Abstract

Urban centres are often sites of settler colonial violence and erasure for Indigenous peoples as territorial dispossession and displacement impact identity, belonging, and self-determining futures. This research-creation zine shares reflections on an Indigenous-led collaborative design (co-design) case study that follows the development of the first dedicated hide tanning cultural hub in the urban setting of Tiotiàh:ke/Montréal. This research is engaged through Indigenous autoethnography and land/place-based visual storywork, utilizing research-creation and zine-making through photography, illustration, graphic design, reflexive writing and personal archive. This thesis reflects on design sovereignty in relation to generating Indigenous land-based futures and considers the roles of architecture, design and the built environment in settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. This research applies a critical necropolitical lens alongside Indigenous strategies of inquiry to re-imagine urban relations through placekeeping, land-based pedagogies and Indigenous sovereignty over deep time.