The Wind River Indian Reservation in west-central Wyoming is nestled in the Wind River Basin and surrounded by the Wind River, Owl Creek, and Absaroka mountains. At roughly 2.2 million acres, the reservation is the 7th largest by land area in the United States, and 5th largest by population. The reservation is shared by the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, though it is the ancestral home to Eastern Shoshone tribal members going back at least 12,000 years.
In the early years of European colonization, the Eastern Shoshone were among the first tribes in the area to trade with Spain and acquire horses, which continue to hold a strong resonance with tribal members today. The land offered fertile hunting grounds for buffalo and mountain sheep and became contested land in the 1800s when other tribes – including the Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho – encroached as they were pushed off their own homelands by the U.S. government and white settlers heading west. Fighting over control of the Wind River Basin was frequent between these tribes and the Eastern Shoshone during the 1860s and 1870s. Chief Washakie’s leadership and allied relationship with the U.S. government led to the local military fort being renamed in his honor in 1878; the military post remained active until 1909, by which time it had become a central place for the tribe.
Headquartered today in Fort Washakie, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe has contemplated a cultural center and archives facility for more than 40 years. The CIRD local design workshop held in May 2024 built on early concepts which became more intentional in 2006, with a study commissioned by the Eastern Shoshone General Council. The 2006 study, led by Dr. Ren Freeman, generated strong support in the community for creating a unified space that could house Eastern Shoshone treasures and tell the tribe’s story on their own terms. The CIRD workshop brought together programming needs for a public museum, tribal gathering space, archival and artifact storage facilities, and office, research, and meeting spaces, all housed under one roof and infused with tribally significant themes and ideas.
Site Visit: CIRD workshop activities kicked off almost a year before the official workshop took place, with a site visit to Fort Washakie in June 2023. CIRD team members Omar Hakeem (To Be Done Studio) and Hillary Presecan (Housing Assistance Council) met with project lead and tribal archivist Alejandra Robinson and other tribal leaders, including tribal co-chair John Washakie and cultural center leaders Zeedora Enos and Robyn Rofkar, to understand more about the Shoshone community, project requirements and visit several potential sites for the project.
Site selection was a major point of discussion throughout the workshop engagement process. The benefits and drawbacks of the potential locations considered tribal significance, alignment with economic development and local business interests, site control, and access to necessary utilities such as water, sewer, and electricity. The Eastern Shoshone team have continued to explore potential sites and gather community input in the months between the site visit and the workshop, and after the workshop as well.
Virtual Engagement: Virtual meetings became a critical part of project development as the team expanded to include members of MASS Design Group’s Sustainable Native Communities team - contributing their strong experience with tribal projects – and input from archive and museum planning experts, including archivist Ryan Flahive from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Through bi-weekly meetings and smaller group gatherings with tribal stakeholders, the team generated a thorough list of programming requirements as well as more refined considerations for site selection. The thoughtful documentation of the building requirements in particular allowed the workshop to go deeper into potential floor plans and space planning.
CIRD Local Design Workshop – May 7-9, 2024: The workshop kicked off on Tuesday, May 7, with a blessing by John Washakie and an ambitious agenda for brainstorming and meeting with community members. Throughout the day, small groups of business owners, tribal leaders, culture bearers, elders, and young people were invited to share their ideas about project priorities, tribally-significant themes and concepts, and hopes and dreams for the future cultural center and its surrounding landscape. The day wrapped up with a well-attended open house which opened with a cedaring ceremony provided by Shoshone elder Arlen Shoyo and songs from the local drum group. Attendees had a chance to expand on the thoughts and ideas expressed during the day and respond to the themes that began to emerge.
The resource team included architects Mayra Udvardi and Joseph Kunkel from MASS Design Group and archivist Ryan Flahive. These experts worked closely with the CIRD team members - Omar Hakeem, Candace Maloney-Franklin, Caitlin Mackenzie, and Brandon Robles from TBD Studio; Hillary Presecan and Louie Sheridan from the Housing Assistance Council, and Courtney Spearman and Maya Hering from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Eastern Shoshone staff included Alejandra Robinson and Sierra Coando from the archives; Zeedora Enos and Robyn Rofkar from the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center; Lynette St. Clair, Eastern Shoshone linguist and culture preservationist; Curtis Barney, Shoshone Elder; Josh Mann, Eastern Shoshone Tribal Historic Preservation Office Director; Dr. Ren Freeman, anthropologist; and Liz Kinne, founder of Grant Pro Group.
Day 2 of the workshop was a working day. While the architecture team dug deep into the themes and ideas shared during the previous day, the archives team visited the various locations where records and artifacts are stored and met with different tribal offices responsible for those materials. With several sites still under consideration, the group coalesced around a clear mission statement and two distinct concepts for the building and surrounding landscape – the building as Medicine (symbolized by the culturally significant Shoshone rose) and the building as Connector (represented by abstractions of the local landscape – valley and mountains).
The goal of this project is to…
Preserve, share, and pass on the language, culture, ancestral knowledge, and Tribal history of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe through community gathering, storytelling, and Tribal sovereignty; and to impact public understanding and economic development through cultural tourism.
The workshop culminated on Day 3 with a community presentation that summarized the goals and intentions of the project, reflected back the rich input that community members had shared, analyzed the pros and cons of the potential sites and offered a path to site selection, and presented design concepts aligned with the two selected themes. The presentation also included more concrete diagrams of potential room configurations for the archival and research spaces. Attendees, including tribal leadership and a variety of other stakeholders from across the reservation, responded to the presentation with questions, further ideas, and overall enthusiasm and excitement to see the project coming to life.
The workshop was a great success in terms of gathering thoughtful and wide-ranging input from community members for the project. People offered their ideas for how the building could be used, but more importantly came together to share their values and memories from across generations. These shared threads, in some cases going back to stories from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, will inform the character of a building and landscape that celebrates Eastern Shoshone traditions, preserves their heritage, and tells their stories in their own words.
The two prominent design themes that emerged, Building as Medicine and Building as Connector, anchor the cultural center design in important values as shared by tribal members.
Following the workshop, the CIRD resource team continued to develop the design concepts and completed a Design Book with more detailed drawings and additional resources for future project development. Meanwhile, the Eastern Shoshone tribe has further refined plans for selecting a site, continuing to engage community members and stakeholders in making the best choice for the cultural center’s location and configuration. With support from an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, they will be able to further develop the design concepts, getting closer to implementing this long-sought anchor for their community. With designs on their way, the tribe will create a website for the project begin a capital campaign to support the project’s future implementation.
You can learn more about the Fort Washakie local design workshop from “Many Ways to Tell a Story” and from the Design Book.
