Brave and bold, Chiara “Sunshine” Beaumont dedicates her voice to the freedom of her people.
By Regine Malibiran
Photos courtesy of Chiara “Sunshine” Beaumont
Like her namesake, artist, educator and activist Chiara “Sunshine” Beaumont possesses an enduring fire. As a member of the Karankawa Hawk Clan, she has confronted the false assertion that her people are extinct – a common misconception she’s faced throughout her life. The Karankawa are indigenous to the Gulf Coast of Mexico, historically stewarding the coastal valleys amongst the Brazos, Colorado, Guadalupe, San Antonio and Nueces Rivers. Because they defended their territory from Europeans, the Karankawa continue to endure lies that accuse them of savagery and cannibalism. These lies have justified targeted violence towards their people since the 1600s, including Stephen F. Austin’s intent of extermination.
One of the ways that Beaumont inherited this violence is through the deceitful assertion that her people are gone.
“When you’re reading literal textbooks in school, when you’re looking up information online, everything’s saying that you’re extinct,” shares Beaumont. “And that’s a very specific and unique experience. A lot of Indigenous people know what it’s like. It’s maddening.”
Beaumont’s mother raised her children to object to their own erasure. Though educational and career opportunities kept their family in Virginia, she prioritized building a connection between her children and their ancestral land, culture and community. Beaumont remembers spending school breaks, birthdays (including her quinceañera), holidays and “every opportunity” they had back in Texas.
“I’ve only recently started to mourn what life was like at that time,” Beaumont admits. “Because it lasted until I was 17, I can’t put into words how crazy that felt. To think and believe that your people were killed off, extinct, decimated – no longer on this earth.”
In a 2020 essay, Dr. Elena Ruiz, the Founder and Director of the Research Institute for Structural Change at Michigan State University, refers to the “effort of one culture to undermine another culture’s confidence and stability by causing the victimized collective to doubt [its]own sense and beliefs” as “cultural gaslighting.”
As a child, Beaumont recalls being “a living entity whose spirit just resisted – always.” She questioned everything, rebelled against authority and spent a lot of time in internal reflection developing her own values and convictions. As she grew, her reflections transformed into a drive to create.
“I would find a lot of freedom of expression in making not just art, but art that ‘[comforts]the disturbed and [disturbs]the comfortable,’” Beaumont shares, referencing poet, activist, and educator Cesar A. Cruz. “I didn’t have the verbiage until my early 20s to know that it’s more specific than that. I’m not [just]disturbing the comfortable. I’m resisting against these colonizers.”
Through mixed media collage, Beaumont juxtaposes landscapes, cultural symbols, human figures and graphic text to create powerful statements about capitalism, environmentalism, the Land Back Movement and other Indigenous issues.
One of her recent works, Drowning, is a collage on paper inspired by the damaging effects of Hurricane Helene on the Appalachias, a region that Beaumont cherishes and protects as her home away from the Gulf Coast. The work stitches together a collection of images: a drone shot of condos built right on the shore, a photo of lines spray painted on an outdoor brick facade indicating the flood levels for Hurricanes Ike and Harvey, a headline reporting on real estate development that is “Beyond the sea wall’s protection” and an upper-class white couple smiling and watching through binoculars. Layered above everything is a patchwork of Beaumont’s own words, asserting: I’m tired of drowning in the mistakes of settlers who don’t even know that the Earth is alive.
As a woman who has spent her life in intentional search of the living remnants of her heritage and community, mixed media collage is spiritual for Beaumont. Her identity and message are magnified not only through the artwork, but also her chosen process of creation. Beaumont’s artistic practice gathers, rebuilds, demands and decolonizes – just like her, just like the Karankawa.
“It’s about taking these pieces and trying to make something liberating, beautiful and cathartic out of it,” says Beaumont. “No part of the process is unintentional for me.”
Beaumont’s calling to connect smaller elements into a greater whole is reflected in both her art and community work. Despite the myth surrounding the extinction of the Karankawa, Beaumont’s family had an innate hope and belief that there had to be more of their people out there. In 2011 Beaumont’s mother started searching for other Karankawa on social media, which led to an emotional introductory Zoom meeting and the first time Beaumont interacted with others in her tribe outside of her family.
Many of the fellow Karankawa she would meet had similar stories. Either they always knew they were Karankawa through oral histories and family trees but had to blend into other cultures and communities in order to survive, or they deduced they are Karankawa because their cultural practices were neither Texan or Mexican.
In January 2023 the Karankawa leadership, the Five Rivers Council, posted an official reconnection statement guiding others in their journey to finding each other. The tribe empathizes with every Indigenous person’s intent to connect with their heritage and encourages potential relatives to start their research with family oral histories. Though they don’t prescribe to blood quantum (a controversial standard introduced by the federal government in the late 1800s to determine how much “Native blood” an individual possesses), they do acknowledge that DNA testing can provide supporting information. This can be especially helpful if one’s “oral history sources are in the spirit world.” Once there is viable supporting evidence for Karankawa heritage the tribe invites their potential relative to a reconnection meeting over Zoom, which is organized by Beaumont and one of her family members.
“I would have never thought that I would be one of the many pivotal people spearheading what is now considered a cultural revival for the Karankawa people,” Beaumont reflects. “Never in my wildest days.”
Since 2023, the Karankawa have gathered as a tribe for the first time in 200 years. This past March the tribe spent a few days together in Livingston, Texas to make fire, art and new stories together.
To the Karankawa, reconnecting with their tribe isn’t just an opportunity to answer their lifelong questions about identity and origin. It’s also an ancestral call to protect and reclaim stewardship over their lands. In August 2021, the tribe sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for approving the expansion of Enbridge (then named Moda Midstream), an international pipeline and energy company that boasts on their website about moving “30% of the crude oil produced in North America” and transporting “nearly 20% of the natural gas consumed in the U.S.,” in an area called McGloin’s Bluff in Corpus Christi Bay.
Photo courtesy of Jon Stegenga
According to the Texas Tribune, the Port of Corpus Christi Authority sold the land to Enbridge, despite a report by renowned Texas archaeologist Robert Ricklis asserting that “this site should be avoided in any future impacts or alterations to the property” because “the area contained so many important artifacts that it was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.” In addition to violating the land’s historic and spiritual significance, the oil terminal expansion could also lead to environmental damage towards the seagrass beds that prevent coastal erosion and provide shelter for fish and other sea creatures in the bay.
In May 2022, Enbridge announced that construction of the oil terminal was delayed until after October 2022. Two years later, Beaumont shares that the tribe is still navigating the bureaucracy of the legal process, something she recognizes as a strategic and intentional obstacle for progress and justice.
“There’s no reforming this system,” Beaumont says. “Rather, it needs to be liberated.”
Beaumont fights for liberation in every aspect of her life that she can. Aside from being an artist, activist and cultural leader, she works at Miraval, a destination resort and spa in Northwest Austin surrounded by 220 acres of forestry. She started as an outdoor guide five years ago, guiding guests through ropes courses, kayaking and archery. Guests would inquire if she did her own programs and two years ago she became Miraval’s Indigenous Educator. As one of their specialists, Beaumont designs offerings that include classes, workshops and lectures, providing “an Indigenous perspective to common everyday ideology and values.” Whoever and whenever she teaches, one of Beaumont’s first lessons is to decolonize the perception of a monolithic Native American culture and reconstruct people’s relationship to the land and nature itself.
When reflecting on what solidarity looks like to her, Beaumont shares advice for two different groups: colonizers and the colonized.
“If you’re a colonizer here, like a direct descendant of Europeans – whether by extreme extension or directly involved with the genocide of my people – then solidarity to me looks like eating your humble pie, educating yourself and taking several seats. It’s okay to be told what to do by Indigenous people,” says Beaumont.
For those who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+ or part of other communities fighting for decolonization, solidarity equates to action.
“It looks a lot less like talking about political theory and what’s gotten us here,” says Beaumont. “I am more interested in your solidarity looking like bodies. Resistance that is intentionally disruptive. Showing up, building community, organizing. Walking while we talk, not just talking.”