Listening to the Land: Integrating Indigenous Perspectives for Restoration and Healing - 1.25 PDH (LA CES/HSW)

Recorded On: 10/10/2025

What is it to be redbird, water, a cottonwood? Learn how participatory park design fosters healing through Indigenous, local, and historic perspectives. By integrating cultural narratives, promoting reciprocity, and strengthening partnerships, we restore ecosystems and gain understanding of our own identities through the experiences of other beings.

Learning objectives:

Form partnerships that include strategies for engaging Indigenous and other diverse communities and incorporating feedback on themes like play, connection, and uniting ecologies and histories.
Learn specific presentation and inquiry methods to effectively and respectfully engage Indigenous communities, focused on initial research that prompts and inspires stories and feedback.
Learn how storytelling can shape design elements, using Indigenous narratives to influence play features, planting choices, and pathways that encourage learning through experience and cultural exploration.
Learn how park design connects people and ecology, emphasizing the role of reciprocity in restoring relationships with the land, wildlife, and communities and ensuring systematic positive impacts.

Gordon Yellowman

Tribal Historian

Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes

Gordon Yellowman, Sr., Yellow Hawk, is a descendant of Sharp Nose, the Sacred Hat Keeper of the Northern Cheyenne Chief, and Spotted Skunk, the Cheyenne Chief Sundance Priest and member of the Council of Forty-Four. He is also related to the Sacred Pipe Keeper of the Northern Arapaho Tribe. Raised with traditional Cheyenne and Arapaho values and art, he has served as chief since age 16. He is a curator, illustrator, ledger artist, and USPS stamp designer. Gordon has worked for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma since 1979 as cultural advisor, Transportation Planner, and preservation representative.

Darin DeLay, ASLA

Parks & Urban Design Manager

City of Arvada

Darin DeLay has over 25 years of design, construction, and project management and procurement experience. His interests lie in transforming the urban environment to create spaces that are socially and culturally important to place and community. His previous work expands across schoolyard Learning Landscapes, creating experiential learning and garden-based education opportunities in low-income schools, to intimate public spaces, mixed-use master plan development, and large park design. Darin holds a BLA from Ball State University, with minors in Anthropology, and Sustainable Land Systems.

Jennifer Mahan

Landscape Designer

Wenk Associates

Throughout architecture school at California Polytechnic State University, Jennifer was called to vernacular design and spaces that convey a sense of place. Using organic and honest materials, designing with the land, and using local conditions as passive opportunities came to the forefront of her studies. These interests naturally guided her into landscape architecture, and in 2022, Wenk Associates in Denver gave her the opportunity to pursue her goals of improving habitat, listening to the land, and elevating all beings from surviving to thriving. She works on public parks and spaces there as a landscape designer and project manager.