Refusing Erasure: Indigenous Women, Memory, and the Future of Story

A panel and reading on how Indigenous writers preserve suppressed histories while creating future-facing literary forms.
About this Event

In partnership with Aunt Lute Books and Cosecha Collective, please join us for this free panel: Refusing Erasure: Indigenous Women, Memory, and the Future of Story.

A panel and reading on how Indigenous writers, LeAnne Howe (Shell Shaker), Kim Shuck (American Indian Stories and the Language of String), and Gwendolyn Paradice (The Divining Season), preserve suppressed histories while creating future-facing literary forms.

Aunt Lute Books is an intersectional, feminist press dedicated to publishing literature by those who have been traditionally underrepresented in or excluded by the literary canon. Core to Aunt Lute’s mission is the belief that the written word is critical to understanding and relating to each other as humans.Through the sharing of stories, we strengthen ties across cultures and experiences, and at the same time honor the hurt, loss, and harm incurred through structural power imbalances, prejudiced and gendered systems, and ancestral trauma. We uplift these voices in order to build a more just future.

Cosecha Collective is an Indigenous women-led arts collaborative founded in 2024 by Barbara Mumby Huerta and Veronica Torres. The collective gathers what dominant culture has refused to see: the stories, knowledge, and presence of marginalized communities whose care and labor sustain life—yet who remain structurally invisible within it. Working from bases in San Francisco and Modesto, California, Cosecha operates across the breadth of the state, centering communities whose work feeds, heals, teaches, and nurtures us across generations.

Through muralism, photography, portraiture, installation, performance, poetry, and film, Cosecha develops a shared visual language rooted in collaboration and relational accountability. Our work is not made about these communities—it is made with and from them, grounded in an Indigenous understanding of land as relational, labor as cultural continuity, and memory as a living force.

About Brava! for Women in the Arts celebrates nearly 40 years as a professional arts organization, and nearly 30 years of owning and operating Brava Theater Center. Brava’s recent producing history includes award-winning new work by Rhodessa Jones & Cultural Odyssey, Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe & Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience, Marga Gomez, and Lisa Mezzacappa, as well as world premieres by Cherríe Moraga, Marisela Orta, and Lisa Marie Rollins; the Bay Area premieres of Solitude by Evelina Fernandez & Latino Theatre Company, the Off-Broadway hit Mighty Real: A Fabulous Sylvester Musical, the monthly podcast series Indómitas, as well as annual events such as Loco Bloco’s Dia de Los Muertos celebration. Brava’s current artistic programming includes traditional and contemporary music festivals, a variety of film festivals, contemporary and experimental theatrical productions, international comedy shows, lectures, and professional dance productions—making Brava one of the most eclectic and multifaceted arts venues in the Bay Area.