Please join us for the book launch of the Faculty of Engineering and School of Architecture's Elder-in-Resident's book launch.
The book is an account of Elder WIlliam Woodworth's's reflection on his journey of healing and recovery of one's identity in the modern world through space-mapping and space-making that intersects indigenous architecture, culture and identity.
The book is the author's attempt to connect my personal ordeal and awakenings with the enlarged collective transformative experience, and ultimately to clarify the workings of the imagination and the intentions behind creative action. The traditional understanding of duty and responsibility which is always communal, is shown to be a recoverable quality of personal identity in the modern world. By recounting in a profoundly reflective and interpretive way the patterns of his personal ancestral migrations forwarded into the present, the conceptualization and design of the ceremonies and ceremonial grounds which are the culmination of my work, demonstrate the power of memory as a source of imagination and vision.
William Woodworth is a member of the Lower Mohawk Kanien’kehá:ka Nation of Six Nations of the Grand River in the Bear Clan. Adopted into the Deer Clan of the Cayuga Nation he was named Raweno:kwas “he dips the words” in the Haudenausaunee tradition. Educated in architecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he has an independent architectural practice and is an educator. His principle teacher there was the well known Latvian architect Gunnar Birkerts.
William completed his doctoral work in Traditional Knowledge, Recovery of the Indigenous Mind, at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. He studied under Dr. Apela Colorado and Jurgen Kremer. From 1995-1996 William had the privilege to be an apprentice and assistant to the great Condoled Cayuga Chief Jacob Ezra Thomas Deyohonwedah at Six Nations of the Grand River Territory where he was given a rigorous teaching in all the Haudenausaunee practices and culture, and travelled extensively.