The Image of the Indigene and Semiotics: Cultural Ventriloquism
Events such as the “Viens Commission,” relentless instances of exploitation through cultural appropriation and, more recently, the death of Joyce Echaquan due to racist hospital staff bring to light the failure of our system regarding Indigenous populations. How is this racism constructed? And how can designers and planners use their agency to prevent the further perpetuation of this inequity? Respect, safety, adequate housing, and health care, to name a few, are fundamental human rights, but systemic racism impedes these, generating inequity. By challenging the current role of the architect and redefining participatory design, we can enable a paradigm shift towards the eradication of hierarchies between cultures, and between designers and users.
Terry Goldie attempts to understand the relationship between the Indigene and settler, or native and white, by analyzing how the Indigene is represented in white literature. In doing so, he “skillfully reveals the ambivalence of white writers to indigenous culture through an examination of the stereotyping involved in the creation of the image of the "Other.”1 As humans, we cannot help but draw lines when confronted with differences or diversity. Semiotics, the study of signs and how they are formed, explains this idea: "The Indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chessboard under the control of the white sign maker.”2 The attempt to control and contain the "Other" results in biased, inauthentic images. This is deeply problematic, as many look towards these stereotypical, culturally inappropriate representations of the Indigene, formed by imperialist perspectives, rather than engaging with indigenous populations themselves to understand said communities.3
Another important concept that Goldie develops is "standard commodities.” These are "the few basic moves which the indigenous pawn has been allowed to make" within the semiotic field of the Indigene.4 They are poles of fear and temptation, positive and negative stereotypes: sex, violence, orality, mysticism and the prehistoric. The last is particularly relevant as it reveals the settler's tendency to view Indigenous culture as "true, pure and static.”5 The Indigene image becomes one of the historical artifacts with little connection to contemporary life, rather than as an active and ever-evolving people with cultural value anchored in modernity. Goldie also highlights a predominant desire for Indigenization: the aspiration by the settler to become more native.6 In doing so, the non-native has two instincts: erase or incorporate the Indigene in the settler's own culture. Both concepts become important areas of study in understanding the interventions of non-native designers in Indigenous design projects.
Embedded Hierarchies: When the Desire to Control Leaves a Culture Powerless and Stuck
Gabriel Arboleda problematizes this duality between the native and white by juxtaposing it to design, opposing the designer to the user, and underlining issues of high-design, "attemptive planning" and top-down methods of architecture.7 He attributes inadequate and insensitive outsider solutions of social design to the prevalent hierarchy embedded in western civilization ideals and design values, where the architect and building form, stand above the process and end-users.8
While the participatory design is identified as a plausible solution to these design challenges, Arboleda points out that there are many ways to control and manipulate participation to render it futile, ultimately coercing a seemingly horizontal design process to keep the designer on top.9 Thus, there must be a shift from the standard "designed with" the community to a more equitable "designed by" the community, indigenous or others. Arboleda believes that "the first step in the proposed bottom-up approach is to understand poverty [and other indigenous needs] as people experience it rather than as the designer assumes it to be.”10
Interpretation of cultural needs and experience by an outsider is too often informed by the images generated within art, literature, and popular media. This leads to cultural appropriation issues; whereby, inaccurate narratives of sustainability, traditional housing materials, primitive techniques, and natural symbols are promoted and crudely misemployed by white architects in design proposals.11 Tamara Eagle Bull, Canadian Indigenous architect, claims that if a narrative is propelled without consultation of a tribe and without holding meaning for this tribe, it is simply inauthentic and disrespectful.12
From Genius to Facilitator: Participatory Design in Which the Designer is just Another Participant
The paradigm shift enabled by the blurring of the designer's role, planner or researcher allows for indigenous communities to be at the forefront of the design process. When "people are treated as active citizens and therefore seen as partners and active co-creators in the design process," the Indigene becomes encouraged to move freely and evolve.13 Whereas, a top-down process may produce an inauthentic indigenous object that is the product of a designer's decisions, the radical positionality shift that Arboleda suggests allows for the emergence of new Indigenous housing typologies and architectural languages, generated by the communities themselves.14 Eagle Bull asserts that when a culture can speak for itself, it can thrive and become an active part of society.15
It is important to mention that community engagement practices and holistic participatory design have always been intrinsic to Indigenous planning and design. They are not new while they may seem radical to western architects. Theodore Jojola, professor and member of The Indigenous Design and Planning Institute (iD+Pi), describes Indigenous designers as follows: "They are facilitators, not imposers of authoritative solutions. They inspire and work toward improving the quality of life for its constituents. They are obligated to see through a course of action or, at the very least, assist the community in building local capacity. Ultimately, they heal deep cultural wounds by assisting the community in reclaiming its culture and heritage.”16 It is important to realize that we have much to learn from current indigenous practices and these cross-cultural partnerships. Quoting American historian Sander Gilman, Goldie asserts that the line between us is dynamic and shifts with our representation of the world.17 We must actively engage in making that representation authentic and ethnographically sensitive.
Arboleda coins the term "ethnoarchitect," redefining the designer's role as an advocate of "the people's perspective on their problems" and "their perspective on design.”18 In questioning and molding our role as architects to this definition, we may finally achieve meaningful and representative integration of these communities and enable respectful coexistence while avoiding cultural appropriation practices within the built environment.
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1 Terry Goldie, “Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures”, ed. revised (McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1993), 272.
2 Terry Goldie, “The Representation of the Indigene,” in Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994), 232.
3 Ibid, 233.
4 Ibid, 235.
5 Ibid, 236.
6 Ibid, 235.
7 Gabriel Arboleda, “Beyond Participation,” Journal of Architectural Education 74 (2020), 17.
8 Ibid, 17.
9 Ibid, 16.
10 Ibid, 17.
11 Ibid, 18.
12 Tamara Eagle Bull, “Stop Appropriating my Culture,” Architecture Magazine, April 4, 2019. https://www.architectmagazine.com/practice/tamara-eagle-bull-stop-appropriating-my-culture_o
13 Marques, Bruno, Greg Grabasch, and Jacqueline McIntosh, “Fostering Landscape Identity Through Participatory Design with Indigenous Cultures of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand,” Space and Culture (2018), 2.
14 Arboleda, “Beyond Participation,” 22.
15 Eagle Bull, “Stop Appropriating my Culture.”
16 Theodore Jojola, “The People are Beautiful Already: Indigenous Design and Planning,” Cooper Hewitt, February 16, 2017. https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2017/02/16/the-people-are-beautiful-already-indigenous-design-and-planning/
17 Goldie, “The Representation of the Indigene,” 233.
18 Arboleda, “Beyond Participation,” 23.
