Landscape as indigenous space: sovereignty and indigeneity in urban environments

Abstract

Although urban environments have been characterized as alienating to everyone, the level of displacement for many Indigenous peoples goes beyond that experienced by non-Indigenous peoples, in part because some Indigenous individuals are in fact locals made foreign through urbanization. This thesis explores how displaced Indigenous peoples have begun to appropriate the urban environment, and it relates that work to sovereignty.

Throughout the United States and Canada today, there are many examples of buildings designed by architects to suit the interests and needs of Indigenous peoples. Have those structures done anything for Indigenous sovereignty? Do they embody or reinforce indigeneity more than do other, generic structures?

Settler colonialism has long equated indigenous sovereignty with “self-determination,” and the governments of the United States and Canada have reinforced that understanding through policies of recognition and reconciliation. This thesis considers three alternative approaches—refusal, resentment, and tradition—and how those are conceived spatially. An analysis of five indigenous spaces in Winnipeg, Canada, then shows how indigeneity and sovereignty are represented or embodied through specific works in the contemporary built environment.