Nisga’a architect luugigyoo patrick reid stewart likens the gram-mar of the English language to the striation of colonial land appropriation. To counter the violence of lan-guage, he writes without periods or capitals and spells “Canada,” a word derived from the Iroquoian word kanata , meaning “settlement, ” with backward slashes between each of... See more

Over forty years ago, Toronto architect George Baird was similarly drawn to explore the relationship between land division and lan-guage, when he began a consideration of the lot, the piece of property on which a building sits, as the essen-tial semiotic unit of both architectural typology and urban morphology. 3 In this theory, the shape and size... See more

the act of delineation as a process that is common to cartography, surveying, urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture. Each of these disciplines draws lines to prescribe the division and compartmentalization of land.

In a recent informal conversation with Elder Winnie Pitawanakwat about the notion of property, there was a long pause of silence while she thought. Then a smile. Then a question of what that really meant. “How can someone own the land?” she eventually asked. “Do they think they own the trees too? What about the birds, the animals, the insects? I’ve... See more