Being a Good Relative: Following Mni into the Future

Abstract

This thesis engages with the challenges and disciplinary discourse of collaborative design with Indigenous people who are working to heal their homelands both ecologically and spiritually. The design project is located at a sacred site for the Dakota (an Indigenous people whose home is the state now called Minnesota). The landscape has been permanently altered by the infrastructure of colonization, resource extraction, and urbanization. I have been given permission to work on the site by the Indigenous caretakers who now maintain it. The site will function as a laboratory to enact a design practice that is embedded within, conceptualizes, and translates across multiple ways of knowing and being in relation to land. The project structures its methodology through three ethics of relationality which decenter the futurity of design to instead co-labor with the site’s Indigenous caretakers towards the realization of a shared, common future.