American Indian and Alaska Native households face heightened housing insecurity across the United States. Respective HUD housing projects remain largely prescriptive, favoring standardized, cost-driven solutions that ignore cultural practices, environmental conditions, and Indigenous ways of life. These frameworks often impose rigid designs and ownership structures that undermine community governance and limit self-determination. Along the Nushagak proposes a decolonized design approach grounded in traditional knowledge, environmental responsiveness, and collective stewardship. It examines the cultural, economic, and political forces shaping housing in both rural Alaska Native villages and urban Indigenous communities, where restrictive Western policies persist. The project reimagines housing not as static shelter, but as a living system that supports cultural continuity, shared gathering, ecological care, and long-term community control. By integrating ancestral practices with contemporary technologies through tribal land trusts, indigenous cooperative practices, local fabrication, and circular material strategies, it envisions resilient housing futures defined, built, and sustained by Indigenous communities.
