Acknowledging Landscape: Walking Paths Towards Indigenous Urbanism

Abstract

In North America, all cities have beneath them Indigenous land and are set within Indigenous landscapes, and yet this connection is rarely explicit in the physical environment. Much of urban development has been constructed as part of the settler colonial project that has sought to replace Indigenous land tenure through destruction of Indigenous lifeways on the landscape, in order to build something new as settler colonialism has always destroyed to replace (Wolfe 2006). But the lands on which cities reside continue to remain Indigenous lands so long as Indigenous people continue to relate to them. Landscape architecture as a field and discipline works with the land as its medium, and yet the discipline has yet to truly acknowledge the implications of Indigenous tenure on the lands on which they work and shape in North America, and have failed to examine the discipline’s role in the settler colonial project. As a student of landscape architecture and an Indigenous person, I have sought to first situate myself in the lands I live in as a visitor as a first step in acknowledgement of Indigenous lands and people of Dgheyey Kaq’ as a means to interrupt the dominant narratives of the history of our cities. In doing so, I have attempted to get to know the city through a different lens and through embodied experience by walking three of its urban streams that were important to Dena’ina peoples who shaped and named this landscape. Walking through ancient pathways through a contemporary city revealed opportunities for an already emergent Indigenous identity to grow into an Indigenous urbanism that could help shape how people see and live in the city and give an Indigenous voice to the narrative of the city as a place.