Picturing Living History

For thousands of years in what we call Florida, Indigenous peoples gathered together to transform their environment, building mounds and structures with earth, shells and sand. Indian mounds, as they’re known, served as village gathering places, temple mounts for religious ceremonies, and as burial sites that kept and honored ancestors. The act of creating the mounds marked a group’s place in the world, as they shared common interests, ancestry and beliefs.

Florida’s mounds are among our oldest American monuments, with some taking shape 6,000 years ago. Altered by neglect, development, and time itself, the Florida mounds that remain are sacred places. They are survivors of invasion, cultural conflict, ignorance, and fascination. They honor and keep alive the history of Indigenous peoples of Florida, whose lives were forever changed when they met and fought European invaders on their shores.

In the 16th century, the Spanish arrived in Florida to colonize and exploit the land and people.  On first contact they encountered descendants of the mound builders, like the Apalachee, Ocale, Calusa, Timucua and Tocobaga, who fought fiercely against the incursions. In the following 250 years, European diseases, war, colonization, and servitude decimated Indigenous peoples, and yet they and their descendants persisted and remain in Florida.

In Florida and around the country, cultural, educational and corporate institutions are making Land Acknowledgements to show respect to Indigenous peoples by recognizing them as the original stewards of the land, on which they may or may not currently reside. In Florida, the acknowledgements include these earlier mound-building peoples.

Shadow and Reflection: Visions of Florida’s Sacred Landscapes

Working in collaboration with nonfiction writer John Capouya, Suzanne Williamson explores this early part of Florida's history, focusing on the accumulated layers of human narrative that exist in the landscape. Drawing the viewer through the camera lens, she reaches for stories that are embedded in the mounds that contain all past events and written accounts—including the efforts to erase or preserve them and the people who built them. Her images of these sacred sites, printed on sheer fabric, bright metal and paper, evoke the mounds’ history, our Florida environment, and the inventive possibilities of photography. Capouya’s nonfiction vignettes, drawn from historic accounts, research, and interviews with archaeologists, are projected in rotation, allowing viewers to read them on the walls, and through the fabric works.

The show's title, Shadow and Reflection, references Florida's intensely bright light and deep shadows, as well as the beliefs of the Calusa people who lived on a shell mound island of their own creation in Charlotte Harbor (in the Fort Myers area). To them each person had three souls: one in the pupil of the eye; another in one's shadow, and the third in one's reflection. The soul in the eye stayed with a person after death and these Southwest Florida Indians would visit their ancestors' burial sites to consult with their enduring spirits. Williamson’s camera lens is an eye, recording an enduring image on film.