Bridging divergent worldviews for social good

Since 1970, the University of Waterloo has hosted a thought-provoking public lecture series: The Hagey Lectures. This premier invitational lecture invites a wide range of celebrated scholars and artists to challenge, stimulate and enrich faculty, staff, students and members of the Waterloo community.  

This year’s keynote speaker, Wanda Dalla Costa, senior global futures scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at GIOS and institute professor at The Design School, centered her talk on decoding meaning in Indigenous design.  

As a member of the Saddle Lake First Nation who has worked with Indigenous communities in North America for more than 20 years, Dalla Costa is a prominent figure in Indigenous architecture and discussed her journey and contributions to the field.  

Through an insightful presentation, she introduced the concept of two-eyed seeing — the gift of working with multiple perspectives simultaneously. Dalla Costa explained how the concept refers to the practice of seeing from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing while simultaneously practicing seeing from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing. Using both eyes together has been transformative to her work. 

She also emphasized that her work is not about replicating traditional designs. Instead, the focus of her work is in making Indigenous culture visible, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and preserving cultural practices.  

Increasing visibility through dialogue 

Dalla Costa shared how she always imagined there must have been other ways of designing than what was being taught in architecture school. “I wasn't being disruptive, just for the sake of being disruptive,” Dalla Costa said of challenging her professors during her undergraduate degree, “but when I travelled, I just saw all these amazing, very expressive pieces of architecture out there. This is while we were being taught how to construct these austere little white boxes that really had no relationship, nor did it have anything to do with the house that my grandmother and my mother grew up in on the reservation.”  

Following a seven-year backpacking journey around the world, Dalla Costa decided that she would join the field of architecture and founded TAWAW — a design-research firm dedicated to advancing Indigenous architecture. She has since been dissecting interconnected holistic Indigenous worldviews and applying them to her work. Dalla Costa shared that what is always of utmost importance is to make visible pieces of Indigenous culture that have become invisible.  

“When we create these designs, what it does, is it creates this cross-cultural dialogue. We begin to talk, and we begin to talk together … and that's a really important distinction. This is the primary result of our work. It’s also a quiet form of activism.” 

Acknowledging that there are many cliches and stereotypical representations of Indigenous design that pervade the world, Dalla Costa took the audience through her team’s journey of coding authentic Indigenous design in their work. By listening to the communities in which they work, the team has gathered a wealth of new knowledge that helps them produce authentic visibility in their designs.  

“Not only did we uncover what objects meant, there were also meanings associated with how they made it, how they used it, the presence in their lives, and all of that sort of circular process actually helped solidify material culture,” she said. “When you produce works that people want to ask questions about, such as, ‘What is it?’ or ‘What does it represent?’, we start to have dialogue, and I think that’s very powerful.” 

Wanda Dalla Costa on stage at Federation Hall during Hagey Lecture

Concluding her talk, Dalla Costa shared that her work in architecture has simply been an ongoing process of decoding a holistic worldview into bite-sized chunks to enable transformative change in a world where multiple perspectives exist and must co-exist.  

“Through this work, we're increasing visibility. We're inciting dialogue. We're leaning into trying to preserve anything and everything that we can …  and we're also trying to seed imagination so more people can join us.”

Banner image: Chippewa of the Thames First Nation Heritage Hub designed by TAWAW Architecture Collective Inc.