Paradise Fires, 2023

"A few years ago, an incredibly tragic and violent fire swept through Maidu forests and devastated a small town called “Paradise”. The violence of the fire and poetic nature of the disaster, with “Paradise” itself turning into a hellscape meant it became a subject of national news, with Trump himself commenting on the crisis.

The tragedy forced America to acknowledge that it didn’t know how to manage the land it stole, it forced America to admit it was disconnected. As prior, First Peoples used small fires to clear old and dead growth and had gardened the forest to create the “park like” and pristine “Wilderness” colonists “discovered”. It was these massive fires that forced politicians to acknowledge that they needed to consult tribes on the care of our land, and this land management has become the basis some tribes were able to argue for the rematriation of their sacred sites.

Our house is deep in an oak forest, and twice we were evacuated with the fear of a fire, and we’d see pillars of smoke out the window or hillsides of charred bramble painted pink with aerial flame retardant. With the years of drought and the removal of man from nature, the forest was like kindling. The fear of all the forests burning seemed to be all anyone could talk about. Recently, my Mom, an NDN friend and I drove for miles through burned Maidu mountains on the way to a Big Time in Greenville, and it was charred and burned for as far as we could see, and this very Maidu town was burned to the earth with residents set up in trailers.

I asked my friend, “What does all this mean?”, because in native culture, everything means something. He said with the forests that we are tied to burning down, that new life would come in, and it would all start over. "He said “It meant change.”

Pehéipem, 2024

At first glance, Pehéipem shimmers softly—an iridescent shell cradling delicate threads of glass and abalone beads. But lean in closer, and it begins to speak.

Carved from abalone, a material rooted in both protection and sacredness across many Indigenous cultures, the piece feels like an offering. Or perhaps a wound. Tyler Eash, who moves fluidly between poetry, installation, sculpture, and sound, creates work that refuses to settle into a single category—mirroring the very instability of personal history he often investigates.

Here, the abalone is both body and memory. Hollowed, pierced, adorned—it carries the weight of something once living, now transformed. The dangling beads become tendrils of narrative, shimmering traces of the unsaid, the buried, the broken-open. There’s a tenderness in the craftsmanship, but also a sharpness—an acknowledgment of pain as part of the archive.

The title, Pehéipem, comes from the artist’s engagement with his Numunu (Comanche) heritage. It suggests a reconnection to a language, a people, and a past that colonization tried to sever. Eash does not aim to restore some static identity; instead, he leans into fragmentation, letting the form whisper through its absences. What’s missing becomes just as potent as what remains.

As part of his broader practice—where storytelling becomes entangled with personal, spiritual, and cultural threads—this work embodies resistance through material intimacy. It’s not a monument. It’s a relic of the everyday sacred. A listening object. A pulse.