My mother is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and my father immigrated to the United States from Mexico when he was a teenager. Three years ago, I migrated to Canada from the United States. Stories of migration often name the colonial countries that bodies move through, leaving out the land-experience of the Indigenous territories passed through. Overtime, I have migrated across far more than just three nations or territories. In unbelongings: boots, I try to tell the story of moving through an Indigenous continent that resists political borders. I have used photogrammetry to digitally re-create a pair of cowboy boots I’ve had for ten years. Cowboy boots, like me, are a hybrid of Indigenous and European materials and technologies. During the early 1800s, Indigenous farm hands from different parts of “New Spain” worked for – or were enslaved by – settler ranch owners, and began adapting European style riding boots to be better suited for ranch work on their traditional territories. Overtime, these became the cowboy boots we know today. I bought my cowboy boots in a market in Oaxaca, a place where the story of my body has beginnings, and they have accompanied me ever since. Like many other leather objects I work with, these boots have collected the scuffs, marks, patina and shininess from use and wear over time, moulding perfectly to the shape of my feet. While photogrammetry can capture much of this textural information, it is much harder for felt experience and embodied knowledge to be expressed through a digital object.

This video shows my boots rendered in different image textures, using photos of trails in territories I’ve passed through, picked from my personal archive gathered over years of moving from place to place. I do not think of myself as belonging to any of these places and they don’t belong to me, rather I think of myself as actively unbelonging to all these places, and often find myself longing for them. Is this because their memories have become important parts of my lived experience? How do those territories and the knowledge they imparted to me live on inside me after my body has left them? And if I unbelong to all places, are these boots my belongings or unbelongings? The images used show many Native territories including the traditional lands of the Skokomish, Konkow Maidu, Zapoteca, Mazateca, Blackfoot, Cahuilla, P'urhepecha, Kumeyaay and Ohlone nations. The final image I’ve textured the boots with is of the river valley just down the trail from where I currently – but probably not permanently – live, in Blackfoot territory. The trail has been frozen over and can’t be walked down until the ice melts and the river level goes down.

It's worth noting that the quality of the scan was hugely informed by the land itself, by Treaty 7 territory: these boots were scanned on a day where there was snow in the coulees but there were also tufts of grass poking through the snow. This made for perfect scanning conditions, as the snow reflected the light with the perfect balance of contrast and dispersed light. The exposed grass served as visual markers that the photogrammetry software was then able to reference while stitching together the images. In a way, by turning my boots into digital objects, I can now walk digital Indigenous territories, too.