Full Circle: Truth, Healing, and Indigenous Futures by Design

The Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples is now rising on Dickinson College’s campus in Carlisle, about a mile from the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School. For nearly forty years, that school used architecture, regimentation, and schooling as instruments of assimilation, bringing Indigenous children from more than 140 Tribal Nations to Carlisle and working to strip away their languages, names, and cultures. This project turns that legacy around. At a moment when painful histories are easily contested or erased, the Jim Thorpe Center is designed so that history can be relearned, healing can take root in Native communities, and learning can open to students and the public.

The two-story building brings together, under one roof, an art gallery devoted to Native and Indigenous artists, including the Samuel G. Rose ’58 collection, alongside classrooms, a storytelling and recording space, offices, and gathering and ceremonial spaces for Tribal Nations, students, scholars, and the public. Its form draws on Indigenous building traditions, from a welcome gallery shaped by the tipi to a light-filled hall shaped by the longhouse, and orients itself to the cardinal directions and the surrounding gardens.

A moderated panel asks how design can move from erasure to remembrance and from harm to healing. Hear from Richard Olaya, Principal of O Z Collaborative, and the project team. Guests will learn how the Center came to be and the history it responds to, how its galleries, classrooms, and learning spaces are designed to support truth-telling, healing, and Indigenous futures, and how Indigenous principles and a close relationship to nature shaped the architecture.