Indigenous futurity and architecture: Rewriting the urban narrative
The “‘post-Millennial’ generation is already the most racially and ethnically diverse generation” in history.1 At the same time, urban and suburban areas are now home to nearly three quarters, or 72 percent, of all Indigenous people in the United States.2 Yet, while urban environments are becoming increasingly diverse, the profession of architecture “becomes more male and more white as experience levels increase.”3 As a result, there is a disconnect between those who are designing cities and those who inhabit cities. How do cultural values, norms and aspirations become integrated into our urban environments if the people creating those urban environments have limited cultural understanding?
To interrogate this question, this essay will examine two urban projects that led with purposefully bold concepts of Indigeneity. Both projects reimagine the city as a site of advocacy, participation and dialogue. Both are expressions of Indigenous futurity, “operating in resistance to those assumptions that consign Native American peoples and lifeways to the past.” Both are laden with meaning. For Indigenous people, architecture enables their narratives, histories
