Dominic Gomez-Tagle, “Indigenous Histories of Design and the Politics of Visual Representation”
Mentor: Maura Lucking, Architecture
Poster #74

In this SURF research project, I have studied the writings of Oneida Woman activist Laura Cornelius Kellog relative to histories of federal Indian policy and worked to develop strategies of representation that will allow her work to be better understood as a utopian designer and planner in the history of architecture. Our research started with a simple question: why is Kellog not remembered as one of the great utopian planners of the early twentieth century alongside figures like Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier? And how can we rewrite that history? Her unrealized plan, called LOLOMI, called for reclaiming Indian reservations and reorganizing their land around modern industry, infrastructure, and sovereign, self-determined institutions for things like education and healthcare. The research includes closely analyzing primary documents-from Kellogg’s writings to maps of the Wisconsin Odeida reservation, interviewing Dr. Kasey Keeler a contemporary Native American housing expert, studying the well-known history of the Garden City, and developing visual materials for a workshop and exhibition. While we initially tried various visualization strategies regarding LOLOMI, we ultimately decided that as non-native researchers, it made more sense to develop a way for designers to critique colonial and anti-indigenous biases within our own field and better understand the politics of representation: this is why we are leading a paper-making workshop to literally and symbolically remake the ground of cartography. Our next research phase will be an exhibition that puts Kellogg into direct conversation with canonical planning schemes and their representations, from scale models of the suburbs to bird’s eye view plans. Our goal is to show, paraphrasing Dr. Keeler, that all places can be understood as “Indian places.”