Indigenous Planning: From Forced Assimilation to Self-determination

Abstract

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.

The relational shift in urban ecology: From place and structures to multiple modes of coproduction for positive urban futures

“…McGrath et al ( 2023 ) include indigenous perspectives and needs in design in integrating village-level design with watershed management, agriculture, and cultural processes in the rapidly changing Chiang Mai region of Thailand. Calls for incorporating indigenous perspectives in urban design are growing apace (Hibbard 2022 ).…”

What might decoloniality look like in praxis?

“…Such texts disrupt forgone conclusions about the urban, the rural, land, and planning by resisting dominant onto-epistemologies and axiologies in ways that are foreign to mainstream planning praxes (Winkler, 2018). Above all else, resistant texts are found in ‘indigenous planning [that is] distinct from the colonial apparatus; and [that has been] practiced since time immemorial’ (Matunga, 2013: 3; see also Barry and Agyeman, 2020; Barry and Thompson-Fawcett, 2020; Hibbard, 2021; Jojola, 2008; Patrick, 2017; Porter and Barry, 2015; 2016; Prusak et al, 2016; Walker et al, 2013). To be sure, indigenous planning incorporates an altogether different ontological and ethical understandings of land, attachments to land, ancestral values, and nonhuman actants.…”

“What do we want and how do we get there”: A comparative content analysis of First Nations Comprehensive Community Plans in British Columbia

“…Indigenous community planning is not new. The literature on Indigenous planning and its resurgence notes that there is a long tradition of community planning among diverse Indigenous nations and that this tradition has been disrupted and undermined by colonialism (Booth & Muir, 2011; Hibbard, 2022; Hibbard, Lane, & Rasmussen, 2008; Lane & Hibbard, 2005; Prusak, Walker, & Innes, 2015; Van Assche, Birchall, & Gruezmacher, 2022). It is important to understand First Nations CCPs as one tool within Indian Act governance that has been conceived in part as an answer to the constraints inherent to the legislation.…”