Learning From Indigenous Technology
Julia Watson's growing body of research traces the infrastructural, architectural, and domestic designs that have worked for millennia.
By Anthony Paletta
Western architecture is adept at building “hard” solutions to managing nature. Concrete and other impermeable materials rigorously wall off the natural ebb and flow of nature–both destroying ecosystems and often ensuring that these variations will become all the more intense somewhere else. But there are more nimble solutions around the world, used for centuries if not millennia; and often, at least in the West, they have been largely overlooked. Julia Watson, a researcher and architect, first glimpsed these possibilities early in her career when she was exposed to Indigenous design mechanisms at the University of Queensland, then on visits to Borneo and Bali. Since then, she has embarked on a mission to document and amplify these undersung traditional practices—ones that work with nature, rather than against it.
Her body of work exists under the umbrella of what she calls “Lo—TEK”—“Lo” standing for “local,” and “TEK” for “Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” The term itself is subversive, undercutting the fiction that Indigenous solutions exist on a primitive pole opposite Western “high-tech” ones. In 2019, she published Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, an engrossing survey of Indigenous technologies for land management—from rice terraces in the Philippines to underground aqueducts in Iran. Each case study is presented with local collaborators. As she writes, “While ‘modern’ societies were trying to conquer Nature in the name of progress, these Indigenous cultures were working with it.”
Her work has continued with the co-founding of the Lo—TEK Institute (with Melissa Hunter Gurney) in 2024, which has since undertaken research, curricular, and design work in collaboration with Indigenous experts. Last year, she published a second book, Lo—TEK Water: A Field Guide for TEKnology, taking a focus on water-management systems around the world—from fish weirs in Cameroon to salt pans in Goa, India. These systems, refined over thousands of years, offer testament to the merits of treating water not as a foe but as a collaborator. “When it rises onto the land,” writes Watson, “it does not come to ruin but to remind us that we’re distracted from our role as its custodians.” On the heels of her latest announcement—the launch of the Lo—TEK Office for Intercultural Urbanism, which adds applied practice to her three-legged stool with education and research—we caught up about how Indigenous knowledge is translated, protected, and put into practice today.
Tell me about your journey to Lo—TEK, as practice, research, and a publishing project. What made this work feel necessary?
Through the cultural heritage and conservation work I was doing in my practice with Indigenous communities in Bali and Iraq. I was repeatedly seeing complex, culturally grounded, place-based systems that hadn’t been documented in the design field and sometimes even in the sciences—the tectonics that created sacred landscapes protecting soil, food, water security, synchronous seasonal cycles, and Indigenous cultural systems. I realized that there could be a landscape urbanism where we don’t look objectively at everything as a resource, and we start to understand the environment relationally, with a broader understanding of human connectivity to nature.
Lo—TEK took my work on the ground with communities and carved out a framework that reflected how communities have been creating very sophisticated infrastructural systems—for 6,500 years, in the case of the Ma’dan of Iraq. And those infrastructures have remained unrecognized in academia and within the architectural profession.
I’m assuming that whenever they do receive academic attention—and if I’m mischaracterizing, please let me know—that they’re being examined anthropologically and not technically?
Yeah, I would say that asking, “Is it anthropological?” or, “Is it technical?” is a very Western framework. In Western scientific rationalism, you’re taught that spirituality and science are separate from scientific inquiry. I’m asking, “Can we move out of these tropes?” I’m looking at localized infrastructural systems, Indigenous sciences, and material cultural studies. If you survey Indigenous technologies around the globe, you’ll see that there are ways that communities are arriving at similar, sophisticated solutions to extremes within their climate, without having contacted each other.
I’m fascinated by the examples you give of communities drawing upon traditional methods—by incorporating contemporary technology such as 3D printing or electronic sensors, or working to use invasive species, such as hyacinth in Bangladesh or mangrove on Moloka’i?
I think this is the future of design, and it flies in the face of the misconception that these are technologies of the past. If something has had a continued life cycle for thousands of years, adaptation is a continuous ongoing process. An Indigenous community is living in response to real-time changes in their environments. It’s not like downloading a software update on your computer. Indigenous communities believe in cyclical time. The fact that they’re now incorporating non-Indigenous practices and materials and construction methods is just a renewed cycle that gets us into that next cycle of regeneration.
You bring up many examples of immensely sophisticated systems whose complexity, until now, has not been framed in ways familiar to a Western audience. You’ve featured all sorts of charts and drawings explaining these systems. Is there a block to overcome when these things are codified in this way?
I was talking to a tribal leader recently, who explained to me that I have the ability to translate our deep traditional ecological knowledge into a framework of language that Western people get.
I think it was foundational training—plus deep engagement over a very long time. I have no right to speak about spirituality in an Indigenous sense, but when you speak about it in terms of socioecological systems, it suddenly unfolds. And so maybe I was able to transmit that understanding through language and illustration that felt more accessible. I think Western education is not driven by place-based, observational, culturally grounded research, though I think landscape architecture and the design profession are in a unique space of agency to bridge them.
Among those examples in your books, were there any that felt like big finds?
I would say the living root bridges of the Khasi people in Meghalaya, India. There, humans have long understood how to create infrastructure by growing a ficus tree and training its tiny, hanging roots over a river. [It eventually] plants on the opposite bank, creating a bridge condition that grows stronger with age. That one blew people away.
I’d say about 15 percent of the case studies that I explored, I found through some sort of a built-environment publication. Eighty-five percent of them I found going through other sources: touristic writings, or speaking with the communities themselves. A lot of our work was just connecting with these communities. I mean months and months spent trying to find a co-author to find the right resource and the right people, and then trying to overcome language barriers.
I’m fascinated by the sense that many of these examples seem to be systems of best practices that are unknown more broadly. It also makes sense why communities might be suspicious of outsiders and exploitation. In the book, you build toward an idea of Indigenous intellectual property as a sort of missing element in these engagements.
I was working on an exhibition piece for a show at the Barbican in London in 2021. The brief was to imagine a world in which Lo—TEK had become the urban model of the future. Our project envisioned the co-design of three urban climate technologies for the year 2040, by pairing three Indigenous communities from Bali, Iraq, and India, with three groups of engineering experts from Buro Happold. In this co-design process, we were paying the Indigenous experts involved professional rates, as you should. But then halfway through the collaboration, upon listening to the engineers speak about infusing the knowledge into all the other projects they were working on, I panicked, thinking, “Well, clearly something is missing in the process I have created, if these professional experts don’t understand how to use knowledge offered by communities in a respectful and reciprocal way.”
So I began speaking with a group known as the Enrich Hub, who are Indigenous intellectual property scholars, as well as a lawyer, to create a new legal framework for the protection of the IP on this project. I wanted to move away from asymmetrical Western legal systems, [and toward] communities retaining control of their knowledge—to deem its value on their terms, and make sure that it was used for the good of those communities and for the benefit of humanity, rather than commercial profit. We haven’t resolved these questions, but are working on them.
Water runs through almost all of the examples in your first book, but you take a true focus on it in the second. What led you to that sort of zoom-in as a follow-up?
Climate rhetoric usually speaks about the rising or warming of waters as the biggest threat to coastal shorelines and communities. I wanted to really shift that. What’s the biggest difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous understanding of water? They’ll say that we are all related—that the water is my ancestor, or the ocean is Mother Earth’s amniotic fluid. That’s foundational. And that is so foreign to non-Indigenous people.
Is water threatening our infrastructure? Or is it giving us dire warnings about where it needs to move? Those are two very different ways you can understand water, and in response, design infrastructure and urbanism: You can treat it as a threat or co-design with it as a partner.
Your examples usually involve human activity being vital to sustaining ecosystems and muting the effects of climate change. So often, people are making a living off of a place while also actively maintaining ecosystems. That is not usually the way we think about it in the West, because that’s not normally how we do it.
In all ways of modernization there’s the prioritization of economics and extraction, and the deprioritization of humanity and environment. With Indigenous communities, that’s very much reversed: They have a deep, holistic understanding of direct and indirect impacts.
Within Indigenous infrastructural systems, abundance is optimized. Take, for example, the raised agricultural beds or chinampas, which were the foundational landscape of the pre-colonial city of Tenochtitlan. While most of this system was drained by the Spanish, some chinampa fields still exist in the South and East, where they have eight harvests a year, cool the city, protect from flood and drought, and cleanse some of the city’s waste water. As with all Indigenous systems, it was not created with the intention to just benefit humans; they are designed to benefit all living species, as well as non-living elements, like soil and the water.
I really like the example of the native Hawaiians. I talk about the Loko i‘a, the fish pond which is part of the TEK of the Ahupuaʻa, the mountain-to-shoreline ecosystem adaptation system of the native Hawaiians. In this system, the reason communities care for taro is because they have reverence for the plant. Taro is an ancestor of the Native Hawaiian people, as it came before them in the cycle of creation.
The Swinomish build clam garden walls that protect against tidal surge. They believe that clams are a nation they should respect. The clam nation feeds them. They are there as custodians to provide a habitat on which the clam nation can live in response. It’s a very reciprocal engagement.
The Sangjiyutang, the polder dyke canal system in China, is really interesting principally because it’s completely circular. It’s feeding the population; it’s producing textiles; it’s cleaning waste water; it’s sequestering carbon; and it’s also part of the flood protection system in the Pearl River delta.
The Bheri constructed wetlands system on the outskirts of the city of Kolkata is incredible—it cleans up to 70 percent of the water coming out of a city of 15 million people. That city’s population has exploded in a short timeframe. You have a system that’s not a formal sewage treatment system, but it’s able to expand and adapt—not just to take in sewage, but also produce food.
I know that many of these are broader systems or structures. Do you have a sense of any lessons that can be drawn at the scale of an individual home?
There are a couple of examples. For one, there is the Seaweed Reimagined project by Kathryn Larsen. This also related to the case study houses we were working on—really thinking about seaweed thatching, which is fire resistant, thermally insulative, and endemic to Scandinavia. It is commonly used for roofing; however, communities on the island of Læsø use it as a cladding structure. Compression is the critical factor in expanding from thermal insulation to an actual cladding system.
There is also Mud Frontiers by Emerging Objects, who are 3D-printing habitable desert structures out of earthen materials. They’re using a very new technology and an ancestral building material and form.
One example in the book is called Blanket of Warmth. The Starblanket Cree Nation working with McPherson Engineering has co-designed a radiant heating system for reservation housing. This heating was usually provided by space heaters, which have a terrible risk of fire and mold and are very high cost. It’s a radiant heating system that employs TEK from the tipi, to create a safe, efficient, paneling system that’s also economical for these communities.
Or the Totora Reed Emergency Housing system designed with communities on Lake Titicaca, for families whose houses were devastated by an earthquake. They could be constructed in four days from pre-fabricated panels of custom-woven totora (a local sedge). The raised design addressed site‑specific constraints, such as freezing temperatures, by lifting the housing off the ground and adding a skylight for additional solar heating.
You noted that paper and electronics are two things vulnerable to water in any setting. A hermetic seal against water is the watchword of every American architect, it seems like—occasionally there will be a concession in a flood zone of raising a building, but your examples seem to point to greater flexibility.
I think about the idea of “smart housing,” and I also think about housing through a Lo—TEK lens. Those seem like very different approaches, but if you look at their mission, they’re actually driven by the same intent.
I talk about technological specifications in my book. Co-evolutionary technology that has emerged with communities for 1,000 years should be lifted up above non-biodegradable technology from the last 200. If water was going to write specifications for the building industry, what would those look like? ⌂