[Bayley Marquez] My name is Bayley Marquez. I am Santa Ynez Chumash from Kalawashaq Village. Kalawashaq means "The Shell of the Turtle," and that is the village site where my people are from and, on our tribal community flag, in the center, is a turtle. So turtles are something that have always been very close to my heart. They’re something that reminds me of home. When I see them, I smile. So seeing this, and what I saw as like a small child riding on a turtle's back, was just so happy and lovely and joyous. It just made me think of that wonderful connection to the ocean, to ocean life; to homelands, to places I hold dear. And whoever this artist was had that same joy and love and connection to that place in the same way that I hold to where I'm from. Essentially this is a small sculpture, but it also is really useful because fishermen could put nets down to capture fish or shellfish, but they needed to be able to find their nets, so they would tie their nets to these pieces of wood, which would float on the top of the water and act as sort of a buoy. And then they could see their nets and come back to check if they had caught anything. I loved that they're pieces that are both practical and really beautiful. The thing I really connected with in terms of sort of what it's portraying is the joy in the connection Indigenous people who live close to the sea, feel to the ocean.

[Bayley Marquez] I have two children, and I tell them a lot of stories, and one of them is the creation story for our people, which starts with a rainbow bridge. [Ocean waves crash as sea birds squawk and screech and dolphins click] So where I'm from, there's the ocean, and then there's the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. And the story goes that our people were born on the islands, but we ran out of space on the islands and we needed to move. And so, a rainbow bridge was built by essentially the mother of our people to help us cross from the islands to the mainland. But it was precarious. It was slippery. It was scary. And those who looked down and fell, fell into the water, but were turned into dolphins when they hit the water. And then those that crossed became the people who lived along that part of the coastline. And so, I always tell my daughters, “Dolphins are your cousins.” And they always laugh at me and say, “Mom, that's silly. Dolphins can't be your cousin.” And I was like, “Well, it's not necessarily about like the actual truth of it. It's about the feeling of kinship to the ocean, to ocean creatures.” And to me, that's very reflected in this.