What do you want to be when you grow up?
“To be leaders, to show the right path,” Mike Laverdure hopes today’s teens will say—and he’s guiding them to that dream.
Laverdue, an architect and owner of DSJW and First American Design Studio, co-founded Indigenous Design Camp. It’s a free, week-long summer intensive for Native high school students. The volunteer-run camp, which is the first of its kind in the U.S., wrapped up its second year in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Throughout the week, the teenagers set up (day) camp at Dunwoody College of Technology’s architecture studios. They created projects and models using scale and measurements; they checked out the University of Minnesota’s architecture program and learned from Indigenous architecture; and Native designers visited and presented.
PARTICIPANT, INDIGENOUS DESIGN CAMP“I was surprised how few Native architects there are. It made me want to change that.”
“I think a lot of us on reservations don’t get to see that. We only see a few different careers. . .we don’t see architects, we don’t see landscape architects, we don’t see interior designers. We don’t even run into a lot of engineers,” Laverdure says, noting there are only about two dozen Native architects in the whole country. “And 20 years from now, there’ll be hundreds.”
He and the Indigenous Design Camp crew are starting small: Last year, around 10 kids participated. That’s just about doubled this summer.
Co-founder Jessica Garcia Fritz is an assistant professor and an architectural educator. The citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe says the camp lets these students—and over a dozen architects—gather in community.
“I also see the camp as an alternative and a way to build a collective of Indigenous architects and designers who may view the environment, and certainly the built environment, in a different way—one that needs to be stewarded, taken care of,” she says.
Students at the camp learn about Indigenous design principles. Garcia Fritz says they contrast western architecture’s often destructive and exclusive nature.
“It’s not looking at dominance over the land, dominance of relationships. I think that it’s—and this has always been a part of our cultures—looking at working with relationships, working with the land,” Garcia Fritz says.
Another co-founder and architect, Sam Olbekson of the White Earth Nation, says this camp helps students see themselves in not only architecture, but the architecture they create. It’s about sovereignty.
“It’s my first time doing anything architectural—I’m excited to get that hands-on experience,” a participant from Elk River, Minnesota, shared on the camp’s website.
“To design for themselves, to speak for themselves, to create the ideas and concepts,” Olbekson says. “They don’t see boxes. They see the shapes, the colors, the patterns, the symbols when appropriate, or not. That makes them feel at home.”
Indigenous Design Camp can be a major catalyst for many of these aspiring students, Laverdure says.
“Because as Native architects and designers, we’re the ones who really are the change makers and the nation builders for our tribes,” he says. “So to me, it is just kind of that first initial step into creating an environment where we take control of our own progress, our own generations, our own future.”