The Garinagu/Garifuna are an Afro-Indigenous community, residing along the east coast of Central America. Amidst a growing diaspora, the community has proactively taken measures to preserve and retain their traditional practices rooted in Indigenous, African, and European influences. This research contributes to this ongoing movement by documenting their artistic traditions and relating them to identity and historical exchanges with other Indigenous and European communities. Through Wanaragua/Jankunú (a performance that usually takes place during the Winter holidays), it becomes evident that colonial hostility in addition to African and Indigenous roots plays an integral part in the Garinagu’s artistic expression, making a perspective that incorporates hybridity and creolization paramount. To answer these questions, I will firstly record their practices by conducting a narrative literature review, which includes looking at academic literature, museum catalogs, and ethnographic sources about Garifuna traditions and intercultural connections. Secondly, to understand materiality and making techniques I will document and analyze a selected group of Garifuna-related objects held in museum or community collections. Visual analysis and scientific investigations (e.g., microscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, infrared absorption spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy) will then be utilized to investigate materials like fibers, animal skin, natural resins, and pigments. Through interdisciplinary approaches, this research safeguards traditional craftsmanship and heritage whilst highlighting hybridity.

Contemporary architecture faces a growing pressure to respond to the socioecological crises with regard to the consequences of design that so often accept environmental systems as separate from the living. In contrast, many indigenous systems, often referred to as traditional knowledge, comprehend cumulative, place-based bodies of knowledge that are developed through extended histories of interaction with specific environments. In this context, traditional knowledge encompasses resource use practices, territorial memory, spirituality, and an emphasis on a relational worldview. It is characterized in such a framework that different layers of existence, such as humans, animals, plants, water, climate, and materials, are understood as shared participants. This separation has led to spatial forms and the creation of built environments that fail to support community life. Such models treat land as sites, materials as unlimited, and climate as an external force. This research investigates how indigenous understandings of place as relational can inform a more responsive and context-based architectural practice. Drawing from traditional knowledge literature, indigenous writings, and case studies, this research suggests that principles of relation, such as reciprocity and listening, can help frame better questions and design decisions about housing, climate adaptation, and cultural development. While provided with an extensive number of research subjects on traditional knowledge as a complex system of ecological interpretation, the architecture field has yet to fully explore how these principles might inform contemporary design practices.

Decolonization is a term often used to present a simple shift from colonial thinking, heavily maintaining the establishment of colonial systems today. However, this usage oversimplifies and overshadows the word’s key purpose. Common proclamations of the term forgo the fundamental indigenous essence behind the word. Doing so, we not only strip the word of its inherent power, but obstruct further possibilities for actual decolonization to appear in our world. Many argue that the U.S. legal system, a product of colonial factors, has reached an alarming state. Our current legal, political atmosphere gears not towards justice or morality, but fascism and oligarchy. The colonial make-up of our legal system seemingly fails to effectively and actively combat these unwanted outcomes. With a truly native-derived mindset of decoloniality, we can form solutions within our legal structure that benefits more than just a select few. These solutions repair the damage of our current legal system, rightfully acknowledge the importance of native forms of society, and incorporate the philosophies of indigenous peoples into daily practice. This research advocates for incorporation of decolonial philosophies in our legal system. First, we define what exactly is “Decolonization.”Then, we examine existing California water legislation and legal precedent to discover key missteps and what can be improved. The project culminates in a revised version of certain laws and guidelines on how future legislation should be created. In whole, we aim to argue the material importance of indigenous ideologies and recognition of indigenous offerings as useful in contemporary ordinances.

Embodiment, as a place of negotiation between matters of the self and the way one’s lived experience manifests into a body of writing, has been an increasingly relevant lens within Latinx poetics. Poetic forms often push poets to search beyond the limitations of language and convention. In Chicago, a printing paradigm emerges. Contemporary poetry collections like Sandra Cisneros' Loose Woman or José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal elaborate on tensions of the present-day Latinx identity–all complicated by the form of the poem and accessibility of the experience. On the other hand, the noncommercial form of the zine allows for a body of work that exists outside of the literary canon. Importantly, these bodies of work function in concert with working class efforts to inform, connect people to movements, and unabashedly share their whole selves without the barriers or censorship that prelude publishing on a larger scale. Despite this compelling dichotomy, little research has been done to interrogate the importance of accessible poetry and expression to Mexican American communities in the Midwest. To this end, does noncommercial poetry allow us to fight against these long-standing barriers in literary and artistic accessibility? What is lost in the commercialization of poetry? In this paper, I seek to analyze the effectiveness of economic printing forms Mexican American poets in Chicago engage to connect with their embodied realities and how they differ from commercial poetry projects. Further contextualizing the significance of DIY publications may provide crucial insight into the current social, geographic circumstances of Mexican American Midwesterners.