The article’s title, “Designing Indian Country,” is provocative. Where is “Indian Country”? And if we think of “Indian Country” as the patchwork of reservation lands across the country (hint: it’s much bigger than that), then what are the “design” issues in these spaces? Author Rod Barnett, a member of the faculty in landscape architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, has practiced in his native New Zealand, across the Asian-Pacific region, as well as in the Mississippi River watershed, and he provides a perspective that is at once far-reaching and intensely local.
The article addresses questions of landscape architecture and landscape, which are slightly different than a focus on “land” as a system in itself. “Landscape,” as authors such as J. B. Jackson and many others have argued, refers to a defined area, sometimes described as what can be readily comprehended at a glance. For landscape architects, the question of scale is paramount: is the site in question for design the scale of a yard, an urban park, a regional system? Barnett’s analysis ranges across the larger of these scales, focusing on parks in and around St. Louis, MO to make his arguments about the roles of design and its concerns in contemporary times, with a greater recognition of the harm colonialist practices have imposed on landscapes.
Barnett identifies three qualities of landscape as essential to understanding how designers might work to create “true contact between cultures” that recognizes the lasting legacy of colonialism. These are, in the order of his argument, Landscape as Curated, Landscape as Narrative, and Landscape as Encounter. He then closes with powerful arguments concerning Deterritorialization and Projection
To regard landscape is curated is to recognize power and knowledge differentials between the curator and what (who) is curated. “Placemaking,” which he terms a “misleading and inadequate practice” (and which in North America has always been preceded by place-taking), is therefore an act of marking and managing terrain, in which not everyone participates equally.
Landscapes inevitably tell stories, as Landscape as Narrative conveys. But the shapers and hearers of these stories are not always, apparently, aware of the dimensions of the narrative act in which they are engaged. Barnett’s example here is from the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Cahokia was the largest concentration of people in North America north of Mexico until the 19th century. But the interpretations at the site address only the fictive category of “Cahokians,” rather than the descendent communities of this center, which still live across the United States. As Barnett puts it, “... the narrative binds an anthropological category called the Cahokian to a national bedtime story masquerading as a place. The interesting dead Indians have receded into the past, …” while the “uninteresting” living Indians are rendered invisible in myriad ways.
The problems with this false and damaging narrative that Indigenous people only lived in the past might be addressed by imagining Landscape as Encounter. Suppose, Barnett asks, “Native America is not over, that there is no liberation, no “after colonialism.” In that case, it becomes necessary for every work of landscape architecture to see itself as an encounter between the curation of “placemaking” and the presence of remaining Indigenous people, whose ties to North American places date back centuries if not millennia, As Barnett says, “References to the Cahokia Mounds evoke a Native Americanness that has been established by historians, archaeologists, and ecologists, rather than a living culture that defines itself through its actual landscape relations.”
The fundamental problem, then, is of deterritorialization and projection. Landscape architects, nearly all of whom are working at the behest of dominant cultural institutions, have to account for the fact that the people original to the place they are working have been removed. Further, they must be careful not to project their own vision of what it means to be “Indian” when there are people present for whom this identity is their everyday reality. Barnett argues that there is and can be no “post-colonial” sensibility that allows these tensions to be evaded, and that landscape architects make spaces that replicate power relationships in which they dwell.
The article is primarily addressed to designers and planners, but we are all inhabitants of the spaces created through those professions, so the work is more broadly important than just for those professions. If we understand all of North America to be “Indian Country,” and the work of coming to terms with the violent history of colonization to be something that is or should be part of a broad agenda of moving forward, then the title makes sense and the argument is profoundly resonant.
The article itself has abundant citations, so leads for further reading and learning are ready at hand.