Informed by research that connects transitional issues with assimilation, this practicum project focuses on how culturally-relevant education and service-based interior environments support the transition of urban Indigenous peoples. Eagle Urban Transition Centre (EUTC) in Winnipeg is studied as the client, providing specific examples of Indigenous service and educational frameworks employed to mitigate transitional issues. Spatial criteria for the adaptive reuse of 601 Aikins Street on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, were developed through a photo-elicitation interview process, and a theoretical framework that connected urban Indigenous identity, Indigenous education, transition and resistance with interior environments. Representing and recognizing the diverse Indigenous cultures of the users of EUTC in the design required a formal analysis of examples of Indigenous cultural production, such as the eight-pointed star blanket and Métis beadwork, as well as precedents of Indigenous spaces. The interior design for EUTC supports their organization, facilitating transition and creating opportunities for resistance through spaces that respect and emphasize cultural (re)connection. / October 2015

The present study comparatively examined the socio-political and economic transformation of the indigenous Sámi in Sweden and the Indian American in the United States of America occurring first as a consequence of colonization and later as a product of interaction with the modern territorial and industrial state, from approximately 1500 to 1900. The first colonial encounters of the Europeans with these autochthonous populations ultimately created an imagery of the exotic Other and of the noble savage. Despite these disparaging representations, the cross-cultural settings in which these interactions took place also produced the hybrid communities and syncretic life that allowed levels of cultural accommodation, autonomous space, and indigenous agency to emerge. By the nineteenth century, however, the modern territorial and industrial state rearranges the dynamics and reaches of power across a redefined territorial sovereign space, consequently, remapping belongingness and identity. In this context, the status of indigenous peoples, as in the case of Sámi and of Indian Americans, began to change at par with industrialization and with modernity. At this point in time, indigenous populations became a hindrance to be dealt with the legal re-codification of Indigenousness into a vacuumed limbo of disenfranchisement. It is, thus, the modern territorial and industrial state that re-creates the exotic into an indigenous Other. The present research showed how the initial interaction between indigenous and Europeans changed with the emergence of the modern state, demonstrating that the nineteenth century, with its fundamental impulses of industrialism and modernity, not only excluded and marginalized indigenous populations because they were considered unfit to join modern society, it also re-conceptualized indigenous identity into a constructed authenticity.