Indigenous Plants Archive
Plants
Beyond
Latin.
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Taxonomic systems have long fragmented ecological understanding, reducing plants to memorized lists while obscuring the cultural and ecological relationships that sustain them. By moving beyond frameworks rooted in colonial science, Plants Beyond Latin creates space for knowledge systems and relational ways of knowing Indigenous lands, practices, and ecologies.
“In some Native languages, the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
The Vision
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Decolonizing Taxonomy
For centuries, the Linnaean system has dominated our understanding of plant life, often erasing indigenous knowledge systems. This course challenges students to look beyond the Latin binomials and rediscover the names that carry history, utility, and spirit.
The Archive
Plants Beyond Latin is a collective, research-based archive that rethinks how plants are known, represented, and remembered. It contextualizes plant names within territories, and cultural significance.
This project centers plants as agents within cultural, spiritual, and ecological relational systems. Each plant profile integrates knowledge, practices, and relationships carried across generations, foregrounding the narratives and voices of people who have long understood these species beyond their Latin names. Through drawing, narrative, and other creative modes of representation, the archive resists extraction and classification as primary tools of knowledge. Instead, it emphasizes connection between people and plants, land and memory, use and meaning.
This is a living archive. One that invites multiple ways of knowing, seeing, and relating.
The Design Field
This project foregrounds critical questions concerning how design practices may be reconfigured through the decolonization of plant learning. It further examines the role of landscape architects and designers in either reinforcing or contesting these taxonomic structures as they are embedded within classification systems, and design methodologies.
In this framing, design is understood as a disciplinary site through which systems of knowledge are produced, legitimized, and potentially reimagined.
While students are not explicitly engaged in professional practice, this project operates as a framework through which emerging designers are asked to situate themselves within, and critically reflect upon, naming, classification, and ecological knowledge. It encourages an interrogation of how design practices may reproduce or disrupt these epistemic structures, and what it means to work critically within them.
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THE ARCHIVE
Individual Research Portals
Washington University in St. Louis