The integration of Indigenous Knowledges in planning represents an ongoing dilemma. On the one hand, involvement in the planning process enhances a decolonial space for Indigenous People(s). On the other, it legitimates the coloniality of planning and coopts Indigenous Knowledges. Because of its complexity, a holistic view of the mechanisms Indigenous People(s) create to engage, support, and empower themselves during the planning process represents an alternative approach. In this paper, I apply the voice of place to describe the epistemological reclamation five Tribal Nations experience in the Bears Ears National Monument. The findings suggest a refusal of settler narratives in Indigenous Land, the importance of Indigenous processes, a praxis of relational Knowledges, and the fluid forms of moving between knowledge systems while maintaining knowledge sovereignty. By telling a story from the Tribes’ perspective, this research re-signifies the role of Indigenous People(s) when engaging in settler-state planning.

Indigenous intelligence in the production of the built environment represents generative codes. These systems provide an alternate epistemology to learn from in order to find solutions to our contemporary affordability and climate crisis. The ahupua’a and kauhale are Kānaka Maoli systems of abundance that provide models of Indigenous intelligence in resurgent practices of self-determination.The ahupua’a is a self-sustainaing land unit encompassing land from the sea, running up the valley ridges to the mountains; the wedge shaped division allowed for equal distribuition of food, shelter, medicine, and more. The kauhale is a housing compound that relates to the ahupua’a ecologies and reflects a living architectural system supported by knowledge transfer, collective work, and sustainable land-based practices.

The paper examines the interconnected systems of the ahupua’a and kauhale through Moana epistemologies, specifically the application of Vā/ Wā theory. It draws from archival research consisting of the Nupepa ‘Olelo Hawai‘i and documentation of ahupua’a, kauhale, and hale. Through interviews, lived experience, and participant observation of living examples, namely Ho’oulu ‘Āina on O’ahu, the qualitative analysis demonstrates consistent principles for the possibility of alternate land-based futures.

While the research project focuses on the development of a kauhale housing model based on Moana epistemologies, it provides recommendations to address regulatory roadblocks of the settler colonial state, such as financing, construction processes, and building equity. Strategic arrangements between existing nonprofit and grassroots coalitions with established land bases and an expressed commitment to sustainable futurities modeled on ahupua‘a systems of reciprocity and care could empower Kānaka Maoli self-determination and challenge settler colonial actions of alienation and dispossession. The logic behind the design of ahupua‘a and kauhale has simple rules: cultivate relations as a restorative act; honor resources; do not take more than needed. These are lessons that can contribute to just transitions.

The First Nations housing crisis in Canada evolved as colonization overtook Indigenous societies and civilizations. The introduction of the Indian Act [1] of 1876, directed all aspects of life for First Nations peoples, and attempted to outlaw the speaking of some fifty Indigenous languages in Canada. Without language a society loses its ability to identify with and define its essential principles. The Dënesųłiné language is one such example, resulting in a society without the ability to record and create its traditional built form and its ways of knowing Indigenous domestic space.

Dene people were left homeless, forced into the typology of the officially mandated “Indian House” introduced in the 1940s and 50’s by the Federal Government for “civilizing the Indian”. An architectural model which imposed the western idea of home as a tool for colonization, a built application of the principles animating the Indian Act. This resulted in Indigenous people left disoriented, disenfranchised – separated from their own stories of origin.

This paper will use examples of how the peoples own Dënesųłiné language principles are being used to reshape colonizer typologies in the design of Dene homes – the intersection of Dënesųłiné linguistics and shape forming. Using our language and traditional teachings to help re-design ideas of the function of domestic space – an important act of resistance and sovereignty, to re-identify our architecture according to our own worldview and traditional cultural aspects of the Home -Se Kue’, Dënesųłiné for the spirit home, or place where spirit resides.

[1] The Indian Act, which was enacted in 1876 and has since been amended, allows the government to control most aspects of aboriginal life: Indian status, land, resources, wills, education, band administration and so on. … In its previous versions, the Indian Act clearly aimed to assimilate First Nations.

The 1969 Alcatraz Island Occupation was an act of Indigenous resistance compelling justice and recognition of tribal self-determination and sovereignty. Place-making and architecture was fundamental to envisioning a brighter future for American Indians and catalyzing a cognizant American society. On December 23rd, 1969, in negotiations with the United States, the Indians of All Tribes Conference on Alcatraz Island presented a plan to design and build spaces for Indigenous resistance, redressing centuries of cultural repression. Although the Occupation helped to solidify an official U.S. policy of tribal self-determination and prompted increased focus and resources to American Indians, the plan to construct a gathering place for all tribal nations on Alcatraz Island was never fulfilled. In 2019, on the 50th anniversary of the Occupation, three American Indian scholars attending the Yale School of Architecture revisited the spatial practices and objectives of the occupation in the form of a student exhibition entitled, “Making Space for Resistance: Past, Present, Future”.

A closer look at the Alcatraz Island Occupation itself, the exhibition, and the group who designed the exhibition, the Indigenous Scholars of Architecture, Planning, and Design (ISAPD), will provide a contextual analysis of Indigenous architectural resistance of multiple space times within the sociopolitical and academic landscape. The paper will cover spatial practices at the Occupation and specific building characteristics and architectural tools proposed by the Indians of All Tribes Conference council that was translated into the exhibition. The exhibition’s historical references alongside the designed innovative spatial identity, the construction process, and the curated artwork and architectural work will be analyzed. The community building beyond Yale School of Architecture and the continued work of the evolved ISAPD will establish the presence of a resistance that is energized from the past, adaptive to the present, and that advances Indigenous spatial culture for the future.

By examining architectural precedents indigenous to the Great Lakes region of North America, this paper examines the lifespan of buildings through the lens of the traditional ecological knowledge systems of the Anishinaabeg—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples who have called the Lakes home since time immemorial. In contrast to patterns of modern and colonial architectural practice, I argue that Anishinaabe construction and the worldview it embodies together represent a fundamentally different approach to design, one that is more in tune with both ecological systems and the thermodynamic forces that govern energy consumption. Central to this worldview is a repudiation of the common understanding of objects and buildings as fixed or stable, instead conceptualizing them as always in flux, and therefore impermanent.

This paper takes the midewigaan—the Mide lodge—and the domed waaginogaan as central models for the Anishinaabe creation of form and space. Built from bent and tied saplings anchored directly into the earth, the midewigaan defines its interior through a repeated frame—one that is left open, allowing for free passage of light, air, and water through its architectural boundaries. Even when covered with reed mat insulation and sheets of cedar or birch shingles to form a more weatherproof shelter, these frames are always created to be light and portable, to be assembled quickly, and to decompose gracefully. Sometimes built in a single day, such structures are expected to last for a handful of years, not decades or centuries, thus deeply connecting to the pulsing cycles of their surrounding environment. This intentional openness and ephemerality sit in stark contrast to the ecological alienation of superinsulated high-performance buildings that meet Passivhaus standards. These Anishinaabe models mark a critical site of indigenous resistance to more conventional understandings of how buildings consume energy over the course of their “useful lifetimes.”

During the 1880s, Očéti Ŝakówiŋ people at the Great Sioux Reservation contended with U.S. Senate committees that were charged with coercing them to accept the terms of the General Allotment Act. The act’s aim was to remove Indigenous people to individual allotments while appropriating some 11,000,000 acres of common land to sell to white settlers. This paper will focus on buildings and spaces associated with two extended meetings between the Očéti Ŝakówiŋ and Senate committee members at the reservation’s Standing Rock Agency in 1883 and in 1887, before and after the act was passed. These meetings provide a particularly good opportunity to consider Indigenous structures, spatial strategies, and practices in relation to the committees’ attempts to impose their own agenda. Detailed information about where they met and what people said and did during these meetings is available in photographs and in transcriptions in the Congressional Record. Examples include the council circles that facilitated consensus before the meetings, the layout of the federal building’s at the Standing Rock Agency, the way the committees positioned themselves, and how Očéti Ŝakówiŋ people countered this with their own spatialities, actions, and rhetoric. This offers an unusually intimate view from several perspectives of how Očéti Ŝakówiŋ people and white federal officials interacted and contended with clashing spatial practices and assumptions about race, sovereignty, governance processes, and what it meant to be “settled.” The differing ways Očéti Ŝakówiŋ people and committee members configured spaces before and during the meetings says as much about their differing strategies for negotiation and decision making as it does about how the Očéti Ŝakówiŋ subverted the committee’s blatant efforts to establish their authority, and why the committees’ mission failed.

The restoration of cultural patrimony offers indigenous communities the ability to remediate their cultural loss and to create a space for reconnection. In the 1700s, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma lived at the confluence of three rivers in Kiihkayonki (or Kekionga), currently in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Decades after their forced removal between 1795 and 1846, the Miami Tribe reclaimed their legacy and material culture by revisiting their ancestral lands and preserving their historical landmarks. One of their remaining historical structures in Kiihkayonki is the Pinšiwa House or Chief Richardville House. Born to a Miami Indian mother and chief of tribe Tacumwah, Chief Jean-Baptiste Richardville acquired an allotment after receiving an exemption from removal as part of the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary’s. He built a Greek Revival home in 1827 where he lived with his family until 1841. Currently owned and maintained by the Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society, this house represents an architectural heritage for the Miami Tribe. The following research around cultural patrimony addresses the challenges of land rights, property ownership, and allotments. Building on previous work developed with the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, this paper explores the preservation process and collaborative practice involved to restore the Chief Richardville House and to keep the legacy of the Miami leaders. It expands on the role of Indigenous women in determining their rights to land and place. The impact of allotments on the Miami Tribe is central to understanding gender roles in relation to lands and to explain the process of cultural assimilation in the context of 19th century settler colonialism. The architectural heritage of the Miami Tribe materializes various efforts involved in the repatriation process responding to years of successive displacement and to colonial projects of erasure.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Inuit Nunangat—the Arctic homeland of the Inuit people in Canada—has undergone profound architectural transformations that disrupted the traditional building practices of its Indigenous inhabitants. These changes were driven by an unprecedented influx of Western materials, ideas and people, primarily motivated by the capitalist exploitation of animal-based resources such as baleen, tusks and pelts. Notably, Euro-American whalers and later Euro-Canadian fur traders, who either wintered temporarily or settled permanently in the region, brought with them a wide range of building materials, construction techniques and cultural norms that were alien to traditional Inuit practices—functionally, aesthetically and even cosmologically. In a few decades, these Western enterprises established a vast network of whaling stations and fur-trading outposts, using architecture as an apparatus of settler colonialism that not only facilitated trade with Inuit communities but also created “architectural contact zones” across the Arctic.

Among all traditional Inuit dwellings, the igloo—Arctic’s iconic winter shelter—is particularly exemplary of Western influence through its architecture. Thus, this paper examines how the igloo, understood as both a material and ontological construct, evolved into a culturally and technologically hybrid structure at the turn of the twentieth century. After providing a brief overview of pre-contact igloo architecture, the paper critically analyzes a series of historical photographs depicting igloos built by Inuit, mainly on Baffin Island—the largest in the Arctic Archipelago. These photographs provide insights into the architectural transformations of igloos and illustrate how Inuit builders adapted their building practices to shifting material, spatial and ontological conditions. Furthermore, the paper draws on Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit—Inuit traditional knowledge—to deepen the analysis, revealing how Western influences reshaped Inuit concepts of materiality and comfort. Ultimately, this study illuminates how architecture became a medium for cultural negotiation and adaptation within the context of colonial expansion in North America’s northernmost region.

This paper examines practices of erasure and resistance through the use of pōhaku (stone) on the Mauna Kea volcano of the island of Hawai‘i, and within the boundaries of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve. Mauna Kea is a sacred site of genealogical connection for Kānaka Maoli. It is also a contested landscape: Crown and Government land seized from the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1898, held in trust by the territorial and then state government, and leased in 1968 to the University of Hawai‘i to host an everexpanding astronomy industry. Since the inception of the Mauna Kea observatories, Kānaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) kia‘i (protectors) and environmental activists have resisted the increasing construction of large scale telescopes on Mauna Kea for both their degradation of the land and their violation of Hawaiian sovereignty. One way they have done that is through the built environment. Pōhaku is a material that registers and refuses settler colonial attempts to expropriate land and control Indigenous political relationships to place. Through oral history and archival research this paper centers the stones erected as shrines within the jurisdiction of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve, removed by Department of Land and Natural Resources officers, and discounted by archaeologists only to be returned again and again by kia‘i. This paper brings these stones into dialogue with the Hale Pōhaku (stone house) architecture built for the astronomy industry in the 1970s and 80s, which became a site for direct action against the construction of the massive Thirty Meter Telescope from 2014-2019. During protests pōhaku became an essential architecture of protection that blocked construction equipment from ascending the road. This prompted the return of a saying from the time of the Kingdom’s overthrow: “Ua lawa māhoku I ka pōhaku.” We are satisfied with the stones.

Amidst Anishinaabe homelands in what had become the territory of the United States, colonial knowledge production around Anishinaabe land, people, and history at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries was coterminous with policies of Indian removal and the forced assimilation of Native people to settler lifeways. In this paper, I explore the colonial production of knowledge about the wigwam. This production was understood by its authors as a way to salvage information about the vanishing architecture of vanishing people. But salvage projects often inadvertently documented a history that the authors of these project were unable to see.

My focus is the ethnographic work of Frances Densmore on the White Earth and Mille Lacs Reservations in the early 20th century, subsequently published as Chippewa Customs in 1929. Chippewa Customs includes detailed descriptions of the construction of wigwams on each reservation; at the same time, the book ignores the struggles over land that were taking place on these reservations while their residents were studied. On these reservations, the U.S. government prevented so-called “full-blooded Indians” from selling allotments of land; only so-called “mixed-blood Indians” could engage in these sales, a policy that made “mixed-blood Indians” into targets for deceptive and fraudulent land
purchases. Because the government tied mixed-blood status to the adoption of settler ways of life, such as dwelling in wood-frame houses, the construction of wigwams on allotments staged the allotment’s owner as full-blooded, unable to sell their land, and therefore protected from land fraud. The architecture that Densmore identified as “traditional,” then, was constructed in the context of contemporary political struggles against dispossession and displacement. What Densmore documented was not simply a vanishing form of traditional architecture but an architecture enmeshed in Anishinaabe resistance to settler colonialism.

Entering into any Canadian Embassy, one first encounters portraits of the British monarch, the Governor General of Canada, and the Canadian Prime Minister. In 2021, Mary Simon became the first Indigenous person to be included in this group when she was appointed Governor General of Canada, and her presence symbolizes a new era in Canadian politics and diplomacy. Combined with representations of Canada’s “natural wonders” and Indigenous art, the projected image of the nation state is one of cultural and economic progress set within an awe-inspiring and untouched landscape.

However, in the wake of the Calls to Action issued by the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and encouraged by Simon’s presence, many questions continue to surface about the identity of the Canadian embassies abroad. Who exactly does “Canada” represent? Why do so few Indigenous peoples work in the embassies? Where do the over 630 First Nations and multiple Inuit and Métis communities fit into this space for inter-nation-al diplomacy? Are there spaces designed to represent and support them in these diplomatic buildings? And shouldn’t the Canadian parliament building itself be acknowledged as an embassy on the unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Algonquin nations?

Over the past three years, the author has collaborated with Global Affairs Canada to ask these challenging questions through three case studies: 1) Mexico City, 2) Washington DC, and 3) the UN Headquarters in New York City. This paper will summarize the history of Canadian embassy design and offer a few examples of student work derived from these studios, as well as a brief summary of guidelines developed to guide Canadian embassy design moving forward. The outcomes suggest that the design of spaces for inter-nation-al diplomacy can no longer serve the colonial nation-states alone and must instead support the voices and rights of Indigenous peoples as integral to a multilateral diplomatic future.

From 1969–1973, Red Power activists founded survival schools and colleges in repatriated colonial buildings across the country. D-Q University, the nation’s only accredited Tribal and Chicano college, was the only institution of its type to operate, in its original architectural form, into the 21st century.

In 1971, activists seized a disused military communications facility in Davis, California to use for an Indigenous college. In keeping with intertribal design theories generated through the takeover of Alcatraz—which called for the destruction of colonial architecture to build Indigenous architecture—the D-Q University board commissioned a multi-year plan to replace the existing program with a new architecture that reflected Indigenous cultural and educational values. No major structural changes were ever implemented. Instead, the university educated Indigenous students for decades in a repatriated military complex. In interviews, students recount the shock of realizing, on move-in day, that the campus was surrounded by barbed wire, and their dorms were military barracks. Yet despite the apparent architectural fixity, D-Q University became a sacred space for the region’s intertribal communities and a central landscape in international fights for Indigenous sovereignty.

Scholarship on architecture and Indigenous education has focused on purpose-built architecture, from boarding schools to Tribal universities. This paper expands the discourse to include the repatriated sites that marked Red Power fights for community-led education, and the everyday non-architect actors who transformed these environments. Drawing on unrealized architectural plans, archived academic assignments, photograph and television archives, site visits, and interviews with former professors and alumni, this paper illuminates how generations of Indigenous students and educators used everyday bottom-up design practices to transform this military complex into a space of sovereignty. Examined within the longer history of Indigenous education, this case study identifies radical and transgressive place-making as a central practice of Indigenous education.

In 1961, a new, modern complex was completed at St. Mary’s Residential School on a site overlooking the Fraser River in S’ólh Téméxw, the unceded and traditional territory of the Stó:lō. Just down the hill was the previous school, founded a century earlier by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and from which the adjacent settler town of Mission, British Columbia derived its name. Following roughly five decades of state architectural production of residential schools, St. Mary’s was among the few in postwar Canada to be designed by a private architecture firm, the Vancouver-based Gardiner Thornton Gathé & Associates. The architects modelled the building on Roman Catholic educational institutions such as seminaries, reestablishing its religious roots and obscuring its position within the federal residential school system even though the government was the client and owner. Through an architectural microhistory of St. Mary’s in the 1960s, informed by survivor testimonies and broader built histories of residential schools across Canada, I examine how Catholicism, settler colonialism, and modernism coalesced and overlapped at this specific place and time. The modern architecture of St. Mary’s must be seen in the context of significant reforms within the Catholic Church leading to Vatican II and transformations of Indigenous-state relations driven by Indigenous activism and political organization. At the same time, it can be read as an attempt by religious and secular authorities to legitimize and thus salvage the waning residential school system. The new architecture of St. Mary’s likely helped spur its operation into the 1980s, making it the longest-running residential school in British Columbia. The site, whose buildings exist to this day, has since been returned to the Stó:lō and regained its Stó:lō name, Pekw’Xe:yles.

The United States’ Federal Indian boarding school system policies altered the lives of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children, their relatives, and Indian Tribes and the Native Hawaiian Community for over 150 years. Of the 408 Federal Indian Boarding Schools identified by the U.S. Department of the Interior in the first ever Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, 105 or 26% of those schools are in the four corners region. A closer look at Federal Indian boarding school system of the four corners region will allow a focused analysis of three main areas; specific building characteristics and architectural tools of these educational spaces, specific Indian treaties and agreements related to these schools, and the Southwest Indigenous architectures and characteristics Native children came from.

In 1819 the Federal Indian boarding school system evolved from the Federal Indian day school system because architecture and location were recognized as defining factors to manipulate the behavior of removed Indian children. The US Federal Government supported schools with housing directly on-site with the education component. The building and infrastructure of the Federal Indian boarding schools included shared characteristics including new buildings, dismantling of reusable materials, and the moving of used buildings or recycled building materials for Indian boarding school purposes, military installations and facilities. Architecture displayed an array of programmatic lineage relating to foreign, military, religious, and government operations that ultimately influenced the experience and education of Native children. These educational structures supported total immersion away from Indigenous architectures; from space programming, datum changes, viewscapes, building envelope, body movements through architectures, all the way to collected, harvested, made and hunted building materials. This analysis will gather data on key schools of each state, contextualize the architecture of pertinent Indian policy and agreements, and contrast the architectures these Native children came from.

The Indigenous presence in Southern California cities prior to the Indian Relocation Act of 1952 has not been well-historicized, and yet, Indian Boarding schools of the region were devoted to making wage laborers and homemakers out of Indigenous students in the preceding decades. By analyzing the curriculum guides produced for the vocational training of Indigenous students at the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, this paper explores the role of the Indian boarding school in the making of the Southern California metropolis. From its founding in 1903 into the New Deal Era, the Sherman Institute took Indigenous students from their homelands to rid them of tribal affiliations and teach them an Anglo idea of civilization and progress. Courses in carpentry and domestic science, with lessons in laying out property lines, pouring sidewalks, cleaning house and caretaking for children, suited the conversion of communal lands into private property for sale on the open market. While Indigenous labor supported the expansion and upkeep of the Indian boarding school, as well as the growth of the surrounding tourist and home construction industries, Indigenous students were housed in overcrowded and unsanitary accommodations. The curricular and physical environment of the school illustrates the inherent contradictions of the assimilationist agenda enacted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Indian boarding schools across the nation. Economic ascension for some paralleled processes of exploitation and displacement for others. Operating between acquiescence, resistance, and self-determination, Indigenous students trained at the Sherman Institute built those very suburbs that threatened tribal sovereignty. This paper concerns itself with the centrality of Indigenous training and labor to the expansion of the domestic economy, despite its relative absence within architectural histories of Southern California housing.

Since 2020, I’ve worked with the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe of Michigan to imagine a new future for the site of the former Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, a federal institution which operated from 1892-1934. The 320-acre district, which includes several classroom and dormitory buildings, was listed on the National Register for Historic Places in 2018. The place has a complicated history, but for generations it served as a site of federally sponsored assimilation for native children taken from throughout the Midwest. In 2010, fifteen of these acres were given back to the Saginaw Chippewa, including seven school buildings. The Tribe is committed to transforming it into a place for honoring, healing, and remembering those who were students there, but not all seven are likely to be reused. Left vacant for decades, many are too far gone for simple renovation. While there is important history present in all of them, there is also some sense of justice inherent to the idea of their removal. Some in the community argue that complete demolition of the buildings is the best way to move forward from the past, while others stress the need to protect them as incontestable proof of the school’s existence. The project brings up important questions about the value and purpose of historic preservation. Some are highly specific to the legacy of these spaces of oppression and intergenerational trauma, and others are more general questions about land ownership, the purpose of memorials, and how long buildings should last. I propose that by understanding traditional Anishinaabe material and spatial practices, we can reorient assumptions about collective memory that are central to debates about historic monuments. The key lies in changing perceptions of permanence — a shift in thinking that requires designers and users of buildings to learn to let go.

In a 1981 paper on cognitive modes of design, Stephen Lekson argued that the appearance of an analogic design process facilitated the emergence of Chaco Canyon’s unique and monumental great house architecture. Lekson asserted that analogic design is indispensable for reasoned innovation. At Chaco, where conventional plan representations have never been retrieved, Lekson proposes that markings on the site prior to construction and subsequent foundations functioned as full-scale, on-the-ground, analogic plans that afforded developments that produced great house architecture. Lekson differentiates the analogic mode from an earlier iconic mode, whereby developments would occur incrementally and were often unnoticed. Lekson ties the shift in design modes to the emergence of new specialist managers who evolved the radically new great house building type in order to increase their status and solve problems associated with deteriorating conditions. Thus, the appearance of the Chacoan great house is tied to political change and increasing hierarchy. That an iterative architectural design practice existed at Chaco Canyon during the 9th through 13th centuries C.E. is evident in the many variations in great house form that existed throughout the Greater Chaco Region as well as in each great house’s many remodelings. To take Lekson’s design observations a step further, it can be said that the great houses themselves operated as fields of action—negotiated spaces and forms that responded to a variety of dynamic forces and overlapping conditions. This paper demonstrates through original research that iconic architectural forms sourced in Mesoamerica served as preparatory diagrams—in the Deleuzian sense—for great house architecture. Great houses are demonstrated to have emerged as an assemblage of power and social relations with newly generated indexical meanings. Since prior research has not identified specific Mesoamerican precedents for Chacoan great houses, these findings have significant implications for future studies.

The 1930s marked an economic decline in the United States and, for Native people, indicated a new regime of tribal-federal relations. The newly appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier stressed, “Indians must be their own savers and their own helpers,” and his office should facilitate this transformation. [1] His efforts resulted in the Indian New Deal: federal monetary aid for tribal development. [2] This paper examines how the Indian New Deal brought a suite of architectural interventions to the Navajo reservation and the surrounding region. At the center of this negotiation, architecture and building became a tool for transformation. Architecture took on the dual role of signaling progress through control of the built environment, incorporating the new, and being subject to the logic of heritage and inheritance. This paper analyzes this line of inquiry through two development projects: the demonstration station and the day school. When evaluated as typologies, both become a proving ground for persuading Native people to heed New Deal-era ideology. [3] Idealist bureaucrats, political agents, architects, and scientists were all involved in realizing the demonstration station. They performed the modern gesture of designating what is traditional, drawing a line between the modern and the traditional, and constantly moving that line. Therefore, the paper aims to historically chronicle how architecture contributed to New Deal development on the reservation through an analysis of photographs, architectural plans, and drawings.

[1] John Collier, “Statement for Release upon the Confirmation,” Box 83, AAIA, Mudd Archive, Princeton University.
[2] James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
[3] Donald Lee Parman, The Navajos and the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

Western architectural and preservation theory relies primarily on the object, as an idea and collection of materials to be saved when under threat. Unfortunately, this has had devastating consequences not only for the structures built and held sacred by native peoples of what is now the southwest over many generations, but also the very nature of how they are protected, and often egregiously, restored. The author will use original documentation and images to critique the way in which many of these sites have been altered, excavated and reconstructed. Further, this paper proposes to rethink these interventions using the Tewa centered theories of po’quin, Hopi concepts of kuvenki (loosely meaning footprints) and other ideas of the sacred to rethink the way we understand the broader cultural landscapes and architectures of the largely unprotected Chacoan world, the ongoing controversy of the first native-led national monument of Bears Ears, and the idea that perhaps protection itself has been a failure.

The Phoenix-based Hopi artist and architect Dennis Numkena (1941-2010) was the first registered Hopi architect and the first Native American architect to helm his own firm. Unfortunately, despite his recent passing, he has largely faded into obscurity. In this presentation, I will argue that one of Numkena’s extant structures from his early professional years, the 1972 Canyon Records building in midtown Phoenix, embodies the resilience as well as the fragility of his legacy. As a self-described “urban Indian” architect, Numkena’s early professional objectives centered on creating a hub for Indigenous people who lived off-reservation in Phoenix. Numkena designed a record store and recording studio for Canyon Records, one of the first independent record labels that recorded and produced Native American music marketed to both Native Americans and Anglo customers. With its flat roof, dusky colors, and exterior ramada, the building cites the Pueblo Revival idiom. Yet Numkena subverts Pueblo Revival’s “imperialist nostalgia” rhetoric through his design which marshals Hopi and pan-Indian aesthetics, announcing the continuing presence of Indigenous peoples on (urban) Indigenous lands. Although the Canyon Records building is in a ruinous condition, the building functions as a community resource as it is one of the few brick-and-mortar venues in the Phoenix area that caters to the needs of Native American artists and patrons of Native American music. It functions, still, in its current iteration as Drumbeat Indian Arts, because it attends to the specific needs of specific people rather than attempting an overweaning monumentality. Like the Ancestral Puebloan ruins that Numkena so frequently cited, it contains the community’s history as a site of memory. Even as its own documentation and physical body has disintegrated, it is itself an archive of Phoenix and its Native community, and thus it embodies the logic of Numkena’s architectural archive.