Centering Indigenous Voices: Fowler invites visitors to rethink land, culture and responsibility

It was a total fluke and an unfortunate and sad coincidence that the Fowler Museum at UCLA debuted its “Fire Kinship†exhibition on Jan. 22, 2025 — 15 days after the tragic LA Palisades and Eaton wildfires erupted.

But as Silvia Forni, Shirley and Ralph Shapiro director at the Fowler, explained, the exhibition was in-the-making for over three years.

“The coincidence was devastating, and we were traumatized when thinking about opening this exhibition, knowing about the pain and destruction that our community was living,†said Forni. “But when we went back to the exhibition text, and we asked ourselves, do we need to rewrite the text, thinking about what is happening in LA now, we did not change a word. The message was not that fire is great. The message is: You have to respect the environment; you have to think of yourself as being in a relationship with the environment. If you think in those terms, then you go about your life and your your relationships in a way that ultimately is more respectful of the land.â€

The exhibition, which closed on April 12, 2026, was developed with the aid of two curators, Daisy Ocampo Diaz and Lina Tejeda, both Indigenous women, and a broad range of advisors. 

“The focus was on Southern California Indigenous communities and the way they had engaged with and managed the land with fire for centuries before the establishment of the state of California,†Forni relayed, “and how the encounters with Europeans brought the demonization and suppression of Indigenous practices of land management, which eventually brought a very different type of understanding of the place of humans in the environment.â€

She continued: “What was important for our advisors and curators was to reflect on humans being in a kinship relationship with the elements and the environment, including fire. What is the attitude and approach that you have as an individual or as a community if you think of your place in a kinship relationship? Putting yourself in relationship with water, land, fire, the heavens, the skies and so on versus a domination relationship—recovering and reflecting that plants are relative, fire is a relative, and we need to respect and engage with these different elements in a more humble and open way.â€

Questions asked included, what does it mean to suppress fire, and what did it mean for the land and environment to stop burning in a controlled way? In fact, demonizing fire may have enabled different growth in the landscape that ultimately might have been partly responsible for the destructive LA wildfires.

“Fire has always been part of California,†Forni shared. “There is a fire season. It helps plants regenerate. There are things you can do as humans that can reduce the destructive impact of fire. We wanted to reflect on fire as something that can be regenerative and positive if respected and used properly and consciously.â€Â 

The current exhibition, “Mountain Spirits: Rice and Indigeneity in the Northern Luzon Highlands, Philippines†is a bit like “Fire Kinship,†according to Forni, who sees the two projects as related and in line with the museum's mission: to explore global arts and cultures with an emphasis on Africa, Asia, the Pacific and the Indigenous Americas—past and present.

Fowler was founded in 1963 at a time when UCLA was expanding and internationalizing its curriculum and launching a number of departments to expand the ideas of culture, art and knowledge beyond Euro-American traditions. Fowler houses over 120,000 objects. It presents temporary and permanent exhibitions and programming such as film screenings, mindful meditation, talks, StoryTime and student-led concerts.

Some events draw 20 people sitting reflectively in the gallery for 30 minutes and some, like the opening night reception for “Mountain Spirits†last month, draw over 1,000 people enjoying performances, music and food. 

Stephen Acabado, professor of anthropology at UCLA and director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, played a big part in creating the current exhibition, which centers on the UNESCO-recognized Ifugao rice terraces—engineering and ecological achievements first constructed in the 16th century as a strategic response to Spanish colonization of the Philippine lowlands. 

“The terraces are, in part, the result of the Ifugao people choosing to move up the mountains and reestablish themselves further away from where the Spanish colonial settlers were establishing their sphere of influence,†said Forni. “Acabado brought to the floor how this idea of indigeneity was always in communication with other places, societies and cultures and that the Ifugao, even though they chose to establish their communities further up the mountains and build these incredible feats of engineering, did so in ways that, on the one hand, protected their community and their sense of self and established a strong anchor to the idea of indigeneity, and they also were in communication and aware of what was happening more generally in the Philippines. They were part of a network of trade. So, this idea of Indigenous cultures being isolated and out of touch with history is something that gets belied by the archaeology of the terraces.â€

“The rice terraces are agricultural structures that express Ifugao identity, values and

responsibility,†emphasized exhibition curator Marlon Martin, chief operating officer of the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo), which focuses on the transmission and continuation of Ifugao traditions locally and intergenerationally.

“If you know who you are and where you come from, you are a better adult,†added Forni. “You have a sense of self that allows you to be a stronger person as you move about the different challenges of life. So, there was this idea of thinking about the contemporaneity of tradition, even though many of our objects may be decades old, they continue to be, or similar objects continue to be, part of the way rituals and ceremonies and life is performed today. On the one hand, contemporary people are able to engage with this historical collection and at the same time witness how these forms have evolved and continue to be present in contemporary practices.â€

Forni joined the Fowler team in January 2023, following her tenure as a senior curator of Global Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada and deputy vice president of the museum's department of art and culture.

“I have a history of curating exhibitions in African art, but I also, by virtue of where I worked before, had quite a bit of experience with working with global Indigenous communities and ideas of restitution and interpretation of what collection care means,†Forni shared. “Coming to the Fowler, I found myself in a new museum, but also in a very familiar environment in terms of the questions that we were asking of ourselves as an institution: What does it mean for a museum in the 21st century to hold in care and interest these collections that are so meaningful and significant for Indigenous communities across the globe?â€

“That is a question that we ask ourselves every day,†she continued, “and we continue to evolve the responses and how we activate different things at different times. The Fowler offers us the opportunity, not just of presenting art through exhibitions but of questioning how we define art, what are these objects that we have in our trust and care, and who are the experts that we should consult when we put these objects on display or when we write descriptions in our database. It is a pretty interesting place to be.â€

As a trained anthropologist, Forni has always been interested in the role of objects, materials and art in the life of individuals. She thinks of art as something that is integrated with people's lives and their understanding of the world and not separate and just seen in museums. Art is part of architecture, households and what people wear in ceremonial occasions. She is intrigued by the idea that beauty is connected to lived experience in a way that can be meaningful for people and define who they are and how they understand themselves.

“We are attracted and fascinated by aesthetic productions from elsewhere,†she said. “We bring home objects when we travel. Objects carry memories; they are signifiers of experiences and relationships. It is this connection between objects and people that was always a fascinating part of thinking about global arts. The Fowler is a place where these questions and relationships are always at the forefront. Often there is this idea that objects come to die in museums, especially objects from other cultures. What we see here at the Fowler is different. We have an active material repository that gets activated throughout history, and these objects are a presence that Indigenous communities can choose to claim back sometimes and, in other cases, can reactivate in collaboration with us for their community use and for the public use in ways that are endlessly fascinating and change with time and with the players and the people that come to be part of that relationship and engagement.† 

 

The Fowler Museum at UCLA is located at 308 Charles East Young Drive North, Los Angeles; 310-825-4361; fowler.ucla.edu.