Tribal Futures 2.0: Indigenous Design, Knowledge, and Identity in Conversation

Park Street, MT, August 23, 2025 --(PR.com)-- On World Indigenous Day, the ninth day of Tribal Futures Fest 2.0, four Indigenous creatives from different parts of the world came together for a candid and deeply personal discussion on design, sovereignty, and cultural preservation. Hosted by Angrah, the session moved beyond aesthetics to ask difficult questions about who owns Indigenous knowledge and how it can be protected in a rapidly changing world.

The panel featured Frida Larios from El Salvador, known for reimagining Mayan hieroglyphics; Desna Whaanga-Schollum from New Zealand, an artist and activist who inscribes ancestral narratives into cultural landscapes; Rita Hungla Ghatphoh from Meghalaya, India, founder of Dakti Craft, a social enterprise reviving traditional crafts through ethical design; and Sudhir John Horo from Jharkhand, India, a designer and cultural practitioner deeply engaged with land-based knowledge systems.

The conversation opened with a welcome by Dr. Anugrah Pandi of the Lepcha Tribe, a member of the Tribal Design Forum. Before the discussion began, the audience watched the music video of “Kung Kung Go” by Sofiyum, a celebration of the interwoven relationship between humans, birds, insects, and animals. Two other screenings added depth to the cultural tapestry of the evening: Rukom Ka Ri – The Many Lives of Land, a song by Rida exploring the layered connections between people and their environment, and Ngāaho – Designing Māori Futures, a work that envisions Indigenous pathways for future design grounded in ancestral values.

Teaching Indigenous Design: Between Preservation and Appropriation
The question of whether academic institutions can truly teach Indigenous design sparked an animated exchange. Frida spoke with both irony and frustration about universities attempting to embrace Indigenous design while still operating within colonial structures. Drawing from her teaching experience in the United States, she described the stark contrast between a Black-led university, where Black narratives shaped the curriculum, and predominantly white institutions, where her efforts felt like a drop in the ocean. Many universities, she noted, have yet to establish an Indigenous design department.

Desna Whaanga-Schollum spoke from a different but equally critical perspective. Her design practice is rooted in the land and in the teachings passed down from her mother, a writer who taught herself to paint and illustrate children’s books when she could not find a Māori illustrator. Initially rejected by publishers, her mother self-published and sold books in a community meeting house, eventually attracting a major children’s publisher. For Desna, this story is not about resilience alone but about how place, language, and relationships are inseparable from design.

She argued that Indigenous knowledge is not an abstract subject for a classroom but a lived experience — a knowing, doing, and being that is inseparable from the responsibilities to people and place. When separated from its origins and turned into academic content, it ceases to be Indigenous. She warned against institutions that extract the aesthetics of Indigenous culture while ignoring the responsibilities that come with that knowledge.

Rida, speaking from her experience teaching at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, shared the limitations she felt within a conventional classroom. She questioned whether it is possible to teach knowledge tied to a specific land and language in a generalized urban academic environment. With India’s immense diversity of Indigenous communities, she asked, how could a single framework serve them all? She reminded the audience that Indigenous communities have always practiced design and design thinking through their own adaptive systems, shaped by landscapes and ecologies.

Land, Language, and Authentic Learning
For Sudhir John Horo, the meaning of “Indigenous” itself is tied to land and people. He challenged the idea that one can authentically learn something rooted in a specific ecology far from its source. Using the monsoon as an example, he asked how students could truly understand and design with it unless they experienced it where it belongs. For him, Indigenous knowledge is not learned from theory but through immersion, practice, and community participation.

Owning the Narrative
Closing the session, Anugrah offered a summary that centered on self-worth and ownership. Indigenous people, she said, do not need others to celebrate them because they celebrate themselves every day. She warned that institutions often act as gatekeepers of Indigenous knowledge, yet such knowledge belongs to the community, not to the individual holding it.

She celebrated the presence of women speakers and likened Indigenous knowledge to a web where everything is interconnected, with each individual a designer in their own right. Her final call was for living the Indigenous way every day, taking pride in identity, and ensuring that future generations inherit not just skills but the values that sustain them.

A Conversation that Extends Beyond the Festival
The panel did more than highlight the challenges of preserving Indigenous design in the face of institutionalization. It offered a shared vision of design as a living practice inseparable from land, language, and community. The discussion also served as a warning: as global interest in Indigenous aesthetics grows, so does the risk of detachment from the responsibilities and relationships that give them meaning.

In the words shared that day, one truth resonated across continents — Indigenous design is not something to be taught in isolation. It is lived, it is practiced, and it is owned by those who carry it forward in everyday life.