Sam Olbekson

Join the conversation with Sam Oldixon, an architect whose designs are as robust in social purpose as they are in beauty. From his roots in South Minneapolis to reservations in northern Minnesota, Sam's journey is more than just a tale of professional success; it's a narrative woven with threads of community upliftment and justice. His role as CEO of Full Circle Indigenous Planning and Design LLC is not merely a title, but a mission statement, underlining his commitment to fostering Indigenous spaces that resonate with cultural pride and resilience.

This episode peels back the layers of architecture to reveal its potent role in the curation of cultural heritage within Indigenous communities. We discuss the balancing act of honoring traditional values through sustainable practices while engaging in the art of modern innovation. Sam imparts his wisdom on how the thoughtful design of communal spaces can serve as heartbeats of cultural activity, pulsing with the life and values of the people they were created for. It's a celebration of spaces that do more than function—they tell stories, preserve legacies, and inspire.

Looking ahead, we tackle the future of Indigenous architecture and the ripple effects of environmental justice in urban planning. With insights gleaned from Sam's time at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, we consider the influence of strategic urban planning in nurturing the relationship between Indigenous communities and their environments. The dialogue branches into mentorship's critical role in shaping future architects and planners, as well as the intriguing potential of artificial intelligence in the design process. Our exchange is enriched with visions of fostering dignity and creating spaces that reflect the vibrant tapestry of Indigenous culture.

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Chapters

• 0:27 Designing for Indigenous Communities
• 16:39 Designing for Cultural Heritage
• 23:18 Indigenous Design and Urban Planning
• 28:29 Inspiring the Next Generation of Architects

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Welcome future construct podcast listeners. Today we have the privilege of delving into the aspiring journey of visionary architect and advocate committed to transforming the lives of Native Americans through innovative and community-centric design. Joining us is Sam Oldixon, the founding principal and CEO of Full Circle Indigenous Planning and Design LLC. With over 25 years of experience in community-oriented projects, sam has dedicated his career to infusing justice and equity into every facet of his design endeavors. A proud alumnus of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's MAUD program, sam attributes much of his ability to foresee the potential effects of his work on communities to his time at GSD. He emphasizes the unique opportunity the program provided him and opportunity to deeply consider the impact of the built environment on people. With this privilege, sam becomes, and believes, a profound responsibility to care for the world, our neighbors and our environment.

Speaker 1: 1:26

From his urban roots to South Minneapolis to living on reservations in northern Minnesota, sam's journey has been marked by a deep understanding of diverse Indigenous experiences. This unique perspective has shaped his approach to design, allowing him to bit bridge the gap between inner-city Indigenous settings and tribal and rural environments. Sam's commitment to community-oriented design has roots in his upbringing, where mentors and teachers instilled in him a sense of value and the importance of giving back Architecture for Sam became the vessel through which he could impact not only individual buildings but entire communities and neighborhoods. Get ready to be inspired as we explore the incredible work and insights of Sam Oldixon, a true advocate for justice, equity and the transformative power of architecture in Indigenous communities. Welcome to our show and thank you for all of your many contributions in the AAC Space, sam yeah well, thank you, it's good to be here To get going.

Speaker 1: 2:21

I'd love to hear a bit about you first, how you first became interested in architecture and what were the metaphorical building blocks that sparked that interest early on.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Yeah, so I grew up in kind of, like you said, a couple different places growing up. I grew up mostly in South Minneapolis but moved back and forth between a couple of different reservations in northern Minnesota and one of the impacts was just seeing the different quality of life in different areas, the urban setting versus the rural, and just being part of kind of the poor urban and rural Indigenous communities. It just kind of made me have a stronger awareness of just my environment, housing and just living in probably not the best places to live in. You're aware of your surroundings and the challenges that that creates and seeing other folks with better opportunities. So that was one of the contexts.

Speaker 2: 3:16

But at the same time I watched the Minneapolis American Indian Center being constructed in the early mid-70s and seeing that built and seeing that I actually had an uncle who was one of the construction workers on the project. So when me and my mom would ride on the bus next to the building under construction she'd always say your uncle is working on that building. So I always thought that my uncle built it but he was one of the trades people on the job and it gave me the just my first experience with the fact that a building is being built and it's in this for our community. And then when it opened, I was there on opening day and it was a big celebration and just watching that site transform from nothing into this beautiful, wonderful community resource with people in. It was probably the first experience I had with architecture and the built environment. I didn't know it at the time because I was pretty young, but I did understand the impact of having something built for our community.

Speaker 1: 4:20

That's amazing. Thank you, yeah, I love that you're. You know you had that sort of real world experience and your uncle working in the trade and seeing you know how many individuals in the trade it takes to build a building and have that impact on the community center as well. Did you end up using the community center?

Speaker 2: 4:43

Oh yeah, it was right in the neighborhood. I grew up sort of all on Bloomington Avenue and Franklin Avenue. For those people who know Minneapolis, you know that's where that Phillips neighborhood is, that's where the Native American community is, and there was at the time the Minneapolis American Indian Center was pretty much the heart of the community, the only institution that had both the services and the recreation, the cultural classes. I remember when I was taking a traditional dance class in the building, but it was always there as a resource and they had a food shelf and I remember standing in line with grandma for commodity cheese and she always wanted to, so that's why she brought me. But yeah, so that that building had, you know, that important impact and just it was right there in the heart of the community and I think that's one of the staying powers of it. We'll talk maybe a little bit later, but we're under a major transformation of it, so I'm being part and architect of that as well, so I have a long history with this building and the community Absolutely incredible.

Speaker 1: 5:50

I'm wondering if you could dive a little bit deeper into what you were saying earlier, where you had the chance of living on multiple reservations and also living in Southern Minnesota, and so you said you saw many different aspects of life, and some of those aspects of life were difficult. What is life on the reservation like?

Speaker 2: 6:09

Well, like on the reservation back there back then was, you know, as a kid it was, you know, going up to see grandma and going up to see family and every once in a while I'd live there. It was sort of a nomadic upbringing, like many Indigenous people in Minnesota and other reservations around the country where we had the city folks and you had the reservation Indians. And I'm a citizen of the White Earth Nation and I lived in Natowash but my grandma lived in a small town called Ball Club on Leech Lake and so going back and forth, living with my grandma, living with my mom, living with my dad, at times I probably moved 30 plus times by the time I graduated high school. So it was really a nomadic lifestyle and anywhere from a small trailer you know that was aging to multifamily housing, to just those different environments and again that the urban Indigenous community here Franklin Avenue.

Speaker 2: 7:11

When I grew up it was a lot of liquor stores and there was a whole lot of maybe not so great things happening there on the reservation those times, and still are there's a lot of poverty, there's a lot of need for help and there's a lot of opportunity for design and I think all of those things sort of just call us in my mind as I grew up and that's what really kind of solidified my interest in the built environment, not necessarily just architecture itself, because I do anything from actual buildings to multiple buildings to whole neighborhoods. I do community design and visioning and graphics and all sorts of things, landscape. So all of these opportunities have impacts that can help shape a community, that can help shape cultural revitalization, ecological restoration, both on and off reservations in the city. There's so many different aspects that design impacts our experience as people.

Speaker 1: 8:14

Yeah, I'd love to dive into that a little bit more, Sam. For example, how do you navigate the balance between different environments of your upbringing into your design work, ensuring that it resonates with the indigenous experience?

Speaker 2: 8:25

Yeah, so on reservations at least with my reservations there are some small towns, there's a lot of rural areas, there's some very small towns In the city. Here we've got a lot of density, so just the context can be very different. So in Minneapolis it's a dense relatively dense urban environment. There's a lot of transportation. We have a new-ish light rail station in our community we're building five, six stories and that's very different than on a reservation where there are most likely individual buildings. Sometimes they're more spread out.

Speaker 2: 9:02

A lot of reservation and urban areas the land base of the indigenous organizations are usually scattered, so it's not like you always have that one core big site to work with. So it's all about understanding what the environment is. Every place, every community has a different context and different environment. I grew up mostly in cold weather climates, so designing for that can be relatively important. I actually have the honor to work with tribes all over the country, so I'm working in places such as Southern California to Louisiana, right now to Alaska, washington State, and so all of them all have different contexts and different cultural stories behind them.

Speaker 2: 9:52

And when I design in my community so I'm Ojibwe Hanashinabe I look to cultural leaders and elders to get guidance on what is appropriate for that. Look at the beauty of our traditional architecture and cultural forms and identity and try to infuse them into design. It's not just about aesthetics, though. It's about how does our culture succeed best? You know, how does our, how do our communities, how are they designed to create the mix of services and amenities and recreation and housing to make it a thriving, healthy community? And so, in those ways, designing both in the city and on reservations can be very similar, because what you're doing is you're thinking about the long-term future, that seven-generational thinking about what are the design impacts we're going to have by our choices and how are they going to support a thriving community. And that again has to do with all of the different aspects that create opportunity for culture and recreation and education and economies.

Speaker 1: 11:05

Fantastic, Sam. This has been so insightful so far. I'm so excited to continue diving into your work, and we talked at a high level of how you approach your projects. I'd love to hear specifically in the last 25 years of community development and work, is there a notable project on your mind that has really helped you transform the community and the neighborhoods?

Speaker 2: 11:25

Yeah, I think two come to mind actually. One is the Minneapolis American Indian Center that's nearing completion, that'll be open May 1st of this year. Another is a urban planning project in Cass Lake, minnesota, so up on one of my reservations. The Minneapolis project is part of an effort that's led by the Native American Community Development Institute called the American Indian Cultural Corridor, and so we've been doing master planning along Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis to understand how design and ownership and construction and building can help really rejuvenate this community Again.

Speaker 2: 12:13

In the 70s and 80s there were not the best type of retail establishments for our community on the sites, but we've been working as a community to really transform the built fabric more housing, more community centers, more services, but also the economic opportunities. And the Minneapolis American Indian Center is at the heart of that. It has long been the heart of our community but it had gotten through many years of just challenges with operating it. It's very expensive to run a building that was designed in the 70s when fuel was cheap and so we didn't have a whole lot of insulation. Over time the skylights were leaking and really the nature of the community also changed because there was a lot of social services in the building. There had been less of the opportunities for culture and for meeting and for economics. So when we started thinking about renovating the facility, we stepped back with the community and we did almost a decade of community engagement, really trying to understand what the community needed. So we were designing to meet those needs and again the community was the biggest voice in all this. We had questionnaires, we had open houses, we had many different outreach opportunities to ask people what this facility needed and what did our community and how we can do that from that. So now in the renovation we have opportunities for co-working space, there is an art gallery, there are programs for elders, there's going to be a teen text center, so there's youth elders, there's health and wellness, there's a gym, there is a workout space, there is a new restaurant that'll be along Franklin Avenue. So it's really a lot of the different needs of our community all embodied in one central location, and so that's going to be again a very transformative project for what we're doing here and it'll support other organizations in the area who can also use the large spaces and the meeting rooms that we've designed.

Speaker 2: 14:33

The other impactful project that I think is going to be important is that project. In Cast Lake there is a superfund site where there were these companies over the decades that essentially polluted Cast Lake. The groundwater is undrinkable right now. The site is unusable. There are areas that are fenced off with razor wire because it's just that unhealthy to be there.

Speaker 2: 14:58

Cast Lake has seen a downturn for a number of different reasons, but I've been involved in the past year and a half working with the community to envision what a healthy future Cast Lake would be. So how do we redevelop, how do we clean up the superfund site? How do we create better connections between housing and new opportunities for economic development to help the citizens not only just find work, find places to not have to drive an hour to get services or whatever they need, but how do we create that central location within a reservation community that acts as a core neighborhood that has all those things together? So I talked about those two projects because architecture again isn't just about a building, but it's about what is the impact of the building and what is the impact of what we do, and that is far more than just simply what it looks like. What does it generate, what does it act as a catalyst for in the community, and how can these things help create future opportunities to develop and build more and create a stable community?

Speaker 1: 16:14

Well, I'm so grateful that the community has you to work with, especially on the Cast Lake project. It sounds like a lot of damage has been done there and I'm grateful that you're helping correct that damage and, as you mentioned, provide a positive impact. And I'm very, very excited for the community building that you've been working on and that'll be opening up in May. That's very exciting. Would love to hear, in your many years of experience and many projects that you've worked on, are there specific design principles or strategies you employ to bring sort of a modern day approach into the preservation of cultural heritage with indigenous communities?

Speaker 2: 16:57

Yeah, I think design and expression is so important. Architecture often gets left out of the discussion. When we think about cultural revitalization. We focus a lot on language, the arts, crafts, other different traditional cultural practices. Architecture often is thought of as something else, so it doesn't really get included. And all that. But we have such a rich history of beautiful design in every community across the country.

Speaker 2: 17:28

All indigenous communities had buildings that responded to the materials, the landscapes, the seasons. All of those were reflected in how buildings were built. How communities built themselves were the different seasonal patterns of life, and so those are great ways to think about, I think, values of our community. If you think about the way our traditional buildings were meant to dissolve into nature once we were done with them, there were no chemicals, there were no it's really hard for modern-day archaeologists to even find many of our communities because they don't understand the importance we placed on not impacting and hurting our environment. So when I think about sustainable design and regenerative design, I always look to indigenous values. So it's not only about the colors, the shapes, the patterns, the symbols of our communities, but it's also about the values, about how we treated each other, how we treated our environment, how we gathered the different practices, what was our reciprocal relationship between the plants and animals and the weather and the seasons. That all impacted not only our built environment but also our culture. So everything was intertwined and in Ojibwe there's no word for architect. There never was. There was no word really specifically for art, because it wasn't this compartmentalized, separated thing, that sort of modern Western practices and to do with them A holistic, indigenous, full circle process of incorporating everything into your daily lives, and that everything was related was so important in every aspect of it, and so that's kind of the foundational thing is to look at the values. The other thing was architecture and design was a community event, so it wasn't just about a single architect sitting there working and drawing up plans and then hiring a contract to build it, but women were the designers and the builders in our communities often, and community built things together, and so it wasn't just about one family. It was about how do we create and design so that our entire community can succeed. So I looked at that as a value.

Speaker 2: 19:55

When I think about aesthetics, we had so many different beautiful aesthetic traditions the beadwork, the painting, the regalia everything is really important. I don't take an attitude where I take those ideas and I abstract them too much in a modern way or I try to reappropriate them. So you're not going to see a whole lot of eagles and feathers and and TBs or arbitrary things and the designs that I do, but you'll see things that evoke the qualities of why those things existed, the importance of cultural identity. You know, beadwork and other traditional art forms were constructed and made, and it all related to the, to the use of the actual materials that we were utilizing at the same time. So when you think about using steel and concrete and drywall and acoustic materials, you can't just simply, you know, reflect those on a one-to-one basis, but you can create spaces for those things to happen. You can create opportunities, for identity happen in many different ways.

Speaker 2: 21:10

One of the important things that all communities want to evoke in building is just that sense of walk welcome, you know, how does this building welcome you?

Speaker 2: 21:19

What is that entry? What is what? Is there a different way of even designing the spaces of a building? Buildings aren't just about like, what does it look like from the outside, but it's also about how do you move through space, what are the types of spaces that are inside? What are those spaces allowed for and those activities and the uses that become so important, and how you actually design a building.

Speaker 2: 21:44

So you know there's many different, overlapping, interrelated factors that impact a design. One of the most important things is that each community gets to design it for themselves. So I don't see myself as the architect coming in to design for a community, but I'm there with a certain skill, set and experience and I can help them get from an idea to either a built community or a built building or built infrastructure piece or a landscape. But I want it to be from their heart and their ideas and their values.

Speaker 2: 22:19

So a long community engagement, relationship building process is really important for every project. To make sure that cultural leaders, that people who may not always even think that they're a designer or wouldn't even be involved in a discussion about a building I try to go and find them and say, hey, this is your building and anything that they say is fair game. And how can we create at least if we can't incorporate every element that every community wants? But how can we evoke and express the goals of the buildings? And again, it comes to the outcome when a building is done and built and that people fill it up with activity. That's the best point in the whole process is once you see it full of life and full of culture and full of activity.

Speaker 1: 23:12

It sounds like you have a really impressive ability to help the community feel seen, and that's very special. I also loved your focus on the link between sustainability and core values. That was a real strong connection that you made for me and I imagine there's so much that our modern building can learn from the values of the native community.

Speaker 2: 23:40

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 23:42

We'd love to dive into your experience at Harvard Graduate School of Design. So I understand that you have a master of architecture and urban design and that helps in your ability to foresee the potential effects of work on communities. What are some of the significant lessons and insights from your time at GSD? For example, that changed your approach to indigenous design and planning.

Speaker 2: 24:07

Yeah. So my undergraduate degree was at Cornell and it was a Bachelor of Architecture and it focused on a lot of different design thinking. It's about really problem solving. Design is really about how do you problem solve and the methods and the means are through buildings and materials, but they're always trying to create opportunities to solve a need, a spatial need, a cultural need, a use need.

Speaker 2: 24:39

When I went back for my graduate degree, I wanted to not just do another architecture degree but expand thinking into broader, regionally based thinking. So architecture is about a building and urban design is about the relationships between those building and a combination of that, but also thinking about how it impacts the landscape, how different city processes, the relationship between developers, public, private partnerships. There's so many things that need to happen to get a building done that I wanted to be at least aware and part of most aspects of it. There's fundraising you have to get things through the city. There is financing. There's so many different things about just setting the context to actually get the buildings and the funds and the site for that. And through my urban design I'm also doing large scale community planning. So a 300 house community with parks and infrastructure and cultural facilities. So thinking on that really regional and broad scale is important.

Speaker 2: 25:53

Many tribes have had the scenario where they've gotten funds at very different times for different projects and they have very limited sites, and so now they have very scattered buildings across the reservation, which perpetuates sort of a suburban model of car dependency. And so what I try to do is think about what is the right relationship of the buildings to each other within the construct of a community's available land, preserving natural features, cultural sites, but trying to create some sort of denser environment so that if you have to drive your car you can go to one place and then walk to the rest of them, that those services are actually in walking distance from your house, so that you're not having to drive everywhere back and forth. So it's that bigger thinking that interested me, that brought me to my graduate degree, but again, it's that relationship between how do you think about anything from an individual room to an entire reservation system, so that everything reinforces a sense of success.

Speaker 1: 27:27

And speaking of the sense of success, I understand that you had a lecture at the Graduate School of Design which focused on culture, community and environmental justice and contemporary indigenous design. Could you share a brief overview and outline of the lecture and how you believe that these elements are crucial in shaping the future of indigenous design?

Speaker 2: 27:47

Yeah, so I get the honor to be asked to speak and be part of different design reviews at a couple different institutions. A while back I did speak at Ferrari, but I came back from the context of not like, this is all my work, here's pretty pictures, some sort of graduate story hat in the back. But it was more about trying to like, inspire people who are there, who may be graduating, understanding that there's different paths than going to try to get out there in architecture to just do a work building or just do something that looks cool or makes money, but that you really can have an impact and that you can have an impact on many different ways. So when I talk about architecture, my experiences, I do talk about a lot of the things that you've asked me about, like how do you even start and what are the reasons why you might become an architect? What are the reasons why a community needs architecture? What are the different interrelated, social, cultural, economic identity aspects that help create that larger purpose and meaning for creating an environment?

Speaker 2: 28:59

And so I often think about the experience of a young child waking up and what is their experience in that day. Did they have a warm bed? Did they have a family structure that greeted them with a smile, were they able to eat? And if they're going to school, what do they see when they first walk outside of their door? Do they see a beautiful community with culture and people walking and also opportunity? And that's the vision that tribal communities have all over the country.

Speaker 2: 29:36

It's, how do we create that type of pride and dignity in our environment? Again, we were detached from even the control of our built environment for so many years because there are so few architects that are native around the country. There's so few people who are in the landscape or engineering that help impact it, in spite of the fact that it plays such an important role in our lives. Every day we're in a building and every day we're going from one building to another. Every person listening here is somehow being impacted by the environment that they're in, and I always like to think about that. We shape as designers. We shape our environment, but really the way to think about it is under the same impact that our environment shapes us and our environment shapes everyone. So what can we create so that that environment inspires that dignity and health and wellness and opportunity for people in our communities now, but especially in future generations?

Speaker 1: 30:46

Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that, Sam. Reflecting on your native upbringing and the mentors who instill this sense of value, how do you mentor and inspire the next generation of indigenous architects and planners?

Speaker 2: 30:58

Mentorship is so important, and I can think of so many examples of people who said one little thing that they didn't even know they said, and it gave me either pride or confidence to do this, and I was lucky enough to have people around me who maybe believe I could do anything I wanted.

Speaker 2: 31:18

So that's part of what I want to give back to others. One effort that I'm working on now, and this is with the other one of two native architects in Minnesota. His name is Mike Labrador at DSGW, and he's spearheading the idea of an indigenous design camp, and so we've been waiting over the past couple months to try to develop and promote a design camp in the Twin Cities here for people who might be interested or who don't know about the field of architecture, design and planning and landscape, so that they can see that there are two people who look like them working in our community that they can do it. There's a lot of different reasons maybe why people don't get into the design professions as native people, but one of the things that me and Mike and other native architects around the country do is we always make sure that we talk to people. We talk to the schools and other people in the communities. We all focus on community engagement in that sense of like yeah, we're designing this together.

Speaker 2: 32:27

So that mentorship, you know that mentorship even that word kind of sounds top down, but it's really being a resource and being, you know, leading by example and just doing it. So just people seeing it, people seeing buildings come up out of nothing, just like I saw when I was four or five years old, and say, wow, that just happened. And here I am, decades later actually doing it. So it's instilling that sense of belief in others and helping them now chart a path to get there, because when I was little there were no native architects that I was aware of. I didn't actually meet an architect until I went to architecture school, and so if I can provide at least opportunities or paths, or even if they're related fields, then that's one way of hopefully impacting, you know, generations of architects that are native to come.

Speaker 1: 33:30

And what advice would you have for those aspiring to follow in your footsteps?

Speaker 2: 33:35

Well, it's, you know, find. Think about the impact, and I'm going to go back to that. One thing that I focus on is think about the impact of creating places where people can succeed, and that can be in any field really, from a built environment, being involved in those discussions about what's important to a community, being involved in the discussions of how do you give that form in life. And you can be involved in this through planning or financing or being a leader in the organization that hires an architect. There's so many different ways you can be part of getting things built and done and doing it from an indigenous perspective, involving people, and it's really about capacity building in a community.

Speaker 2: 34:30

It's a generational thing. There were no native architects. Now there's a couple, next generation, hopefully, there's a handful and hopefully even more as we go on. So it's just really thinking about that. This we're in a continuity of a whole lot of different forces, so I'm just one piece of what a whole lot of people set up for me in my community to make me succeed, and we need to do that and give that back to the people who are going to come after us.

Speaker 1: 34:59

Well speaking of the next generation as a final question of the show and a tradition of future construct, if you could project yourself out 25 years and wanted to have any device or technology that would benefit you personally, what would it be and what would it do?

Speaker 2: 35:12

Yes, it's a great question. I think one of the big questions in the field of architecture is what AI artificial intelligence is going to do, because you can literally Teleprogram, design a building with this many, yeah, units of housing, and its four stories, and it's made out of wood and it'll pop something up. It's it's it's kind of interesting and it's kind of scary and it's kind of it's a big question. And so how's that going to impact the way our communities get built? And so, if the technology is there, I would love for that technology to give power and opportunity for communities to Design for themselves, design their own places, to have that impact on what they do. And so that technology it, if it creates that sense of excitement and opportunity and Ways for people to envision Buildings, communities. I think that's what I look forward to.

Speaker 1: 36:18

Yeah, what a great view lens to view that, that that technology from Well, sam, I've really enjoyed our conversation and I've learned so much from you. Thank you so much for your dedication to see it to the indigenous community and for your years of success and the impact that you've had on the industry.

Speaker 2: 36:35

Yeah well, thank you. That's a good thing to talk about, and Having discussions about future of community is is is so important, and so I'm inviting Everyone to reach out to me or, you know, have this important discussions a community about what's gonna Make a better place for everyone.

Speaker 1: 36:54

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 36:55

Sam Appreciate you Go ahead, just thank you.