Built on Solid Ground: Indigenous Architects are Reinforcing Cultural Identities on Ancestral Lands and Beyond

Cedar, a wood sacred to the North Pacific Coast peoples, is employed throughout this building. It covers the pillars that hold up the roof, and it forms a swooping roofline reminiscent of their traditional structures. The glass panels that make up the wall are the same dimensions as the traditional cedar planks that were once used to construct the longhouses of the Squamish and Lil’wat Nations’ ancestors. The total effect links ancient culture with contemporary design, said Alfred Waugh of the Fond du Lac Denesuline Nation, the building’s architect.

Waugh’s firm, Formline Architecture and Urbanism of Vancouver, British Columbia, is just one of the growing number of Indigenous architectural firms in the Americas. Half a century ago, Indigenous architects were few. Today, their designs are visible in museums, community centers, educational institutions, health centers and more across the landscape. Their body of work reflects deep cultural roots in modern building construction, helping to reinforce Native cultures on tribal lands and beyond.

Strong Foundations

Before European contact and the upheaval of Native lives that followed during the 18th and 19th centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had developed an extraordinary variety of structures adapted to their ecological settings that used available materials and were grounded in cultural traditions and knowledge. For instance, longhouses on the Plains or in the Northeast were made of saplings embedded in the ground, their tops bent over to form a rounded roof that was then covered with reed mats. In the heavily forested Pacific Northwest, longhouses were often made of cedar posts and planks.

The conical tipi of the Plains was built of hides draped over poles. The tipi was a portable home with a form of displacement ventilation that could be varied by adjusting the lower covering and the flaps at the top. It was easy to erect and take down to follow herds and move communities in search of food from season to season.

In the Southwest, the Diné people constructed their hogans by packing adobe around log frames, with the entrance always facing east. Knowledge of how to construct them was passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next. “Hogans are sacred spaces,” said Diné architect Tamarah Begay of the Indigenous Design Studio and Architecture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “The organic, rounded shape emulates a woman’s pregnant belly and the opening through the center connects the earth to the sky. And while the whole community worked together, the process was guided by the women, accompanied by storytelling and songs.”

The builders in what is now known as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico cut the area’s plentiful sandstone, split it into flat blocks and built monumental ceremonial structures that have lasted for 700 years. Other peoples in the Southwest used adobe mudbrick as their preferred material. The heavy bricks or stone moderated temperatures by staying cool for much of the summer and retaining some of summer’s heat into the winter.

In Chaco, they also constructed roads that led to the ceremonial sites in the valley. Roads the Inca built in Peru served travelers from city to city and ultimately to the corridors of imperial power. In Peru, as well, the Uru people in Huancané province still build houses with blocks of turf cut from local grasslands. The buildings, called “putucos,” have a square base topped by a corbeled, conical roof.

Like other Europeans, the Spanish in South America were obsessed with the stunning, closely worked stone walls built by the Incas in Peru, possibly because they were built to manifest political power like the monumental stone buildings the Spaniards knew back home. However, their descriptions ignored the rest of Inca architecture, said Stella Nair, an associate professor of art history at University of California, Los Angeles. “For the Incas, the walls were just supports for the roofs, which were 4 feet thick and made of ephemeral organic materials such as ichu grasses, with long overhanging eaves covering four-fifths of the building,” she said. “Their extensive use of adobe and other ephemeral materials was also devalued by the conquerors, allowing Westerners to ignore much of Inca architecture.”

Indigenous houses and other buildings were often not isolated structures but rather used by extended families or as community gathering places. “Most tribes were organized into regional confederacies with common values regarding land and environment and a common traditional knowledge and science,” said Theodore Jojola, a community planner from Isleta Pueblo and director of the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute.

Pueblos, for example, radiated out from a central plaza, oriented to the cardinal points and limited to the place where agricultural fields began. The Cherokee people organized their often large towns into red villages, headed by a war chief, and white villages, ruled by a peace chief. Tipis among the Lakota peoples were carefully organized in circles following strict, culturally determined protocols. The Mandan cultures of the upper Midwest built clusters of enormous round structures of mounded soil, able to house extended families. The architects of these houses were a special society of women who maintained the knowledge of the designs and directed the men who actually constructed them.

Square Pegs

Like so many other elements of Indigenous cultures, such as their religions and languages, the design of their homes and communities were severely impacted by European contact. Conventional Western architecture—like the replicas of New England saltbox houses that the Bureau of Indian Affairs installed on reservations—was a form of colonization. “It took us from tipis and hogans and longhouses and put us in this barracks-style housing,” said Daniel Glenn (Crow) of Seven Directions Architects and Planners in Seattle. “This removed us from our own architecture, which embodies our diversity, our unique cultures and our connection to place.”

Among the colonists’ plans to stamp out Indigenous cultures and languages were the Indian residential schools the governments in Canada and the United States created. Today, in an effort to heal some of their impacts, the Indian School History and Dialogue Center at University of British Columbia was built as a library for documents of that era and a link to the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The consultative process with the Musqueam people on whose land the building sits offered insights that led to design decisions. One person, for example, asked for expansive windows to provide a view of the landscape to offer patrons some solace after reading the harsh historical documents inside. Red cedar—the “Blood of the Coastal Salish”—was used but was charred, both to protect the wood and to represent a “resilient people,” said Waugh. Originally, the university asked for a green roof planted with vegetation, but a copper roof was used instead as this metal is a symbol of dignity for the Musqueam people. A roof shaped like a butterfly with folded wings sends water pouring in front of a glass wall when it rains. “It’s a symbol of all the tears of those who went through the residential schools,” explained Waugh.

The impacts of colonialism are far-reaching. “The colonial project interrupted continuity and resilience of cultures worldwide,” said Wanda Dalla Costa, a member of the Saddle Lake Cree First Nation in Alberta, Canada. “It served to wipe out the uniqueness and heterogeneity not only of architecture but of cultural identity, worldview and lifeways.”

Modernism—a style of design principally composed of simplified, right-angled lines—was developed in Europe during the early 20th century in rebellion to Victorian-era, elaborately decorated structures. It became a new standard around the world without regard for local customs or historical context. As one of its lead practitioners, Le Corbusier, said: “A house is a machine for living in”—an idea wholly anathema to Indigenous cultures.

Eventually, many Indigenous buildings rejected Modernism’s straight lines in favor of curvilinear exterior walls and roof lines and circular spaces inside and outside. Daylight flooded interiors. Modern materials sometimes echoed natural ones, such as bark or wood or hides. Today, “Indigenous architecture reconnects with the past and tries to express the identity of the people through a modern medium,” said Waugh.

Indigenous architects began reinforcing their cultures on landscapes during the last half century. In the United States, two pieces of federal legislation influenced the next stage in reservation architecture. One was the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which allowed tribes to contract for local services—including building design and construction—rather than work solely through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “At first, they used non-Native architects, but then young Native architects began to play a more direct, strategic role,” said Theodore Jojola. “Reservations became a ‘new frontier,’ unhampered by the multiple regulations and codes of large U.S. cities, which opened the chance to innovate.” 

Then, in 1997, the Native American Housing Sovereignty Development Act gave federal dollars and authority for housing to the tribes. Casino revenue provided additional funding as well. The doors were now opened to firms run by Indigenous principals, offering them a chance to work directly with tribes and to create uniquely Indigenous buildings honoring and reflecting their cultures. In Canada, a 1994 Call to Action to correct the neglect of the past and the subsequent 2008 Truth and Reconciliation Commission led to rules requiring an Indigenous consultant on all requests for architectural service proposals.

The Modernist era has passed. “Now people are looking for something else, with more contextual connection, meaning and authenticity,” said Dalla Costa, who teaches at Arizona State University and whose architectural firm has offices in Phoenix and Alberta, Canada. One of her goals as an architect is to make visible those characteristics, both tangible and intangible, that colonialism made invisible.

A Sense of Place

All these designs and adaptations have influenced contemporary, Indigenous-led architecture. The Canadian architectural historian Daniel Millette has called this new wave “a reemerging architecture that captures elements of long-held traditions and joins them to contemporary design that is at once evocative and true to traditional pasts.”

Central to these structures and communities, then and now, is the idea of “place keeping,” said Dalla Costa. “Place” reflects not only the ecology of a region but also the communities and people who have lived on their lands for millennia. “When we dig into this, we find there are embodied centuries of learning about the place, the space, the climate, the orientation, the materiality,” she said, “Then we start to understand how these places meet the needs not just of individuals but of communities, with their seasonal rituals and other sociocultural needs.”

One of the important links to the surrounding world in these structures is often an orientation to the cardinal directions, “because that is how Native peoples relate to the land,” said Duane Blue Spruce, a Laguna Pueblo/Ohkay Owingeh architect and former public spaces planning coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian.  The NMAI building in Washington, D.C., reflects this. Its conceptual design was by Blackfoot architect Douglas Cardinal and was completed by Johnpaul Jones (Choctaw/Cherokee) of Jones and Jones in collaboration with SmithGroup, Lou Weller (Caddo) of the Native American Design Collaborative and the Polshek Partnership. Like many Indigenous structures, its entrance faces east, toward the rising sun, for example. The central interior gathering space is circular, and the exterior walls are sinuous curves of Kasota limestone from Minnesota emulating windswept rock. It is surrounded by plants Indigenous peoples grow for food, fiber, medicines or ceremonial purposes and by large “grandfather rocks,” each placed in one of the four directions.

Yet Indigenous cultures often have a three-dimensional perspective of the world and acknowledge seven directions. Glenn’s firm takes its name from these directions. Besides north, south, east and west, the directions include upward (representing the Creator), downward (to Mother Earth) and inward to the heart, said Glenn.

It Takes a Community

Indigenous architecture is not just about the what and where but also the how. For most of the 20th century, conventional architecture expected the architect to impose his will on the client. “But Indigenous design is reciprocal,” said Jojola. “The architect becomes more of a facilitator, taking part in community engagement.”

All architects consult with their clients to learn what sort of building they want, what style and what purposes it must serve. But there’s a difference. “When I design a building in Lincoln, Nebraska, I work with a project director,” Oglala Lakota architect Tammy Eagle Bull, founder of Encompass Architects, said in the film “From Earth to Sky.” But with tribal projects, she said, “the whole community is involved.”

Indigenous architects also immerse themselves in tribal history and traditions, in local ecology and landscapes. They visit and revisit the site, going well beyond the purely pragmatic to include the historical, cultural and spiritual. They listen closely to the people who will use the building, from youth to tribal leaders to the elders, to capture both the past and the views of future users. All have something to contribute. “We must look three generations into the past and three into the future while considering the present generations as the point that connects past and future,” said Glenn.

After such meetings, the architects go back to their computers and try to incorporate what they’ve heard into their plans. Then they return to the site and the people and go through the process again—often more than once—before everyone is satisfied with the design.

Making the Invisible Visible

Despite their influence, Indigenous-led designs are only just gaining recognition within the profession at large, wrote historian Millette. “The thought that tradition in building crafts had little to do with architect-designed architecture prevailed during much of the last century and, in this way, entire architectural histories, including that of First Nations, have been cast aside as unworthy of serious study.”

However, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has begun to make amends. “Indigenous architecture is underrepresented in architectural discourse and education,” the SAH acknowledged in a statement establishing a group for Indigenous architects in 2023. “Few architectural historians, let alone Indigenous architectural historians, have conducted research on the topic. Architectural education in North America is traditionally based upon European models and has rarely included Indigenous architecture.”

Times may be changing, though. A group of Indigenous architects that includes Cardinal, Begay, Dalla Costa, Eagle Bull, Glenn, Waugh as well as Patrick Stewart (Nisga’a) and Brian Porter (Six Nations, Ontario) were honored at the 2018 Venice Biennale, bringing the world’s attention to their work.

Ultimately, these architects have a message. In the words of Alfred Waugh, “As we move into the future, it’s important that we bring the knowledge of the First Nations people and their connectedness to their land to find a new way to live with this earth.”