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Abstract

Radio Healer is an indigenous media expression facilitated through dialogues where artists mentor each other to create a practice of music, story, and dance that includes the use of indigenous electronic implements. Indigenous electronics and ceremonial implements are created and used in Radio Healer to re-imagine ways to express cultural traditions within the context of the urban environment and the digital age. A function of Radio Healer is to exercise critical thought regarding the cultural impact of electronic technology on indigenous ways of being, as well as to critique electronic technology within the context of mainstream society. Project artists achieve this through a tactical media approach by applying Chicano rasquache traditions for the innovation of indigenous electronic technology. Rasquache traditions exemplify and celebrate the creativity and resourceful innovation of Chicano and other indigenous cultures throughout the world. These traditions demonstrate adaptations of foreign cultural artifacts and materials, as well as the use of local materials to innovate utilitarian and aesthetic designs based on creative improvisation and cultural epistemology, ontology, and epistemology. Rasquache is an innovation-framework that is practiced by indigenous communities to create outcomes that demonstrate political legitamicy, self-determination, survivance, and environmental sustainability.   In the case of Radio Healer, Rasquache is applied to the design of indigenous electronic implements that are constructed through a process of hacking, circuit-bending, appropriation, recycling, and adaptive reuse. These tools are used for the performance of music, story, and dance to uncover knowledge and conciousness through "re-imagined" ceremonies deriving from ancestral ways of being. The artists of Radio Healer contribute this practice as members of their respective cultures for the humanization of each other and all peoples.

Left Photo: Artist Lisa Tolentino holds a Radio Healer rasquache musical instrument. Right Photo: Radio Healer rasquache musical instrument constructed with a poster mailing tube and chiptune circuit design.

Radio Healer is directed by Cristóbal Martínez (Chicano) and Randy Kemp (Choctaw-Euchee-Creek) as an electro-acoustic expression of indigenous self-determinism.

Photo above: Artists Robert Esler, Lisa Tolentino, Cristóbal Martinez, and Randy Kemp perform Radio Healer.

Radio Healer is an art project in residence at Pueblo Grande Musem, Phoenix, AZ.