May 2023 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine
The trading post in Round Rock, Arizona, near the dead-center of the Navajo Nation Reservation, had been many things over many years. Over its 120-year history, the trading post offered groceries and prepared food, and served as Round Rock’s post office. It sold traditional Navajo crafts, gasoline, and meat butchered on the reservation, and rented DVDs. There were livestock corrals and a shed for storing hay. Undergirding all this was a credit system that let visitors barter for goods well into the 20th century. These are the some of what Round Rock, in addition to trash service and running water for some, now lacks. Today, the nearest grocery store is 30 miles away, and the nearest gas station is 16 miles.
Round Rock’s trading post was likely the oldest on the reservation owned by Indigenous people, and its long history of Navajo ownership makes it a point of pride. It was established between 1887 and 1890 by Chee Dodge, the first chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council, and Stephen Aldrich. Navajo people would bring blankets, buckskins, and beads, to be traded for cash, sugar, coffee, and calico. The trading post was also a social center and town square. “Some [people] would just go there to visit,” says Alberda McKinley, 50, who’s lived in the Round Rock area her entire life. People would linger at the trading post to talk to each other about their livestock wandering to and from; flowing across the high desert like wind.
In late October, 10 University of New Mexico (UNM) graduate landscape architecture students, led by assistant professor Anthony Fettes, made their first visit to Round Rock. Working in conjunction with the UNM’s Indigenous Design + Planning Institute (iD+Pi), which coordinates community development projects on tribal lands using Indigenous planning methods, the students were examining a broad range of community-development needs for a design studio that started with the trading post as a potential nucleus of basic services.
In 2014, the trading post burned down. It’s now mostly a pile of earthen masonry, bonded by dissolving red clay mortar. Newer sections are made from concrete blocks, likely blackened by ash from illicit campfires. A long chimney stands sentry above charred wood and broken glass, overlooking the Lukachukai Wash, which is contained by a gabion wall and shaded by trees and shrubs. It’s green and moist there; water flows and traces whorls in red clay.
Across the Navajo Nation’s 27,000-square miles in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, there are no large towns. The nation’s largest settlement, Tuba City, Arizona, has a population of 8,000, and Round Rock has only a few hundred residents, widely scattered. People live in small multigenerational family clusters of houses and trailers that trickle along stretches of desert highway, dwarfed by red mesas and vast electric blue skies. Cars, rusted and disassembled by the vast distances between everything, dot the landscape everywhere, in between and amougst these homes. Alongside them are small herds of horses and cows that still graze where they please in the towns of the reservation, munching on grass in front of empty commercial storefronts.
For this first meeting, there were guardrails around the student’s enthusiasm. For example, there was no room for place-making. “You can’t do that in communities like this, because these places are already made. It’s place-knowing,” says Chelsey Begay, a Navajo program specialist with the iDPi.
“A lot of times, when landscape architects come to a meeting, we say ‘This is your site,’” says Fettes. “But what we’re trying to do is dial things back and say, ‘These are the things that we’ve been learning about your community. What are some additional things [you] might be able to share?’” In October, the students were introducing themselves and learning more about this beautiful and sparsely populated corner of northeastern Arizona. The conversations with residents were loose and open-ended. Rather than encouraging students to jump in, Fettes had to hold them back. “Really, this is going to be a catalogue of ideas and strategies that we present as a resource,” Fettes explains.
That goal meant walking into the project with “humility and bravery simultaneously,” says Katya Crawford, the chair of UNM’s landscape architecture school. The key, she says, is gaining trust and being a good listener. “That’s something that is very difficult to put a grade on, but it’s so critical,” she says. “The studio is much more process-oriented over product-oriented, which is also a pushback against capitalism.”
“I think it’s critically important to make sure that the way we are teaching and learning landscape architecture isn’t an extension of colonization,” says Crawford. “At the core if it comes the idea of equity; the idea of acknowledging and embracing diverse cultural perspectives and stories.”
Given the wide diversity of Indigenous cultures across the country and further afield, there’s no singular Indigenous approach to design. But common factors point toward communal, less hierarchical design practices that rely more on the continuity of ancestral knowledge than technocratic expertise. One interpretation of this worldview is an understanding that there are no externalities. Ecologically, this means that, no matter the short-term gain, environmental disruptions must be factored into all landscape interventions. Temporally, there’s the idea of the seven generations model for action and community activism, extolled by Ted Jojola, a Puebloan Native American and the director of the iDPi. This model positions decision-makers as the middle generation preceeded by three generations and followed by three more; urging them to make their choice based on this continuum. “There are lessons to be learned there that are critical in terms of how Western society moves forward in a way that’s much more sustainable,” Jojola says .
“Any community that lives successfully in the same land for seven generations or more has to be able to build a relationship with the environment around them, because that’s what contributes to their notion of sustainability and resilience,”he says. Indigenous people’s understanding of a place and perhaps their entire worldview is derived from direct experience of the landscape, says Jojola. “The way we ascribe meaning to a place is based on walking the land,” he says. “In walking the land, we learn the stories, we learn the language, we learn the relationships. All the things that make us who it is that we are.”
For the educators at UNM, this contact with Indigenous worldviews requires everyone to learn the environmental history of the area and the people who live there. In the Western United States, the Navajo Nation (the largest Indigenous reservation in the country, it cuts across three states and is roughly the size of West Virginia) is only one-fourth the size of their native, pre-contact range. Over a century of forced dispossession and federal actions such as the Livestock Reduction Act in the 1930s left Navajo peoples’ land, culture, and livelihoods diminished and nearly destroyed. After it’s discovery in the 1940s uranium was mined on the reservation until the 1980s. The legacy of the over 500 abandoned mines include cancer rates that doubled in the Navajo Nation from 1970 to 1990, and more recently, a 2019 study that found more than a quarter Navajo women and children had had high levels of uraimum in their urine. In 2017, the EPA reached a $600 million settlement with the Navajo Nation to clean up 94 of the abandoned uranium mines.
These are the underlying realities of living in the Navajo Nation that Fettes and his students must confront. “This studio is really about taking action,” says Fettes. “[It’s] about working with these communities and learning about them, [and] through landscape architecture, [addressing] some of their challenges,” including pollution from abandoned uranium mines, poverty that affects 40 percent of the population, and 30 percent lack running water and electricity.
Kayla Jackson is the hinge between Round Rock and the university. A program specialist at iPDi, she grew up in Round Rock and accompanied the students on their visit and explained its complicated local governance structures. Because all Navajo land is held in trust by the reservation, very few individuals can own land, and instead must lease it for their homes and businesses. Politically, the reservation is divided into five administrative agencies, each of which are subdivided into individual chapter houses that have differing levels of municipal autonomy. She also introduces the students to residents, unpacks Round Rock’s history, and sets expectations. “White people in general, and a lot of academia, come into the community to strip our stories from us and make a profit off of it,” she says. So she’s made it clear to students: “This is not for them to gain. This is for the community to gain.”
Fettes and his students had set up project boards they developed from their research at the Round Rock chapter house, virtually the only public venue for communal interaction in town. The boards focused on climate, geology, hydrology, flora, fauna, agricultural practices, trading post history, and were filled with questions, as were the students. “What does Tse Nakami [Navajo for ‘Round Rock’] mean to you?” “What are the important ceremonies during the year?” “How has the weather changed during the last decade?”
One way the weather has changed has been the diminishing rainfall since the 1970s, one reason the local reservoir, dammed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1937, has run dry, severely restricting the ability to grow crops that are central to Navajo livelihoods and basic sustenance. There were 14,500 farms in the Navajo Nation in 2017, and 69 percent of them had sales of less than $1,000, suggesting that what came out of these fields and pastures didn’t travel much further than the local kitchen tables. Driven by climate change, temperatures have been rising steadily since the 1960s, creating additional strain. Today, the reservoir, choked and clogged by excess sediment in in canals, could be easy to miss, a rocky slope flanked by a culvert and its graffiti-adorned retaining wall.
Bumping along in his small SUV from the reservoir back to the road, one graduate student, Jonathon Cunningham, says his exposure to Navajo culture in the studio uncovered lots of things he “should have been taught but never was,” especially since he’s a New Mexico native. “I feel like mainstream American culture either fetishizes [Indigenous culture] or ignores it completely.” Back at the chapter house, his classmate Thea Swift wants to get a glimpse of how the “land can guide me more,” she says. “I’m interested in how people look at the world, and [consider] land in different ways; how those lenses define who we are and our view of the world.”
For a day and a half, community members trickled in to the chapter house and the students asked them questions. They asked what people might want to see on the trading post site, but mostly they want to know what they remembered about it, what they grow in their gardens, and if any of the plants or crops on their boards are meaningful to them.
Round Rock native Sylvia Benally wanted to see an orchard at the trading post, where she was once postmaster—something to remind her of the peach trees her family grew until there wasn’t enough water. She has other priorities, too. “We really need the trading post because we have to go to Many Farms, or Chinle, or Rock Point, or Lukachukai to get gas or groceries,” she says.
Alberda McKinley would like to see an RV park at the trading post where people could camp, and a café that serves traditional Navajo foods; “Mutton stew, fry bread, everything like that,” she says. Other ideas discussed include a nature and cultural center, and a system of trails with the trading post as their hub.
There are already plans for a new convenience store nearer to the Chapter House than the trading post, and the community’s need for this very basic infrastructure leads to some tension when it collides with the students’ expectations.
“It seems blindingly obvious that when everyone rolls into that room, the first thing they say is: gas station. That’s top of mind,” says Cunningham. “Part of respecting the community means not trying to shoehorn landscape into it. It seems like there’s a risk of talking past each other.”
The gap between the studio’s project and what’s most on residents’ minds can seem insurmountable, even to Kayla Jackson. “I’m trying to balance both of the projects at the same time,” says Jackson. “I don’t have the courage to tell the community, ‘That’s not what we’re going to help you with, we’re not going to focus on that.’ I’m never going to say that because these are my family members.”
How do designers and students make themselves useful in places where the most basic needs are unmet and public services are far from guaranteed?
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Fettes and his students describe the process as giving design vision to community policy and infrastructural needs; a tangible, visual interpretation that people can avocate for. But not without the IDPI. “None of this could have been possible without the support of my Indigenous colleagues,” says Fettes. “I don’t think this project would have been possible without someone like Kayla. You can’t just plow into this and say, ‘This is an idea that’s going to save your community!’” says Fettes.
The students know “this is not about you,” says Fettes, and their designs won’t be, either. “I don’t feel like myself or any other member of my studio could claim the design as ours, because if we’re doing our role here correctly, it’s the community’s design that we’re helping to visualize and put onto a page,” says UNM student Abby Kuchar.
Kayla Jackson puts it more practically: “We’re arming the community,” she says, “to go in and get money.”
What emerged from the studio was eminently presentable to elected officals and civic purse-string holders. The students work was concise insertions of ecological and commercial infrastructure subtly oriented to Navajo culture and place, without many design flourishses. The circular form of a hogan (a Navajo ceremonial structure) and the lean-to-like Chaha’oh (a traditional shade structure made from tree trunks and leafy branches) were an implicit and exlplicit refain, along with the more ubiquitous phytoremediation strategies and birding trail pavilions. By the following spring, the students and Fettes had issued a 56-page report, taking a run at just about every problem and deficiency they’d come across, serving Sylvia Benally with a gas station and a tastefully sited orchard, fed by remediated graywater from the trading post.
Kuchar focused on the trading post building itself, preserving its surving chimney, as an aknowledgment of the importance of the hearth in Navajo culture, and extracting and preserving some of the grafitti on the walls. Jonathan Cunningham’s portion of the plan was a birdwatching nature trail running along Luckachukai Wash, centered on a pavilion with the arcing form of a rainbow and offering vistors to the looped trail sculptural bird blinds along the way. Kristina Bos inserted an arts campus focused on traditional Navajo craft around the trading post; an arts center and silversmithing lab surrounded by islands of landscaped green space.
A bit closer to the students’ disciplinary wheelhouse, Cecily Anderson’s landscape restoration plan for the area between the trading post and the chapter house focused on collaboration, autonomy, and food sovereignty, and included an edible forest with apricots and peaches shielded by a series of windbreaks and boomerang-shaped berms.
Such a plan would likely require improved access to water, and Victorija Kristupaitis’ section of the plan examined how to get more water from Lukachukai Wash into the canals and reservoir. Among other suggestions, Kristupaitis pointed to a dam system in which a barrier holding back water from the wash is propped up by an inflatable rubber bladder. When sediment builds up, the bladder is deflated and the barrier lowers into the water. As water surges forward, it washes out excess sediment.
It fell to Thea Swift to untie the studio’s least glamorous and perhaps most important knot: integrating culturally literate design principles into the a gas station and grocery store. She suggested a Native-owned co-op with a full suite of retail and service offerings: a community store, gas station, laundry mat, and wifi café. The complex is surrounded by peach and juniper trees and a series of Chaha’oh shade structures connected by a circular stepping stone trail. It curves to embrace a parking lot, and from the opaque store and laundry mat, the building dissolves into a series of open-air roof canopies and small vendor market stalls—a combination flexible social and commercial event space. This curve faces and frames views east, providing a look at the Chuska Mountains, and capturing the sun’s first rays, an act that’s considered a harbinger of good fortune in Navajo cosmology.
Fettes and his team of students have presented their research to local elected leaders and others to positive reviews, according to Jackson. They’re still sorting through the best methods of presenting the work to more Round Rock residents. “All of these could have been semester-long projects,” says Fettes. “It did bring about more questions than answers and solutions.” Building the relationships needed to synthesize this work might be the studio’s biggest accomplishment.
For Kayla Jackson “seeing that Western landscape architecture can be supportive in our traditional landscape architecture” has been a poweful lesson. “I have learned that landscape architecture is pliable into our Navajo communities.” Through the studio, the boundaries between Indigenous worldviews and disiplinary practice have began to blur and dissolve. “We as an Indigenous people have been given the opportunity to place landscape architecture into our everyday prayers,” says Jackson. “We Navajos pray to mother earth; we understand our place [in] this life.”