Cleveland Native American Culture Garden Land Survey
Your support for a professional land survey + our indigenous garden designs = real architectural plans needed to break ground!
Leader
Cynthia Connolly
Location
781 Martin Luther King Drive Cleveland, OH 44108
About the project
Over the last two years, the Native American Cultural Garden Steering Committee partnered with Sustainable Landscaping, LLC to create our concept designs. Our garden aims to restore our plot to pre-contact times, using native Ohio plants, as well as sustainable construction and maintenance practices. Future plans include modern Native American public art to juxtapose pre-contact with the modern community we are today.
Before we break ground, however, our concept plans must be translated into architectural drawings for approval by the Cleveland Cultural Garden Federation and the City of Cleveland. To draft these drawings, a land survey must first be completed. The funds raised through IOBY will allow a registered Ohio professional surveyor to complete a topographic survey of the Native American Cultural Garden located at 781 MLK Jr. Blvd.
Topographic survey work will include collection of all elevation data, tree locations, walk, pavement, and retaining wall locations across the parcel. The final product will be certified and stamped hard copies of the survey, as well as digital CADD files.
Following the creation of the survey, our architect will then construct our actual architectural plans to be presented to the Cultural Garden Federation and finally the City of Cleveland for approval. This process can take several months, and we hope to conclude the approval process by spring 2018. Upon aproval, then we can finally break ground!
The Steps
Mid-November: Topographic survey completed
Why we‘re doing it
When thinking about Native Americans, most people think of Oklahoma, the Dakotas or the southwest, not Ohio. Yet 96,500 people who are either exclusively or part Native American call Ohio home, and 34% of these residents live in Cuyahoga County. This is because from the mid-1950s to 1970s, Cleveland was one of nine target cities for the federal government's Urban Relocation Program - a federal policy that physically relocated Natives from reservations into cities. The ultimate goal was to promote rapid assimliation and de-culturalization of Native people. Cleveland was intentionally selected due to its distance from reserations and lack of tribes - counting on a lack of mobility preventing their return to the reservation.
We are now in the fourth generation since the Relocation era, and nevertheless, we persisted. Today, our community's largest obstacle is a general lack of representation in the greater Cleveland region. Our small numbers mean we are often left out of conversations, or our issues not brought to the forefront. The Native American Cultural Garden aims to remedy this, and our steering committe wants to promote our community (and our ancestors' who came before us) with a 1.3 acre representation of Native American culture. This garden will be not only a joy to look at, walk through, and take in - it will also serve as a much-needed functional space for the Native American community to host ceremonies, gatherings and events.