Passion Profile: Coyote Park
Written by Katelin Ling Cooper
This month’s Passion Profile highlights two-spirit Native artist Coyote Park (he/they) who is among a wide range of Indigenous artists featured in a virtual gallery hosted by Facebook’s Open Arts page titled “In Photos: Native and Indigenous Voices.” The series highlights Coyote and other visual creatives from this community who are pushing their culture and heritage forward through visual art to celebrate, inspire and elevate key issues facing marginalized and diverse Indigenous communities of color across Turtle Island. Coyote lives in Tongva Territory, or so-called Los Angeles, and they are a photographer and storyteller who is Indigenous to California.
Image of Coyote via their Instagram
"Home is an emotional space with my queer family of color"
Katelin: Can you tell us about who you are and where you are from, wherever you call home?
Coyote: I am a Yurok two-spirit artist. My family is native to Northern California near the Klamath River. I am also mixed race, as I am Native American, German and Korean. I am originally from Honolulu, Hawai’i, so I grew up in the Kingdom of Hawai’i on the island of Oahu. I ended up moving to New York for school and once I finished school, or mid-graduating, I moved out to Tongva territory, or Los Angeles, where I have family both in downtown LA and in Orange County. It’s been nice reconnecting to family here, especially thinking about a lot of displacement for different people who are Indigenous to California, a lot of us get relocated to either the Bay [area], San Diego or Los Angeles. I moved out here to live with my partner whom I got married to at the end of 2020. A lot of my photo practice has developed with my partner, both out of love and also necessity in the pandemic. A lot of my early photography before I got married has been centered on portraiture of community. Because of the pandemic, I’ve been quarantining with my wife and creating work with her. I have also been creating work with my sweetie, since I am non-monogamous. I’ve been seeing my sweetie for almost two and a half years now.
What I call home is really a loaded question because of displacement, and I feel that my home isn’t a city or a town or a territory of land and physical space; I feel that it is an emotional space with my queer family of color. I feel that I am creating home with the people I am always around and building with. I feel there are a lot of spaces that I feel very emotionally tied to, recognizing that the Kingdom of Hawai’i is illegally stolen land, that is a space from the pacific diaspora that I feel culturally connected to with other people there, but it is land that my friends and kanaka kin are fighting for sovereignty for, and in New York I have most of my closest friendships so I feel very close there, but I feel that more and more I am coming into and loving being here in Los Angeles because of the history and connections that I’ve been able to build.
“the Home is the Body”
Katelin: Your digital gallery show All Kin is Blood Kin (AKiBK) focuses on re-defining family and kinship relations through the lens of vulnerable intimacy, and your artwork asks poignant questions about what conceptions of “home” look like, sound like and feel like, especially for people whose identities, gender expressions and sexualities have been historically invisibilized and underrepresented. Can you expand more on how the idea of “home” for you is exemplified within your art and how your work helps to dispel these marginalizations?
Coyote: Something my work always comes back to, especially since a lot of it is self-portraiture, is the idea that the home is the body, and what does it mean to rebuild that. As a mixed Asian-Native person Indigenous to Turtle Island, I feel there is so much ancestral trauma that I have inherited, so being able to build a better relationship with my body that my mother and my father’s mother didn’t get to have. [I am often] thinking about what does it mean when you have the stereotypical nuclear family idea of a physical home where you are repainting the walls or doing renovations; [I approach] tattoo magic [as] being an act of coming into my body and also my gender-affirming surgery — everything I have done to rebuild and reconnect with my body. So in the way that I show my relationship with my body as a home, [for instance] there is this photograph that is on the digital gallery of my wife and I doing our hormone shot together, just thinking about these type of moments that are our own ceremony or ritual together, in the way that we come closer to ourselves and to each other. I think a lot of my work has to do with camaraderie: What does it mean to exist alongside people that have not the exact gender journey as you or life experience but at least similarities that you both are able to grow through with one another and feel less alone in.
Weekly Ritual: Hormone shots | Image via Instagram @coyotepark
A lot of my work is trying to tackle or break down what loneliness is like. Being both a mixed-race person, a trans person, a queer person whose sexuality is “I’m into people,” as both my partners identify differently. I feel like coming into transness and my sexuality has always just been with people, having different types of identities. I came out really young as trans [during] my junior year of high school, so it’s been eight years since then, almost a decade of being out. I feel like being the only trans person in my grade, being someone that had to be a queer outlier from a really young age, that loneliness is something I’ve always struggled with on island, and it wasn’t until moving and building both a physical and internet space that I felt less alone, especially meeting other Native people to Turtle Island that are queer and trans Natives.
How do I visualize something that is so far from loneliness; I think that is what building a home means, that feeling of togetherness and feeling that love is around every corner.
Katelin: How has navigating your identity as a mixed-race, queer urban Indigenous person impacted your creative expression and experience?
Coyote: I feel like a lot of my artwork is influenced by people in my family and my cultures. Due to scarcity and survival, a lot of my elders didn’t get to do a lot of the different types of work that I’m doing now, especially surrounding [my] direct family. My dad is Native and Korean, my mom is Native and white, and my dad was a painter when he was younger but he had to give that up to join the military to support family, and then my other family members were photographers, so seeing art as something they had to give up in order to create what was viewed as sustainability for their future generations. I think I am in this place of seeing [my art practice] as necessity; everything has always informed each other.
For my Korean family members, a lot of the work I do and a lot of the moments of prayer is [influenced by] my nana who is from Korea, and that influences my paintings more so than my photography. As an Indigenous person from that diaspora of homeland, I’m always doing land-body relationships when I’m doing self-portraits, [such as in] this one self-portrait of me in my homeland which is on the Yurok reservation. I think everything I’m doing, especially in my writing right now, has been ways to address that cultural and racial diaspora, [such as through] language revitalization that will come back into the titling of some pieces or the poetry I write that go alongside of it.
My photography does not exist isolated from my writing. That’s why I was really thankful that with the digital gallery for this show [All Kin is Blood Kin], we had writing prompts and got to prepare our writing with the images. As trans people, as queer people and as people that are heavily marginalized, we are so used to being seen and not heard, so [my art enables me] to have space to give myself that fullness. A lot of the photo projects I’ve done in the past before I was doing AKiBK had a lot of portraits of people and then interviews with them and artist profiles.
“As artists, we all are world-makers … anything I’m creating has to do with making a world that I want to live and continue surviving in.”
Self-portrait of Coyote on their ancestral homeland | Image via Instagram @coyotepark
Katelin: You mention that your work “aims to create queer utopia by photographing spaces of comfort, togetherness, and liberation.” Can you expand on what this idea of “queer utopia” means for you and your loved ones, and what it means to create art that affirms and celebrates queerness and indigeneity?
Coyote: As artists, we all are world-makers in a way and so I feel like everything I want to put into tangible image or writing, even paintings or anything I’m creating has to do with making a world that I want to live and continue surviving in. When I was younger, it always felt that there wasn’t space for someone like me, and more and more I think that queer utopia has to do with abundance — abundance of love, abundance of warmth. I’m at this place now where I feel so differently about the way that I view the world than when I was younger. To me, building queer utopia is how I can create for my younger self. I think that’s said a lot, and I’ll talk about it with my wife who is a filmmaker, and she’ll do the same for herself as a trans woman, showing things for her younger self. At the same time, it’s more of not just to my younger self, but for this inner kid that wants more.
“To me, queer utopia building is really showing that all of this is a possibility.”
In my marriage, too, documenting my partnership with my wife — there’s this new series that I’m starting just directly with images of her and I, because AKiBK is my platonic loves, my different partnerships, my relationship with myself and relationship with land, everything that to me is what kinship means. I’m doing an offshoot series with just my wife right now, but all of that work is showing that partnership [and] having someone that is really seeing you in the same light that we all try to see ourselves is [possible]. It is something that when I was younger I didn’t think could happen, for someone to see me in all aspects of myself, to not just see it but to feel and understand it as an unspokenness.
I did a series right before quarantine where it was this T4T bath series — I had friends over that were all queer and trans people of color, and all of us were in the bath space at my old apartment; we would just be talking for hours and then do 10 minutes of photos. To me, the bath space has always been a place for healing and letting people into that sanctuary, so thinking of the bath as its own world. [For] that whole series, I remember having people comment on it early on, and especially queer youth would comment, “Oh this makes me feel like I can experience that, I can experience being vulnerable, feeling safe, but also just being loved on by someone like that.” And early on hearing that reaction by people viewing photographs I was making, I was like this is what I want to create, where people can really see that utopia is in our everydays.
“Queer utopia has to do with abundance — abundance of love, abundance of warmth.”
Katelin: What does healing and self-care look like for you? What role does joy play in your life?
Coyote: Healing doesn’t look like something that is linear. I feel it’s something that I have been working on a lot in my writing, [which] has been the biggest way for me to heal lately. I just finished this QTBIPOC dream anthology with GenderFail that’s from 33 writers that I curated and edited and wrote a preface for. I am going on to do my own anthology of my poems, prose and short essays. That’s been a space for me to heal through my youth and my experiences in this world. But healing outside of that has just been really allowing myself to enjoy being present, like going out on a trail with my wife, as we live really close to the Dodger Stadium area, so going on a walk together or going to the ocean with friends. Recently I went on a roadtrip to Arizona with my best friend who is getting top surgery now. I think just those moments of taking in; as creators it’s always output output output, so being able to go and see the mountains turning purple with my wife — moments like that is really healing, and it allows me to get out of this making role or functioning as a maker, and how I can actually just feel very still and peaceful for a given time.
Katelin: Where do you notice yourself drawing inspiration from most often?
Coyote: I love photobooks, I collect photobooks. I’m so inspired by people who identify as storytellers! My wife is my most inspiring person in my life. She’s a filmmaker, and I was teasing her, “I’m going to get into screenwriting,” because I do so many different types of art forms. She makes me so passionate about film; I’ve always been into film, I used to teach film to highschoolers when I lived in Oahu. But I had put it on pause because I was getting very frustrated over the film industry; because I am so heavily tattooed, I can’t do anything anyway in terms of acting. But I am so inspired by the stories that she [my wife] creates and we’re creating a film that will be in production for next summer. So hearing the ways that people build new lifetimes through the stories they create is so cool.
I’ve also been really inspired by my queer elders — there’s this one photographer I’ve been spending more time with, I have his photobook. I feel like a lot of one-on-one time and meeting with friends of mine in my community, just hearing what they’re passionate about and things they’re dreaming up is the best gift. My wife will always tease me, “You’re always spending time with thousands of people all the time,” because I really enjoy seeing what gets people’s eyes glimmering. The dream zine I made recently was inspired by when you meet up with a friend and they’re telling you about this wild dream they had the other night. I could go on and on about this question!
“People build new lifetimes through the stories they create.”
Katelin: How can settlers of Turtle Island and folks in general celebrate your intersecting communities?
Coyote: By practicing tangible ways of showing up. Sometimes having land acknowledgements in the bio can be virtue signaling, saying, “Oh here, I recognize that I’m on Indigenous land,” but not really doing much for Indigenous people. I live in the world of constantly seeing mutual-aid shares and support from friends, and there are so many avenues for how to show up for Native moms going through medical struggles, or how to show up for Native land defenders that need jail support and aid, how to show up for someone who is funding to get land deeds to their ancestral homelands to do a community medicine farm. There’s so much out there! And not just treating a Native person as Google. I get [so many] DM requests where people ask me things about cultural appropriations or other Native issues without turning to other resources. There are a lot of ways to extend a hand to First Nations peoples.
A lot of people see Native people talking about Land Back as a metaphor, but it is something that is happening in real time in terms of being able to have land trusts to be land stewards on. [It’s necessary to] rework the way we see the treatment of Turtle Island and resources and ownership, this really skewed way of treating something that was so violently taken and the harm that’s left. Also people being able to show up so it’s not just Native people that are on the frontlines. I try to do what I can as an Indigenous person on my own socials, but because of where I’m at with personal family stuff and medical [needs] I can’t be on the frontlines. It’s such a struggle to be someone who is Native to Turtle Island and wanting to show up in those ways, but to be sad that other people, especially white settlers [who] have the protections in the system [can] show up but don’t. That’s something people should be doing in a way that’s not white saviorship.
Katelin: Do you have any resources you want to share, or upcoming art pieces you want people to be on the lookout for?
Coyote: My Instagram is my name, Coyote Park, [where] I’m always posting different things going on. I’m trying to do more regular artist talks because I’ve been having a lot of fun with that. [I visited] a university in January [2022] to give [one], so I want to do more digital talk spaces like that. It’s been really rewarding to just reach out and hear what other creatives are interested in making. Other than that, I’m going to be posting with my wife the film project we’re working on, which is a two-spirit love story film, and the whole cast is all Black, brown, Indigenous, trans, queer people of color, with different actors that all identify as trans, intersex, two-spirit, nonbinary. [For] that project we’re creating a kickstarter and we’re trying to get more industry support. We’ve been reaching out to other filmmakers to connect with. We’re filming next summer, so that’s what’s coming up next besides my personal projects.
For AKiBK I’m [planning] to create that as a physical book and I have the book proof, I’m just finding publisher support right now which is hard when it comes to finding publishers that you don’t have to put money down for. But All Kin is Blood Kin is coming out as a book one day! I have a digital gallery show of it on my website which is coyotepark.format.com and that site is from my opening show in Oahu back in August [2021] so it’s photo uploads from the gallery and it has my opening speech. I really want to make things more accessible which is why I’m trying to do the book because thinking about galleries and how they’re in certain cities, knowing not everyone can physically go there, so with the online gallery it’s bringing the show and my hometown in Honolulu to spaces where other people can view it.
