Rethinking Memorialization

Wed., February 25, 2026

Memory Keeping from Indigenous Perspectives

Public Talk at 518 Valencia

Shaping San Francisco’s year-long case study of the Padre Junípero Serra statue included a folklife-based, community-led research process centered on memory-keeping practices. Indigenous community researchers explored everyday practices from their own cultures that carry collective knowledge. The researchers included members of Urban Native communities, Indigenous migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, and urban youth. Their research invites reflection on how genocide, relocation, and migration continue to erode Indigenous ways of knowing, and how communities continue to protect and hold on to them. The process was facilitated by storyteller Adriana Camarena. Several community researchers will share their findings. The discussion will be presented in Spanish and English.

Wed., February 11, 2026

The Priest, the Imperialist, and the Sculptor

Public Talk at 518 Valencia

Please join us in closing a year-long case study of the Padre Junipero Serra statue. Jonathan Cordero (Association of Ramaytush Ohlone) critically examines the romantic myth that supports the veneration of Serra and reveals the actual calamitous impact of the mission system. Chris Carlsson explains how an unlikely series of events led to the so-called “Mission Revival”, the commissioning of the statue by James Phelan, and giving Serra an undeserved new role in a manufactured public memory. He reveals that the statue's placement in Golden Gate Park in 1907 in fact bolstered a white supremacist agenda at the dawn of the 20th century. LisaRuth Elliott explores Douglas Tilden, the cosmopolitan sculptor revered in the deaf community, and his many other contributions to the SF civic art collection and beyond. This evening is a chance to talk about the reanimation of a man through a monument, the fraught relationship between a patron of the arts and his protegé, and how these honorific likenesses and what they are supposed to signify become part of our urban space.

Saturday, February 21, 2026

Presidio to Mission Dolores

An Urban Walk

A cross-city walk along roads that lead to Mission Dolores as part of our year-long case study of the Padre Junipero Serra statue. Walk with us on pathways trod by lonely soldiers stationed at the far end of the Spanish empire across the hills to Mission Dolores, these routes having been used for centuries before their arrival. Uncover your own lost landscapes as we walk between the coast and inland water sources, locations of 18th century Spanish colonial settlements that irrevocably transformed lifeways here. Moving through present-day urban San Francisco landscapes, along Goldsworthy tree lines and Lover’s Lane, we investigate: How and what are we remembering now? What would, could, should be memorialized? Do you feel like you have a right to be memorialized or represented in the historical record? What parts of the more-than-human world ought to be represented in our efforts to commemorate the past?

Shaping San Francisco's LisaRuth Elliott introducing the walk in front of the Presidio Officers Club.

Hiking along Andy Goldsworthy's Wood Line adjacent to Lovers' Lane in Presidio.

A brief pause at the Presidio Gate.

A block from the Mission Dolores end, here at 16th and Church.