Tim Lehman’s journey to becoming Seattle’s first Indigenous planning strategist started as a teenager working in masonry.
As a child, Lehman (Northern Arapaho) spent time in Montana before moving to Mountlake Terrace, just north of Seattle, at age 9. He’d always had an artistic side, drawing images with charcoals, and felt a similar spark when he began doing masonry. He loved this hands-on work — and planned on it being his career. Things didn’t quite turn out that way, though, landing Lehman at the University of Washington.
“We were doing coastal hazard mitigation work with tsunami evacuation towers. And I fell in love with design.”
While he enjoyed his geography major, Lehman finally found the hands-on connection he was looking for in urban design and planning. “We were doing the coastal hazard mitigation work with tsunami evacuation towers,” Lehman says about a project where he helped his professors work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on the Washington coast. “And I fell in love with design.”
Through coursework and projects, Lehman discovered his passion for looking at design through a lens of social justice and equity — especially for environmental spaces. It eventually inspired him to return to the UW for graduate school for dual degrees in urban planning and design and landscape architecture.
But on his first day of graduate classes, Lehman received bad news. His mother was diagnosed with stage four cancer and died three months later.
As a grad student, Lehman honored his mother by embracing travel, an experience she had never had. “One of her main regrets was not being able to go and see all these places,” he notes. He gained new perspectives studying abroad in China, where he learned more about sustainable rural planning and was able to compare it to practices in the United States.
In 2011, Lehman studied abroad in China and still stays in touch with the Sichuanese family he got to know during his time there.
Post-graduation, Lehman gravitated back toward hands-on design roles — like the masonry work he did as a teen. But he also felt the calling to join an Indigenous-owned planning firm, where he could support Native communities through projects like a 60-acre elder care facility in Oklahoma. He served as a consultant for projects like Seattle’s Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, where he helped create a master plan for the 20 acres of land around the Center and worked with local Indigenous community members to remove invasive species and replace them with native plants.
Working with and for urban Native communities inspired Lehman to dream bigger. Knowing that most Indigenous community members live in urban areas, he advocated and secured a permanent role with the city of Seattle as its first Indigenous planner in 2023 — a historic achievement for incorporating Indigenous principles into urban planning. Lehman is the first to hold such a role in a major American city.
Lehman and others work to retrofit urban shorelines with sweetgrass — a plant with cultural significance for many Indigenous communities — to improve water quality, increase salmon habitat and restore keystone species.
Through projects like wayfinding installations that help educate people about Indigenous history to advocating for culturally relevant housing, he’s working to ensure Native voices are represented in Seattle. He’s also stayed closely connected to the UW, teaching classes in landscape architecture and mentoring students.
Ultimately, Lehman’s work focuses on representing communities of color in and around Seattle through urban planning — and creating spaces for the urban Native community to connect to their cultures and ancestors. “My goal is to create spaces for communities where they feel that they can be happy, celebrate each other and practice their cultures — this, for every community in Seattle.”
Story by Anikka B. Stanley // Top photo by Dennis Wise. Other photos provided by Tim Lehman.
