NO DESIGN ON STOLEN LAND by o p e n s y s t e m s

2020 Creative Commons. ISBN 978-1-64570-697-7 Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN): 2020922459

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Cover: “First Nations Treaty signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 13 July 1713.” Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division’s First 100 Years, Library of Congress (Levi Woodbury Papers). Sleeve: www.nodesignonstolen.land

No Design on Stolen Land

No Design on Stolen Land. Dismantling Design’s Dehumanizing White Supremacy

“Stolen land and stolen labor are the essential requirements of capitalism. Thinking about how most of the world has actually experienced capitalist expansion quickly reveals the crucial and persistent role of theft by coercion, colonization, fraud, genocide, and captivity in capitalist society.”1 —Owen Toews, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg, 2018

“White supremacy is a hierarchy, with whiteness at the top. Indigenous peoples of the Americas, whose lands have been colonized by white settlers, occupy a low place on this hierarchy—white supremacy is trying to replace them. But Black people, whom British and French colonists brought to this land in chains four centuries ago, are at the bottom of the ladder. We are the scapegoats. Whiteness is constantly defined and reproduced through anti-blackness.”2 —Desmond Cole, The Skin We’re In, 2020

No Design on Stolen Land

“Urban settlement has been central to the making of European settler-colonial societies since their inception. Settlement, or more sharply invasion, is given material presence and organizational shape through processes of urbanization. The establishment of towns and cities are synonymous with ‘development’ and ‘progress’ in the colonialist endeavor, and constitute a distinct activity literally building the settler-colonial nation. The process and materiality of urbanization continues to be a primary mechanism operationalizing the spatial and economic dispossession of colonized peoples. Further, the racist imaginary deployed by colonizers of Indigenous peoples has worked to render the urban as a place not Indigenous, profoundly spatially and temporally disconnected from Indigenous histories and geographies, despite the obvious fact in settler-colonial societies that most cities and settlements sit on unceded territories.”3 —Libby Porter and Oren Yiftachel, Urbanizing Settler-Colonial Studies, 2019

very single building site—from a house to a highway—benefits from the exploitation of a capitalist property regime built on the back of broken treaties. Planned and engineered, these sites are not only taken from stolen lands and unceded territories, they are the spatial products of a violent structure and system of settler-colonialism that displaced and continues to dispossess Indigenous Peoples through more than 500 years of territorial injustices. Mundus Novus. Terra Nullius. Doctrine of Discovery. Manifest Destiny. Since 1492, this settler-colonial system of state policies of segregation, assimilation, or extermination continue today, literally mining squandered lands and violating Indigenous Nations through forced removal, gendered violence, police brutality, cultural appropriation, under-servicing, and over-incarceration.4 As cultural genocide, the oppressive reality of settler colonialism today is now normalized and practically naturalized through contemporary urbanism5 precisely because of the “denigration of Indigenous culture. Basically, racism… systemic, institutionalized, individual, interpersonal racism.”6 Misrepresentation through spatial erasure is central to the non-Indigenous urban project. “Genocide,” as Deborah A. Miranda writes in “Teaching on Stolen Ground,” “depends upon, in fact, the appropriation of

Courtesy of Getty Research Institute

No Design on Stolen Land

Theodore de Bry, ‘Of [Spanish Colonial Tyranny] in Guatemala,’ from Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, 1598 [1542]

The Library of Congress

John Smith, Virginia (State Map), 1606

No Design on Stolen Land

the identity of the colonized by the colonizer. Misinterpretations and misrepresentations of Native culture, religion, character, and worldview for consumption by the nonindigenous are the crucial elements in such a genocidal agenda.”7 Inalienable Indigenous rights denied by privileged descendants of Christian Europeans—either by ignorance, neglect, or design.

Design dehumanizes. Infrastructural systems are not only planned, engineered, or built on stolen lands. They are codified as state systems of erasure that lend the appearance of permanence of settler-colonial authority. They dishonor the original treaties by denying the basic, legal principles of consent and community consultation, let alone their intrinsic meanings.8 “Considering its impact on contemporary urban, political, economic, social, and cultural life, the historical experience of colonialism and imperialism is greatly under-researched.”9 Master-planned forgetting and bureaucratic stonewalling, set in and between the lines of colonial law and settler rule. In the paper world of design—maps, plans, codes, symbols, specs, or graphics—urbanism is colonialism. Albeit overlooked by a dominant white majority, this regime of urban erasure is omnipresent, “whether realized or implied [physical

violence] is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations—notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid—play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space … are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.”10 Upheld by colonial-era constitutional rights, the plunder from looted landscapes has left behind legacies of broken bodies and fractured families across toxic terrains of resource industrialization, now in overdrive. The fallout of this colonized world, flooded with European (mostly Christian) descendants, is a dark hole of endless extractivism, a “nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one of purely taking.”11

Design dispossesses. They call it D-E-S-I-G-N for a reason. De-sign. Destruction of signs, signals, symbols, signifiers—oral, traditional, territorial, political, corporeal. Settler-colonial semiotics. As substitute for signs, place names subdue spatial identities. From Alaska to Oklahoma, racist toponomies are the white man’s corruption of original places and original peoples perpetuated by what Black Cana-

No Design on Stolen Land

Map of Indian Territory & No-Man’s Land, Atlas of Oklahoma, 1866–89

dian studies scholar Charmaine Nelson identifies as “the colonial, cartographic imagination.”12 The moment Amerigo Vespucci touched down in what is now Rio de Janeiro or that Christopher Columbus hit the shores of present-day Haïti, was the moment the ‘Americas’ and the ‘Caribbean’ became occupied territories. Design not only destroys memory, it ruptures tradition by imposing techno-scientific terms that edify white supremacy through Cartesian ideology. Mapmakers as liars. Land use is rationalized terrain by racialization: from waste colonialism on Navajo Lands in New Mexico,13 to industrial capitalism throughout the territories of Quichua Peoples in Amazonia,14 to resource extractivism in the Athabasca River Delta on Treaty 8 lands that are home to Dene, Cree, and Métis Peoples.15 Design endlessly captures place names by implanting colonial identities, through the imposition of a body of jurisdictional powers and standards on everything from deserts, forests, and rivers to streets, parks, and sewers.16 Territorial planning, structural engineering, and building specifications are its arms. The genius loci of dumps, dams, pits, pipes, and mines are its monuments. Radium, mercury, arsenic, lead, phosphorus, ammonia—its transgenerational poisons.17

No Design on Stolen Land

Design whitewashes. Laundering land has a long history. Planners, engineers, architects, illustrators are its bleaching agents. The deep geological repository for the 10,000-year storage of transuranic radioactive waste in New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert on ancestral lands of the Navajo Peoples, a project operated today by the American multinational engineering conglomerate AECOM.18 The 10,000-year old Willamette Meteorite stolen from the Clackamas tribe of Oregon and moved to New York City’s American Museum of Natural History in 1906, then relocated to the Rose Center for Earth & Space in 2000 proudly designed by architects James Polshek and Todd Schliemann.19 The horrific story of Matoaka, violently taken away from the Powhatan People in the seventeenth century by English colonizers, then romanticized in Disney’s 1995 Oscar-winning musical animation Pocahontas; directed by American filmmakers Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg.20 Baseball’s racist Chief Wahoo mascot, unapologetically worn by the Cleveland Indians since 1946 and designed by then 17-year old draftsman Walter Goldbach of the J.F. Novak Patch Supply Company.21 Jeff Bezos’ exoticization of the world’s longest river, branded and trademarked into the largest corporation in the world in 1994 with a smug smile conceived by Turner Duckworth designer Anthony Biles. Senator Eliz-

Doane Robinson and Gutzon Borglum, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Keystone, South Dakota, 1927–41

No Design on Stolen Land

abeth Warren’s self-assigned claims to Native American identity since 1986 and race shifting attitude to Cherokee Nationhood in her race for the 2020 US presidential election.22 Lies on the land.

Design alienates & excludes. Representing a growing 6 percent of the world’s population, Indigenous Peoples live on, care for, and nurture a majority of the lands and waters on the planet.23 Yet, city and territory are strategically segregated by the ever-increasing capitalist divide between spaces of consumption and production; lands fragmented by logistical landscapes. Metropolises. Hinterlands. Wastelands. Hardened by tight metropolitan grids littered with architectural effigies, lands are crisscrossed and waters butchered by technological infrastructures: “Fine-grained spatial technologies of power such as town-planning regulation and policing … “Imperial expansions [that establish] specific spatial arrangements in which the imaginative geographies of desire hardened into material spatialities of political connection, economic dependency, architectural imposition, and landscape transformation.”24 This dominant matrix not only leaves little room for the body politic of the under-represented, under-serviced communities of Black, Indigenous,

and People of Color that live in cities today; the concrete realities of the metropolis also functions as a brutal reminder of colonization’s accumulating monumentality. Designers and engineers, its contractors. The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor: settler-colonial doormat designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and French engineer Gustave Eiffel in 1876. The General Lee Monument in New Orleans: confederate-era edifice designed as victory trophy by sculptor Alexander Doyle and architect John Roy in 1884. The St. Louis Arch on the Missouri River: frontier gateway to the American West designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen in 1935. The Mount Rushmore in Keystone South Dakota on the sacred Black Hills lands of Lakota Sioux Peoples: conceived by Doane Robinson and carved out by KKK sympathizer Gutzon Borglum between 1927 and 1941. The Central Park in Manhattan, New York: African American villages and pasture lands on former Lenape territory cleared for bourgeois open space by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux in 1857. Yellowstone in northwest Wyoming, Indigenous hunting grounds evacuated as National Public Park on lands of Indigenous Peoples of the Great Plains: a wilderness system championed by conservationist John Muir from 1872 onwards.

No Design on Stolen Land

Anonymous, Occupation at Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay, California, 1969

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, Moapa Valley of Nevada, 1970

No Design on Stolen Land

Design subjugates. From towering complexes in the colonial metropolis, the darkness of settler urbanism and its mountains of light casts long shadows on surrounding resource hinterlands. The high priests of settler urbanism, a lineage of privileged historians, call it “the city”; where more than 75% of the world’s population now apparently lives.25 Settler urbanism imposes and inscribes in broad daylight a spatial code on the oppressed, reduced to users, using a geographic information system of distanced surveillance (algorithms, biometrics, IP addresses), remote control (fixed addresses, fiscal taxes, social security numbers), and controlled remoteness (pipes, wires, cables) across a strata of different elevations, altitudes, and atmospheres.26 Controlled airspace. Abused Labor. Plantation logic.27 From Sigfried Giedion to Alan Gowans, Lewis Mumford to Henri Lefebvre, the intellectual gentry of white men have preached the gospel of settlements ad nauseam while chronicling and criticizing its many frontiers from their academic outposts, rarely if ever setting foot on the ground. Ivory towers. White walls. White skin. Glass masks. “[Through a colonial lens,] gentrification of urban space [is] yet another ‘frontier’ of dispossession central to the accumulation of capital. Through gentrification, Native spaces in the city are now being treated as urbs nullius—urban space void

of Indigenous sovereign presence.”28 Urban space as white space, on a planetary scale.

Design masks. For every city, there is a territorial treaty or a land title. Broken or not, unceded or not, urban lands were taken by force—either by war, invasion, starvation, or surrender. So, there is nothing novel nor revolutionary about urbanism.29 Only tricks and traitors.30 Settler urbanism, a war zone of occupied territories and contested grounds. Designers, terrorists. Urban dwellers, space invaders. The hostiles. Washington, DC: on ancestral lands of Anacostank (Nacotchtank), Piscataway, Pamunkey Peoples.31 Ottawa, ON: on traditional and unceded lands of the Omàmiwininìwag (Algonquin) Peoples.32 New York City: on lands of the Lenape Peoples from the Delaware Nation.33 Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal, QC): land of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation.34 Los Angeles, CA: on lands of the Gabrielino, Tongva, and Tataviam Nations.35 Vancouver, BC: on unceded territories of Coast Salish Peoples including Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.36 Quito, Ecuador: on land of the Quechua and Saraguros Peoples.37 Santiago, Chile: on land of the Mapuche Peoples.38 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: on land of Tupi and Guaraní Peoples.39 If “we are ALL treaty

Courtesy of Department of Energy

No Design on Stolen Land

U.S. DOE, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Permanent storage facility for defense-generated transuranic waste (2,000 feet below ground), New Mexico, 1999

James Polshek and Todd Schliemann, Rose Center for Earth & Space, American Museum of Natural History, New York, 2000

No Design on Stolen Land

people,”40 then “the evidence of our betrayal lies all around us … we [settlers] have … not lived up to our end of the bargain.”41 And after all, “it takes two … to make a treaty.”42

Design launders. The art world is no exception to design’s delusions. Settler artwork (especially European) precisely depends on physical and political erasure of Indigenous bodies and sovereignties to fabricate remoteness and emptiness—modern settler space. 43 Enter the anti-establishment of land artists from the 1970s, founders of the earthworks movement in the so-called “middle of nowhere.”44 Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) carved out of ancestral lands of the Southern Paiute Peoples. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973) built on ancestral lands and waters of Ute, Diné (Navajo), Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone Peoples. Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) planted on traditional territories of Apache and Navajo Nations. James Turrell’s Roden Crater (1979) sculpted from traditional territories of Hualapai and Navajo Nations. Illegitimate earthworks on sites of the displaced, rife with art historical traditions of exploiting the dispossessed. Ideas forced onto politically organized Indigenous territories; territories that

were appropriated by the U.S. Department of Interior between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Federally-disposed lands that were then spread out across a Cold War laboratory landscape of military bases, testing sites, and dumping grounds often in the headwaters of Indian Reservations.45 Twentieth-century con-artists—whose alibis are blanched in environmental histories and carved-out nation-state boundaries—complicit in the forced exile and duplicitous contamination of Indigenous bodies. No justice, nowhere.

Design destroys. In this settler-colonial plot, conservation is the con job that normalizes extinction and naturalizes domination. For the naturalist junta— generation after generation of regional preachers like Muir, Turner, Roosevelt, Thoreau, Emerson, Pinchot, Leopold, Mackaye—preservation of nature was inherently the preservation of the nature of white supremacy. The naturalism of nationalism.46 The picturesque, an imperial gaze. Conservation, heteropatriarchal heroism. Obsessed with eurocentric maps of New World – Old Word divisions, missionary men like George Perkins Marsh weaponized the crude and rude term ‘nature’ in his 1864 biblical Man & Nature. Heteropatriachal man, conveniently univer-

Courtesy of Thirty Meter Telescope Corporation

No Design on Stolen Land

Proposed Thirty Meter Telescope, TMT, 2015

Courtesy of Bunky Echo-Hawk

Bunky Echo-Hawk, Not Your Mascot, 2016

No Design on Stolen Land

salized to consume and colonize the New World by disarming and destroying Indigenous sovereignties, nations, and kinships to re-arm a “wilderness” for “the civilized” and the “superior,” free of “savages” or “blacks” and recounted in racist, frontier fantasy novels.47 Ernest T. Seton’s 1912 The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore, fake lore. For naturalists, conservationists, foresters, ecologists, even presidents, wilderness weaponized as “the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”48 Predators.

Settler-colonial statecraft. The Christian wrecking ball that cleared forests not only made way for an imagined emptied wilderness that was quickly re-populated, like in Seton’s 1903 fiction Two Little Savages, with young boys playing cowboys and pretend Indians “with all that is bad and cruel left out.”49 Colonial tropes re-enacted, primitive living invoked, and extinction narratives replayed. Riding the coattail of George Catlin’s ethnographic writings of Indigenous encounters and paintings of American colonial exploits, the British imperialist Robert Baden-Powell epitomized colonial conservationist ideologies by scouting for boys across the Commonwealth, from Australia to Canada. After escapades

in Rhodesia and South Africa, Baden-Powell brought along the wild, frontier fantasies of Canadian storyteller Ernest Thompson Seton and the wilderness survival skills of American outdoorsman Frederick Russell Burnham. Together, their mission led to the foundation of the Boy Scouts of America; a brotherhood that has grown to over 30 million scouts and volunteers worldwide since its creation in 1907. Pledging allegiance to God, Country, and Self, its patriotic oath and nationalistic emblem are like the architect’s north arrow: a divine ethos pointing upwards as a sign and symbol of the heavens; the revival of colonial-era heteropatriarchy and entrenchment of white male savior complex at the precise moment of the decline and fall of the British Empire.50 The paradox of “playing Indian,” as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe scholar Philip J. Deloria observes, is that “the self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests on the ability to wield power against Indians—social, military, economic, and political—while simultaneously drawing power from them.”51 Scoutcraft, as masquerade for statecraft. So, what if the design world52 brought an end to its “[conditioning] of active unawareness”53 by honoring and actively engaging the responsibilities of historic treaties drafted over the course of the past five cen-

Adapted from Terracon Géotechnique

No Design on Stolen Land

Oil Sand Lease Ownership, Northern Alberta, 2016

The Knickerbocker Press, 1915

City of New York, Official Seal, 2016

Courtesy of ATCR

No Design on Stolen Land

A Tribe Called Red, Great Seal of the Halluci Nation, 2016

Water is Life, 2020

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turies that binds us all? What if the current generation of designers defied the cult of personalities and its failures to own up to the unbreakable agreements that treaties represent? Could that ensure a ground to live on and a future to fight for the next five centuries by unbuilding the structures of settler-colonialism?

Surrender. This counter-design claim54 confronts the urgency (cautiously) and inseparability (urgently) of climate change55 that are embedded in the racialized urban spaces and capitalist structures of settler-colonialism. The claim is conceived for settler designers and scholars in reaction to the near-total apathy, ignorance, marginalization, suppression, and erasure of the identities, histories, territories, and rights of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color that form a complex, conflicted, and entangled web of urban and territorial ecologies upon which the professional disciplines of design—from architecture and urban planning, to civil engineering and graphic design—intervene… as if representation matters.56 It entails concessions, a kind of disciplinary weakening. As a counter-disciplinary crossover, this claim also emerges from different communities and discourses that landscape architect of Maori descent

Rod Barnett aptly summarizes as “intersectional discourses of race and ethnicity, sexuality, and materialism [that] have challenged … self-conceptions [of scientific or professional practices] and opened up more radical modes of practice.”57

Rereading & Listening. But, to do this, the system and structures of settler-colonialism—including the technocratic standards of design disciplines and spatial orders of design projects—need to radically and fundamentally change. To unmask the settler-colonial fantasy requires a re-reading of treaties and engaging with the inherent roles and responsibilities they carry from the ground up. Treaties chart anti-colonial, anti-racist futures.58 This is the project of undesign, forming a language and way of working to overwrite the present by underscoring the past. “How can settler society,” asks Nick Estes, “which possesses no fundamental ethical relationship to the land or its original people, imagine a future premised on justice? There is no simple answer. But whatever the answer may be, Indigenous peoples must lead the way. Our history and long traditions of Indigenous resistance provide possibilities for futures premised on justice. After all, Indigenous resistance is animated by our ancestors’ refusal to be

No Design on Stolen Land

Christopher Columbus Park, Boston, MA, 2015

Line 3 Pipeline, Superior, WI, 2017

No Design on Stolen Land

forgotten, and it is our resolute refusal to forget our ancestors and our history that animates our visions for liberation.”59

Transgression & Transfiguration. To undress this carceral landscape requires the unmasking and unmaking of settler urbanism. It means destroying the dispossessive categories that sanction exclusion, exploitation, extraction, and erasure. Un-naming the colonial place names, to dislocate them, to displace them, to then re-locate them, to re-place them, to rebase them. Drawing new legends to debase old base maps. Displacing survey stakes to debunk benchmarks. Dismantling the structures that obviate the legal landscape of treaties that are constructed to sever, rupture, and break relations between lands, waters, beings, cycles, communities, and futures. De-presentation—découpage, démontage, décollage— not only bends the rules or rewrites settler-colonial code, it breaks law. From flora to fauna, lifeforms do not confine to the boundaries or logic of straight lines and sharp angles. Biota resists reducibility. Sentient beings both move and carry maps of knowledge and intelligence in their patterns, their colors, their blooms, and their scents. Ecologies of flora and fauna subvert the linear, positivist dead-ends of Darwinian

evolutionary tendencies through natural selection and Linnean hierarchies60 of growth by charting alternate pathways and relational trajectories that resist categorization, captivity, or conquest. They leave traces. Like families, they build relations. They create connections. Rivers, waters, streams, and seeds carry meanings that invoke these interconnections.61 They pollinate. They fertilize. They catalyze. Defying the singularity of individual specimens or identifiable species, lifeforms embody geopolitical histories. Lifeforms track climatic data and mark territorial sovereignties. To seed and to plant is therefore to un-plan and unravel the wonders of emergence and reproduction. To let grow and to let flow is to transgress. To let be is to be in relation.62 If “every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression, is by definition violent,”63 then to let life live and breathe, is to respect and to love.

Unbuilding. Structures and systems of whiteness that continue to erase Indigenous voices and marginalize Indigenous land rights must be confronted, challenged, and reconfigured. Essential to this project is the declaration of unqualified support for adopting, enacting, activating Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) from Indigenous Nations

No Design on Stolen Land

Projection of Hariett Tubman by Dustin Klein on Confederate General Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond, VA, 2020

Courtesy of Jorge Barrera

Indian Reserve No. 14, Garden River First Nation, 2019

No Design on Stolen Land

based on the principles of the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples64 as baseline way of practicing; a professional and verifiable protocol before any environmental planning, site design, building construction, or built work takes place. The current and future climate for generations in the twenty-sixth century depend on it. Resonating with Clayton Thomas-Muller’s 2016 statement in “Change the System, Not the Climate.”65

Whose lands are you on? Who invited you? Who are you accountable to? Whose stories and histories are you privileging? Who are your collaborators? Are waters, rivers, estuaries, streams, fishes, grasses part of that team?66 What exactly are you fighting for?

These concluding questions may seem extraordinarily banal, but they remain essential in unbuilding the structure of settler urbanism and weakening the system of whiteness that have destroyed so much. These questions are catalytic. But we can also build alliances and become its counter-measures so long as land remains at the base of our endeavors. Until design becomes a ghost of its former dehumanizing self, the project of dismantling its predatory nature will never end. ***

Notes 1. Owen Toews, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg (Winnipeg, MB: ARP Books, 2018), 18. 2. Desmond Cole, The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power (Toronto, ON: Doubleday Canada, 2020), 8. 3. Libby Porter and Oren Yiftachel, “Urbanizing Settler-Colonial Studies: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Settler Colonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2019): 177–86 (177). 4. Several contemporary Indigenous scholars, researchers, activists, and elders have explained the violent, intergenerational effects of settler-colonial policies and capitalist regimes on Indigenous communities. In the context of Canada, an excellent primer is Métis legal scholar and language educator Chelsea Vowel’s Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada (Winnipeg, MB: Highwater Press, 2016). Intergenerational trauma is enshrined in, and reinforced by racial and segregationist legislation across the Americas such as Colombia’s Indian Reservation Law (1821), the U.S.’ Indian Removal Act (1830), Chile’s Indigenous Reservations Law (1866), Canada’s Indian Act (1876), and Brazil’s Indian Protection Service (1910) to name a few. The papal bulls issued by Pope Alexander IV in 1493 are the blueprints of European hegemony and war on Indigenous Peoples, sanctifying the enslavement and dispossession of non-Christians. From the earliest examples to the most recent racial, misogynistic, and gendered violence, evidence is found in the statistical over-representation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. See “American Indian History Timeline,” in Native Land Law: Can Native American People Find Justice in the U.S. Legal System? (Little Canada, MN: Indian Land Tenure Foundation, 2010), 2, https://iltf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ native_land_law_2010.pdf. 5. The understanding of urbanism as spatial instrument, force, and effect of settler-colonialism is widely overlooked due to the colonialism (including racism, sexism, paternalism, eurocentrism, and élitism) of urban studies itself. For a historical profile of the entangled histories of

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urban planning and Indigenous dispossession in the context of Canada’s metropolis-hinterland divide, see Pierre Bélanger (ed.), Christopher Alton, and Nina-Marie Lister, “Decolonization of Planning,” in Extraction Empire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 438–519. 6. Cree scholar from the University of Saskatchewan Raven, Sinclair, citing Christopher Bagley with Loretta Young and Anne Scully, International and Transracial Adoptions: A Mental Health Perspective (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993), on the degrading system of Indigenous child welfare and injustice of transracial adoptions, in Connie Walker, “Salesperson of the Year,” March 7, 2018, in Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo, CBC Radio-Canada, podcast, season 2, episode 8, 36min:05sec (27:15–27:23), https://www.cbc.ca/player/ play/1190611011771/. On the connections between racism, capitalism, and settler-colonialism, see Toews, Stolen City and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 7. From writer and poet of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, Deborah A. Miranda, “Teaching on Stolen Ground,” in Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work, and Identity, ed. Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2007), 169–87 (181). With the Indian Act and the Department of Indian Affairs, “the Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.” See The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1, Canada’s Residential Schools, part 1, The History: Origins to 1939 (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 4. See also Justice Murray Sinclair, “Statement from the Chair,” in Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1:1:vii–ix. Miranda’s assertions are particularly relevant in relation to the oppression that not only BIPOC Peoples have experienced since the advent of settler-colonialism in the mid-fifteenth century, but that it was (and still is) contingent on targeting Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit Peoples, as profiled in Deborah A. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16,

nos. 1–2 (2010): 253–84. Furthermore, see the frictional connections between settler, slave, and Native in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012), 1–40; and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006), 387–409. 8. Treaties are international covenants between nations. “Among the Indigenous peoples who had signed historic treaties, the response [to land title and land rights by the government] was more muted. Most [Indigenous Nations] insist that in the peace treaties they signed, they never gave up their underlying title. And they certainly have a compelling case that the treaties, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were legally abusive and signed under duress. In many cases among the nations of the Great Plains, for example, the people were literally starving to death after the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo, and treaties were forced on them in exchange for rations they needed to keep their children from dying. In almost all cases, the verbal agreements that surrounded the peace treaties were far different form the cession, release, or surrender of land that was put down in writing—a key point when you consider that none of the chiefs who signed the treaties could actually read the text. The struggle of the treaty people for justice remains central to the Indian movement today.” See Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto, ON: Between the Lines, 2015), 45–46. 9. Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London, UK: Routledge, 1990), 2. 10. From settler-geographer on Coast Salish Lands, Nicholas Blomley “Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 93, no.1 (March 2003): 121. 11. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 169. 12. Charmaine A. Nelson, “Interrogating the Colonial Cartographic

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Imagination,” American Art 31, no.2 (Summer 2017): 51–53. 13. The largest radioactive accident in American history occurred in 1979, when a tailings pond at the Church Rock uranium mill in New Mexico breached its dam. Contaminating the Puerco River from New Mexico to Arizona, on Navajo Lands (Kinłitsosinil), the toxic spill released more radioactivity than the Three-Mile Island incident that same year. See Doug Brugge, Jamie L. deLemos, and Cat Bui, “The Sequoyah Corporation Fuels Release and the Church Rock Spill: Unpublicized Nuclear Releases in American Indian Communities,” The American Journal of Public Health 97, No.9 (September 2007): 1595–1600. 14. For a discussion on the settler-colonial variations and Indigenous translations of the term ‘Quichua,’ see Nicholas Limerick, “Kichwa or Quichua? Competing Alphabets, Political Histories, and Complicated Reading in Indigenous Languages,” Comparative Education Review 62, no.1 (2017): 103–24. 15. See Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, “Canada’s tar sands aren’t just oil fields: They’re sacred lands for my people,” The Guardian, June 23, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/23/canadastar-sands-oil-fields-sacred-lands. See also Christopher Alton, “The Lower Athabasca Regional Plan’s Future is History,” Critical Planning 23, (2017): 129–53. 16. In the foreword to Adele Perry’s book Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember (Winnipeg, MB: ARP Books, 2016), Rick Harp describes the spatial apartheid of infrastructure building projects during the past century as synonymous with empire-building, exposing “the removal of Indigenous resources to the exclusive benefit of a Canadian city for what it is: a massive project of empire legitimized via the logic and language of colonial erasure” (p. 10). 17. Néhiyaw (Plains Cree) philosopher Erica Violet Lee has characterized this extractive world as “terra extractus” in a lecture during the symposium titled “Centering the Voices of Indigenous Women: Self-Determination and Decolonization through Literature, Scholarship, and Action” (Harvard University Native American Program, Cambridge, MA, March 30, 2018), https://hunap.harvard.edu/event/centering-voic-

es-indigenous-women-self-determination-and-decolonization-through. See also Erica Violet Lee, “In Defence of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide,” GUTS Magazine, November 30, 2016, http://gutsmagazine.ca/ wastelands/. 18. See “Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” AECOM, November 27, 2013, https://aecom.com/future/projects/waste-isolation-pilot-plant/. 19. See Miranda, “Teaching on Stolen Ground,” in which she profiles the complicity of the disciplines of architecture and planning against Indigenous Peoples’ struggles in the project of settler-colonialism across the United States: “You steal the land, build a country on a stolen foundation, construct a cage around it. All that you have—your possessions, your ethics, your history—depends on keeping this land captive. Your cage must grow still more complex: you must construct more restraints. Literature that serves as steel bars, schools that serve as locks, textbooks that are prison guards. What keys are available to us to dismantle this perpetually tightening confinement?” (p. 182). 20. See Dr. Linwood ‘Little Bear’ Custalow and Angela L. Daniel ‘Silver Star,’ The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007). 21. For the complete design lineage of the Cleveland Indians logo, see Vincent Schilling, “Since 1928: A Pictorial History of the Cleveland Indians and Chief Wahoo Logos,” Indian Country Today, October 28, 2016, https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/since-1928-a-pictorial-history-of-the-cleveland-indians-and-chief-wahoo-logos-Jr3zUVCcI0yUih3opM2ZRQ/. 22. See Kim TallBear, “Elizabeth Warren’s Claim to Cherokee Ancestry is a Form of Violence,” High Country News, January 17, 2019, https:// www.hcn.org/issues/51.2/tribal-affairs-elizabeth-warrens-claim-to-cherokee-ancestry-is-a-form-of-violence. For a longer explanation, see Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). See also Adrienne Keene, Rebecca Nagle, and Joseph M. Pierce, “Syllabus: Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee Citizenship, and DNA Testing,” Critical Ethnic Studies, University Of Minnesota Press, December

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19, 2018, http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/blog/2018/12/19/ syllabus-elizabeth-warren-cherokee-citizenship-and-dna-testing; and race-shifting scholar Darryl Leroux, Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity (Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2019). 23. See former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, “Indigenous Peoples & the COVID-19 Pandemic: Considerations,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, April 29, 2020, http://unsr.vtaulicorpuz.org/?p=2821. See also “Attacks against and Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples Defending Their Rights,” in Report to Human Rights Council, A/HRC/39/17 (Geneva, CH: United Nations, 2018), 3–4, http://unsr.vtaulicorpuz.org/?p=2610. 24. Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), 19, 21. 25. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, NY: Harcourt, 1961). 26. See Kristen Simmons, “Settler Atmospherics,” Fieldsights (Society for Cultural Anthropology), November 20, 2017, Member Voices, https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospherics; William M. Haney, “Protecting Tribal Skies: Why Indian Tribes Possess the Sovereign Authority to Regulate Tribal Airspace,” American Indian Law Review 40, no.1 (2016): 1–40; and Albert I. Moon Jr., “A Look at Airspace Sovereignty,” Journal of Air Law and Commerce 29, no.4 (1963): 328–45. 27. Katherine McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no.8 (2011): 947–63 (951). 28. As Yellowknives Dene scholar and founder of Dechinta Bush University Glen Sean Coulthard explains in his book Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minesota Press, 2014), 264. Coulthard’s assertion extends spatial and urban observations made nearly a half century earlier by Frantz Fanon regarding the under-representations of territorial dispossession and over-representations of settler-urbanization: “Certain countries which have benefited by a large European settlement come to independence with houses and wide streets, and these tend to forget the

poverty-stricken, starving hinterland. By the irony of fate, they give the impression by a kind of complicit silence that their towns are contemporaneous with independence.” In Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1963 [1961]): 100n*. 29. For example, in La Révolution Urbaine (Paris, FR: Gallimard, 1970), urban theorist Henri Lefebvre fails to account, recognize, and let alone explain the contemporary presence of the regional structures or planetary scales of settler-colonialism resulting in racial injustices, spatial inequalities, and heteropatriarchal systems of oppression that BIPOC Peoples and LGBTQ2S (i.e. non-white, non-hetero) communities experience as extensions of the violence and erasure of dispossessive urbanization. Furthermore, the near-total absence of non-anthropomorphic forces and biotic processes in Lefebvre’s work, including flora, fauna, and other planetary lifeforms (across the aquatic-atmospheric spectrum), is not only a theoretical or scholarly lacuna, but it is indicative of a gross negligence in urban literature at large on the suppression of non-eurocentric ways of life and the lands they are in relation with. 30. Trick or Treaty? directed by Alanis Obomsawin (Ottawa, ON: National Film Board of Canada, 2014), 84 min., https://www.nfb.ca/film/ trick_or_treaty/. 31. By Treaty of 1677 with Virginia and Treaty of 1803 with the United States. 32. Under current claim with Canada’s Crown, by Treaty 27 of 1819, Treaty 61 of 1850, Treaty 9 of 1905, Williams Treaty of 1923. 33. By the Breda Treaty of 1667 with the Netherlands, Westminster Treaty of 1674 with England, and the Paris Treaty of 1783 with the United States. 34. By Treaty of 1701 with France. 35. By Treaty of 1848–1851 with Spain, Treaties of 1861–53 with the United States. 36. By Proclamation of 1763 with the British Crown.

No Design on Stolen Land

37. By Real Cédula of 1563, 1739, and 1740 with the Spain Crown. 38. By Treaty of Quilín of 1641 with Spain and ILO Convention #169 of 1989 with Chile. 39. By Sublimis Deus of 1537 and Treaty of 1763 with Portugal. See Anne B. McGinness, “The Historiography of the Jesuits in Brazil Prior to the Suppression,” Jesuit Historiography Online, last updated July 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2468-7723_jho_COM_209645. 40. See singer, songwriter, and composer Tara Williamson (Anishinaabekwe / Nehayowak, raised in Gaabishkigamaag, Swan Lake, MB and member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation), “We Are All Treaty Peoples,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, December 24, 2012, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/we-are-all-treaty-people/. 41. The former Governor General of Canada and Crown Representative retrospectively made this observation in 2001 at Lower Fort Garry (Treaty 1 territory). See Adrienne Clarkson, “The Society of Difference / La Société de la Différence” (8th Annual LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture, Fairmont Hotel, Vancouver, BC, March 2, 2007), 28, https://www.icc-icc.ca/site/site/ uploads/2016/11/LaFontaineBaldwinLecture2007_AdrienneClarkson.pdf 42. Clarkson, 28. 43. For a better understanding of the heavily gendered, colonial, and pioneer-style evacuation of lands and sites necessary for land art, see Emily Eliza Scott, “Decentering Land Art from the Borderlands: A Review of Through the Repellent Fence,” Art Journal, March 27, 2018, https:// artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=9819. The legacy of appropriation, dispossession, and dehumanization in so-called avant-garde art dates back much earlier, as evidenced in the concurrence of cubism during the colonial scramble for Africa. See Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” The Art Bulletin 72, no.4 (1990): 609–30. 44. Often cited, the original quotation by Michael Heizer, “there is nothing, but this is still a sculpture”; originates from an interview conducted with Julia Brown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1983, nearly 15 years after the creation of Double Negative in 1969. The

interview was published in the accompanying exhibition catalog Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse (Los Angeles, CA: MOCA, 1984): 16; cited here from William L. Fox, Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1999), 116. 45. See Winona LaDuke with Sean Aaron Cruz, The Militarization of Indian Country (East Lansing, MI: Makwa Enewed - Michigan State University Press, 2012). 46. See Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature”, The Journal of American History 86, no.3 (December 1999): 976–86. 47. See Ernest Thompson Seton, Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned (New York, NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1903); and The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1912). 48. See national forester Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1970 [1949]), 264. 49. Seton, Two Little Savages, 56. For a complete and current analysis of the embedded violence in Indigenous cultural appropriation, see also Philip J. Deloria (Yankton Dakota), Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 50. See Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship (London, UK: Horace Cox, 1908). 51. Deloria, Playing Indian, 191. 52. Intended for the professional design disciplines, these questions specifically target the organizations of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC), the American & Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA, CSLA), the International Federation of Landscape Architects, the American Planning Association (APA), the American & Canadian Societies of Civil Engineers (ASCE, CSCE), and American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), whose membership totals approximately 250,000 altogether. 53. This expression and statement was made by Leah-Simone Bowen

No Design on Stolen Land

in conversation with Falen Johnson (Mohawk and Tuscarora, Six Nations) in the context of non-Indigenous knowledge and relations (or lack thereof) to the history of the built environment, specifically referring to the history of Canada’s first National Park in Banff, Alberta. See “The Secret Life of Banff,” in The Secret Life of Canada, CBC Radio-Canada, podcast, season 1, episode 1, 35min:20sec (31:45–31:55), https://www.cbc. ca/radio/secretlifeofcanada/listen-to-the-first-season-of-secret-life-of-canada-1.4903603. 54. The claim is accompanied by a non-commercial image (https://twitter. com/lowlowtide/status/1120422761594335232) that combines the graphic language of Barbara Kruger’s iconic red-box captions (including the futura-italic font) and a variation of the insurgent hashtag #NoBanOnStolenLand conceived by Melanie K. Yazzie (Navajo) on Twitter, January 29, 2017 (see Anishinaabe journalist Lenard Monkman, “‘No ban on stolen land,’ say Indigenous activists in U.S.: Native American activists join the fight against the U.S. immigration ban,” CBC News, February 2, 2017) in reaction to chants of the national anthem during protests at the Los Angeles International Airport, and the subsequent image-map by Michif artist Dylan T. Miner, opposing racial bans and extreme restrictions on immigration imposed by the Donald Trump administration. 55. This precautionary nuance to the discourse on the urgency of climate change is owed to Dr. Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi); see Emilee Gilpin, “Urgency in climate change advocacy is backfiring, says Citizen Potawatomi Nation scientist,” National Observer, February 15, 2019, https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/02/15/features/urgency-climate-change-advocacy-backfiring-says-citizen-potawatomi-nation. 56. This representational claim is conceived within the timely context and political advocacy for the design and transformation of a different world; one that confronts the imminent injustices of settler urbanism and inequalities of climate change that are exemplified most succinctly by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2019 proposal for A Green New Deal. See Danielle Kurtzleben, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline,” NPR, February 7, 2019, Politics, https:// www.npr.org/2019/02/07/691997301/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-releas-

es-green-new-deal-outline. 57. Rod Barnett, “Designing Indian Country,” Places Journal, October 2016, https://placesjournal.org/article/designing-indian-country/. 58. Alicia Elliott writes brilliantly of this anti-colonial future as an intergenerational responsibility: “This is how I can decolonize my mind: by refusing the colonial narratives that try to keep me alienated from my own community. I can raise my kid to love being Haudenosaunee in a way my parents couldn’t, in a way my grandparents couldn’t. This is my responsibility as Haudenosaunee woman.” In A Mind Spread Out on the Ground (Scarborough, ON: Doubleday, 2019), 22. See also journalist Desmond Cole, who precisely defines how Black emancipation is systematically co-opted by white supremacy in his recent book The Skin We’re In: “White supremacy, which informs and fuels anti-Black racism, is an insatiable force. White supremacy is never personal, never individual, never isolated. The historic problems I explore in this book are not a matter of some police being too rough, or some government programs being too poorly funded. They have nothing to do with the political leaning of a particular government or the intentions of powerful people. We’re talking about a system of power that seeks to benefit white people above all others” (pp. 7–8). 59. Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London, UK: Verso, 2019), 256. 60. See Janet Browne, “A Science of Empire: British Biogeography before Darwin,” Revue d’histoire des sciences 45, no.4 (1992): 453–75. 61. See Elizabeth Hoover, The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 62. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999). 63. Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (London, UK: Continuum, 2007 [1970]), 17n9. Furthermore, “whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In

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such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things—the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by lack of it. And things cannot love” (ibid.). 64. UNDRIP is an official resolution (61/295) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on September 13, 2007, https://www.un.org/ esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. 65. At the 2016 World Social Forum, Clayton Thomas-Muller (360.org, organizer and member of the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, Pukatawagan in Northern Manitoba, Canada) stated: “When we talk about climate change here in Canada, we have to talk about colonization. We have to talk about reconciliation. Because fundamentally this country’s economy is based on the marginalization of Indigenous people, the suppression of our collective rights, and the dispossession of our peoples from land. So that they can give open door access to multinational corporations to come in an extract those resources, and sell them to the highest bidder on the international market. And so, when we talk about climate change, we have to talk about reconciliation … about healing the wounds of the past … to defend our collective future.” During “Change the System, Not the Climate,” (Montreal, QC, August 9–14, 2016), video, 22min:23sec (19:40–20:25), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIHzhlZoyk8&app=desktop. 66. For a greater understanding of the spatial and political agency of human-animal relations in a relational framework for Indigenous-State discourses, see Zoe Todd, “Refracting the State through Human-Fish Relations: Fishing, Indigenous Legal Orders and Colonialism in North / Western Canada,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7, no.1 (2018): 60–75. See also Hoover, River Is in Us.

Glossary settler colonialism: an ongoing system of power that perpetuates the genocide and repression of Indigenous Peoples and cultures; in other words, settler colonizers do not merely exploit Indigenous Peoples and lands for labor and economic interests; they displace them through settlements.* white supremacy: the belief that white people are superior to those of all other races—especially the Black Race—and should therefore dominate society.� heteropatriarchy (hetero [sexuality] & patriarchy): a socio-political system in which the male gender and heterosexuality have primacy over other genders and over other sexual orientations.† cultural appropriation: when somebody adopts aspects of a culture that is not their own and trivializes violent historical oppression. A deeper understanding of cultural appropriation also refers to a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.‡ racial erasure: the practice and process of collective indifference that renders certain communities of people and political groups invisible, based on race. If typical casualties of ‘erasure’ constitute familiar gender communities and economic classes such as women, minorities, queer communities, and the poor, racial erasure targets underrepresented minorities and racial groups that can and often include communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.§ environmental justice: the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.˜ sovereignty: referred to in terms of ‘aboriginal self-government,’ ‘Indigenous self-determination,’ or ‘Native sovereignty’; it is founded on an ideology of Indigenous nationalism and a rejection of the models of government rooted in European cultural values. Sovereignty is an

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uneven process of re-instituting systems that promote the goals and reinforce the values of Indigenous cultures through land reclamation against the constant effort of settler-colonial governments to maintain the systems of dominance and patterns of control imposed on Indigenous communities for centuries.** UNDRIP: acronym for The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the General Assembly on September 13th, 2007, by a majority of 144 states in favor and 4 votes against (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States). FPIC: acronym for Free, Prior, and Informed Consent; a principle of the UNDRIP and protected by international human rights standards stating that “Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination … and [to] freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” BIPOC: acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. 2SLGBTQIA+: acronym for Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersexual, Asexual, and the countless affirmative ways in which people choose to self-identify. References * Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. � Mike Cole, “White Supremacy and Racism: Social Class and Racialization,” in Critical Race Theory and Education: A Marxist Response (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 35–76. † Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,)” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007 [1984]), 110–13. ‡ Maisha Z. Johnson, “What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation? These 9 Answers Reveal its Harm,” Everyday Feminism, June 14, 2015. § Parul Sehgal, “Fighting ‘Erasure’,” New York Times, February 2, 2016. ˜ Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York, NY: United Church of Christ, 1987). ** Taiaiake Alfred, “Sovereignty,” in A Companion to American Indian History, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 460–74.

acknowledgments For their art work & photography, we would like to express our gratitude to Bunky Echo-Hawk, Gianfranco Gorgoni, David Finnin, A Tribe Called Red, Guillaume Decouflet, Christi Belcourt, Sara LittleRedFeather (Honor the Earth), Stephen Passacantilli, Rob Wilson, Regina H. Boone (Richmond Free Press), and Jorge Barrera. For image permissions and reproductions, acknowledgment is due to the Getty Institute, Library of Congress, University of Oklahoma Press, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, American Museum of Natural History, and Thirty Meter Telescope Corporation. Albeit from a distance, thank you to authors whose work—of important influence—is cited throughout this essay: Deborah Miranda, Raven Sinclair, Desmond Cole, Libby Porter, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, Naomi Klein, Erica Violet Lee, Charmaine Nelson, Eriel Deranger, Adele Perry, Kim TallBear, Kristen Simmons, Jane M. Jacobs, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Waubgeshig Rice, Katherine McKittrick, Falen Johnson, Winona LaDuke, Barbara Kruger, Kyle Powys Whyte, Nick Estes, Janet Browne, and Elizabeth Hoover. For their advice, thoughtful comments, and feedback: Kofi Boone, Austin Allen, Thaïsa Way, Ellen Neises, Marc Miller, Alma Du Solier, Rod Barnett, Anu Mathur, Dilip DaCunha, Walter Hood, Sara Zewde, Charlie Hailey, Alex MacLean, Nina-Marie Lister, Diana Fernandez, Nick Jabs, Hans Baumann, Liz Camuti, Jeff Hou, Helena Cohen, and Maya Gorgoni. Thank you to Caroline Ellerby and Paul Sayer at Wiley Press/AD Magazine as well as Ed Wall for the initial invitation to contribute. Finally, a note of thanks to Barbara Deutsch, Lucinda Sanders, Laura Solano, Danielle Carbonneau, and Rachel Booher at the Landscape Architecture Foundation. With respect and gratitude to Mahtowin Munro, United American Indians of New England (UAINE).

No Design on Stolen Land

This essay is adapted and modified from the original version printed and published by John Wiley Press in the January 2020 issue of AD Architectural Design Magazine authors Alexander Arroyo Ghazal Jafari Hernán L. Bianchi Benguria Tiffany Kaewen Dang Pablo E. Escudero Pierre Bélanger booklet design OPEN SYSTEMS Produced on lands of the Massachusett Peoples, traditional territories of Nipmuc & Wampanoag Nations, and on lands of the Monacan Nation

Proceeds from this limited edition booklet will go towards Massachusetts Indigenous Peoples’ Day Initiative (www.indigenouspeoplesdayma.org) led by United American Indians of New England (UAINE)

No Design on Stolen Land