For the first time in its history, Harvard Graduate School of Design (HGSD) has four Native American students enrolled.
Design and architecture schools across the country have historically had few Native students, with no more than a handful at a particular school at any given time. And out of over 90,000 working architects in this country, only a small percentage are Native American, notes GSD student Elsa Hoover. (A 2015 American Institute of Architects diversity report listed American Indian or Alaska native at 1 percent, based on survey responses.)
Elsa Hoover, Zoë Toledo, Heidi Brandow, and Jaz Bonnin are the four at Harvard, and together they have formed the Harvard Indigenous Design Collective to promote design by and for Indigenous communities, which is foundational to the history, theory, and practice of design fields on Native homelands.