Call for Papers due June 5, 2024

Erasure and Resistance: Indigenous Architecture and Settler Colonialism

Indigenous architecture throughout North America reflects ongoing impacts of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism has led to the erasure or transformation of traditional building practices through alienation from traditional lands, loss of living construction materials such as bison or tules, and disruption of passing on traditional building techniques through mandatory boarding school participation. European-American settlement has adversely impacted even precontact or precolonial architecture, for example, colonizers flattened extensive Mississippian mounds for development and cut down through floors of Pueblo Bonito to reach pots that could be exhumed and shipped to Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Architecture has served as an apparatus of settler colonialism including missions built beginning in the 16th century for Christianization, assimilation, and cultural genocide, and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) administration, healthcare, and school buildings of the 19th and 20th centuries. More recent settler colonial federal architecture such as HUD housing, schools, and healthcare facilities are rarely culturally or climatically responsive.

Contemporary Indigenous architecture designed in collaboration with Indigenous communities or by Indigenous architects resists settler colonialism. Following Indigenous design principles, community-initiated facilities include housing, health care facilities, schools, tribal administration buildings, and tribal cultural centers and museums.

This session invites papers that consider settler colonialism in relation to a wide range of architecture built by or for Indigenous communities. Papers might address preserving traditional buildings and building practices, employing traditional knowledge and building techniques, integrating modern technologies with Indigenous principles to create hybrid architecture, or using traditional approaches to building on the land. Papers could focus on a specific building, building type, Indigenous community, or region; architecture associated with a particular period of policy; or the work of a particular architect. Session chairs welcome papers with any North American geographic focus, although topics concerning the southeastern United States would be especially pertinent. 

Session Chairs: Jason Tippeconnic Fox (Comanche/Cherokee), Idaho State Preservation Office and Anne Lawrason Marshall, University of Idaho  

Contact: Anne L Marshall, RA, PhD, Professor EmeritusArchitecture/American Indian Studies
University of Idaho
875 Perimeter Drive MS 2451
Moscow, Idaho 83844-2451
USA
Founder and Co-ChairSAH Indigenous Architecture Affiliate Group

annem@uidaho.edu