Humility, Honor, Remembrance, and Reverence: Collaboration Principles between Indigenous Environmental Nonprofits and Environmental Design Colleges

Abstract

This study asks which values hold significance for Indigenous environmental nonprofits in their collaborations with U.S. environmental design colleges in the fields of landscape architecture, architecture, and planning. To identify organizations, the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File (EO BMF), a complete listing of U.S. nonprofits, was filtered to show environmentally focused organizations. Using keyword searches within this filtered database and using grant-giving organizations’ lists of Indigenous nonprofits and online queries, this study identified 303 U.S. Indigenous-led environmental nonprofits. Organizations were categorized by service area: Environmental Management, Cultural Education, Advocacy, or Traditional Indigenous Agriculture. Stratified sampling was used to select 101 nonprofits based on service area. Content analysis via NVivo was used to code one-sentence value-based phrases on nonprofits’ online profiles. Two interviews with Covenant Pathways, a nonprofit with whom the author works, were also coded. Nonprofits expressed the values of humility, Indigenous identity, historical heritage, environmental ethics, confronting societal issues, and sovereignty. These results produce four recommendations for universities collaborating with Indigenous environmental organizations: (1) Embrace Indigenous Humility, (2) Honor Indigenous Identity, (3) Remember Indigenous History, and (4) Revere Nature. In case studies, sovereignty is discussed in a shared context with humility and confronting societal issues. Twelve case studies exemplify universities honoring these Indigenous values in studio work, service learning, and master’s thesis collaborations. For example, partnering faculty required students to design within preexisting community masterplans, prohibited placemaking, and guided student researchers to design research methods with Indigenous partners. This article concludes with a set of faculty guidelines for creating courses that collaboratively partner with Indigenous organizations.