Sovereign Relational Architecture Prototype · Paper

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Darren Edward Lone Fight. MHA Nation. I am the first Indigenous tenure-track faculty at Dickinson College. My relatives are buried in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School cemetery, five minutes from my office. It is not incidental that I am here.

My work has moved from Indigenous Futurism and revision aesthetics to archival ontology to sovereignty architecture. I follow the questions. Counter-interface theory is the current frame — general theory from Indigenous experience, applicable anywhere. The paper establishes priority. The ideas are the things that last, with proper persistence conditions.

I think in structural analogies, and I work shamelessly across every domain the questions require.

Work

Sovereign Relational Architecture — SRA

The first computational implementation of counter-interface theory. Persistence conditions as infrastructure. Refusal as a design outcome, not a failure state.

Counter-Interface Theory

General theory emerging from Indigenous experience. Four directions. Four chapters. The paper is nearly out.

Center for the Futures of Native Peoples

Founded. Handed off. $800k Mellon Foundation grant. National advisory board. Carlisle, PA — five minutes from the first federally funded off-reservation Indian boarding school. The address is the argument.

Teaching

Indigenous Futurism. Indigenous Intellectual Traditions. American Futures. Weird: Structures of Strangeness. Dickinson College.

Writing
Persistence Conditions: Relational Ontology and the Infrastructure of Refusal Preprint — forthcoming
Dropdowns, Mirrors, and Beads: Counter-Interfaces for Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Ancestral-Futural Kinship Essay — forthcoming
Archival Ontology and the Art of Indigenous Adornment: Wendy Red Star's Relational Care and Temporal Plaiting Catalog essay — The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College
The Indigenous Imposition: Settling Expectation, Unsettling Revision, and the Politics of Playing with Familiarity Studies in American Indian Literatures — Vol. 31, 2019
Press & Talks
"Creating an alliance and salvaging what you need … in order to resist something that seems completely unbeatable — that's a deeply resonant story."
CBC Radio Unreserved — Star Wars through an Indigenous lens · January 2020
"I like returning to the same piece of art multiple times. Tracking the evolution and change of my relationship to a piece can offer me something different — something I didn't see before."
Open Source with Christopher Lydon — Podcast · November 2021
"I try to make sure to visit them periodically just to let them know that I'm here, and that I know they're there."
InForum — "My heart feels so heavy" · July 2022
"One of the reasons I took the job, frankly, was because there's good work for Indigenous Peoples that needs to be done in Carlisle … I'm more interested in pulling people out of this idea that when they think of an Indigenous person, they see a sepia-toned Indian riding into a setting sun — probably on horseback."
Native News Online — Q&A · February 2023
Dickinson College · Carlisle, PA
lonefigd@dickinson.edu