 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining in person and remotely. My name is Lola Benelon, and I'm an assistant professor here at GSAP and the director of the building science and technology sequence. And I would like to start today with a short acknowledgment for the Lenape land. So though we are dispersed virtually today, we gather in the Lenape hooking the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, the traditional territory, elders, ancestors, and future generations, and in acknowledging as a school that Columbia, like New York City and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many indigenous people. GSAP is committed to addressing the deep history of erasure of indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment generally and in the Western tradition of architectural education specifically. With this, GSAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring indigenous knowledge in its curricula. And with that, I want to move to introducing Wanda D'Alocosta, which holds a joint position at the Design School and the Dell E-Web School of Construction. So a warm welcome to Wanda, who is also a senior global future scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at the Global Institution of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. Wanda is a member of the Saddle Lake First Nation, and she is the first First Nation architect to be licensed in Canada and has spent nearly 20 years working with indigenous communities in North America. D'Alocosta teaches an interdisciplinary service in a studio in Arizona State University where students engage directly with local tribal communities and start the indigenous design collaborative to support students' professional development. Her vast work includes critical community-driven design, indigenous methodologies, indigenous place-making, and place-keeping, and the vernacular intelligence of regional architectures. She has exhibited in various venues, including the 2018 Venice Biennale as part of the Unceded Team Canada, which is a group of 18 indigenous architects. Wanda holds a master of design research, city design from Southern California Institute of Architecture and a master of architecture from the University of Calgary. She's also the principal of Tawau Architecture Collective and check out their website at Tawark.com, which is based in Tempe, Arizona, an architecture and participatory design practice working on both sides of the Canada-United States border, a space of possibility, plurality, relationality, collaboration, special agency, and resilience. Taw's work is grounded in indigenous ways of doing and being. Welcome with me, Wanda. Yes. Thank you. Happy to be here. Let me give me a minute while I bring my PowerPoint up. There we go. Thank you so much for having me join today. I'm very happy to be here to share the thoughts, not only about our work, but also about our process. I think as you'll see from this talk today, that a lot of what we do is about process. So I wanna start with a confession. So I have been challenged by and challenging architecture for a long, long time, both its process and its production. I was trained in the era of white shiny boxes at the end of the 90s, the era which was inspired by technological innovation, which incited this sort of global homogeneity. During my time at architecture school, I learned to conform to the popular ethos, despite the fact that it did not resonate. My non-conformist views of architecture came from two places, specific places. First, it was about growing up with my relatives on the satellite First Nation. Each holiday and each summer, we would pack our grandmother's home, 60 relatives, kids running everywhere, no running water, a double outhouse to serve us all. During the day, we had horses to ride, bales of hate to climb and old cars in a field that became the set for our land-based theater productions. We lacked nothing. The other place that skewed my belief in this shiny white boxes was backpacking adventure. Well, after my undergraduate, a six-month Australian adventure turned into a seven-year journey around the world, where I saw I wasn't alone, many other cultures didn't fit into the white box. I saw curves. I saw architecture made of bamboo and boulders. I saw wildly expressive roof lines, bass release, which cumulated living histories of people around the world. I saw people living in underground caves which mediated the hot temperatures in a desert. There was endless inspiration and no white boxes. What you see on the screen on the left is the studio that I teach through the Indigenous Design Collaborative at Arizona State University. And on the right is my practice to allow architecture collected. As you can see, the vision at the IDC is about preparing the next generation of designers to act what we call as field transformation ambassadors through the power of place design and cultures-based innovation. Our mission at the IDC in a response to having no connection to my architectural training back in the day is to increase understanding, inclusiveness, and accuracy in the field while illuminating undervalued and under-examined ancestral worldviews and value systems that I think can contribute to global transformation. We shared at the beginning the vision for my firm, which again, it doesn't seem like architecture sometimes. It's a space of something else and what we are exploring, you'll see on screen. We have five specific areas of focus. There are Indigenous ways of being, knowing, doing, collaborative processes, mentorship of the next generation, that multi-generational approach, and Earth-centric design. Today, what I wanted to share with you are three things. First, I wanna share how the field is transforming, the signs that I notice, that tell me the field is in flux. The second thing I want to share is a method for you to use and to think through, which I call productive disruption these days. There are three components. I will talk about this as retooling, re-aggregating, and reframing. I, of course, have a very small niche lens. It is about Indigenous design, but I think when I begin to work closely with other disruptors and people who are pursuing the fringe, I think there is a really tremendous undertaking that is taking place in the field. Third, I want to talk about something called, which I call the middle ground. Well, I will discuss a few of our projects while I revive an old theory. It's the cultural sustainability theory in architecture. I used to proclaim that Indigenous design was completely separate from architecture. It was something else, but cultural sustainable theory allows me to build a connection between the two. So for those of you interrogating other spaces, I hope to confirm that the field is in flux while sharing a method for disrupting and an old new language for interrogation. Before we begin with the three parts, I wanted to give you a couple of definitions. People ask what Indigenous architecture is, who can do it, how do you measure it? And I've brought two definitions that are from the same author five years apart. This first definition is more emotive than he's talking about general principles that he could relate to when he does architecture. And he's an author from New Zealand, Hireni Matunga. So, and I'll read a few of these because I think they're important to touch and then we'll touch on the other definition that he wrote five years later. So here he's talking about an architecture of the place. In the first bullet point, he's talking about value systems, knowledge and principles. He's talking about affinity to land, environment, geography and climate. In the second bullet point, he's talking about resources, connecting with resources, materials and original construction methods. He's also talking about introduced. Again, we are still here and we are adapting. So this work isn't about replicating the past. It's about introducing new things. In the third bullet point, he's talking about this notion of ever evolving. Again, bringing to light that we are still here and we are continuing to interrogate and evolve our architectures. And finally, the last bullet point he's talking about a narrative that is about a relationship with place. In the second definition, he talks about an actual formula. This is a seven part formula that he proposes. If you work through all of these seven, you become, what I have been calling it, a deep architecture. Is it possible to do indigenous architecture light where you only hit two or three of these? Of course. So with this definition, when I get asked the question, who can create indigenous architecture? Anyone who can follow this beautiful definition that has been laid out for us. And I'll highlight a few of the words so we can remember them as we go through this presentation today. It's clear about a genealogy where it came from. It connects to an archetype. Again, you see that MITP, which is situated on screen, a response to an indigenous need and that could be past, present, and future. A structural articulation of cultural and social values. Next, it's the place-based narrative again he brings out. Then he follows it up by knowledge, worldview, and cosmology. Cosmology is interesting. I'll show you a project that we're starting to connect to moon systems. It's fantastic. And then lastly, of course, it has to have an indigenous meaning. So let's jump into the first section, Pluriverse Rising Field Transformation. And I'll just give you a, just to touch on the word pluriverse. It was brought to my attention in the last year or so. And it's such a beautiful word that recognizes the plurality of our world that I have been using it constantly to describe the work that we're doing. I wanna talk to you about what I see in the field here that I notice change or a field influx. I was recently reading the book Spatial Agency by many of you are probably familiar with that. And they talked about architectural training being stagnant. We still have the tutor, the servant, the privileging of the visual, raising of individuals onto pedestals. And yet the stasis or the underlying system is left unchanged because we are distracted by the speed of the change on the outside. I think a second indication that we are in a state of flux. I was presenting at the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. And the chair there talked about the disruption that's happening in pedagogy and how we teach. And he said the global pandemic is bringing about unprecedented and drastic changes, including the way we teach. And I would agree. In our school at Arizona State University, many of you know our school has a motto. It's about who we include, not we who we exclude. We have a lot of first generation students similar to myself, who their parents have never been to university. And we have a lot of diverse students here, whether it's through geography or through the policies. And just recently a group of students formed something called the Design Justice Initiative, where they went to the leadership with a series of demands that if those demands were not met, they were going to the press. I heard afterward that a lot of other schools across North America were undergoing a very similar disruption. The students were rebelling against the faculty, the composition, the curriculum that they were being taught, and they were hoping for more broad teachings. So when I went to do my research to understand why they were upset, I realized that, yes, 72% of architecture in North America schools come from Caucasian backgrounds. I am part of the 0.2% of indigenous faculty in architecture schools. I think this is changing quickly in the last decade or so, but I think it is part of the issue that the students identified, that the faculty don't look like them. One positive movement that I see happening out there in the community is this beautiful, all of these emerging cohorts that are starting to emerge in my particular niche field, which is indigenous design. As you can see, starting back from 2011, which is about 10 years ago, there were a series of cohorts that have developed. The first one was the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute at UNM. They specialize in planning. Laurentian followed suit in Sudbury and they have elders in residence, they build canoes, they do place-based learning, very innovative school. The third was us at IDC, and the last two groups were student-led initiatives, both at the U of M, but also at Harvard. They've formed indigenous design collectives and they're starting to rethink what this means. When I start to look at how this disruption is impacting practice, I've started to track different what I call ethnoscapes. Everyone is familiar with Wakanda, the movie in Black Panther, the movie that the city that they existed, that they lived in that was all about a certain culture and it was about an expression related to that culture. While we're starting to see examples happen around the world. On the far left, you see Freddie Mamami's architecture in Bolivia. Does it look like what we're teaching in architecture schools? Not at all. Is it right? Let's see. In the middle, New Zealand has recently released Teeranga Mari Design Principles for Urban Design. So Auckland has a series, look on the website, there's a series of case studies that go through how to incorporate indigenous design on an urban scale. And finally, we recently recalled to Hawaii to help with a placekeeping study with a group of individuals from Kamehameha schools who feel that their culture is being lost. They took us to this beautiful little community cafe where a lot of the Hawaiians who are specializing in design go to think. It's a think tank for Hawaiian indigenous design. So I see throughout the globe, multiple examples of change on the way. So let's talk about disruption. Let's talk about the process of retooling, re-aggregating and reframing. I have been thinking about how to disrupt, since my shiny white box challenge, 30 or so years ago, about how to make this profession be more inclusive and more accurate in the field, as particularly to our communities. So the three words that I've come up with to describe the work that we are trying to do is retool, which means to alter something so it's more useful or suitable. Re-aggregate, which means to bring elements or fragments together in a new way. And finally, reframe, to change the way you look at something. So let me take you through each of these. So I share with you here very open source our process of indigenous design. You will see that the design, which is the black circle toward the end, comes after a very long research process that we engage. The first part of our process, I call place-based research, where we are trying to develop an understanding of the local community. Again, I'm Cree. And so when I go into a Blackfoot or a DNA or a Navajo community, I am also an outsider and I have a lot of learning to do. And so we study archetypes of the region, we study their views on ecology, we study meaning and materials so that when we go in, we might have some familiarity with what's important to them. The second stage, which you see with the TLine are our community-led teachings. Sometimes people call them engagements, but I think the word teaching shares to the people that we communicate with that we are learning as architects when we go into a community. You see the numbers on screen, number four is where we start to integrate local cultural knowledge brokers, cultural bearers, artists, elders to help us on our journey. And then number six is where we take all of the teachings and we integrate them into a series of communication tools where we confirm, did we hear you correctly? After we do that, we create a series of indigenous design drivers, number seven, which are big buckets, which sort of group together all the ideas that we get from community engagement. We go through a series of very transparent iterations and our outcomes, I think, are quite different. Yes, we're getting toward a building, but I think equally important, we are creating a visual storytelling report where we summarize and engage all of the beautiful ideas that have come through. And number 11, we also measure outcomes. Did we get it right? So we have a series of checkings that we do to make sure that we have hit all of the aspirations. I wanted to share with you a diagram of what we're aggregating. So when we go into community, there's a number of things that seem to emerge and we track all of those aspects. We track them because we think they're important and eventually I think we can summarize them in a series of clusters, which we can then teach through, but they extend everything from traditional land use concepts to notions of land tenure to local place keeping concepts to ideals of native science of the region. So there is a lot of things that we are connecting to that we are trying to understand. In the last section here, the reframing section, how we change the way we look at something, I've started to think about this as a bundle of indigenous design. And I think what does it offer the world? If I could describe to people what it brings to the world, I think it actually brings new meaning. It brings new methods, new ways of working. And I think, and I hope it brings new responsibilities and let me share each of those with you. In terms of new meaning, I think some of the most powerful learnings that we have done with our communities. And again, it's been about 25 to 30 years of working with various communities across Turtle Island or North America. And I think of course, number one, I think is that notion of being place-based. I remember in architecture school, people used to say, oh, I was inspired by this landscape. I was inspired by elements in the landscape. But I think being inspired by a place and having a generational history where your great, great, great grandparents inhabited that place and left you with stories of that place are two very different things. And so I think, can indigenous design help reconnect us to place in a really genuine and meaningful way? Bringing back all of those knowledge that these generations of people have created. The second thing on this list is the values. I'm finding that whenever we do work, value systems are very important. We've started working. I'm sure many of you are aware of Harvard working with a series of value-based systems for their urban just design work. And so we're looking at that as a tool to begin to capitalize on values as a driver for architecture. The third thing in terms of new meaning are the alternate capitals. I've often shared that architecture has been focused a lot on economics and aesthetics. And I think the other aspects of it need equal attention, the social, the symbolic, the environmental and the cultural. In terms of new methods, this is I think a really special offering that indigenous design brings to the table. So I have noticed with indigenous design because we come from a consensus-based community and a consensus-based governance system that we are very interested in a consensus-based process. We're also interested in non-hierarchal strategies for engaging. So again, we have a relationship with the natural world, but we also have a relationship with all of the people in the community. No one is higher than others. And so I think it creates this power shifting that I think is really powerful. The second thing is the lived experience, again, being from a place gives you a really different vantage point. And I think that's really important to integrate. So instead of getting a consultant to help you with a local project, how why don't you just get an artist from the community, bring in that lived experience directly to the project. Mutual learning, I think before, we thought that we would go out, take what we need and then do our thing as architects. And I think now we're realizing there's more of a back and forth that happens. Number four, reciprocity. How do we actually provide value through the notion of architecture? And I share with my students that we should be able to name the value that we or what we are giving back by doing a project. And if we can't name it, we should go back to the drawing board, right? It can't be about, I'm gonna create a great piece of architecture or I'm gonna win an award with this thing or I'm gonna try something really innovative and cool. It's about how we are helping social, cultural, environmental and so forth. And then finally, the work should be transformative. It should be able to give back long after we finish in the community. Finally, in terms of new responsibilities, I can't really excited about this section because I think the indigenous worldview, as you know, it's about connecting to a very far in the future. We have something called a seven generation worldview where we believe we are protecting the environment for seven generations in the future. Some indigenous cultures believe we are in the third generation now and that we look back three generations and we look forward. But regardless that the fact that we are looking toward the future to think, I think adds a responsibility to this profession that I think could be very powerful in the way the profession is in flux. The second thing is the custodial relationship to the environment, how we're caring from other nature. Again, if it's part of our land family, nature, the rocks, the trees, the sky, the air and the elements, and we start to have a steward relationship, I think that would be a benefit. And then finally, connecting to the integrity of the land family, all of the land family from the two feathered to the four feathered to the winged ones to all of the people on our planet. For the last section of this presentation, I wanna share with you what I call the middle ground. I will go through a number of projects within our firm and I'm going to couch them in the theory of cultural sustainability. Again, this was such a transformative piece of work that I read that I wanna share with you some of the words from the authors. It was a paper by Paul Mehmet and Kathy Keyes called Redefining Architecture to Accommodate Cultural Difference, Designing for Cultural Sustainability. And in that paper, they talk about a theory of cultural sustainability is about architecture that is sensitive to and encompassing of cross-cultural contexts and values and not overly dominated by Western concept of what architecture is, including what high architecture is, according to Euro and North American traditions. They say that the alternate definition of architecture encompasses not just buildings, but the objects within, on and around buildings as well as the associated meanings, values and behaviors. They also say that without a more balanced definition of architecture, architects will continue to be vulnerable in designing in an ethnocentric manner, possibly providing a good fit in their architecture for their own cultural group, but inadvertently creating a bad fit for other cultural groups who may require to use this architecture. They say that bad fits may result in users becoming stressed to varying degrees or being unable to cope or even avoiding engaging in that built environment. What we want in our firm is to maintain a good fit, which they say will assist in creating a certain level of wellbeing for the user and thereby contribute to a form of culturally sustainable architecture. So I want to remind you that the word culture, I'm using it in its totality here to encompass the total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in thought, speech, action and artifacts and dependent on our capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations through a system. And in this case, our system is architecture. So here is the first tenant of the cultural sustainability theory and there are seven tenants altogether. So I have seven projects to share with you. Number one, the use of space is influenced by our cultural backgrounds. I chose a project which is a justice center. As many of you know that our value systems as Indigenous people relate to restorative justice systems where we are trying to heal and ensure that the person going into the justice system has an opportunity to get better. So instead of putting someone into an institution where there is not any help, we're open to restorative justice. And I think this is an important value system that again, changes the architecture, changes the cultural meaning. When we walk into that space, of course there are symbols that denote that space. There are also emphases on natural elements. Here there are plants and water. The second quality or tenant of cultural sustainability theory. Number two, human needs are and environmental attributes are complex. And if aligned well, it will lead to increasingly complimentary functionality. What you see on screen is the Indigenous people space in Ottawa, Ontario. Well, it's hard to tell, but underneath all of that structure is a colonial building that three Indigenous architects were given to design an Indigenous people space. And I often joke that after we cried tears on our drawing boards at the irony of being given a colonial building to create an Indigenous people space, a leftover building to create an Indigenous people space, we got to work. And we wanted to see if we could draw out a complimentary functionality. We found out that the building was thermally inefficient. So we had to cover it. And so we were quite happy. We could preserve this moment of history in our Canadian history, but we could also create an identity for the building that was much different from what was underneath. What you see on the outside of that building, you see a shape of a shawl wrapping. It's the blanket to us as a gift. And we wanted to denote that caringness for our communities. Those small pieces that you see on the outside, we, some people say there's no shoes or feathers. Other peoples see various natural forms in them. But what we wanted to do was give one of these pieces to each one of the 617 First Nations within Canada to recognize the diversity of our communities. We also, with this bold concept, wanted to share with people that we are still here. And our architecture might resemble slightly the wid warm, which is the archetype of this area. But it is also very progressive and very bold because we are still here. In terms of the complimentary functionality within the building, we have a series of gathering spaces. Again, this is about incorporating our life ways in the city. On the lower level, which you see on the right-hand side, is a place for performance and dance and ceremony. And on the upper left or upper left-hand side, you see another gathering space that looks directly out onto the Canadian Parliament. On the lower left, the interstitial space that encloses the colonial history of Canada. In the third tenet of Cultural Sustainability Theory, it reads, and this is a fantastic, this was a life-changing tenet for me in this theory. It says, there are ideological, social and behavioral meanings that need to be understood, including high-level meanings such as worldview, mid-level meanings such as identity, and low-level meanings such as use. So if you think of Indigenous design, I think this is critically important, those three distinctions, worldview you're trying to attain, how do you capture the worldview, the belief system of the people? Secondly, how do you represent their identity? And third, how do you provide spaces for functions and use? What you see is the Swan River Cultural Center in Northern Alberta. And in the interior, this was a phenomenal concept. We had this beautiful, a series of teachers that created an inside circle within the structure that connected to the 13 moons that were part of their belief system. So inscribed on the benches that go around that inner circle are the pre-word for each of those moon systems. Again, we're reintroducing worldviews and belief systems back into the architecture and putting them as transparent and as, I guess, obvious in the architecture in order to rebuild those connections. Number four, exogenous or outside design and decision-making either undermines or reinforces cultural systems. You see on screen, St. Francis Cree Bilingual Elementary School in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The precedent of the area is a teepee. So again, this looks nothing like a teepee. But what we did do is we took the old syllabics, which were phonetic characters, which you see on the outside of that building, that the missionaries used to create this communication system in order to communicate with the indigenous people of the region. And we thought we wanted to take that back. We wanted to take the syllabics back and we want to create this positive messaging on the school in a form that connected more to our worldview, which is about our connection with nature and the sky and the organic-ness of the earth. These are some pictures in the back area. We had a series of garden, rooftop gardens that would cascade down the building. And on the right-hand side, you see the geometries that led us to this form. And in terms of decision-making, we had worked really hard to change the way schools are designed, as you know, because schools have been so regulated for so many years, it was extremely difficult to actually shift the school board away from following the norms. And we pushed and the indigenous community helped us. And this will be one of the most indigenous-centric designs of any elementary school in North America. But it took us and the community to help the school board realize that we needed to really disrupt what that architecture looked like. Number five, there are culturally specific understandings of what it means to be well. What you see on screen is Western University, the Indigenous Learning Centre in London, Ontario. There was not a garden that cascaded down to that lower building. What they gave us, again, it was a leftover space, an outer space that they wanted to gather in and a renovation of that drum building in the back. We were excited because the drum building had a circle and we identify with circles. It's a shape from nature. And so the community looked at how we house all of the functions for the indigenous students. Again, what is critical here are the belief systems of the students on campus and I guess the long history of institutionalism where some buildings such as universities have been very unwelcoming, I think, to indigenous people, it's very intimidating. I remember my first time going to a university campus, it was really, really intimidating. This was a very foreign place. And we were thinking about how we integrate indigenous concepts of wellness with a welcoming place. So we spoke with the elders, we did a great big series of engagements and we came up with a cascading garden that would lead down into spaces that now had more light and a view of a natural garden when you look outside. What you see, the structure on the outside is a place for storytelling and gathering. But what we wanted to focus on is that, and let me just, what we wanted to focus on is that indigenous knowledge, especially in the university setting, comes in multiple forms. It's not just coming from books, nor is it coming just from our elders. Those are two ways it comes, but it also comes from our internal processing, the vision or revealed knowledge that everyone can possess. And it also comes from empirical knowledge which is land-based knowledge. So again, we have four different types of knowledge, empirical from the land, revealed which we do on our own, traditional which comes from the stories from our elders and contemporary which comes from books. How do you integrate all four of those types of knowledge in a university setting? These are the interior renderings. It's in construction right now. And some of the features to point out to make it welcoming. On the upper right-hand side, we found all the indigenous language greetings for the number of nations in the area. And we have welcome greetings on a series of installation panels that welcome the greeters to that space. On the lower right-hand side, you see a storytelling space or a gathering space which looks more like home instead of an institutionalized building. And again, it was about creating a welcoming space. And on the left-hand side, you see a floor plan of the main drum in the large rotunda building. And the lines inscribed on our floor are solstice and equinox. So we ended up cutting windows in that room to be able to connect to those beautiful origin lines of our cosmology. Number six, architects are members of cultural groups and cultivated within a social value system. This is a project we did, an interior project for Arizona State University here in Tempe. What you see, again, taking language as a departure point, we went connected with three indigenous artists who specialize in graffiti font and we asked them to help create a series of language greetings in all of the indigenous languages in Arizona and put them on the wall to greet the students. They did a phenomenal job and the university was so excited with the results which you see on the lower right-hand side that we did with wood and laid in resin that they asked us to create another piece. So what you see on the top right is a test piece of a table that we're creating. And again, we did it in line with a local indigenous artist. What he was connecting to was a series of baskets that tell a story and that share the lifeways of the people of this region. So that was just installed in the university. So we work a lot with artists in this work and we find that's a really beautiful way to dive deep to those stories of this place. The last slide and the last number seven of the cultural sustainability theory, obviously this is not our work. These are the old Chaco Canyon images that is here in New Mexico near where I am. But number seven says, places are highly symbolic and culturally specific with cosmological, spiritual and historical references that become identity markers for groups, societies and nations. And I think this is really our goal. If we can get to this point where every piece of architecture inspires us and connects us and shares with the world an understanding of who we are and our belief system, I think anyone can help us create indigenous architecture. And with that, I would like to say thank you for listening and I look forward to answering questions and having a conversation. Bye-bye. Thank you, Wanda. Thank you so much. You're welcome. A few thoughts and notions that I would like to maybe engage in discussion is really first and foremost about the intriguing and not obvious links you're making in your work between the technological and the natural worlds. Old built statements to seamlessness with the nature. There's this, I feel there is this kind of a link that you are making with your work. And you were talking about the middle ground and it feels almost as a sense kind of making a link between past with present and future. Maybe just maybe a suggestion that maybe in this, as part of the generation that links between these generations of past and future for ideation of space kind of like connecting between the lineage and the future generations. A lot of your work raised in my mind the notion of biofilia, right? Love of nature as a cultural need. And in addition, as a physiological need, we have following years of evolution of the human body, we need that connection with nature. And similarly in your work, there's this connection to the spirit of the place and spirit of tradition as an intrinsic need that we also need as a society. So that was another interesting point including of course the tactile connection with meaningful objects, symbols and views in your projects and the examples you gave us. You did not talk about the communal dreaming much, but I know from your work that it is also a way you use to transcend design ideas, which is also really important and intriguing for getting together designers, users and community in kind of canceling the hierarchy between decision makers and the passive receivers of a space that being made by foreign forces. And I'm intrigued maybe this is maybe something you can share more about. I'm intrigued about the definition that you propose for indigenous architecture. You gave two definitions of the same other. And my question is how do we decentralize this understanding which provides again an institutional hierarchy which we're trying to move away from of what is right and what is wrong and who can be this kind of architect or not and what are the guidelines? Also in terms of scale and locality, who can be an indigenous architect? As you know at GSAP, many of our students come from outside the US with large body of international students. So I'm curious to hear about your view on the locality of the work and of the participants and designers. Sure, and maybe I'll start there with the scale and locality because I think going back to the definitions and I think when you had the first definition it was so abstract and it was, I mean, it's beautiful, but it didn't give us instructions on how we can actually engage this process. And the second one, it's actually to me, it's formulaic. There are seven qualities that we can aspire to. We can connect to the genealogy, we can connect to the architecture, we can identify the need. But I think what becomes evident as you start to work through that process because we aspire to that, right? And we're testing ourselves on that each time we do our architecture, it's not easy. And what it requires is a deep engagement with community. So I think just by presenting this definition, which opens it up to the world to be able to join forces with it, once you start to try to do it, it is difficult and it reminds us and it humbles us as architects because we are reminded how much we don't know, right? And I think part of our work as indigenous architects, I think is really to build that comfort in unknowing, right? There's a lot that we have to learn and we have to be comfortable not knowing. We're trained as architects to have answers and to come with answers. But I think this process, this seven part definition has shared with us all that this is hard work and it requires numerous conversations with our knowledge brokers of the community. But I think to your point about international students and can they do this work? Of course they can do this work and even better when we teach our classes here and they're all indigenous centric focused, we have a lot of international students that take these courses because they are now identifying with the term indigenous. And to me, we are all, many of us, I think of the fast moving development happening in places like Shanghai or Dubai where the indigenous cultures of those regions are being decimated by development, right? And so I think a lot of people are identifying with this push to maintain our ancestral belief systems, traditions and all of those connections to place. And what I would also share is that culture feeds culture. So when I am in a room with, we have a lot of students from India, we have a lot of students from the Middle East, we have a lot of students who are international students here, we all talk about the same things using potentially slightly different terminologies, but we are all talking about the same thing and pushing toward the end goal, the same end goal. So I think bringing international students into this work is the perfect medium to push it even further. So I would absolutely welcome the community. To your second question about, you know, the biofilia and nature and the physiological and the spirit and the notion of decentralizing, I think part of the push that we are aiming toward in every project is slightly different. And we have a four part process that we typically work through, which I teach through, which is this work is process-based, place-based, community-led, and there needs to be a reciprocal alignment. And so when we teach through this, when we look at those four qualities on every project, each project has a life of its own. For instance, we were doing a project for, there were a lot of people who are without homes on a tribe just very close to the Canadian US border. They, all of the people have a lot of, there's a lot of social issues, there's opiate, you know, addictions and so forth. And they needed housing, little tiny homes to bring them home. And they needed to be cheap. This is in rural, rural, rural areas where there isn't a lot of money. And so what we did in that particular instance, we brought everyone together, a contractor like the integrated design process we brought together, the contractor, the client and the designer to work together to create, it's basically a little tiny home duplexes to be able to bring those community members back home to the res. And I think, you know, on another project, I think particularly we're working on a housing project here in the Southwest, where it is really hot here in the summer for about four months of the year and everything is centered around energy. And we, of course, we're trying to create a wall system that would function in the heat of this weather that would reduce the energy bills that we could integrate people, give them jobs from the community. And so that one had a completely different push and it was about training locals and it was about using local materiality. And so I think all of us can really strive in every biome or every region that we're working to really understand the community's needs and to build a network or a team of champions around that community to help them. So I think to your point, you know, it's really about connecting with the need of that community and seeing what we can do as architects to sort of bring the necessary components to make that project work. Yeah. Great questions. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe we can open the chat for discussion. Do we have any questions from the audience? Laila, can we put the chat in front of me so I can have it in front? So if you have any questions for Wanda and if not, I have another question I would like to ask. In the meantime, and my question, Wanda, is about the engagement throughout the process that you were just talking about with the materiality. How are the concepts, the natural concepts, ancestral concepts, material considerations, how do these manifest through the process of executing of the construction itself? How do you use these forms to inform the construction, the execution of the building? Yeah, and I think this is an area that I think is starting to emerge globally where we're starting to rethink, I guess, the generic materiality from one climate to the next. We're starting to rethink importing materials. We're starting to look at more place-based understandings. And a lot of us in Indigenous architecture are going back to be inspired by the original architectures of the area. Not only the materiality that they bring forth. I think I'm from the Southwest here or I'm living in the Southwest right now where there's a huge tradition with Adobe. But of course, we did some practice. We tried to build some Adobe bricks. It was so difficult and so onerous. I can't imagine anyone trying to build a house out of Adobe bricks. But then we thought, can we actually bring in a 3D printer and actually 3D print the mud? Because then we're actually going back to the original materiality. But we're doing it a way that is easier and that is less labor intensive and hopefully more economical. And so I think this is what it's about. This is the switch that we need to make. We need to start by sort of reconnecting with the local architecture of every region. We need to look at what the principles were that were developed for survival in that region. So for instance, when we started studying the Southwest here and our hot climate architecture, and this is a big issue as it keeps getting warmer here and the water's starting to run dry from Colorado. And fine for us, right? We can just get on a plane and go home or go across the country and live somewhere else. But there are families here who have lived here for generations. They are not going anywhere. And so we have to consider how we are contributing to their needs for the future seven generations ahead. And I think part of our work here by studying the original forms, we learned that they had about seven different structures here for living in their housing compounds that were completely ingenious. So some of the wall types were different, seasonally, not only seasonally, but the West wall where the sun hits and it's so hot if you have a bedroom on the West side of your house here in Arizona, this is the worst place to sleep, right? Because that's where the setting sun comes and permeates through all throughout the night. And so they had different wall assemblies on different areas, on different sides of their homes. They had different structures, whether it's for cooking, right? You cook outside, because why would you want to cook indoors, right? It's go outside, put an oven outside in the yard. They had big shade structures that they used to perform different lifeways outside, cooking, gathering and socializing outdoors. So they had all this ingenuity. And here when I look at the houses that we're building here, it doesn't take any of that ingenuity into effect. And so I think if we started to look at those old architectures and archetypes as progenitors, as indicators of a new way of building in each region, I think we would be in step one. And then step two, if you start to build in the cultural associations, the materiality, the forms, the shapes, the principles of those original architectures, I think we would all be better for it. And we would have better, more bio-climatic architecture in all of the biomes in North America. I'm really curious what were different assemblies around the structures. So for their different materials, different use of the different layers. Yeah, they used to have, they had, so for instance, they're sleeping hot. So you can imagine when it's 120 or 45 degrees outside 120, 45 degrees, it is really hard to sleep. So they used to burrow the bed into the ground where it's obviously, we all know it's much cooler. And they built the walls with mud and grass together. So it's a completely encased structure that had a natural air flow system built into it. In the other, in the daytime, when they were out doing work, they had a system, we have something called, well, the windstorms here in the desert. So they had a series of fence-like structures that would allow the people who were working on food gathering or food preparation to sit behind one of those wind walls safely and be protected from the sun, but also be protected from the wind. And it was just a half, almost like a half structure. And I think these are inspirations for the future of houses in Phoenix, right? Why are we trying to build something that looks the same as Montana to Phoenix when we could be inspired by these original structures? You know, and I think if I was to use an example from my part of the world, we come from the teepee. And that simple structure, which is basically right now a piece of cloth and a few poles, had so much ingenuity in it. You know, we used to lift up the skirt at the bottom so the air would flow and it would escape thermal effect, which is a mechanical concept. We used to create a double layer in the, in certain seasons and stuff it with material in order to insulate it. We had a certain number of poles in our community that all have a value associated, honesty, humility, respect, sharing, generosity, wisdom that would remind us about what's important, our belief system as we were putting up that structure. So there are, there's all this ingenuity that is associated with our original structures that people have just discounted. And I think that would be a beautiful place to go back to and to interrogate. That's super interesting. And I have another question related to that, but first maybe I can read that there's a comment and there's, okay, yes, please. Okay, this is from Ahmad Palama. Oftentimes architect or designer trapped into repetition of pattern or design language, that's somewhat the archetype of the indigenous architecture. Applied into the facade or the floor plan of a new building as a statement that yes, we respect in quotes the vernacularity of the architecture. Do you think this is the right approach or should we move away from this? Yeah, I just wanna read it. Can you just read the beginning of that one again? Absolutely. So oftentimes the architect or designer is trapped into a repetition of pattern or design language that are somewhat the archetype of an indigenous architecture. So for example, like adding patterning to the facade of a building but not actually having like taking it into account in the indigenous like cultural meaning beyond an applique in new buildings as a statement of respect for the vernacular of that area. And do you think this is the right approach or should we move away from it? Can you put it inside and see? Thanks, that's a great question. And I think for me, I don't want anything to be because this is in such a transitional time in the field I don't think we should be formulaic about anything with indigenous design. I think this should be our fun phase where we think about what it could be. But I would advise that the three things that I think make indigenous architecture so powerful. And again, it comes from that cultural sustainability theory. If you can integrate the worldview, if you can integrate a piece of identity or representation that has meaning for the local community and if you can ensure that the use contributes and complements and is functional to their life ways of that region, you have hit the most, the three most important things. So do you remember the school, the Swirly school that looked nothing like a teepee, right? It looks absolutely nothing like a teepee but it had the worldview, it had the use or the function of a, you know, a disrupted school and it had the identity of this Cree syllabic. So I think there's a room to play. And I think getting into formulas, I think at this early stage in indigenous design, I think it would be to our detriment, it would limit us. That's a great question though. And there are two additional comments. Wanda Del Acosta, I found your approach to further certifying for refreshing. Thank you for your ongoing work and engagement with indigenous communities and with communities at large. Our society, our world needs to respect and honor multiple perspectives. And Kirk is writing, I happen to be building and remodeling an Adobe house right now in Phoenix. And I'm a recent civil engineering graduate from Arizona State University. So those are two nice comments. We receive additional questions, people who are in the audience. So maybe I can share an additional, yes. Would you like to ask a question? Thank you for the talk. It was very insightful and it was very like helpful, especially the comments in which you shared about how indigeneity is a very global experience. So I think that was amazing. The one thing I was really struck by was when you said that you're consistently given colonial leftover buildings and that's something that you kind of have to work with. And I think that really defines or is quite literally a marginalized space where it's like, well, it's almost abandoned. And I'm curious as to how does that architectural conversation look like within between the space of that building that you were given and then what you choose to do with it. And if there is a degree of almost research that goes into, okay, what is the history of the building, what purpose was it serving? And then building on top of that or does the focus primarily remain on the land and how it was used and the indigenous cultures on that land? Yeah, that's a great question. And it is unfortunate that we keep getting leftover buildings because I think there's so much opportunity to create something so innovative with this field and to be given to have to repurpose the building I think is unfortunate. The good thing is I think I've repurposed three buildings to date now in the last, in the last, I don't know, five or so years and now we're being given new buildings. So I do hope that it's changing. I think it was a matter of people trusting us to be able to take on a full architecture building. I hope that's what it was and now that they trust us we're going to get more and more full buildings. But I think to your point about the researching of the original architecture, we look at colonial architecture with a really cautious eye and the reason for that is many of our parents in mind, including went to boarding school or residential school. And unfortunately, regardless of what that old colonial building is, there is trauma associated with many of the elements of our original architectures. The hierarchy that's built into the facades of the colonial bow arts architecture or the straight corridors sometimes remind our community members of not so great histories in the history of the boarding schools where they were lined up in these institutions and their culture was being sort of forced out of them. And so I think there's a trauma with those old buildings. So to answer your question, we are not doing very much research on the history of those original structures that were given this so much as we want to mark the passage of time with commemorating the fact that these are part of our history, right? When we did that building where we encased it in the blanket or the shawl, part of us wanted to just knock down the old building and then part of us wanted to preserve it and wanted to remember that piece of history and wanted to wrap it and remember it forever. And so I think this is going to be a conversation, a sort of a polarized conversation that will continue to happen over the next couple of decades as people wrestle with this transformation that's happening in the field. That's a great question, Mom. Fantastic, thank you for that. Naila, maybe you can post the other question so I can read it out loud. There's another question for you. Oh, got it, sorry. I'll read it anyway. It's in the same realm of what we were discussing and we can have this maybe as a final question before we close. What would you say is the impact of culturally appropriate buildings on those not of that culture? Sure, it could be a tool for teaching and learning but any negative notions, any negative vibes. So maybe the question here is about the locality and appropriateness of buildings within a culture that is different from the notion of those buildings. And what is the, sorry, is the question about the effect on the people of the culture or the effect on the people not of the culture? Not of the culture? Not of the culture. So I think of, let me see if there's an example that we can use to delve through. So I think, you know, what is, I think there's a few large questions in there. What is a culturally appropriate building? You know, I think we are still finding this out or trying to determine what a culturally appropriate building is. But I think in, you know, regard to whether one culture assesses a structure in the same way as another culture, I think, you know, my 20s were spent backpacking around the world and when I saw, you know, so many different ways of living, I think all of those ways of living have something to contribute. You know, I remember just a simple example of the bas-reliefs of Cambodia, you know, in Ankarwa temples where they had, you know, a whole history of this culture and this community inscribed for generations and centuries on the outside of this building. It was so powerful. And I just remember going around and trying to understand what all this meant was, how did I feel when I was going around? I was just curious. I knew it, it meant that there was a deep history of this region in Cambodia and I wanted someone to explain it to me and I wanted to know more about it, but I didn't, I was an outsider looking in. The one hopeful moment, I met an English girl who actually had been studying. I was by myself in Cambodia and she was also on a motorbike. We were zooming into the Ankarwa temples at five in the morning and she was, happened to be studying bas-reliefs. That was her degree. And she eventually shared the stories of what she knew about what was happening on the outside of that building. Now, when I think back to that time, did I get the accurate history? Because she was not from there. She studied out of a book, those bas-reliefs. So it dawns on me now that I might have been getting half troops of the building instead of a full troops. And I think in order to get the full, the full understanding of those bas-reliefs, I would have actually had to sit down with a group of Cambodians who would tour me around the site and explain to me the meaning of this. And then I would have a full view and a full understanding of this place. So when I think about the indigenous ways, this is what I would hope. I would hope that if we do buildings in the future and there is something that gives people pause, that makes people curious, that people will ask the questions and people will go to find a knowledge broker and go to find a cultural bearer and begin to increase everyone's understanding through architecture. And I would also say, I think a last comment there is that I know from traveling around the world that a lot of cultures have a lot of beautiful belief systems to share that would help us all. I've seen them, I think of the Tibetan people and their beautiful prayer wheels that just exist in the cities that you ring as you're walking past and it centers you and it reminds you of where you are and what's important. And I think that architecture, particularly indigenous architecture has that ability because there is such a profound connection or the building of connections between people and people, people in place, people in this spiritual place, people and all of the land family from the plants to the animals, to the rocks, to the mountains. I think that would be our offering is what I would hope is that the offering of indigenous design is one of connection. It's about connecting to each of those places in North America. So do I hope people get something when they go to see it? Maybe they're confused, but hopefully they'll ask and that hopefully that there is some form of enlightenment that it comes from another culture that would be offered through the architecture. Well, Wanda, thank you so much for sharing with us your important knowledge and projects. And I'm truly honored for having this conversation with you and for having you sharing your work with us. So thank you again. Thank you so much.