Among Relatives: Indigenous Voices in the Cuyahoga Valley 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 AD. 1000-1640. While the earthworks sustained significant damage over the centuries, they remain visible today.

Interleaved among the five edited and transcribed interviews featured in this book are color images of the Greenwood Village site and surrounding slopes rendered as ghostly, pointillistic landscapes. These images, also known as “point clouds,” were derived from high-resolution 3d lidar data scans of the Greenwood Village earthworks and surrounding area and rendered using custom software developed by Aviva Avnisan.