Radio Healer is a performance art project that expresses multi-ethnic indigenous cultural practices that include music, dance, and electronic media arts expression. Radio Healer focuses on promoting peaceful discourse and sustainable cross-cultural partnerships for understanding the cultural implications of marketplace technology in the context of indigenous life. Radio Healer also functions to resolve itself internally as the project collaborators take responsibility for each others’ cultural backgrounds to create a work of art within an indigenous media framework. We seek to build friendship, as well as a common understanding regarding cultural sustainability, colonialism, and the advancement of marketplace technologies and how these technologies can be tactically appropriated for decolonization. In the context of our work, we seek to adapt and hack marketplace technologies to tell contemporary stories that describe our time and challenges.

The project evolves with the collaborative efforts of artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners from diverse ethnic and professional backgrounds. As cultural workers, we use our knowledge to build sustainable relationships. Through these relationships we strive to identify and understand histories, socio-political dynamics that govern communities, and cross-cultural border conditions that are divisive and regressive. These understandings are vital to the health and promotion of cross-cultural communication with a consciousness for co-intentional partnership, social justice and social change. As a sustainable network between peoples, Radio Healer demonstrates intelligible and emotive ritualistic interpretations of this experience. It does this by using a rich vocabulary of symbols through dance, design, and music to communicate the story of our region and time. We believe that community demonstrations of this type help encourage cross-cultural healing and trust building through education and understanding.

Radio Healer demonstrates cultural conservation and emergence to utilize indigenous knowledge systems in our efforts to approach electronic technology. This is executed to gain insight into how people of different backgrounds can work together to preserve ceremonial rites within the context of rapid technological change. The gathering of diverse peoples within Radio Healer is a celebration of leadership in pursuit of common ground. The sustainability of these relationships is necessary to encourage the level of intercultural exchange required to shed light upon community issues. An issue of particular importance is the effects of marketplace technologies on tribal life. Radio Healer is an evolving artwork with the intent to field-find and articulate community perspective and experiential knowledge within the context of this complex issue. We believe that all cultures can appropriate and reshape market driven technology through indigenous media frameworks for culturally sensible applications. The works encompassed by our project signify a convergence of cultural resilience and indigenous innovation.