Among Relatives: Indigenous Voices in the Cuyahoga Valley, created in collaboration with Leila Khoury, asks what we can learn from the rich and varied perspectives of Northeast Ohio’s Indigenous people as we grapple with the dark legacies of settler-colonialism, white supremacy and the human-caused climate catastrophe. 

At the heart of this project are eight conversations with Indigenous folks and scientists from Northeast Ohio that Khoury and Avnisan recorded between August 2021-March 2022. The cultural, spiritual and historical starting place for these conversations is the Greenwood Village site, located within the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Greenwood Village is significant because it is one of the places that the Cuyahoga Valley’s Indigenous inhabitants chose to construct earthworks between A.D. 1000-1640. While the earthworks sustained significant damage over the centuries, they remain visible today.

On view, an immersive audio visual installation transports viewers into a ghostly rendering of the site derived from high-resolution 3d lidar scans. Complementing the projection is a data sonification–an atmospheric soundscape algorithmically influenced in response to current weather conditions in the park. The soundscape includes field recordings created in the park as part of a scientific study, bird calls of species that citizen scientists have identified in the park, and, most importantly, the voices of the eight individuals the artists spoke with. 

A fine art book offers readers access to the edited transcripts of the five conversations the artists had with Indigenous folks, and the invitation to take a piece of this project home with them. Interleaved among the book’s pages are color images of the Greenwood Village datascape. 50% of proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated to the Lake Erie Native American Council and mutual aid funds across Northeast Ohio. 

A very special thanks to the kind, wise and generous folks we interviewed to make this project possible: Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson, Mario Pollard, Robert Rice, Molly Rambeau, Philip Yenyo, Andrea Case, Chris Blackwood and Ryan Trimbath.

This project was made possible by the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Boston Activation Project, an initiative launched in 2021 to develop new public art projects and visitor experiences near the Boston Mill Visitor Center. We thank the following funding organizations for their generous support: Cleveland Foundation, Gund Foundation, Ohio & Erie Canalway Association, Ohio Arts Council and Arts Midwest.

The iteration of this project documented here was up from September 23, 2022 - Dec 31, 2022 at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Trailmix Boston Gallery, located at 1550 Boston Mills Rd, Peninsula, OH.