I have always seen design primarily as a form of activism. Design invites us to imagine how our world could be better. How can we create environments that support sustainable ways of providing for our basic needs of food/water/shelter, plus ample space for friendship, play, creativity, connectedness, community, justice and self-determination?

 

Design empowers us to think critically about how we create the social standards, decision-making practices, and economic structures we maintain through our social contracts every day. What have we made, and why? What tools do we need to level-up our game as creators?

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This design-minded orientation, as I see it, translates seamlessly from the external environment to the body, and back again.

 

Much of my work as both an eco-architect and a healing arts practitioner has been themed around human rights, environmental sustainability, and cross-cultural exchange – and in particular, around Indigenous knowledge. I was first introduced to Indigenous culture during two summers spent working in a restaurant in Hawaii while in university. I was touched by the Hawaiians' practical and beautiful ancestral wisdom which seemed to me to be priceless human heritage, contrasted with the trauma these communities have suffered under colonialism and modern capitalism. I've been working, researching, and studying in Indigenous and traditional communities ever since, now for almost 20 years.

 

My architectural thesis research was done in collaboration with the National Cultural Center of Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation, on sustainable tourism development and Indigenous land rights. The project utilized traditional building techniques and ancestral skills to create affordable businesses for families without the need for foreign investment. In 2007, I received a grant from my university to research ethnocidal practices in the built environment in Tibet. I later went to work for an American eco-architect in Nepal. The business was affected by the world financial crisis of 2008, which had a profound influence on my values as a young architect just starting out in the field.

 

In 2010 I attended graduate school to add organizing and facilitation skills to my practice as a designer. I wanted to be able to work with people as co-creators on built environment issues, rather than following the industry standard of treating them as “users” of built landscapes made by others who often don’t have their best interests and/or actual needs at heart. In grad school I studied alternative narratives in international development and the history of colonialism, training design, participatory teaching and learning, social entrepreneurship, community organizing, conflict transformation, and topics in social identity and social justice. I moved into a more collaborative, DIY style of working under my then-design/development firm, CATALiST.

 

In 2011 I interned at the seminal natural building and permaculture NGO Kleiwerks/Ashevillage in Asheville, North Carolina, USA. I completed several trainings in DIY building with natural materials in the US and Thailand. In 2012, I led a year-long project in Nepal called Hariyo Chowk (Green Square). The project was co-built through a series of community natural building workshops and volunteer opportunities, and ran for some years afterwards as a sustainability education and outdoor arts space that touched the lives of hundreds of students, designers and residents of Kathmandu. I've also practiced as a designer in Western urban contexts, completing two interior renovations in New York City in 2013 and 2016 that focused on using ecological and reclaimed materials, and utilized the work of local artists and craftspeople.

 

After getting sick in 2011 I turned to natural, ancestral healing traditions and have been working with many natural healing systems since then. One could say that my illness brought Indigenous practice alive for me. Rather than viewing these cultures from a basically anthropological standpoint as keepers of valuable sustainability principles, the nature-based spiritual teachings embedded in Indigenous worldviews took on a life of their own. I began to feel all of life as sacred and conscious. Perhaps it is as the saying goes, that “there are no atheists in foxholes”… in any case, communication opened up and I haven't looked back.

 

I seek to know what it means to reclaim our own Indigenousness where it has been lost, and I believe that the integration of modern and ancestral knowledge systems is the best chance we have to save this planet and ourselves. This is the focus of my work currently.

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With love,

Meredith