Sarah Biscarra Dilley on their relationships with place, the built environment, and Forge's stewardship
Oct 15, 2026
Saturday, October 17, 3:30–6pm, we are excited to host a special afternoon at Forge Project: Placing Architecture’s Responsibility to Land Justice. This conversation is envisioned as the first of a series of future-facing conversations about building the interdependence of architecture, land justice, and Native sovereignty.
Forge’s Director of Relational Education, Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yaktitʸutitʸu yaktiłhini [Northern Chumash]), will be joined by Michael K. Chen, principal of Michael K Chen Architecture, and Dominic Leong (Kanaka ʻOiwi), founding partner of Leong Leong, will discuss what shifts when committing to relationships with place and the spaces we inhabit as tangible and collaborative processes.
For this month's newsletter, we've invited Sarah to frame the series and respond to a few questions in anticipation of the first collective conversation.
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Tell us a bit about your relations to place(s) meaningful to you/the relational landscape you live/work within.
hatʸu mitɨ Sarah Biscarra Dilley wamitʔɨnɨ yakʔitʔɨnɨsmu tiłhinkʔtitʸu. I belong to yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe and currently serve as the Director of Relational Education at Forge Project, situated in Mo-he-con-nuck homelands near Taghkanic, NY.
While a network of villages throughout nitspu tiłhinkʔtitʸu [the land/world of yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini] and places connected through shared and distinct waters shape significant parts of my knowing — both through deep understanding or re-emerging relationship — I am currently meditating on the the continuous motion of our coastal villages like tsɨtqawɨ [Morro Bay, CA], tsɨtxala [Cayucos, CA], tsɨtkawayu [Cambria, CA], and tissimassu [San Simeon, CA]. They offer important points of engagement and understanding of our protocols of hosting and visiting.
I position myself as a visitor in both Munsee and Mohican-speaking homelands. This is both a gesture of humility and recognition of the long relationships to the places I have been moving through since I joined Forge in late 2022. Through living our community’s cultural protocols in places faraway from my home villages, I work with the aspiration of moving from being a visitor to a guest.
You joined Forge Project in its beginnings when it had already inhabited its properties in Stockbridge-Munsee homelands. Can you talk a bit about coming into that space/place, and what that meant for you, especially in stewarding Forge’s programming?
Living in, and learning from, this region has presented both opportunities to recognize shared struggles as well as understand the distinct differences in the stories of this place and its peoples. Coming from knowledge shaped in what is now California, the timelines of occupation and patterns of displacement are considerably longer — with the lived impacts of these histories present in the conspicuous absence in the region of many of the tribal communities and populations.
From what has been shared with me about the histories surrounding the Mahicannituck [Hudson River], I understand that tribal leadership leaned upon extended cultural kinships and made dire decisions to move with their people in moments of settler incursion, actions that were both devastating and demonstrations of their survivance.¹ As in many of our communities, decisions like these allowed for continuance, stewarding their communities through unimaginable loss by affirming relation. Today, the cultural workers from these communities are shaping the futures of their people — waking up language, narrating their own stories through creative and critical expression, and working to rebalance their worlds.
Forge tries to contribute to this, however modestly, through the dedicated spots in the Forge Fellowship for two members of Stockbridge-Munsee Community, sharing fifty percent of our program and site visit fees towards the Cultural Affairs Department and their new cultural center, and the steady process of building connections with cultural workers from the community. I hope that we have made positive contributions to the homeland communities during my time here but ultimately understand the depth of this work will be led by them and the kinships they maintain or are actively rebuilding.
Forge’s built environment consists of two structures designed by Ai Weiwei in collaboration with HHF architects. Knowing the commitments you expressed above, how do you see an organization’s job in fostering relationships between the land and the built environment, particularly in (re)building relations?
In what is now known as the United States [among many other places], we are existing in the ongoing aftermaths of many waves of dispossession and extraction. This makes all of us complicit in the mechanisms of settlement, whether through force, as those doubly impacted by its harm, or through presumed inevitability, as those who are beneficiaries of its structures can too often imagine. I say this not to flatten the complexities or conflate the responsibilities of our respective experiences, especially as Native peoples, but to refuse the complacency or fabricated past-tensedness of setter-colonialism.
Erasure, or forgetting, becomes a tool to imagine the inanimacy of place. Because these structures are ongoing, it is foundational to name the impacts of colonialism, particularly as a Native-led organization. The land we currently steward as an organization has a well of relationships within and through it — and many that have been interrupted in the last few centuries. The buildings we work within, while striking, are also jarring displays of wealth.
This applies to many built environments, which in many cases, are created from and upon the very wealth that was stolen from our communities. For example, I cannot look at the vastness of Hearst Castle, now managed by State Parks in California, and not also see the enclosure of our villages at tissimassu or the census records that listed one of my grandmothers as their servant on the lands they stole from around us. Too frequently, as Native people, we are silently carrying these fraught realities without naming their violence. Many many thousands of years of relationship to place are oddly eclipsed by two to four hundred years of disordering them.
Speaking directly about the distinct stories of our places, however unsettling [pun intended], is part of interrupting complacency — and foundational to possibilities of meeting in relation, with each other and with places and their people.
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1. Gerald Vizenor, in “Aesthetics of Survivance,” defines survivance as “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent.”