Canada’s Venice Biennale of Architecture entry embraces Indigenous perspective

“It’s a question of perhaps freedom and opportunity, and that we largely never gave up anything; that’s where the name came from,” said Gerald McMaster, a professor of Indigenous visual culture at OCAD University and one of the co-curators of Unceded: Voices of the Land, opening May 26.

“But it’s a frame of mind as well. It’s about resistance, change, gaining authority back. It’s about self-determination, a living culture. For Canada to be represented by a team of Indigenous architects and designers is really testament to a growing strength and awareness in how our environments are being designed. I would think now, with a growing interest in our climate and our environment, that the interest also flows from the relationship Indigenous people have always had with the land.”

Indeed, building — the act and its products — has always been a colonial pursuit, the land more a platform to put things on than an entity with which to commune (have you seen Concord Cityplace?). But with a sea change in both environmental sensitivities — LEED buildings, sustainable architecture — and a burgeoning awareness of Indigenous culture, the balance has begun to shift.

“That’s the hope,” McMaster said. “There’s the built environment, where most of us live now. But it’s a human ecosystem as well, not just a lived space, but a culture. And that’s where the whole notion comes from. That’s the ‘unceded’ part: it’s an attempt to give that thinking back and rearticulate perhaps the Indigenous position in Canada today.”

Led by renowned Métis architect Douglas Cardinal — he of the organic swoops of limestone that make up the spectacular Museum of History in Ottawa-Hull, and the curling forms of pale stone of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. — Unceded, the project, occupies a big footprint in the Arsenale, a former medieval armoury.

It bears his formal signature — curling walls that soften the hard right angles of the old military installation, an esthetic counterpoint that makes the division between European and Indigenous cultures clear all on its own — but also his world view. Bear in mind that it was Cardinal, an Order of Canada recipient, who led the campaign to ban the name of the Cleveland baseball team in the Major League playoffs against the Blue Jays in 2016 (he intends to proceed with the discrimination complaint in court).

As Cardinal told Azure magazine this year, “The dominant culture is about dominion over nature and it’s all about power and control; it’s hierarchical,” he said. “The Indigenous world view is entirely different and has been since the dawn of time. Indigenous people come from a perspective of balance and harmony with nature. It is a different way of looking at the world.”

Cardinal, one of the most important architects of his generation, has spent his career campaigning for respect for Indigenous people and the entry to the Biennale proposed by his Ottawa-based firm dovetailed with a watershed national moment: during Canada 150 last year, interest in Indigenous culture and history surged, and from opposite directions.

With the full report of the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the horrors of the residential school system a little more than a year old, the sesquicentennial became both an opportunity for the telling of hard truths and a platform to showcase the resilience and dynamism of Indigenous cultures that had endured the absolute worst, and had managed to recover and thrive.

Unceded is less a harangue over past ills than a monument to the things McMaster — a member of the Siksika First Nation — suggests. Four discrete sections knit into a holistic experience: Resilience, Sovereignty, Colonization, Indigeneity. Each is punctuated with a video of an Indigenous person emerging from a swirl of forms, speaking directly to the viewer. All around, images both moving and still capture scenes from a vast land of mountains and plains, forests and sea, woven with vignettes of Indigenous culture, alive and well.

Among its most vibrant expressions is in the architectural world, where a new generation of Indigenous architects are forging new relationships with the act of building. There’s a ways to go yet — the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada lists only 12 members who identify as Indigenous — but Unceded means to move the needle, and on the world stage, said McMaster. That means acknowledging not only the work of Indigenous architects, but their unique position as stewards of environmental balance.

“So much of it is about the land, really,” he says. “People’s cultures and lives have been based on the land and, really, most of us have lost that connection; the built environment doesn’t reflect that. Unceded is really about the language of the land and what it can teach us as we continue to build, going forward.” If there was ever a time to listen, it would be now.

Unceded opens at the Venice Biennale of Architecture on May 26, 2018. See www.unceded.ca for information.