Eastern Shoshone Cultural Hub

The design challenge: create a building program and design that ties together the Eastern Shoshone Tribe's cultural values and connections to their ancestral lands and provides a repository for Tribal archives, artifacts and records from the Tribal Historic Preservation Office in Fort Washakie, WY on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

The need for this new facility was clear: the current Eastern Shoshone Tribal Cultural Center is housed within the local school, and as such, has limited hours and constrained timing for visits or programming. Similarly archives, artifacts, tribal records, and the enrollment department files are housed in disparate places with less than ideal storage spaces, with little capacity to accommodate tribal members or other researchers who want to learn more.

Alejandra Robinson, Eastern Shoshone Archives Director and Omar Hakeem, TBD Principal, in one of the tribe's archival storage spaces

The Eastern Shoshone Cultural Hub project, supported by the Citizen's Institute on Rural Design, builds on the tribe’s vision of an cultural center that will improve connection and fluency within the community to Eastern Shoshone culture, tradition, and language. The long-term goal of this project is to provide a space for generational healing, equitable access to cultural knowledge, connection to the land, and establishes Tribal sovereignty over the historical narrative for the youth and members of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe.

Focus group discussing potential design themes.

The design team was led by To Be Done Studio, and also included designers with deep experience working with Native American communities—including Joseph Kunkel (Northern Cheyenne) from MASS Design Group’s Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab, and Mayra Udvardi from MASS Design Group’s Sante Fe Studio, and archivist Ryan Flahive from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

"What does it mean to decolonize the concept of a museum? When you talk to a lot of tribal members, it's a box and you put stuff in it. That's just what we've come to understand and learn. So how can we create something totally different, that's more our story, that's us?" - Alejandra Robinson, Archives Manager, Eastern Shoshone Tribe

During the 3-day workshop we asked the focus groups that had gathered a number of key questions:

Mission-Method-Impact: How do we establish visioning language to guide the design and development of the cultural center? We used the Impact Design Methodology developed by MASS Design Group.
Site & Space Program: What spaces are important to this building? How do they relate to each other? What are the important considerations for the site?
Design Themes: How can the building’s design uplift and embody cultural values and placed-based elements of the Wind River/Warm Valley?

Outcomes

Two conceptual strategies emerged: "Building as Medicine" symbolized by the rose and "Building as Connector". From the engaged design process, that included focus groups to delve into questions of mission-method-impact, programming requirements, visual preference surveys, site evaluation tools, and good conversations over sumptuous meals, these two concepts merged.

The Cultural Center's design is shaped by three main concepts that define its volumes and connection to the site.

Three volumes break through the circular roof and house the museums program spaces. They align to the radial logic of the design concept and invite new interpretations and connections to the surrounding landscape.

The center of the museum volume emphasizes and facilitates a connection to the cardinal axis.

The petals of the rose, "building as medicine" are articulated by a series of stone interior walls, curved window walls, and gestural rammed earth walls, as well as by the undulating landscape. These walls reverberating from the interior to the exterior of the building serve as a key defining element of the building.
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Interior view of the museum space, looking towards the main reception area.
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Exterior traditional and native plant garden.
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Outdoor learning classroom and performance space.

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Since the workshop in May 2024, 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 hub's location and configuration. With support from an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and recent Mellon Foundation grant they will be able to further develop the design concepts, getting closer to implementing this long-sought anchor for their community.

For more information about the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Hub project, workshop and final Design Book, please follow this link to the CIRD website.

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