Welcome

The Indigenous Planning Division is a professional organization that advocates for a community development approach that is based upon an indigenous planning paradigm. Indigenous planning is predicated on land-tenure principles and using the distinctive worldviews of indigenous peoples to inform community development.

Although it could be argued that an Indigenous Planning paradigm is a "new" concept, its principles are actually a validation or reformulation of practices that have been used by "traditional" communities for millennia. Long before the impacts of Westernization, indigenous societies actively planned their communities. They regulated their settlements through land-tenure and evolved unique worldviews that served to define their relationships to the physical and spiritual world.

U.S. federally recognized American Indian tribes, Native Alaskans, and Native Hawaiians are among the most visible indigenous communities. They are not alone though. The history of Westernization is replete with examples of traditional land-based communities that have faced being overtaken and subsumed by outside forces. The history of such engagements has resulted in an enormous, complex body of legislation and laws that govern their interrelations both within and outside of their lands.

Euro-Western approaches to planning were used with the earliest attempts at tribal comprehensive planning. Beginning in the late '60s, the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), enabled 701 Comprehensive Planning on American Indian reservations. It was often a frustrating and counterproductive ordeal. In order to implement the effort, a quasi-federal organization of tribal planners, called the United Indian Planners Association (UIPA), was created. When the 701 comprehensive program was axed, the UIPA eventually dissolved. Since then, there has been no organization to network planners working in indigenous communities.

The IP Division was established, first and foremost, to fill this void. Aside of basic communication needs, however, we are a proactive body whose efforts are engaged in practices that do not necessarily subscribe to the assumption that all mainstream land-use planning practices can be uniformly applied or are beneficial to indigenous communities. Rather, we are committed to a community development process that must be informed by the special legal and cultural framework necessary for implementing meaningful social, economic and political change.

Our long-term agenda, as such, is necessarily an ambitious one. Among the stated goals are to:

• provide a forum for exchanging issues and approaches to community development that entail the complex interplay of public policy and tribal sovereignty;

• provide a professional forum to share and showcase the efforts of indigenous communities that use cultural practices and approaches to planning;

• identify and link planners of tribal nations and indigenous communities with one another utilizing newsletters, the internet and conferencing;

• develop a professional support network that can assist in establishing contacts between planners, tribal planners and indigenous planning practitioners;

• develop a resource manual (i.e. the Indigenous Planners Toolbox) for use by tribal and indigenous groups to advance their approaches to community development using their inherent social, economic and political principles;

• develop a basic curriculum in indigenous planning that can eventually result in a certificate program; and

• develop a network that can help facilitate the development and exchange of indigenous planning internships for students interested in learning or applying this approach.

I welcome all new- and old-comers to this collective effort.

Ted Jojola
Regents' Professor
University of New Mexico
Chair, Indigenous Planning Division