Indigenous People’s Day: An Interview with Brian Skeet, IDSA

IDSA: From your perspective, what are the ways in which Indigenous design and ways of thinking differ from Western design and Western ways of thinking?

Brian Skeet: I took a class at ASU taught by a First Nations instructor [architect Wanda Dalla Costa] and it was really amazing how she structured everything. It wasn’t her telling us what the curriculum was; it was the students making the decisions on the way the class was going to go. Usually Western education is more like, ‘Here is what I’m going to teach you, and here’s what you are going to produce at the end.’ [This class] gave me a new perspective on how we perceive what we learn, from what we’re used to and what our parents teach us.

I started to understand that my worldview as an Indigenous person didn’t always jive with Western culture and worldview. For a long time I thought, even growing up,  ‘Why am I like this? What’s wrong with me? Why is everyone getting this but I’m not?’ This class helped me to understand that there’s nothing wrong with me as an Indigenous person; [the Western way of thinking] is just not how we’ve been programmed. We are very much in tune with the land and what we build, and what we build is for a purpose. When we cultivate food or gather water or any sort of natural resource that keeps us alive, there is a purpose to that and we don’t own that. Water and food are not for us to own. That is for our community and for nourishment; and when we take something, we always give something back.

Understanding this empowered me to realize that the way I am is not a flaw. It’s actually helping to set us up for the future, by keeping these teachings in the family and in the community. Now, a lot of capitalism and Western-world thinking is reverting back to Indigenous knowledge. But it’s kind of crappy at the same time, because a lot of that Indigenous knowledge has been wiped out. Within the past century or so, we’ve been forced to conform, we’ve been forced to lose our language, we’ve been forced to fit in to this Western box.

Sustainability, circular design, biomimicry—a lot of this is being repackaged as new and groundbreaking when it sounds like this has been part of the Indigenous worldview for a long time. These are not new ideas. 

Exactly. That’s the frustrating part. We may be on the same wavelength or you by coincidence may have the same idea…but it’s frustrating to see new programs around sustainability or biomimicry being “innovative.” It’s been here! Again, it goes back to being dismissed as ‘these natives who don’t know anything.’ We’ve learned from the land, we’ve learned from each other. We already know these things. 

When thinking about and designing meaningful products that last, what can all of us learn from Indigenous people and communities?

A basket is one of those tangible products that can be used for utilitarian purposes like carrying water, but there also is something celebratory in the process. It’s a communal process and it’s healing, because you get to socialize as well. And when you’re weaving the basket, there’s a story woven into it, into the patterns of the basket itself.

When it comes to products [in the Western worldview], it comes down to capitalism. People need to make products to feed themselves, to make some kind of money. But does it always have to be that way? ‘I make the product, I sell it, therefore I live’? What about: ‘I make this product for myself or my community, and it lasts’?

It’s about blending the two worlds together and deciding when you’re making the product if it really needs to be there. Until we start viewing ‘things’ as ‘things that have meaning,’ I don’t think the way we produce products will change.