Nipahootih kuuk Tanivaana, Returning to Myself is a performance and evolving multi-channel video series exploring the life cycle of a garment I made titled Suit No. 5.

I have been working with Suit No. 5 since 2020, created initially for a collaborative exhibition with Creighton Baxter titled Realigned Possession. The latex rubber parent suit is periodically coated with silicone rubber and sometimes constellated with drawings then textured to resemble more-than-human kin. This work honors and prays for the woven relationships my people have with the other relatives we share the land with and their reliance on our care. Its polymer composites, a natural rubber that will age at a similar rate to my own body accumulates and releases an inorganic silicon-based silicone rubber polymer— one more sensitive to light and oxygen, the other more archival stable orients it in a duality of self. The suit changes form at every stage of its process and was made to release it multilayered skins.

For its salmon form, present in this video work, I embedded graphite transfers of family photographs, honoring my Karuk and Yurok ancestors who have been salmon people since time immemorial. Living in Los Angeles affords me a rich and vibrant community of artists and creatives but I miss my homelands very much and I grieve for the rivers, their displacements and entombments here and there and everywhere and the loss of our many relatives and native species caused by the impacts of the settler colonial project that is the United States of America.

This suit touches both on this longing of home and the ongoing traumas and struggles that impact vulnerable populations. I think of all of the watersheds in California, all of which should touch the Pacific and have salmon runs. I think of the LA River and the salmon that once thrived but can’t come home to Tongva-Gabrieleno Land since the entombment of the LA River in 1938. I think of the 4 dams that came down in 2024 freeing the Klamath River to run back to Oregon. I think of the ever flowing memory of those lost, living in the water, waters displaced from homelands and flowing amongst other rivers that keeps me alive in their resilience and positions of unwellness.

I must return to myself daily to acknowledge the imbalances in which we all live in, tracing my lineages recurrently, grounding in the discipline of the life I move toward. This suit is in honor of the experiences of my family and ancestors, in their survival and in the space they made for me to carry forward and to land where I am at always in change and transition, in growth. In my reach to honor them and my culture through a deep understanding and an invitation to learn the type of care that is rooted in karuk culture, to know that the agency of life, led through a desire to stay in balance with the land and its people requires a deep and detailed learning of place and the lineages/histories that inform its past, present and future positions.

With this work, I ask: how do we care for our relations? how can and how do we remember them? how do we care for ourselves and get to know and live in peace and intimacy with our pasts? how do we move through the waters of our memories and ancestral violences and wounds? how do we honor all of it so we step into a place where we can live in ways of expression that those who came before us were not afforded but carved out a place for us to be? how do we become the ancestors needed to future generations, even if we struggle every second of the way?

Miller Robinson

Miller Robinson