Amina Lalor (she/her) is a mixed Vietnamese-Irish-Métis designer and researcher from Tkaronto. Her Métis roots are from the Red River Settlement, and she is a member of the Métis Nation of Ontario. Since 2018, she has been working as a researcher at the University of Guelph to help create “Nokom’s House,” a proposed Indigenous land-based research lab led by Indigenous scholars Dr. Kim Anderson, Dr. Sheri Longboat, and Dr. Brittany Luby. She is also a collaborator on a SSHRC-funded research project called “Where the Rivers Meet: Decolonizing Place Narratives in the City” that strives to challenge the settler-colonial erasure of Indigenous presence in the City of Guelph.
Amina holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies and Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo where she has also taught as an adjunct instructor. During her master’s studies, she was one of three co-founders of the initiative Treaty Lands, Global Stories, a student-led initiative advocating for an architectural curriculum that de-centres Euro-Western values, reflects the diversity within the student body, and responds to the Indigenous and settler-colonial context that we all operate within. Working from the perspective of a mixed settler, refugee, and Indigenous designer, Amina’s continued research explores the meaning of practicing architecture “in a good way” on Indigenous lands within a violently imposed settler-colonial context.
