Making 100 Ribbon Skirts

Betti Ono Art Residency

In 2024 Inés Ixierda was selected as a Reclamation of Space Artist in Residence with the Betti Ono Foundation (BOF). With the idea of creating an honoring project around the experience with Ancestral names and records, Inés worked with Lisjan Nation to create a proposal for this project and through the year, a public exhibition of the work created within it.

As an Artist in Residence, Inés helped create three workshop spaces for 40 Indigenous artists and 12 weeks of drop in-sewing hours at the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust offices. For Tribal members who lived further away, materials were mailed back and forth. All of the artists and workshop leaders received honorariums for their participation.

  • A rainbow of ribbon in a workshop materials display.

  • Inés, Maud and Flavia securing a couple hundred yards of fabric.

  • A skirt design layed out at one of the workshops led by Lisjan Nation culture keeper Cheyenne Zapeda.

  • Inés adjusting a skirt for documentation.

  • All of the skirts were photographed by Ashley Salaz.

The Ribbon Skirt Workshop Series

The workshop series was led by Lisjan Tribal member Cheyenne Zapeda, sharing cultural knowledge, the story the land and her own family history, the impacts of the mission system, the history of ribbon skirts, and hands on sewing techniques. Indigenous women's names from the Mission San Jose and Mission Dolores records were prepared and chosen from a basket by each artist to create a skirt in honor of.

After a series of workshops, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust transformed their back room into a sewing studio for 10 weeks of drop in sessions for artists to access sewing support, use machines, pick up supplies, and work on their pieces.

For many participants, this was their first time learning these stories, the first time seeing these  ancestral names,  and their first sewing.  This project not only honors this difficult past, but also created spaces for cultural connection in the present and for the future, contributing to Indigenous women’s legacies of resistance and remembrance.

Reading the Records

The names of the women and girls honored in this exhibit were documented in the missions and digitized through the Early California Population Project (ECPP).

ECPP encompasses digitized records from all 21 California mission containing information culled from 104,000 baptisms, 28,000 marriages and 72,000 burials performed in California between 1769 and 1850.

Thank you to the team that navigated the ECPP databases for this project including Theo Gardner, Arely Hernandez, Sharon Marcos, and Ashley Salaz.

Thank you to those that prepared the printed records and hand wrote all names for the artists and exhibit including Lucio Jacob Tena, Frida Tucker, and Victoria Montaño.