HAASMEEN

Ancestral tattoo by mugen. Click here to view their work.

I was born and raised on land that was stolen from the Tohono O'odham Nation. My immediate connections are to people and land from the southwestern United States and northern México.

My Story

My first personal project involved driving to Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians’ tribal land (so-called Solvang, California) back in the summer of 2021. The tribe had faced racist backlash in response to their right to reclaim 1,400 acres of their ancestral land. This sparked interest in our connection (and disconnection) to land as people. The presence of White Supremacy in this concept of land ownership within the so-called United States. And the trauma that comes with the installation of nation-states. Man-made borders intentionally divide and separate the ancestal connection between being and land.

My lineage carries ancestors who have been forced to leave a land and ancestors who participated in settler colonialism — destruction of homeland, community, culture, language, and ancient traditions. Scott Richardson-Read (Scottish working-class writer, researcher, forensic folklorist) warns of the romanticization and cultural appropriation of folk beliefs and practices. His writing has been a guide in my exploration of (how he describes) my “distant Scottish roots” — ancestral roots of mine that originated in the Scottish Highlands. These roots spread violently into Mi'kma'ki (now known as Albert County, Nova Scotia) reproducing the displacement of the local Mi'kmaq people by the same Highlanders that had been displaced by British imperialism and ruling class members who believed sheep were worth more than the people of the land.

Photography and ancestral research are part of my process of unsettling settler colonialism. My approach to visual documentation requires me to question and reject prescribed history and patriarchal traditions. The past assigned everyone a role; forcing us to perform on a stage of extraction and destruction. Land is saturated with stories that resurrect memories of community, resistance, and healing; experiences that are queer and non-binary. Through art, I seek those memories and the reconnection to land.

Thank you for taking the time to visit and be with my art.

In gratitude,

Jazmin (pronounced Haas-meen)

Pronouns: They/she

Image of a mother and her children

“Blood and DNA are not culture. DNA does not define ethnicity. Ethnicity does not equate homogeneity and is not reflected in phenotype. Culture and cultural belonging are complicated; defined by a community's sovereign self-determination of identity and community, and expressions that describe it such as art, music, folklore, religion, cosmology, language, and storytelling. And none of these have anything to do with nation-states or nationalism. Therefore we must remember, in our own attempts to reshape ourselves in reconnection to culture and cultural histories, to not perpetuate the methods of exclusion, violence, and colonization in our practices.”

Excerpt from: Arnold, Sharon. “Reconnecting to ancestral plant culture, lore, and traditions.” Dimensions Variable, 8 Jan. 2025, https://www.dimensionsvariable.org/altar-hearth-field/reconnecting-to-ancestral-plant-culture-lore-and-traditions. Link to article here.