As the centerpiece of the exhibition, The land is a being who remembers everything, Mercedes Dorame (American, Tongva, b. 1980) created an immersive, site-responsive work at the Allen.

For Dorame, whose tribe is not federally recognized, an art installation can be a way to build a world and create a space where she has autonomy. Trained as a photographer, Dorame uses the camera’s logic against itself, reclaiming a tool that settlers employed for the othering of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on Tongva cosmology, wisdom, and ceremonial practices handed down to her, she wields the camera to create a record of Indigenous permanence instead of erasure, honoring her ancestral connections to land and sky through her work.

Dorame visited Oberlin College several times to meet with local Native artists, activists, and community leaders. Each one brought her to a site that has helped them connect to their heritage, and those sites became the subject matter of a new body of photographs that Dorame transferred to the panels hanging from the ceiling of the gallery. The arrangement of the panels is based on the winding path of rivers, evoking both the vital role of Indigenous water protectors and the role rivers played in guiding freedom seekers and throwing off their pursuers on the Underground Railroad.

Waterways connect Dorame to her heritage and her ancestors, both in her native Tovaangar (Homeland) and in the territories around Oberlin College—that is, the unceded land of the Erie, Seneca (Haudenosaunee), Wyandot, Ottawa, Lenape, and others. As an artist skeptical of the superficiality of borders, Dorame notes, “waterways are not linear paths. They are passageways to freedom. Moving through water is about reconnecting to site.”

The artist’s use of iridescence throughout the installation is rooted in her connection to the abalone shell native to her ancestral lands. Territorial boundaries are fluid and porous, much like the relationship between one iridescent color and the next.

Special thanks to community partners Joella “Joe” Algarin (Haudenosaunee) and Pastor Cindi Byron-Dixon, M. Carmen Lane (Haudenosaunee), Paul Edward Montgomery Ramirez (Monimboseño), Jean Foggo Simon (Bermuda Pequot), and Sundance (Muscogee).

Locations where the photographs were taken include the Oberlin Arboretum, Oberlin’s Westwood Cemetery, Plum Creek in Oberlin, Mound School in Cleveland, African American Cultural Garden in Cleveland, and Big Creek in Parma Heights.