Design by Radical Indigenism
with Julia Watson, landscape designer and educator
Organized by Jolene Rickard, associate professor of History of Art and Visual Studies, Art, and director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program
Oct 30, 11:30am-12:30pm
Register: https://bit.ly/35EMGcb
On Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the need to reduce humanity's negative environmental impact.
Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology. Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, this mythology ignored local wisdom and Indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Today, we have slowly come to realize that the legacy of this mythology is haunting us.
Designers understand the urgency of reducing humanity’s negative environmental impact, yet perpetuate the same mythology of technology that relies on exploiting nature. Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogeneous design, we are ignoring millennia old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remains inherently unsustainable.
Lo—TEK, derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs, countering the idea that Indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. It is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems.
