Viewpoint | Spring 2019

Telling the Story of Diversity at the University of Washington | Spring 2019

The Magic of Marvin Oliver

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Voices East of the Mountains ยก Indigenous Foods ยก Seeing Past Stereotypes

v

SPRING 2019

FOUNDED 2004

Published by the UW Alumni Association

P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E U W A LU M N I A S S O C I AT I O N I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H T H E U W O F F I C E O F M I N O R I T Y A F FA I R S & D I V E R S I T Y

viewpoint

:: Telling the Story of Diversity at the University of Washington

in partnership with the UW Office of

POINT OF VIEW

Minority Affairs & Diversity

4333 Brooklyn Ave. N.E UW Tower 01, Box 359559

Celebrating Lifelong Connections

Seattle, WA 98195-9559 Fax: 206-685-0611 Email: vwpoint@uw.edu Viewpoint on the Web: UWalum.com/viewpoint

viewpoint STA F F Paul Rucker, ’95, ’02 P U BLIS HER

Donna Miscolta GU EST EDIT OR

Hannelore Sudermann, ’96 M A N A GING EDIT OR

Julie Davidow S TA F F WRIT ER

Carol Nakagawa A R T D IRECT OR

viewpoint ADVISORY COMMITTEE Rickey Hall Vice President for Minority Affairs & Diversity University Diversity Officer

Eleanor J. Lee, ’00, ’05 Director of Communications UW Graduate School

Tamara Leonard Associate Director Center for Global Studies Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies

Erin Rowley Director for Communications Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity

A

S I MEET WITH OUR ALUMNI in the community and at events around campus, I am greatly impressed with the strong, lifelong connections many of them have with the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMA&D).

Several stay involved by serving on boards or advisory committees, attending events or giving to scholarships. Many simply hold fond memories and share stories about how OMA&D changed their lives.

In January, we were pleased to host a reunion for all past and present members of the Friends of the Three vice presidents: Rickey Hall is joined by former OMA&D VPs Educational Opportunity Program (FEOP) . A dediMyron Apilado (center) and Sheila Edwards Lange, ’00, ’06, at the Friends of the Educational Opportunity Program board reunion cated group of alumni and community members, in January.

FEOP serves as a fundraising board and joins us in hosting Celebration, our signature scholarship fundraiser. As we approach In This Issue the 50th anniversary of the event in 2020, it says a lot that so many mem4 Postdocs at Gonzaga bers—especially former OMA&D vice presidents Sheila Edwards Lange, ’00, 5 In the News ’06, and Myron Apilado—came back to connect with each other and reflect 6 Cover Story: on the value of supporting our students. §§ The Many Dimensions of OMA&D connections also extend through family generations. Our 2019 Marvin Oliver Charles E. Odegaard Award recipient, Professor Emeritus Marvin Oliver, ’73, 13 Creating is an example. Not only did Professor Oliver spend the entirety of his career a Culinary Bridge supporting the academic success of our American Indian and Alaska Na14 Q Center Celebrates, tive students, his father, Emmett Oliver was OMA&D’s first supervisor for the In Memoriam American Indian and Alaska Native student advising division when the office § § Verlaine Keith-Miller was taking shape 50 years ago.

And these connections are not just limited to alumni. They extend to community members and friends who, because of their affiliation with the early establishment of the office in the late ’60s and early ’70s, still remain supporters and partners of our work today.

On the Cover I really believe these lifelong connections are what make OMA&D unique.

Glass Basket by Marvin Oliver, It’s what makes the University of Washington special as well.

UW alumnus, professor emeritus EMILE PIT RE

Phone: 206-543-0540

Rickey Hall Vice President for Minority Affairs & Diversity University Diversity Officer

2

V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t

and Northwest Artist. This work is a blown, waterjet-cut fused glass and etched image of a Native American woman weaving a basket.

A Course, a Career and a Calling |

Guest editor Donna Miscolta

On my way to being a writer I was many other

DAVID OH , ’11

things. I tried on potential occupations like a new pair of shoes, walking in them for a while before seeking something with a better fit. I found my fit and my footing at the UW, which set me on the path to both my career in local government and my life as a writer.

I moved to Seattle in 1977, a year after receiving a bachelor’s degree in zoology from San Diego State.

I lived in the U District, and in the years that followed, home was never more than 3 miles from the University, its pull insistent and inviting. While zoology had interested me, I wasn’t a scientist in either heart or mind. I had to find that betI WAS SEEKING ter fit. While working as a phlebotoA FORM OF mist for two years, I took drawing, EXPRESSION, writing and dance classes through A WAY TO SATISFY the UW Experimental College. I was seeking a form of expression, a way SOME DEEP-DOWN DESIRE TO CREATE to satisfy some deep-down desire to create something.

SOMETHING. With no clear intention, I enrolled at UW as a fifth-year student. I signed up for French and Spanish language classes and Spanish literature courses. I read classics of the Spanish Golden Age, the Generation of 1898, and 20th-century Latin America. It was my first acknowledgment that perhaps my passion lay in the literary arts. And yet, where would such a path lead in terms of a job? Pragmatically, I entered graduate school in the College of Education. I focused on teaching English as a Second Language and took courses in linguistics and syntax. I did well, writing strong, cogent papers, recognizing I was better at writing than at pedagogy. After teaching for a year, it was clear that I was working too hard at it, none of it came naturally to me, and I was doing it without passion. It was time to try on a different pair of shoes. My husband helpfully paged through the UW graduate catalog, every so often asking, “What about this?” I declined his suggestions until he came to the School of Public Affairs. It seemed a fit.

“ ”

It led to an internship and eventually a 30-year career in recycling and environmental services at a county agency. It was work I liked and believed in.

But early in my career as a project manager, I knew something was missing from my full and busy life. Hearing my friend Kathleen Alcalá read from her newly published story collection in 1992 triggered a long-buried desire to write fiction. Another graduate program was out of the question due to time and money, but continuing education classes were a good alternative. That first quarter, I began my practice of writing every evening after my children were in bed. It took decades, but those evening pages added up to many published stories and two books of fiction.

On my way to being a writer I was many other things. But one thing I have always been is a person of color. In many spaces I occupy, I am often the only person of color, so occupying this space in Viewpoint brings great pleasure. This issue includes the art of Marvin Oliver, the vital scholarship of Stephanie Fryberg and a tribute to barrier-breaker Verlaine Keith-Miller. I am proud to have the UW experience in common with them, to have walked and found my way on the same tree-lined campus paths.

Donna Miscolta is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. She grew up in a Filipino/Mexican family in National City, Calif., and moved to Seattle in her early 20s. Her first book, “When the De La Cruz Family Danced,” was published in 2011.

Her short story collection, “Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories,” was published five years later.

the story of diversity at the UW

3

RA J A H B OSE

Recent Ph.D.s Bring New Voices to Eastern Washington

alma khasawnih, left, and Quin’Nita Cobbins-Modica recently completed their doctorates at the UW. Now they are fellows in a joint program between the UW and Gonzaga University to bring underrepresented minority faculty to the front of Gonzaga’s classrooms.

BY JUL I E DAV IDOW

I

N HIGH SCHOOL, when she could pick her own topic for a history term paper or an English essay, Quin’Nita Cobbins-Modica wrote about Black women. She chose subjects like Madam C.J. Walker, a successful entrepreneur at the turn of the 20th century, and Mary McLeod Bethune, a civil rights activist and educator who served in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Cabinet.

But her interest in Black women’s history didn’t seem like a career path when she arrived at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. Coming from her small hometown of Lexington, Miss., she had never seen a historian before. “I didn’t know what a historian was.”

Her path changed when she met Linda T. Wynn, a professor who specializes in African American women’s history. Wynn, who is also Black, mentored Cobbins-Modica and helped her imagine herself as a historian. “Just to have someone who is doing the work you’re so interested in let me know that it was possible,” she says.

Now Cobbins-Modica, who completed her Ph.D. in U.S. history at the UW last year, hopes

4

V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t

her presence will make a difference to students at Gonzaga University, a Jesuit liberal arts university in Spokane.

A two-year fellowship in Gonzaga’s Underrepresented Minority Postdoctoral Program gives recent UW gradates valuable teaching experience and at the same time boosts the number of faculty of color at Gonzaga, where 30 percent of the students and about 10 percent of the faculty self-identify as a racial or ethnic minority.

Jessica Maucione, co-director of the program, helped develop the fellowship with the UW’s Graduate Opportunities & Minority Advancement Program (GO-MAP). “Diverse students wanted to see themselves reflected in the faculty,” she says.

The first UW postdocs started teaching at Gonzaga in 2016. This year, Cobbins-Modica is joined by Yasi Naraghi, who specializes in comparative literature and critical theory, and alma khasawnih, who has a degree in feminist studies and is teaching in Gonzaga’s communications department.

Cobbins-Modica had never been to Eastern

Washington before she interviewed for the postdoc program. As a graduate student, she wrote her dissertation about Black women’s political activism in the West during the 20th century and helped research and design an exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry based on Al Smith’s photographs of Seattle’s Black community during the 1940s and 1950s.

She says many of the Gonzaga students who are taking her upper-division course about Black women in the West are looking for diverse perspectives from the past. “They are thirsty for that type of knowledge,” she says.

Hiring faculty members with different backgrounds, experiences and academic interests creates change in the department, as well as the classroom, says Cynthia Morales, GO-MAP’s director. “If you want to diversify, you can’t do it in a marginal way,” Morales says. “Students and faculty need to know their research and the classes they are teaching are being valued and highlighted.”

The fellowship prioritizes support for postdocs, says Maucione. In return, UW graduates bring fresh and valuable knowledge into their host departments and schools. “It’s really nice to have very recent Ph.D.s who are doing cutting-edge work.”

Her colleagues at Gonzaga have been generous with everything from syllabi to reading lists and lesson plans, khasawnih says. But, she adds, being one of the few teachers of color on campus comes with additional responsibilities.

She identifies as an Arab immigrant from “Far West Asia.” Students look to you as an example, and they’re more likely to ask for guidance, she says. That’s an extra responsibility that people of color and women of color take on.

Living as a minority in a predominantly white city—Spokane is 87 percent white, according to the 2010 Census—can be challenging for students as well as faculty. “I do see a need for us to be here,” says Naraghi, who was born in Tehran and immigrated to the United States when she was in middle school. “If I hadn’t had people I could identify with, I don’t think I would’ve ended up in graduate school.”

in the news New Dean of Built Environments Renée Cheng, the new dean of the College of Built Environments, joined the UW in January.

As an architect and a leader in the American Institute of Architects, she is an advocate for equity in the field and in practices related to the built environment.

She told UW News that one of her interests in coming to the University was the region’s challenges around housing and homelessness and the college’s efforts to contribute positively to the urgent societal issue.

Off to a Good Start New video for first-year students urges engagement RACE & EQUITY INITIATIVE

I

T’S EASY to feel lost at a school as large and complex as the UW. This year a video, produced by the Race& Equity Initiative in partnership with OMA&D and First Year Programs, encourages students to pursue equity and engagement. It has become part of every new student’s online orientation.

Cheng comes to the UW from the University of Minnesota, where she was a professor and associate dean of research. She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

In a warm and forthright manner, six students from a variety of backgrounds share their own experiences finding places to connect at the UW. The video also highlights resources like the Q Center, the Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center and – Intellectual House.

“Freshmen and transfer students come to the UW with a range of experience around ideas of race, equity, diversity and inclusion,” says Leilani Lewis, associate director for diversity communications and outreach. “Some already have a strong worldview grounded in these concepts, while others will shape their understandings of difference and equity during their time here on campus.”

The seven-minute segment highlights the student experience with intersectionality, personal growth and finding ways to engage. The students urge joining clubs, seeking leadership opportunities and stepping into what the student community has to offer.

In her segment, recent graduate Tae McKenzie talks about being able to work on real issues on campus, making it better for all students. “Being involved is how you grow as a person — that’s how you grow at the UW,” she says.

Check out the new video at washington.edu/raceequity

Design Icon Leaves Legacy Of Support The Sara Little Turnbull Foundation has donated $200,000 to support underrepresented minority, low-income and firstgeneration students pursuing design degrees. Turnbull, who died in 2015 in Seattle at age 97, was a nationally known trail-blazing designer and design consultant who brought an interdisciplinary and anthropological approach to her work. She often based her product designs on things she learned during her travels. Serving clients like Neiman Marcus, Coca-Cola, Volvo and Elizabeth Arden, she consulted on products, including makeup, pot handles, and pick-resistant locks. Early in her career she was editor of House Beautiful. She lectured at many universities, including the UW. The Turnbull gift will establish an endowed scholarship for students of design who are affiliated with the Educational Opportunity Program.

Clearing the way to college With $40 million in federal grants for GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduates Programs) awarded last fall, the UW Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity will deepen its outreach to in-state school districts and community organizations to make college a reality for more low-income middle and high school students. More than half of the money is a single grant to establish a new GEAR

UP Achievers Partnership in South King County, particularly with students in the Auburn, Kent, Renton and Tukwila school districts. The program will serve more than 4,300 students a year.

Another $16.7 million goes to support nearly 3,000 students in the RISE UP (Rural Initiative in STEM Education) GEAR UP grants in Yakima and Skagit valleys.

The middle and high school students will par-

ticipate in STEM-focused activities, gain mentoring and develop their readiness for college through workshops to help with admissions applications, financial aid scholarships, pre-college testing and career exploration.

Since 1999, when OMA&D first administered these grants, UW GEAR UP has provided over $62 million in funding and served more than 17,000 students.

the story of diversity at the UW

5

“Eagle Bearing Wealth,” a 1988 carving at North Seattle Community College.

The Many Dimensions of

MARVIN OLIVER

BY HANNELORE SUDERMANN

In the mid 1970s, Marvin Oliver, ’73, was a new instructor at the UW,

teaching art and Indian Studies. The Quinault/Isleta Pueblo Native American was also spreading his wings as an artist, blending his training in fine arts, history and anthropology into insightful and original works on paper.

“Reaching for the Stars,” a 1999 serigraph.

One spring, he decided to do something special for the American Indian and Alaska Native students he had watched overcome hardship to earn their degrees. There were so few of them and they had worked so hard, “I wanted to acknowledge their success,” he says.

He reached out to Bernie Whitebear, a friend and cofounder of the new Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. Native American activism and the 1970 occupation of Fort Lawton to reclaim the federal land for all tribes led to a center for Seattle’s Native community. Oliver thought it the perfect home for a celebration of the students where he would surprise each graduate with a print he had made featuring the traditional style of Northwest Coast Native American art.

“That first year six students and about 20 people showed up,” says Oliver. “That was it. It was fun.”

So fun, they did it again the next year. And then again. Now the event, which Oliver has named Raven’s Feast, takes place every spring. As many as 500 people come including students completing their master’s degrees and those on their way to being doctors and lawyers. There’s a feast. And, as is Oliver’s tradition, each new graduate receives a print.

What started as a simple acknowledgment has taken on a life that even someone as imaginative as Oliver couldn’t have dreamed.

Today Oliver, a professor emeritus, is one of the biggest names in Northwest art. He is a culture-bearer, a carver, sculptor and print-

“Mystical Journey,” features a mother orca and her baby. It adorns an atrium at Seattle Children’s Hospital. maker, and his works adorn buildings and parks around the world.

He has a totem pole in Tokushima, Japan and a 30-foot bronze orca fin titled “Sister Orca” in Perugia, Italy. Another of his totem poles towers over Pike Place Market, and his carved and painted red cedar Raven Doors hang at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Oliver is an innovator, blending Native craft and history with fine-art sensibility. At the same time he is a beloved teacher, gallery owner and adviser to other artists.

“My folks would call someone like Marv butter on a hot skillet,” says Tony Johnson, chairman of the Chinook Tribe, a carver and former student of Oliver’s. “He has so many things going on at any one time. And he sees them through to fruition.

Continued on page 7

6

V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t

Since the 1970s, artist Marvin Oliver has been carving a life out of teaching, creating and connecting with a community of students, colleagues and artists.

Here, he lays down a coat of color on a silkscreen in his Fremont workshop.

PHOTO B Y TIM MATSUI

the story of diversity at the UW

7

Marvin Oliver “He is an amazing combination of a dreamer and a realist who manages to get really significant projects done. Also, he is so much fun to be around and so inspiring because of his ability to dream so big. He can’t help but compel you.”

Was there ever a time that Marvin Oliver wasn’t an artist? “I think you’re born being an artist,” Oliver says from his perch on the couch of his Wallingford home one afternoon this winter. “It’s always in your blood.”

Both his parents were teachers. His mother, Georgia Abeita, an Isleta Pueblo Indian, made art and shared her culture with her children. Growing up, the Oliver children spent summers visiting Georgia's family in pueblos outside Albuquerque.

His father Emmett Oliver, ’47, a Quinault Indian born in Washington, left for school in California and New Mexico. After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard in World War II, he returned to Washington to complete a master’s in education at the UW. Throughout his professional life, the senior Oliver focused on bringing people together around the cause of improving the lives of Native Americans. He was the first supervisor for the American Indian/Alaska Native division of the Office of Minority Affairs at the UW, and director of Indian Student Education for the state of Washington. In 1989, he organized the Canoe Paddle to Seattle, which has evolved into an annual tribal canoe journey with over 100 canoes and 10,000 participants.

Marvin Oliver was born in Shelton, Wash., and grew up in the Bay Area. When he enrolled at San Francisco State University, he thought he would turn his penchant for drafting and art into a career in architecture. But a faculty member pushed for him to be admitted to the prestigious art program. There, Oliver encountered teachers like photorealist Robert Bechtle, famous for his residential landscapes and snapshot aesthetic. “That was just amazing,” Oliver says. “Some of the best professors in the country were there.”

Oliver also took an elective in Native American studies and for the first time encountered urban Indian classmates. In the wake of the federal Indian Relocation Act, they were focused on preserving and recovering their cultures, organizing across tribal lines for civil rights and self-determination, he says.

That started to shape his own perspective, and visits to Alcatraz Island during a 19-month Native American occupation helped cement

8

V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t

TI M MATS UI

Continued from page 6

Oliver created “A Salish Welcome” for the Samish Bay Natural Area in 2010. The work references a traditional Salish welcome figure holding a disc that represents the life cycle of the salmon. it. By the time Oliver was in college, his father was chairman of the Bay Area Native American Committee, the group that led the takeover of Alcatraz in 1969. The effort to reclaim the abandoned federal prison as Native land drew attention to the plight of Native Americans throughout the country. “I was young and other Native students were there,” Oliver says. “They were activists dreaming of making changes.

“I started to think about what’s my contribution to this event,” he says. “I told my dad that I was going back to school and I would graduate.

Now I had a purpose.”

He finished his bachelor’s degree in 1970 and moved to Seattle to explore his own Northwest Native American background. At the UW he sought out anthropologist Erna Gunther, who had an expertise in coastal tribes, and art historian Bill Holm.

By the time he met Oliver, Holm, ’49, ’51, had recently published a book on Northwest Coastal art, was lecturing in art history and anthropology and serving as a curator at the Burke Museum. Holm recalls that Oliver quickly became interested in traditional Native art. Taking in the fundamentals of a 2,000-year-old approach

that Holm had dubbed “formline” design, Oliver learned to render the ovoids, curving lines, the thick and thin elements and soon mastered the form in drawing and carving.

“I took all Bill’s classes,” says Oliver. “He gave me a foundation.” The young artist also studied painting with Professor Jacob Lawrence, the African-American artist famous for his vibrant depictions of Black culture and history. “I loved him,” says Oliver. “When you meet such a wonderful man like that, you want to work. You want to create. I would think, I want to do this and I want to share it with him.”

The course of study inspired him to teach other Native students and artists. In 1973, he completed his Master of Fine Arts, and within a year was leading classes at the UW. He also found friends to help him produce his own art, people like Paul Nicholson at the poster shop at the HUB where Oliver would sneak in nights and weekends to make prints.

His serigraphs abounded, pushing from the traditional colors of red, black and turquoise and into purples and greens, rendering animals in both formline style and a more realistic illustration style, embossing designs on the plain paper near the print. “I can’t leave the paper alone,” Oliver says. “I really like to push it.”

He also carved wood panels for Daybreak Star and was soon crafting large pieces for libraries, schools and parks. “I really enjoy creating public art,” he says. “The piece that is most dear to my heart is the mother and child that was commissioned for the Children’s Hospital.”

The larger-than-life masterwork, completed in 2006 and titled “Mystical Journey,” floats at the top of a three-story atrium in the Seattle hospital. The 26-foot-long fused glass and steel Orca mother and baby was a demanding project, and some worried that the 12,000-pound sculpture was too ambitious. “It took us a year and a half to build it,” Oliver says. “But my approach to art like that is to have no fear.”

While he has so many ideas, dreams and projects, it’s Oliver’s family that fastens him to the here and now. In the late 1980s, Brigette Ellis, ’86, an anthropology graduate from Ketchikan, asked if she could sell Oliver’s prints in her hometown. That led to the Alaska Eagle Arts gallery and a partnership that evolved into marriage and family. Owen, their oldest, now attends the UW. Twins Izzy and Sampson are school-aged and often come along on Oliver’s

installations and visits to regional events.

Last summer at the end of the tribal canoe journey, Tony Johnson listened happily as his mentor held a tableful of people in thrall long after the tent had emptied out. “It was so much fun to sit and listen to Marv spill out his philosophy to the members of our canoe family, his motivation, his compulsions toward art,” Johnson says. “He shared his story of his connection with Alcatraz and why he holds the Raven’s Feast. We’re still talking about it months later.”

Today, more than 40 years since the first Raven’s Feast, the celebration has moved to the – Intellectual House on campus. And for many, the gift of a print is no longer a surprise, but a goal. “Kids have sat looking at their aunt or their mom’s print hanging on the wall, and they felt they wanted that, too” says Johnson. “It actually got them up and to college to get that token of graduation. I guarantee that those prints have more life than the actual diploma.”

Today Oliver uses a range of materials, including cast glass for “Face to Face,” 1997, and bronze for “Spirit of Our Youth,” 1996, which is installed at the King County Youth Services Center.

Oliver receives 2019 Odegaard Award PROFESSOR EMERITUS MARVIN OLIVER, ’73, is this year’s recipient of the Charles E. Odegaard Award. The recognition was established in 1973 to honor those whose leadership in the community continues the legacy of President Odegaard’s work on behalf of diversity and equity at the University and throughout the state.

It is regarded as the highest achievement in diversity at the University.

The award will be presented at the 49th annual Celebration hosted by Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity and the Friends of the Educational Opportunity Program on May 15, at the Husky Union Building on the UW Seattle campus. Learn more: uw.edu/omad/celebration CHARLES E. ODEGAARD AWARD RECIPIENTS 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974

Ricardo S. Martinez Joanne and Bruce Harrell Richard A. Jones Colleen Fukui-Sketchley Denny Hurtado Rogelio Riojas Gertrude Peoples Assunta Ng Nelson Del Rio W. Ron Allen 1968 Black Student Union Alan T. Sugiyama Charles Mitchell Mike McGavick Jeff and Susan Brotman Herman McKinney Constance L. Proctor Ernest Dunston Vivian Lee Albert Black Bill Hilliard Andy Reynolds Hubert G. Locke Ron Moore Bernie Whitebear Ron Sims Sandra Madrid Ken Jacobson Herman D. Lujan J. Ray Bowen Frank Byrdwell Andrew V. Smith Phyllis Gutiérrez Kenney Norm Rice Nancy Weber William Irmscher Mark Cooper Millie Russell Minoru Masuda Toby Burton Vivian Kelly Sam and Joyce Kelly Leonie Piternick Larry Gossett Dalwyn Knight

the story of diversity at the UW

9

Reclaiming Native Truth

BY JULIE DAVIDOW

Stephanie Fryberg looks out at the water. The morning air is cold and damp. The pebbly cove is littered with large driftwood logs swept ashore by December’s high tides.

This is Hermosa Beach on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, a 7½-mile drive northwest of Marysville. Dozens of Fryberg family homes sit on the land that slopes gently up from the beach. Fryberg’s great-grandfather bought the 72-acre property after the mostly wetlands interior land assigned to him by the federal government proved too remote and difficult to cultivate. He gave each of his children an acre.

A view of the 22,000-acre Tulalip Reservation where Stephanie Fryberg, a UW professor of psychology and American Indian studies, grew up. She centers her scholarship on how social representations of race, culture and social class influence the development of self, well-being and educational attainment. She works with teachers and administrators at schools, including a Tulalip elementary school, to build culturally inclusive classrooms.

10

V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t

MAR K S TO NE

Fryberg, a professor of psychology and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington, grew up here, steps from her grandparents’ house and next door to her aunts and uncles.

In her memory, it is summer. She is with dozens of her cousins, exploring the shore, swimming and eating sandwiches delivered for lunch by her grandparents. In the evening after work, Fryberg’s aunts and uncles join the children for a feast of potato salad and crab her grandfather caught in Puget Sound.

“Every decision I’ve made in my life has been about trying to make my grandparents proud,” Fryberg says. In 2012, she bought a house just over the ridge from Hermosa Beach. On warmer days, her son and daughter ride stand-up paddle boards and watch gray whales feed near the shore in the same water where she played as a child.

“Living in my community reminds me every day why I do what I do,” Fryberg says.

Fryberg’s research branches in two directions.

She studies perceptions of Native Americans and how students are affected by a lack of cultural awareness in the classroom. In both areas, her goal is making change outside of academia.

“I don’t have a lot of interest in doing research for theory’s sake,” she says.

Last month, Fryberg delivered the Samuel E. Kelly Distinguished Faculty Lecture hosted by the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity. She built her talk around the data she and the researchers and students in her laboratory have compiled over the past several years. Her findings, based in part on two surveys of over 9,000 college students and adults around the country, revealed the persistence of outdated, romanticized and negative stereotypes, and an overall lack of awareness about Native Americans in contemporary America. “For the most part, we’re invisible to people,” Fryberg says.

Erasing indigenous people from the national narrative and diminishing their current contributions makes it is difficult for Native American children to see how and where they fit, Fryberg’s research shows. Non-native people are also less

“

I SAW MY COMMUNITY TRANSFORM FROM ONE WHERE THERE WAS A LOT OF HELPLESSNESS AND HOPELESSNESS TO ONE WHERE WE STARTED TAKING CHARGE BECAUSE WE WERE FINALLY ABLE TO.

” likely to notice or understand the inequalities and discrimination Native people continue to face. In 2012, the poverty rate for Native Americans was 26 percent––more than double the rate for whites, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Native Americans also have higher rates of infant mortality, diabetes and suicide than white Americans. “If we think that a group doesn’t exist, we don’t feel a sense of responsibility to make changes for them,” Fryberg says.

In demonstrating a link between invisibility and bias, Fryberg’s research reveals the consequences of writing Native Americans out of the contemporary story, says Crystal Echo Hawk, cofounder of Reclaiming Native Truth, an independent research project designed to assess public opinion about Native Americans.

“Some of the most groundbreaking work of the entire project came out of what [Fryberg] did,” says Echo Hawk, who also consults on film and TV projects as the founder of IllumiNative, a nonprofit organization working to end the invisibility and harmful narratives about Native Americans. She often uses Fryberg’s findings to argue for Native American representation. “By just our omission you are creating bias,” Echo Hawk says. “This is not just about diversity. It’s an anti-racism initiative.”

Fryberg’s profession emerges directly from her connections to her family, her tribe and the land where she grew up. On a recent drive around the 22,000-acre Tulalip Reservation, she describes the changes she’s seen over the past several decades.

Members of the extended Fryberg family have been central to the community’s development, helping lead the tribe after the federal Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act passed in 1975. The law gave Native Americans more control over their own governance and resources. “I saw my community transform from one where there was a lot of helplessness and hopelessness to one where we started taking charge because we were finally able to,” Fryberg says.

During the 1970s and ’80s, when Fryberg was a child, most Native Tulalip residents relied on fishing for income and food. Their resources and support services were limited. She points to the portable trailers that once housed the reservation’s only health clinic.

Since then, the Tulalip Resort Casino, which opened in 2004, along with an outlet mall and other businesses have funneled millions of dollars back into the community to provide services for some 2,600 tribal residents of the reservation, according to the Tulalip Tribes website. In 2003, the tribes built a $9 million health and wellness center. New athletic fields and a skate park overlooking Tulalip Bay were completed in 2016.

In 2017, the Tulalip Tribes was the fourth-largest employer in Snohomish County, according to Economic Alliance Snohomish County.

As a child, Fryberg remembers sitting on the couch with her shoes off at her uncle Clarence Hatch’s house, listening to the adults discuss how the tribe should grow and change, which businesses to pursue, and how to maintain a connection to tribal culture. Hatch, who died in 1992, served on the tribal council board and was executive director of the Tulalip Tribes for 13 years.

“I was always a kid who kind of stepped back and watched,” Fryberg says, stealing bites of lunch in her UW office during a short break between meeting with a graduate student and her next lecture. “I was always very interested in why the world worked the way it did.”

After high school, Fryberg left for Whitman College planning to study math. She was soon Continued on next page the story of diversity at the UW

11

S A NDY CH A PIN

Fryberg, pictured with her children, Donald, 3, and Rilla, 9, draws upon her experience as a member of the Tulalip Tribe, family member and resident of the Tulalip community to strengthen teaching and support systems for Indigenous children.

Stephanie Fryberg Continued from previous page

preoccupied by “achievement guilt.” She wondered why she made it to college while other kids from the reservation did not. “It just seemed to me growing up that there were a lot of really smart kids from the tribe,” she says.

“We’d all grown up together, yet there was a period of time when the majority of them dropped out. Why?” Fryberg transferred to Kenyon College in Ohio and discovered social psychology. The new discipline gave her a framework to ask questions about how low expectations, bias and stereotypes stymie Native American children. Native Americans graduate from high school at lower rates than white students and earn undergraduate degrees at about half the rate of the overall population, according to the National Indian Education Association. They are also less likely to take advanced placement classes in high school.

Every one of the children she grew up with

12

V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t

should have been successful, says Fryberg.

Instead they were subtly pushed out of school, given messages that they did not belong and could not succeed.

Fryberg has spent much of her career trying to correct what she calls cultural mismatches between teachers and students in the classroom.

In 2011, while on sabbatical from the University of Arizona, she joined a group of administrators and teachers in the Marysville School District who wanted to find a new approach to educating Native kids. Tulalip Elementary, the school Fryberg attended on the reservation, was merged with Quil Ceda Elementary. Both schools had a large Native student population and low scores on the state’s standardized tests. “We had leaders at the time who were saying, ‘OK, what we’re doing isn’t working. Let’s put everything on the table,’ ” Fryberg says.

Where test scores measured deficits, Fryberg and her colleagues saw strengths in Native American students that could be tapped to improve their academic performance as well

as foster a sense of belonging and safety. The team trained teachers, who were mostly white, to recognize that their students were arriving at school with different cultural frameworks and expectations. “We were looking for places for our children to be their full selves,” says Anthony Craig, principal of Quil Ceda Tulalip Elementary School from 2011 to 2016. Craig is now director of the Leadership for Learning doctorate in education program at UW’s College of Education.

Three years later, the number of Native students at the elementary school whose test scores met Washington state standards had increased by 18 percent.

Using almost two decades of research in Marysville and other school districts, Fryberg and her team are designing a model to help teachers create classrooms where all students feel safe and welcome.

Most American schools, she says, emphasize independence and choice as the path to achievement and success. “It’s a really good, important way of being, but it turns out most of

the world doesn’t do that.”

Instead, many children come from cultures that prioritize interdependence over the individual, she explains. Interdependent cultures see accomplishments arising from relationships and working in groups. “They teach children to know their roles and responsibilities and who they are in relation to others around them,” says Fryberg, who adds that children do best when teachers understand how to recognize and make space for different cultural approaches.

“Is it the responsibility of a teacher or a 5-year-old to find safety in a classroom?” she says.

Fryberg’s work with Echo Shaw Elementary in Oregon changed the way teachers and administrators communicate with students, Principal Perla Rodriguez says. At Echo Shaw, about 25 miles west of Portland, 85 percent of students are Latino and 90 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Simple adjustments like asking students how their families spend time together rather than focusing on the individual child’s weekend plans made a real difference in students’ enthusiasm and engagement with their teachers, Rodriguez says. “The kids, they just light up,” she says. “In that interdependent culture it isn’t just about the child.”

In the latest phase of Fryberg’s research about bias against Native Americans, she asks what it would take for Americans to develop a more accurate view of contemporary Native people.

The public feud between Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and President Trump, she says, is just one example of how the national conversation falls short. When Trump uses “Pocahontas” as an invective to mock Warren’s claims to Native American ancestry, his rhetoric invokes a painful history of colonization and violence, she says. Many Native Americans struggle with the fallout of that history. The back-and-forth between two prominent politicians takes the focus off of the problems Native people face today, and erases their historical experience.

“They’re using our image and our identity as a pawn, and it’s not benefiting us in any way,” Fryberg says. “If anything, it’s just adding more fuel to past harm.”

Michael Spencer, center, is a professor of social work who focuses on health and wellness among Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders. He explores his own Native Hawaiian culture through projects like crafting traditional poi-making tools with his family.

Building a Culinary Bridge to Native Food Traditions

BY JULIE DAVIDOW

At first glance, the wall-

paper photo on Michael Spencer’s phone looks like any other family portrait, with Spencer, his wife, three adult children and his mother all beaming at the camera.

But a closer look reveals clues about Spencer’s recent deep dive into indigenous Hawaiian food traditions. His family members pose with a board and a stone, utensils once common in Native Hawaiian homes for making poi, a starchy side dish prepared by pounding taro root.

Spencer’s family crafted these tools together as part of a class designed to teach parents and children how to hand-carve their own board (papa ku’i’ai) and stone (pohaku ku’i’ai).

“My oldest son came in with me and helped to chop down the wood that eventually became our ax,” says Spencer, a Native Hawaiian who was born and raised in Honolulu and recently joined the UW School of Social Work as a

professor and director of Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander and Oceanic Affairs for the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute.

After Spencer received his Ph.D. in social welfare at the UW in 1996, he spent more than two decades at the University of Michigan focused on community-based health interventions among African Americans and Latinos. About three years ago, he steered his research back to Hawaii and began a new chapter of his career—one inspired by a sabbatical he used to explore indigenous food cultures. “I started to redefine myself as a person doing native Hawaiian research,” he says.

Spencer is one of many researchers from multiple disciplines now studying the impact on native individuals and communities—mind, body and spirit—of rediscovering indigenous methods of planting, harvesting, preparing and eating food. Their work falls broadly under the category of food sovereignty, a term academics and activists use to describe efforts in indigenous communities to reclaim power and control over the food they grow and eat—and, Continued on next page

the story of diversity at the UW

13

A Culinary Bridge Continued from previous page

ultimately, their own health.

For community members, however, small-scale farming and bringing people together is not an academic exercise. It’s just what they do, says Charlotte Coté, a UW professor of American Indian Studies.

Coté, a member of the Tseshaht/Nuu-chahnulth First Nation, says her sister made that point clear while showing her around the community garden she planted three years ago on Vancouver Island. Coté is working on a book about her community’s attempts to re-engage with native food traditions and language.

In her sister’s garden, Coté saw a profound effort to reverse the deleterious impacts of colonization, a process that limited native access to lands and waters and left communities unable to harvest and produce traditional foods, plants and medicines. Coté laughs remembering her sister’s reaction to her assessment of the garden.

“I said, ‘It’s really decolonizing, isn’t it?’” Coté recalls. “And she said, ‘Whatever, we’re just getting healthy.’ ” In Spencer’s native Hawaii, sugarcane and pineapple plantations, tourism and military bases gobbled up the land and distanced Hawaiians from traditional ways of growing and eating food. Diets rich in diverse local plants, fish and animals were replaced by processed and imported foods. Poi, for example, which was once widely prepared in Hawaiian homes, has been largely replaced by less nutritious white rice.

In some Hawaiian communities, alienation from indigenous foods and medicinal herbs and remedies has taken a toll on minds as well as bodies. In 2010, community leaders looking for a way to improve the health of the residents of rural Waimanalo on Oahu began helping families install backyard aquaponics systems at their homes. Waste from fish raised in tanks fertilizes medicinal herbs and other plants such as taro, Hawaiian chili pepper (ni’oi), and turmeric (`olena) grown at the top. The greenery, in turn, filters the water.

In 2017, during his sabbatical, Spencer signed on as mentor for a study of backyard aquaponics in Waimanalo funded by the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Aquaponics re-creates a miniature version of the Hawaiian principle of ahupua’a, which refers to a system of sustaining and consuming food

14

V I E W P O I N T : : U Wa l u m . c o m / v i e w p o i n t

Spencer’s projects to preserve Native Hawaiian cultural practices and promote health and wellness includes a study of backyard aquaponics systems in Hawaii. The project merges technology with tradition so that families can produce fish, fruit and vegetables. Here a project colleague at the University of Hawaii feeds fish at a test site. grown or found from the mountains to the sea.

The study enrolled 10 families for three months and tracked objective data like weight, blood pressure and consumption of fish. But researchers also sought to capture how sharing meals made from fresh food harvested in backyards strengthened community bonds.

To Devon Peña, a UW professor of American ethnic studies and anthropology, food sovereignty means distancing communities from large-scale, genetically modified agriculture at the most basic level: the seed. On his farm in Colorado’s high desert region, about 130 miles north of Santa Fe, Peña harvests heirloom corn that he uses to make chicos del horno. Roasted in adobe ovens, chicos del horno are more savory than most corn grown by large farms.

Peña maintains a seed library with about 70 varieties of heirloom corn, beans and squash, all of which are adapted to the desert’s shorter growing season and intense heat. “GMO corn shrivels under sun,” Peña says. “My corn dances.”

Peña belongs to a community of farmers who water their crops using acequias, a democratic, collective form of irrigation with roots in the Southwest before the Spanish conquest. Members rely on a system of ditches to share runoff from mountain snowpack to flood their crops.

Reintroducing heritage foods and traditions like acequias to the community encourages healthier diets for local residents, protects the integrity of heritage plants and returns the land to sustainable farming practices, Peña says. “Everything we grow has been adapted by indige-

nous people for this environment,” Peña says.

For Spencer, reconnecting with indigenous foods and medicines and building community draws on thousands of years of native Hawaiian knowledge about wellness—a holistic approach to health increasingly embraced by practitioners of Western medicine.

Like many native Hawaiians his age, Spencer was not encouraged to value Hawaiian culture or take lessons from the past. “I grew up in an environment where it wasn’t necessarily viewed as a positive to be native Hawaiian,” he says. “It was almost something you had to overcome.”

As a student at the prestigious, private Kamehameha Schools for children with Hawaiian ancestry, Spencer and his classmates focused on mainstream, college-prep subjects like history, AP English and trigonometry. The Kamehameha Schools have since incorporated Hawaiian cultural studies into the curriculum, but Spencer says his generation is still playing catch up. “I did not learn much about my history, my culture and my language,” Spencer says. “It was a time when we were focused on getting Hawaiians into professional careers. And I benefited from that, but there was a cost.”

Rather than urging native Hawaiians to change their behaviors, programs like backyard aquaponics encourage them to embrace traditional values and practices and to honor the knowledge held by their communities for generations. “I’m not here to prove that our cultural practices work,” Spencer says. “My ancestors have already demonstrated that.”

In Memoriam

Q Center Celebrates 15 years at the UW

BY MANISHA JHA

Verlaine Keith-Miller, ’73, ’80

In the past 15 years, with a break for graduate school in Michigan, Marsh has seen the center

Manisha Jha is an undergraduate studying global health and diplomacy.

Spring 2019 Viewpoint Events

are joining campus partners to celebrate the Class of 2019 with annual community graduation ceremonies.

• Filipino Graduation: May 31 • Lavender Graduation: June 11 • La Raza Graduation Celebration: June 12 • Pasifik Graduation Celebration: June 13 • Raven’s Feast: June 14

Celebration The Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity and Friends of the Educational Opportunity Program present the 49th annual Celebration, a dinner and scholarship fundraiser honoring the academic excellence of EOP

students and the Charles E. Odegaard recipient, Professor Emeritus Marvin Oliver.

Registration is available online until Friday, April 26. More information is available on the event web site: washington.edu/ omad/celebration.

Graduation Events OMA&D and the Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center

When she first stepped foot on campus as a freshman in the late 1960s, Verlaine Keith-Miller imagined a low-key student life focused on studies and new friends.

COURTESY TH E Q CEN TER

COURTESY TH E UN IVERSITY OF H AWA II

A

S THE UW’s Q Center wraps up its 15th year on campus, the resource continues to evolve and grow. It now serves 500 visitors per month.

The idea for the center arose two decades ago when a student led the charge to create a safe community for queer and trans students. By the time he was elected president of the ASUW in 1999, Ryan Biava already had a hand in establishing a Students Valerie Schweigert, left, and Jenesis Garcia with student chapter of the ACLU and in perL. Lincoln Johnson, Associate Vice President of Student suading the Board of Regents to include Life, at a spring Q Center event. same-sex partners and families in student adapt as the needs of students evolved. Today, housing and health insurance. in addition to providing counseling and basic reAs student body president, he appealed disources, the center fosters healing through selfrectly to UW President Richard McCormick to expression. What remains the same, however, is take action so queer students could feel safer the students’ opinions and passion. “We are alon campus. McCormick gathered a task force to ways going to center the students’ voice and the evaluate queer students’ perceptions of their students’ power in this. What that means is that well-being at the UW. The results affirmed what every year, we will be different,” says Marsh, now Biava was saying. The need was clear.

Six years later, Jen Self, then a graduate student in the center’s associate director.

Several Q Center events have become annusocial work and social welfare who was on her way al traditions. Lavender Graduation celebrates to being a licensed counselor, was hired as foundqueer and trans students and allies as they ing director of a new resource called the Q Center. complete their degrees. The Lavish Showcase The same year, Jaimée Marsh, a freshman from highlights the creative work of people from the Spokane, walked into the new center and found queer, trans and people-of-color communities. a place to make friends and build community, a Each fall, the center hosts a welcome lunplace that quickly evolved to be a resource for ischeon for new members. Self can still see the sues like housing, health care and social support. roomful of anxious faces at the first luncheon As Marsh matured, so did her vision of what in 2005. “I remember how afraid they looked. the Q Center could be. It became a place where And how alone they looked,” she says. she could imagine what a better world would “We’re not all living in liberation,” Self says. look like, a space of liberation. “I was growing “We’re not all living out in the light, and until we and imagining what a world free from oppresare, we just have to keep doing what we’re doing.” sion would be like,” Marsh says.

But then, she told Viewpoint in an interview last year, she became aware of the broader civil rights movement and struggles around the country as well as inequities here at home.

It moved her to become an organizer and activist pushing the University to change its practices and make education better and more attainable for all students.

As a founding member of the Black Student Union, KeithMiller was a leader in the effort to get the University to recruit and support underrepresented minority, first-generation and low-income students. That activism led to the establishment of the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity. On May 20, 1968, Keith-Miller was among the group of students who held a sit-in at President Charles Odegaard’s office. “It was really about making a change for the world for the better,” she said last year. “And there was a great unity among students. We were all in the struggle together.”

Later that year, she and two other BSU officers were honored with the Anti-Defamation League’s Sidney Gerber Award for outstanding accomplishments in the field of civil rights.

After completing a bachelor’s degree in Black Studies in 1973 and a law degree in 1980, Keith-Miller went on to a life of law and public service. She was an assistant attorney general for the state of Washington until 1983 and, after several years in private practice, an industrial appeals judge for the Washington State Board of Appeals until her retirement in 2015. She died on Oct. 18, 2018.

A newspaper story from 1968 recognizes the civil rights work of Keith-Miller and two other founding members of the Black Student Union.

• Black Graduation: June 14 the story of diversity at the UW

15

Telling the Story of Diversity at the University of Washington

4333 Brooklyn Ave NE Campus Box 359508 Seattle, WA 98195

MAP Makes it to $1 Million MAT T H A G EN

Diverse, dynamic and devoted: Members of the Multicultural Alumni Partnership take their endowment for scholarships to $1 million

T

WENTY-FIVE YEARS ago, a group of alumni drew together to support diversity at the University. In forming the Multicultural Alumni Partnership, they sought to build a community around promoting equity for future generations of students through scholarships, mentoring and community connections.

Last fall at the annual Bridging the Gap Breakfast fundraiser, 320 attendees celebrated with music and dancing during a live auction as the MAP Endowed Scholarship Fund reached a new milestone: $1 million for the endowment. “It was a culmination of all the hard work and vision of the original MAP founders, UWAA and supporters,” says Jaebadiah Gardner, ’05, who co-chairs MAP with Sumona Das Gupta, ’05, ’09. It was an ambitious push, but well worth the effort because of the energy it brought to the profound support the scholarships provide.

Regent Constance Rice, ‘70, center, joins hands and dances with former State Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez Kenney, as attendees at the Multicultural Alumni Partnership fall scholarship breakfast celebrate news that their endowment reached a major milestone.

The financial awards, given annually, benefit scholars like Alejandra Perez, a UW Bothell undergraduate who advocates for undocumented students and trains faculty and community members to be allies, and Chenglin Hong, whose master’s degree work in public health focuses on health disparities among sexual and gender minority populations.

He’s looking for ways to use social media for health promotion and disease prevention.