Season 2: Episode 4 – Sadie Red Wing

It took just a hundred years time to devastate thousands of years of knowledge and culture when colonizers stole North America from the indigenous peoples. To this day, much of the Western world ignores their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which holds many solutions to our climate crisis. What if agribusinesses healed the soil, instead of depleting it? What if designers knew how to make their own inks from plants, papers from grasses, and other objects without damaging the planet? What if what we made with Gaia’s gifts regenerated her like the Buffalo does the soil? Lakota designer Sadie Red Wing explains more about all of this and more in this episode of Climify.

Sadie Red Wing is a Lakota graphic designer and advocates from the Spirit Lake Nation of Fort Totten, North Dakota. Red Wing earned her BFA in New Media Arts and Interactive Design at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She received her Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University. Her research on cultural revitalization through design tools and strategies created a new demand for tribal competence in graphic design research. Red Wing urges Native American graphic designers to express visual sovereignty in their design work, as well as, encourages academia to include an indigenous perspective in the design curriculum. Currently, Red Wing serves as an Assistant Professor at OCAD University (Toronto, ONT).

sadieredwing.com

Theme music by Casual Motive

At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.

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