 Design and Empowerment within Indigenous Communities 
Assimilation has drastically transformed the material life of numerous indigenous communities. This article offers the theoretical foundation to support the idea that design practice might contribute to the empowerment of Indigenous individuals and communities by enhancing their power to act upon and ultimately change the material circumstances in which they live. It illustrates these concepts and principles, and their articulation, through the example of a participatory action research project involving design workshops. Design can be understood as an inherent capacity of humans to create and transform the material culture. We work with the definition of empowerment proposed by Kabeer (2001), empowerment is the expansion in people’s ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to them. We argue that choices are only truly “strategic” when they are linked to a project. Since the practice of design entails making projects and bringing them to material reality, the ability to make strategic life choices can be enhanced by design training and practice.