How Indigenous Architects, Artists, and Activists Are Using Design to Restore Tribal Sovereignty

Many non-natives have been conditioned to accept the notion that Indigenous people and their culture are extinct. This collective erasure means that Indigenous folks, with 574 recognized tribes in the United States alone, and their access to quality housing, infrastructure, and education are severely impacted. These things are either taken from them or ignored by our history books and our government—who to date have not properly honored land treaties with tribes made centuries ago.

According to the Navajo Housing Authority, more than half of the reservations’ structures are either dilapidated or require serious repairs, and 39% of the housing is overcrowded. Twenty percent of these homes are not connected to a public electric utility, while 30% are reportedly without access to a public water supply. For the few Indigenous households that do have access to water, their proximity to tailings and contaminants from a history of land extraction impacts water quality, ultimately informing major public health disparities. 

Chipping away at the machinery of the United States’ colonial history and its impact on tribal sovereignty requires greater actions beyond changing Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day, or adding Native American Heritage Month to the calendar—and, thankfully, there are Indigenous architects and artists that have already been working on it.

For Studio:indigenous founder Chris Cornelius, educating others about Indigenous presence reveals itself through his architecture. Having grown up in housing provided by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, also referred to as HUD Houses, Cornelius knows firsthand how Indigenous input was left out of solutions for reservation living, sharing that the HUD house model seems to have been copy-and-pasted across North America. 

This homogeneous planning lacks both an understanding of how tribal climates vary and how to leverage input from the community—there has been no sense, he says, of how Indigenous families might use their space for ceremony, for government, or for commerce. “When we leave out design, we’re leaving out culture and environmental responsibility,” Cornelius adds. This is what informed his architectural practice, which emphasizes indigenous ways of life and principles.