“Let us start by rejecting the false opposition of settler and native, migrant and inhabitant, bad species and good. Landscape architecture has always had a complicated relationship with the indigenous. Its practitioners work on the front lines of environmental change, often in situations where the meaning of place is contested. They are relativists by training and temperament. Yet in practice they tend to prioritize site and existing conditions, even as they acknowledge that everything is in motion: geologies, ecologies, hydrologies, ethnicities. In the American Midwest, where I live, a curious sort of place-fetishism has taken hold. Native plants are all the rage, but native humans are bracketed out. Landscape architecture reflects (and refracts) a larger culture in which most ‘nationals’ wish to distinguish themselves from the migrant and the indigene — wish themselves, that is, to displace both.”
So begins landscape architect and educator Rod Barnett’s consideration of the question, “How do we create public spaces that enable true contact between cultures?” Read the full article, published October 2016 in Places, here.
A mound at Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, site of the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico. Photo by Rod Barnett.Find the full Season 8 of arcCA DIGEST, on Indigeneity, here.
