Futurecasting: Indigenous-led Architecture and Design in the Arctic was a seminar and workshop series, embedded within the ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home project, that convened nine emerging Indigenous architecture and design practitioners from across Turtle Island and Sápmi.¹ The series centred land-based practices of architecture, taking place on the land and occupying institutional spaces like the museum and university. Futurecasting unfolded in three parts, the first of which was a series of virtual seminars in January and February 2022 led by Indigenous architects and knowledge-keepers from Turtle Island, Sápmi, and Kalaallit Nunaat.² The seminars were followed by a land-based workshop in April 2022 at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino, Norway, in Sápmi. The final chapter reconvened the Futurecasting participants at the CCA in Tiohti:áke/Montréal to discuss the legacy of the work that was produced over the course of the series and how it may be made accessible to future generations of Indigenous architecture students, designers, and communities. Spanning multiple geographies and months, the project produced a year-long reflection on what it means to design from and with the land, and on how Indigenous epistemologies should be embraced within design processes.

I write this reflection from my position as the one settler that facilitated and co-curated the series with Nicole Luke, a Winnipeg-based Inuk architectural designer and advocate for design education for Indigenous youth from small communities. In my role as curatorial assistant at the CCA, and as a designer, I am interested in collective and relational ways of thinking, especially those that can offer space to underrepresented narratives within the discipline. As a curatorial team, our intention was for the series to provide space for the development of newly authored research and works for the exhibition, while serving as a platform rooted in dialogue. Futurecasting enabled the creation of an environment in which the participants could discuss common interests, passions, and frustrations, and how they would like to see Indigenous-led practices be emboldened to define spacemaking in the North and in their own communities.¹ The participants began to define what methodologies and knowledges are urgently needed within and beyond disciplinary boundaries, asserting that ways of working with space can and should be defined by shared knowledge, oral history, and practices of making and doing. Within the group, it became clear that the creation of such a space—in which kinship and relation are premised over hyper-productivity—is essential yet rare within architectural discourse and education. They concluded that situating care at the centre of design processes is vital and allows for Indigenous designers to develop ways of making that are situated in community.

Many of the discussions that were had together took place on the land, cutting and scraping birch trees for the luovvi structure we were building outside the Sámi University, or in the cabin that we shared during our time in Guovdageaidnu, over meals of bannock and reindeer stew.² There was a distinct rhythm that emerged throughout the project; a timeline punctuated by both online and in-person gatherings allowed for the group to build trust and relationships with one another in a way that felt natural and unhurried. Though everyone was gathering from different territories, there were ways of thinking that felt familiar, and moments of shared affirmation about the roles that land, generational knowledge, and reciprocity played in how the group was developing their work. Conversations were had about how to bring what is learned on the land with community into institutional spaces that are not always welcoming to these ways of working. Some methods involved using materials from the land such as bark, animal fur, reindeer hide, or antler in model making and representation, to consulting with Elders about protocols in engaging with community, to defining architecture as broader than a building to the scale of territory, water, and other living beings.

Rarely are architectural exhibition projects formulated from a place of feeling, yet over the course of the year that the Futurecasting group gathered, the work was always created from an embodied place. Conversations and collaborations proved that research can be something innate and felt, amassed over time through listening. These methodologies can at times be read as opaque to outside communities, and this alone has value. As a design strategy, opacity—the idea that not everything needs to be legible to non-Indigenous audiences—was at the core of the exhibition and Futurecasting project’s goal of resisting many of architecture’s colonial legacies and creating a space in which intelligibility of materials, spaces, and languages are learned. This is largely in contradiction with how architecture and architectural representation often operate: they have the tendency to diagram, to dissect, to draw, and to survey. Historically, these have been harmful ways of documenting, often employed for paternalistic and extractive uses against Indigenous communities. In pushing back against these concretizing methods, much of the work that was produced for the exhibition itself has an ephemeral counterpart in the form of conversation. Some of these exchanges were transcribed, producing records that will be accessible to other Indigenous scholars in the future, while other discussions will only exist in the space and time that we met.

The work that was created during the project will soon find itself in the archival spaces of the CCA. As a settler institution, the CCA will need to grapple with what it means to hold this material, and how to make it accessible to the communities that need to engage with it the most. Historically, the CCA has held almost no Indigenous-authored material, and the records that do depict Indigenous people often illustrate the ways in which architecture has been implicated in violent land dispossession. The ambition of the Futurecasting project was—and remains—not to undo or ignore this legacy, but to begin to write a new one in which spaces for Indigenous communities are shaped by values that are defined first and foremost by Indigenous designers and communities.

One of the last conversations we had as a group and with architect Tiffany Shaw focused on what impact the work produced throughout the workshop series may have on future generations of Indigenous architects and designers, and what space this work could take up within the CCA’s collection and beyond. What follows is a transcript of some of these reflections, including what an Indigenous archival practice entails when considering the stewardship of the group’s work in the collection.¹