So, I told her I was half-Indian

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So, I told her I was half-Indian weaves together a century of my family’s accumulated pauses when asked, “Where are you from?” These fibrous pauses tangle together through generations who have never been mostly-any-ethnicity, and yet through their skin are asked to embody a history of contested racial checkboxes in the U.S.

 

Woven through the red-and-white striped warp is printed fabric that I designed using generative AI. I gave the AI text-based prompts to translate race into pattern: “How would a cloth look in the 1940s that appears to be a Hawaiian fabric but is actually masking a racialized Black identity? What changes if that fabric assimilates into 1960s Asian American racial categories, and 2000s Latino racial categories?”

 

The AI and I face off in the center of this piece to recreate my Auntie Amarjit’s tapestry-woven Punjabi vertical zigzag stripes, an image that the AI cannot generate and instead turns into a mathematical script. Python-scripted by AI or backstrap-woven by me, both zigzags end up as approximate assimilations.

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During the exhibition, the audience will be invited to weave vertical zigzag strips that will later be woven into this piece.

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One final collaborator on this project is my brother Gabriel Dominguez, who fabricated all the wood and is also nearly half-Indian.

– Kira Dominguez Hultgren

 

Kira Dominguez Hultgren’s So, I told her I was half-Indian (2025) is the second artwork commissioned for “What Can Become of Us?,” a collaboration between the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS) and Zócalo Public Square, envisioning new perspectives on migration, America’s changing communities, and how people come together across differences. The year-long series activates four regions of the United States and highlights newly commissioned works of art to inspire a national conversation, through exhibitions, public programs, and essays, about working toward a better future. 

 

Sign up at https://zps.la/become to receive ongoing updates about the project.

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