Recent built responses to Canada’s policies and practices around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (2015) will be analyzed alongside a study of built precedents in contemporary Canadian architecture as a method to test how national desires to engage the built environment in decolonization is being materialized, and as a means to demonstrate how this materialization remains highly fraught. My analysis, and the positioning of the architectural critique, itself, within this positioning provides both a methodology and a lens to re-evaluate the dated and colonial views of the most canonical human geographers (Harvey, Massey, Soja, et. al.) in relationship to the more recent work of a new generation of indigenous scholars, who similarly work in space and place, but whose work is shaped more precisely by specific epistemologies and ontologies of place. As an example, the seminal work and under-celebrated career of Indigenous Architect and Canadian, Douglas Cardinal, will be analyzed, alongside the more recent community planning work of Ted Jojola and others, to understand the need for a new human geography embedded in indigenous place-making and thought. The lesson to be gained in the foregrounding this work, in lieu of more widely-known work, is at the core of the Canadian desire to both decolonize cultural practices and to produce new pedagogies