This August, Dr. Dori Tunstall continues her PRINT series with another incisive pairing of image and text, using just 100 words to open up much larger conversations. A design anthropologist and author of Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook, Tunstall looks beyond design’s surfaces to examine the cultural histories, power structures, and lived experiences they contain. Each installment asks us to reconsider what design communicates, whose stories it carries, and how it might become a catalyst for meaningful cultural change.
Making Space for Indigenous Design
Figure 1 Composite image of the front, side, and back of the book, Designed to Be Red, compiled and edited by Brian M. Johnson (Monacan Nation) and published by DelMonico Books (2026). Image credit: Brian Johnson and DelMonico Books.
“Putting Indigenous First” is the first step in decolonizing design. For non-Native persons, it means clearing space and stepping aside for the true project – the care work of Native American and Indigenous people indigenizing design. Designed to Be Red: Native American & Indigenous Graphic Works contains 159 color pages of 200 years of works from 80 tribes and nations, compiled and edited by Brian Johnson (Monacan Nation) of Polymode Studio. On September 15th, the book, and later its accompanying exhibition of 100 posters at Poster House, officially indigenizes the graphic design canon. Native American design sovereignty has its first textbook.
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