Sawhorse Revolution is honored to partner with yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective, a community of inter-tribal Indigenous artists re-matriating 1.5 acres of land in South Seattle, on Coast Salish territories. Our mission is to help improve Indigenous well-being through art-making, community-building, and equitable creative opportunities for personal and professional growth.

This fall kicked off the design session of this project. Students from multiple high schools met weekly in the Rainier Beach neighborhood, walking the wooded land and gathering in the home Yəháw acquired this spring. We spent many weeks discussing how to work as a collective, and understanding principles of design with a critical eye: how has colonization imposed design values that conflict with indigenous values? Our mentors, staff, and students talked about our own heritages, decolonizing architecture, and what the land in the city looked like before colonization. Thanks so much to our awesome mentor team, Ryan Macari, Kimberly Deriana, Saunders Allen, Jasmine McNeil, Haley Havens and Jen Wood for helping cultivate this feeling of community.

Our youth in this program really valued the weekly gathering around a fire pit for dinner and conversation. Students also shared at their end-of-program presentation and celebration that the enjoyed exploring the woods and walking through the stream as they conducted their official “site visit” to understand the environment in which their structure would reside.

The group explored our shared “taste” by sorting through and collecting inspiration from architectural works and natural scenes. This program also iterated design many times through modeling, creating a three-dimensional representation of their imagined space.

Students presented their final design at the last program. Our design uses light to model the flow of water through space, honoring the relationship between people, land, and water. The use of a skylight in the “food sovereignty shed” will maximize the presence of natural light and storage area, and our students emphasized that the skylight would allow those within the shed to see the flow of water as it beaded and dripped down the glass.

We’ll reconvene this spring to begin building the shed — in the meantime, please follow along and support Yəháw !