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Colonization Through Design explores the extent to which housing, and ideas of home and domesticity, were fundamental to the colonization of Indigenous people in Canada, tracing the historic conflict between agricultural Christian society and Indigenous ways of knowing, and the ongoing assimilative practices of the contemporary settler state. Renwick assesses the use of geometry and planning to create a cartesian and commodified landscape upon which Indigenous peoples were corralled and controlled, and the purposeful imposition of an explicit idea of home. Further, he looks at the generic western European model of Canadian northern housing, with its division between domestic and work environments, as a failure for Indigenous occupants. The design profiles within the book explore a new design plurality that links innovative technical solutions with Indigenous knowledge; it assesses various design solutions that generate cultural continuity and environmental sustainability. This volume precedes a design competition for the adaptation and repurposing of existing Indigenous housing stock, inviting collaborations between communities and makers, manufacturers, designers, and students, and an exhibition that will share these ideas throughout Canada and New Zealand.
Gavin Renwick has taught in and worked through architecture, design, fine art and curation. He has degrees from Napier College, Edinburgh; the Royal College of Art, London; and the University of Dundee. In 2005 Renwick was appointed Professor and Chair of Art & Policy at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee; he joined the University of Alberta in 2010. Renwick’s present work places the practitioner-researcher as a cultural intermediary between Indigenous and metropolitan culture. His applied and curatorial practice aims to facilitate cultural continuity for First Nation communities, particularly in the Canadian Northwest Territories.
