Coping With Neighbors & other entanglements

Abstract

This thesis explores how two ways of "seeing" landscape might be integrated through a set of design interventions for the Kooyooe fish and the people from the Paiute nation. Situated in the state currently known as Nevada, where the Paiute people have lived for over 9,000 years, Pyramid Lake is the Kooyooe's home. The 1905 Truckee River damming and ensuing history of water rights struggles have endangered the Kooyooe, a cultural icon in the Paiute community. Such a struggle represents the violence of colonialism in the landscape and inequitable distribution of its resource.

Contemporary land management that supports damming and extraction and indigenous land stewardship are situated at two moments along a spectrum of knowledge production and land perspectives. The former approach the land from a top-down perspective that foregrounds the land's static, immediate utility. The latter is derived from traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) embedded in the land, which does not differentiate between people, species, and the land on which they are located.

The purpose of this thesis is twofold. In addition to designing the storytelling place, the hatchery, and the series of fish hiders as part of an experiment that attempts to integrate knowledge forms, this thesis is also a journey of self-discovery and a reflection on the institutional architectural pedagogy students experience in American higher education.

The thesis allows the TEK of Paiute people to enter the project and become an invitation to voyage into a different worldview, a native mode of knowledge production previously shunned by architecture higher education. However, expeditions are often accompanied by mishaps and accidents. This project has fractures and failures that the author must fully embrace, as they are critical reminders of what is currently missing in the modes of learning and teaching architecture.