Olivia Shotyk

Exploring Landscape Architecture on Turtle Island through a Two-Eyed Seeing Lens

There are few examples of contemporary Indigenous landscape architecture in North America, despite the great number of rich cultures and their strong relationships with the land. While there are many possible reasons for this gap in representation, one explanation is that the current definition of landscape architecture excludes many examples of Indigenous design. By examining Indigenous relationships to the land and how they differ from a Western perspective, by recognizing elements of design in pre-colonization cultural landscapes, and by interviewing designers who currently practice Indigenous landscape architecture, it becomes clear that through a different cultural relationship to the land, a different practice of landscape architecture emerges. This alternative practice includes implementing traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), illuminating spatial narratives, creating design embedded in a sense of place, and creating space for self-determination of Indigenous communities. This alternative practice exists on the fringe of the profession, despite work by the Canadian Society of Landscape Architecture to make topics of reconciliation a more public conversation within the landscape architecture discipline. Through semi-structured interviews, this research explores the role Indigenous design practitioners hold and how it differs from working within a Western knowledge base. By recognizing how the landscape architecture profession has been limited by the Western societal construct in which it is situated, designers can begin to address how their practice may function differently when working with different cultural and ethnic groups.

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