VISION | FUTURE MISSION | VALUES
VISION
Inscape Arts is a former detention center and Immigration and Naturalization Services building that now operates as a cultural community center with the primary purpose of creating access to culture, safety, remembrance, healing and reparation for immigrant communities and their neighborhood.
FUTURE MISSION
We do this through cultural production, storytelling, offering of creative and maker spaces, gatherings, social and racial justice support, community events and healing, in this space, as part of remembrance, reparation and healing.
VALUES
● We value truth in telling the history of this building including the shattering separation of families, the physical and emotional harm, racism, oppression and aggression, erasure and death, which continues in the NW Detention Center (Tacoma, WA) and across the 200 detention centers around the nation.
● We recognize the use of this historic building as a living cultural center is both part of reparation and healing for our communities and as a neighborhood anchor against displacement as gentrification of this community continues. We believe in the long term community ownership and stewardship of this space and crave authentic and detailed conversations about which communities make up the past, present and future of this building.
● We recognize the right of our communities, including the friends, family members and ancestors of those who were detained in this building or in other detention centers, to reclaim access to sites within, to ensure that multiple generations of our immigrant community can create rituals and pilgrimage, receive healing, honor the suffering that occurred and thrive in the belief of this right.
● We recognize that immigration systems were created by white settlers to harm and displace immigrants and refugees and that US imperialism, and US extraction of labor and capitalism are factors in this intentional oppression. We recognize and name that the detention of immigrants and refugees in the past and present, destroy the peace, health and safety of those families and therefore our communities at large. We stand against incarceration. [1]
● We value healing of the harm that was done to our many communities by the injustices of the systems created to harm immigrant families. We value the engagement of our white allies in learning and telling the stories of this place, and advocating for the rights of these communities and recognizing their role in current politics. .
● We value the engagement, inclusion and incubation of the next generation of culture keepers, and our developing cultural practitioners and artists. We specifically value the inclusion of LGBTQ and 2Spirit peoples as well as their history in and around this space and in this community.
ADDITIONAL THEMES
● Accessible space for arts and culture
● A place where we develop our next community culture keepers
● A gathering place where community gathers to get their needs met
● A place for healing as collective transformation