Objects to Ancestors

I prepared this text for The Summer Happening residency at Texas A&M, May 2025

​I’m going to explain something that is really happening.
I’m going to imagine something that isn’t yet really happening.
I’d like you to listen to this from a future anterior point of view such that the imagined happening becomes that which will have happened.  

I. Indigenous Cultures Institute
For the 2024 Performance Philosophy conference in Austin, Texas, members of the Miakan-Garza Band informed our group about their ongoing struggle with various educational institutions. The members who spoke to us were:
· Dr. Mario Garza currently serves as board of elder’s chair and is the principal founder of the Institute.
· Maria F. Rocha, Secretary
· Ruben A. Arellano, Ph.D., Consultant

Here is a summary of what they told us:
​"The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) databases list more than 7 million Culturally Unidentifiable Inventoried (CUI) Native American remains of our ancestors that have been unearthed over the years and are kept in “collections” by universities, museums, and federal and state departments.  This has happened in a country where it is against the law to disturb a human grave.

As of 2015, the remains of 3,454 ancestors were removed from our Texas sacred grounds.  Over 2,400 of those ancestors are at UT-Austin. The Miakan-Garza tribe is seeking three of those remains for reburial. “Our obligation, as native people, as Texas Indians, is to obtain possession of these ancestral remains and rebury them as close as possible to where they were unearthed.” — Dr. Mario Garza

UT ISSUED DENIAL OF REQUEST TO REBURY ANCESTORS:
On June 3, 2020, UT denied the tribe’s request to rebury their ancestors.  The Miakan-Garza appealed to President Jay Harzell to overturn this decision and gave him until August 17th to respond. No response was received. On August 20th the tribe issued a press release targeting the university’s unwillingness to turn over the ancestors for reburial. September 7th, the community gathered and united with the UT students to launch a campaign for the ancestors’ release."

Put simply, the University of Texas has transformed ancestors into objects. 

II. The Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory
During the same talk, I learned that TARL made it possible for scientific researchers to rent the remains. That is to say, the Miakan-Garza band cannot repatriate their ancestors because they have been turned into objects, but others who are interested in the objects can pay money to spend time with them. 

III. Alchemical Research Coalition, a division of the Invisible College

Let us imagine that there is a revivification of the Invisible College.
 
Founded by the natural scientist Robert Boyle in the 17th Century, the Invisible College convened around a distrust for knowledge received through inherited institutional frameworks. This ensemble, which included the likes of Christopher Wren, took as its motto Nullius in Verba (‘on the word of no one’), a phrase in which resides a distant echo of the founding Performance Philosophy proposition that we ought to think without knowing what thinking is. The Invisible College’s mission was to think anew by refusing the keywords and presumed certainties that pretended to vouchsafe the bedrock beliefs of the sciences. Engaging in experiment and active observation of the physical world around them, Boyle and his colleagues built their own theories and inspired a new generation of non-conformist intellectuals.
 
As non-philosopher Francois Laruelle sees the discipline of Philosophy as a machine that endlessly produces problems suited perfectly to the answers that the discipline itself produces, I understand the University as an institution that, more and more, seeks to commodify education and produce the language that would legitimate and sanction such an education, all the while blocking students’ paths to forms of learning that would cultivate not workers but life-artists, or, better, performance philosophers. This is something to grieve. The University has not irrevocably ceded ground to the forces of ignorance. But the battle is underway. The question: what is to be done? I have been imagining ways to supplement traditional University offerings with experimentation within the Invisible College. The Invisible College has no defined curriculum but operates within the field of research mapped by Performance Philosophy, and as such it would have two guiding principles: 1.) To think such that we do not know what thinking is. 2.) Doing life is that which we must think.
 
So imagine that this Invisible College is alive. And imagine further a group called the Alchemical Research Coalition. Within this coalition, 4 researchers have formed a multidisciplinary humanities research cluster to function as a node of the Invisible College dedicated to completing the work of the great alchemists of the past. Let us imagine that the names of the researchers are Ahmed Adel Awni Al-Dous, Mays Hossam Jamil Al-Zaanin, Ayla Ahmed Ali Obeid, and Niveen Khaled Saleh Hassouna. They partnered with the Miakan-Garza Band and submitted a fellowship application to the American Council of Learned Societies. The stated goal of the proposed research project was to enact an alchemical transformation of objects into ancestors through a fusion of Occult Philosophy, such as that used by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and song, such as that produced by members of the Garza band.
 
The project proceeded in this fashion. First, the team used ACLS funding to rent the remains of the Miakan-Garza ancestors from the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory. Second, once in their possession, the remains were buried on the Sacred Ground of the tribe. Third, the researchers and the tribe members performed alchemy that transformed objects—remains held by the university—into ancestors—participating members in the daily lives of the Miakan-Garza people.

The University sued the researchers and found themselves in the position once occupied by the tribe. No longer the ones in possession of anything, they had to request the return of the ancestors in order to transform them back into objects. The tribe denied the request. Thus, a second alchemical transformation had taken place. The University became those who are denied.

IV. What can imagining do?
It is perhaps an understatement to say that imaginative and creative thinking are needed in the present moment. Is there a way to intervene creatively, perhaps through fiction, in our daily reality so as to produce a kind of change that seems magical upon initial inspection but turns out to be fully material? Might grief be the affective source material upon which we can draw to produce cracks in the smooth façade of daily life?