican/Chicano working class neighborhood and pays homage to the heritage of the current Chicano/Mexican-American populations as well as the traditional inhabitants/caretakers upon which the LA/OC Basin was built, the Tongva and the Chumash. Honoring the contributions, survival, & the resilience of all the indigenous peoples of this region.

Beautiful mural in Anaheim by Focus Smith and Oliver Cortez.

Kalpulli Tekuanis, Mexica-Nahua jaguar dancers, came through to bless the mural in a ceremony when it first was completed.

“Community arts, as a term and recognized field of practice, only came into currency in the latter part of the 20th century. But the process it refers to—the engagement of people in representing their collective identities, histories, and aspirations in multiple forms of expression—is as old as cave paintings and ritualistic chanting….The separation of “art” from “community” perhaps has its roots in both a body/mind and a nature/culture split in Western consciousness emerging from certain streams of the European scientific revolution of the 1700s (Griffin, 1995) and in the commodification of art and knowledge associated with industrial capitalism of the 1800s (Berger, 1972). This has intensified in recent decades with commercialized and individualistic practices of art and media in the context of corporate cultural globalization, often “reducing culture to commerce” (Adams & Goldbard, 2002, p. 20). In the Latin American context, popular education, popular communications, and community arts were linked to the building of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge military dictatorships, United States intervention, and extreme disparities between the rich and the poor in the southern hemisphere (Kane, 2001; Nadeau, 1996; Nuñez, 1999). The arts were not only tools in education and organizing but engaged people more fully, moved their spirits, and inspired collective action.”

(From: Touching minds and hearts: Community arts as collaborative research)

Message from Focus about this mural:.

“I’d like to thank those who all came together to make this happen, this beautiful mural, and the coverage afterwards of having community partners come forward and and do their utmost to document things and and to help spread awareness and to help spread knowledge and to weave community together, in this case, across states, very grateful for technology that allows these things to happen. for going back into it, this mural happened through a myriad of different opportunities, connecting through people, connecting through time, I’m very grateful for the people who all put an effort, put into work to bring these things about to have different people come forward and and continue to do that honorable community work in a humble way, I’m very grateful, very, very grateful. It was just a chance opportunity that I had to go and visit Anaheim and it was a wonderful opportunity that I will always remember and cherish and I’m very grateful again. Going forward from this, it was always apparent to me that the Chicano and the Lakota, you know, those two cultures I was always told by my elders and, you know, the people who came before me that our people are one that we’ve always been one and that the Southern brothers are always the Southern brothers. That’s always how I’ve known it to be, and no other sense no other fashion, and I’ve never believed any other thing apart from it being unity and community of having the southern and northern, you know, come together in that way, you know, many prophecies have been cast out over time, but the one that has stands solid is the one of the eagle and the condor, right, where, you know, it’s prophesied that the eagle and the condor the would fly together and so that, you know, represents the northern and the southern brothers, eagle, northern condor southern, and that extends all the way down into what’s now known as the southern Americas, you know, but the other part of of the nations down there, you know, Peru, other places that have different cultures that have sprung up. There are similarities down there, you know, and that there’s a lot of what happened down there happened up here in terms of colonization in terms of the ways that it looked, but always in the idea that we all grew together through the same struggles, you know, and there’s always evidences of far reaching histories of interconnected uh travel, uh interconnected wholesale of products, right? You know, talking about paint, talking about different pigments that were found, you know, in different parts of the Americas what’s now known as North America that came from down there, you know, and I’m talking about all the way down, uh by the pyramids, you know, the the Mayan uh pyramids, right? There’s different pigments that were found from down there used in those specific murals, and then similar the same pigment found all the way up here in in murals up here or different parts and artifacts, and so that tells me that there’s always been interconnectedness, that there’s always been that voice and that voice was always found and and sharing and helping uplift one another. So that’s where in my heart that when this came together and to see how much it came together, it allowed for even more confirmation upon that and when I took my travels all the way down to to Mayapan and and to again to those pyramids down there and to Merida, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with people who who studied, right? Who were able to look at the scribes and the scholars and and, you know, that’s where I got a lot of the information from. And so that just continued to show me that that’s just the way it was. And having traveled down there, you know, down cross to the gulf of what’s now known as Mexico, right? Now the tail of the turtle of Turtle Island, right? So it just brings a wholeheartedness to it to know that that we had the opportunity and we used every single day to make and create and weave a beautiful tapestry right there, in Anaheim and that’s where we’re left with now and I hear only good things even now almost a year later that uh people are still loving it. You know, they’re telling me that nobody’s tagged it, you know, nobody’s put their mark on it. and I wholeheartedly believe that that’s because it’s infused, it is the life blood of the culture.”