Tricia Rainwater | Falama: to return

Tricia Rainwater grew up in nature and in ceremony, but relationships with family have been shaped by the long tentacles of US policy and practice towards Indigenous peoples: specifically the forced removal of Choctaw people from their lands and the journey on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.

While deep and generational trauma eventually took its toll on her relationship with her father and grandfather, the artist sustains a strong desire to repair ties to ceremony and culture. In 2022  Rainwater set out on the Trail of Tears, the route followed by five southeastern tribal nations—including that of her family—when they were forcibly displaced from their homes to areas west of the Mississippi designated as Indian Territory. Along the way—seeking the familiar, and finding a sense of place in the ground on which she was walking—the artist collected soil from her original familial homelands and sites along the Trail that were important to the Choctaw people.

The return to the land of her ancestors was difficult and disconnected: she couldn’t call family to ask questions and hear stories, and sometimes physical barriers denied actual entry. In fact, locked gates prevented her from visiting some of the most important sites like Devils Swamp, the original site from which the Choctaw people were removed. In other sites and locales the artist had to play down who she was, to not speak of her connection to the land for her own physical and psychological protection. To make the work she had to live in discomfort,  vulnerability, as well as real and perceived danger.

Returning to ourselves, that is when we can tap into ancestral care,
into what our ancestral lands have for us,
what we need to learn and
how we can grow.

Rainwater brought home to the Bay Area the ziplock bags of soil she collected along the way. “An archive of finding place and home,” the photographs in this series depict the artist in California landscapes holding this soil. Sometimes directly in her hands, often still in the bags they were carried home in. The plastic bag serves as a way to keep the collected soil safe and—in a way—separate, a physical manifestation of a feeling.

In these large prints, self-portraits created in the landscape, the artist begins to see herself anew, consciously resisting received ideas of what native women should look like, or what fat women should wear or be. Often gazing directly into the camera’s lens, and therefore into the eyes of the viewer, she takes a powerful stance. The size of the print is substantial, reclaiming the space the artist has often been denied. She is not only reclaiming her heritage and homeland, but also her body, and her image.