Architect, Chris Cornelius: [Oneida greeting] I said in Oneida that I extend my greetings, love, and thankfulness to all of you. I am Chris Cornelius, citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
What you're looking at is one of three drawings from a project that I’ve created called Radio Free Alcatraz.
I started to dig into the occupation of Alcatraz Island by Indigenous people, which happened from November of 1969 to June of 1971. This was a time when Alcatraz was decommissioned as a prison, so it was basically vacant. The people that occupied the island wanted to create a Indigenous university, Indigenous cultural center, so they wanted architecture.
I thought: What if I just started drawing and the architecture started to come out of that?
The first one I did was Trajectories. I started to think about: What are all the ways I could define trajectories? Here's all the buildings that are on Alcatraz, the ferry traffic that happens, airline traffic that crosses the sky.
I decided if you think of it, you should put it in the drawing because you shouldn’t try to edit whether it's valuable or not. Part of that for me is understanding that Indigenous knowledge also works in that way. We see things like dreams, visions, stories, just as important as facts and data.
I see my work as the future artifacts of our culture, a contemporary reflection of Indigenous values. I'm not trying to make symbols and forms that are reflective of specific things in Indigenous culture. I am trying to take those Indigenous values and make new forms out of them.