Oregon Humanities

A Closer Look

Kathleen Holt

Many years ago, in a visual design class at the University of Oregon, I was struck by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s philosophy of “the decisive moment,” which he described as the fraction of a second when a photographer perceives “the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms” that come together to “give that event its proper expression.” His photographs—an Indonesian woman surveying rice paddies, a mother and son reuniting in New York after the war, residents of Shanghai in a run on the bank—show his knack for beautifully documenting a precise moment in time that is significant to both the observer and the observed.

over the years, i’ve come to think of the decisive moment as a way of looking closely at the world around me. As I get older and busier and wearier, it’s harder to be entranced by simple beauties—the unfolding frond of a fern, the blur of faces on the MAX train as it whizzes along I-84, giddy children collapsing into a pile on the cool grass of a friend’s backyard at dusk. It’s easier to think that I’ve seen it all before: fern, faces, children. It’s easier to believe that these images are repetitive and disposable, when, in fact, they are significant because of the unique combination of my perspective and a specific time, place, and subject: this fern, these faces, these children.

Looking, really looking, takes effort. It can be a conscious act and, as such, can yield rewards. Some of the stories in this issue describe what happens when we look—at something we shouldn’t, for a place long forgotten, at the details of a basket in a museum, at a photograph accompanying a poem. Some explore why looks are or aren’t important, and how appearance, beauty, and design affect our lives. Ultimately these stories are about looking as participation, whether as a spectator or a subject. At its best, looking is a kind of engagement with the world that is active and genuine.

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Seeking and Finding

Kathleen Holt

I’ve never been much of a traveler. Growing up in Hawaii, I was prone to motion sickness, and even short drives around the island made me nauseous. And as an adult, I’ve never felt the wanderlust that strikes so many other people I know. I’ve always preferred, instead, to find a small patch of the world to settle on and call my own.

Perhaps—motion sickness and homebodiness aside—this is because I’ve always been uncomfortable with how travel makes economic inequities painfully clear: several of my family members rely on Hawaii’s tourism industry for their livelihoods, though they can’t afford the plane fare that would take them off the islands to explore the world themselves. Hawaiian sovereign rights activist Haunani-Kay Trask took a hard line on tourism when she spoke at the University of Oregon’s environmental law conference many years ago, eloquently and passionately describing the problems that befall local economies dependent on visitors. When an earnest young man in the audience asked how he could better know and understand other cultures without traveling, Trask brusquely replied, “Read a book.”

But I understand the allure of a journey and see the life-changing effect globetrotting has had on some of my closest friends. Pico Iyer describes travel as a means of guiding us toward “a better balance of wisdom and compassion—of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly,” adding that “travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places and saving them from abstraction and ideology.” Given these lofty outcomes: a firsthand experience versus a chapter in even a well-written book? No contest.

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Go Ahead and Look

In praise of forbidden looking

Scott Nadelson

I was maybe eight or nine years old, sitting with my family at the Hunan Restaurant in Morris Plains, New Jersey. It was a weekday evening in winter, the place raucous with kids and businessmen, no different than the dozens of times we’d been there before. We were in a booth beside a bank of windows, and outside it was dark enough for me to see my reflection in the glass. I enjoyed watching myself as I ate, making faces and tracing the movement of food down my throat. But then, just as I took a bite of spare rib, I heard a woman’s voice behind me, not much more than a whisper: “I hope you choke on it.”

The voice was slow and deliberate, full of anger, weighted with a bitterness deeper than any I’d encountered before, and this startled me even more than the words themselves. For an instant I was sure those words were directed at me, though I had no idea how I might have provoked them. I was sure, too, that I was the only one who’d heard them, the only one capable of hearing them, as if they’d been spoken directly into my ear, or only within my head. I chewed carefully and swallowed.

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Abnormal Beauties

Long live jolie-laide

Karen Karbo

In a recent poll by Travel + Leisure that rated the cities with the most attractive citizens in America, my home city garnered a curious set of rankings. The residents of Portland, Oregon, were rated as the second most fit in the country (behind Denver), but they were thought to be only the seventeenth most attractive, behind the populations of cities that don’t exactly spring immediately to mind when one thinks of hotties. Despite our tight abs, firm thighs, and healthy glow, the nation considers Portlanders to be less attractive than people living in Kansas City or Minneapolis.

How can this be, given our national convictions that the first step to looking like Jennifer Aniston is to take up Ashtanga yoga, and that it’s impossible to be beautiful without triceps of steel? Travel + Leisure was equally perplexed. The magazine’s explanation: despite Portland’s mad devotion to 10Ks and bicycles, when it comes to our looks we simply don’t “conform to most visitors’ standards of ‘normal’ beauty.”

“Normal” beauty? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Doesn’t being beautiful always include an aspect of individuality, which is heightened and underscored by how we manage our appearance? Maybe the readers of Travel + Leisure were confusing our lack of beauty with our general lack of style. Setting aside our love of Gore-Tex, we’re a city where you can attend a black-tie function in dark-wash jeans and no one will bat an eye.

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Designing the Good Life

Beauty is a desirable bonus when design improves our lives.

Lisa Radon

It doesn’t look like much, this baby blue tube with cobalt blue fittings on the ends. In fact, it resembles a child’s toy, an oversized whistle or kaleidoscope. But the LifeStraw saves lives. A personal mobile water-purification tool, the LifeStraw, designed by Torben Vestergaard Frandsen, can turn any surface water into safe drinking water. The November 2009 boil-water alert issued in Portland for homes and businesses west of the Willamette River because of the detection of E. coli bacteria may have been the city’s first such warning, but a lack of safe drinking water in many places means half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne diseases, and six thousand people around the world, mostly children, die each day from causes traceable to unsafe drinking water. For them, this humble polystyrene tube is a lifesaver.

the lifestraw is part of the Design for the Other 90% exhibition recently on display at Mercy Corps’ new headquarters in downtown Portland. The exhibition, which originated at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, featured innovative designs for low-cost treadle water pumps, cargo bicycles, off-grid energy systems—products, in other words, designed for the 5.8 billion people in the world’s poorest countries who have no access to services like clean drinking water that we in the developed world take for granted. As Barbara Bloemink, deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, explains in the exhibition catalog, the design of these products “is not particularly attractive, often limited in function, and extremely inexpensive.” But like the LifeStraw, products featured in the exhibition have the potential to change people’s lives for the better.

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What Remains

A search for the site of a notorious massacre in Hells Canyon

R. Gregory Nokes

When R. Gregory Nokes first learned that a Wallowa County clerk had discovered in an unused safe a handful of documents about the murder of more than thirty Chinese miners in Hells Canyon in 1887, he approached the incident as a news story that he could write about as a reporter for the Oregonian. But as he delved deeper, intrigued by the fact that he’d never heard about the crime, he began to realize that he’d stumbled upon an incident that residents of the area didn’t want to talk about and that authorities had only half-heartedly investigated. After leaving the newspaper in 2003, he used his reporter’s skills to continue searching for in-formation in order to piece together the whole story of what happened to the miners. In this excerpt from Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon, published in 2009 by Oregon State University Press, Nokes decides that he needs to see for himself the site where the Chinese miners were killed.

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Seen Though Not Heard

In the designs on a Klikitat basket, a woman finds an unspoken link to her past.

Christine Dupres

In march 2005, I visited the Portland Art Museum to see an exhibition called People of the River. I took my teenaged son. We were guided through the exhibit by maps that helped us interpret what we saw: big maps covering a wall, maps citing broad lines of tribal territory. Lands of the Yakama people, the Chinook. We walked together to see the encased holdings and materials, which were spare in historic and ethnographic description. Among them was a carved bone piece from the Whatcom Museum, dated and cited in Cowlitz tribal aboriginal territory, but not attributed to the Cowlitz tribe. Also in the exhibit were Klikitat baskets delicately coiled and elaborately designed, bigger than life before us. Our Cowlitz weavers made such baskets. It was wonderful to see that the designs on the baskets were identical to the Klikitat designs that my children and I have permanently inked on our skin. We gazed at the beautiful coils of the basket that sat behind glass, seeing the designs of the condor, the deer, abstracts of reptile and butterfly. There was something about the images that was familiar beyond their resemblance to those on our skin. Startled, I leaned in to look more closely. Then I remembered.

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The Guilty Traveler

The complexities of being an American tourist in an inequitable world

Lucy Burningham

I know where I was sitting the moment I wrote the line.

I was in an Internet café off a dirty street in Cusco, Peru. The city was built by the Incas and conquered by the Spanish, who supposedly covered much of it in gold, but today European twentysomethings with dreadlocks walk down the streets without shoes and crippled beggars whine for change in the town square.

“Poor people are happier,” I’d written on my blog, a new tool for me at the time and my primary means of updating friends and family on my three-month travels through South America.
Even then, I felt embarrassed by my hasty generalization, which I knew smacked of ignorance. But I was feeling bold, in touch with a new reality. Here, people lived simply, seemingly content with bootleg CDs, nonorganic vegetables, and a lack of order. Seat-belt laws and emissions standards? Peru seemed just fine without them.

Like a college freshman who, upon reading Nietzsche for the first time, buys her parents a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra for Christmas, I wanted to tell everyone about my discovery. Even though I’d spent a summer studying abroad in Europe and had briefly visited Turkey and Nepal, on this trip I’d found an even bigger world outside the United States—one that included vast amounts of poverty and, yet, joyful people.

Seeing this new world also meant acknowledging a deep, nagging guilt. After all, I was a white, educated, middle-class American who’d been born into unquestionable opportunity. And I’d needed this trip to really begin to contemplate the realities of the developing world and my relationship to it. No book, movie, or essay had ever pushed me to evaluate my identity in the same way. The daily sights, from men urinating in bushes along the side of the road to schoolchildren skipping to class in neatly pressed uniforms, prompted me to form many theories and make quick declarations. My emotions ran high.

I knew the danger of my position. Travel tends to bend truths, obscuring an otherwise clear gaze with a mysterious gauze. Was I making valuable insights or simply seeing what I wanted to see? Did these insights make traveling more than 4,500 miles from home worth the time, money, and resources? Did they justify my cultural voyeurism and contribution to a tourism infrastructure?

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Neverland

The striking difference between travel and escape

Apricot Irving

I never know what to bring Madina. The gifts I come up with—a bag of apples, a homemade peach and blueberry tart, a box of sweaters—all seem superfluous when I place them in her hands. She greets me the same way every time I visit, whether or not I have a gift. She pulls me close, the gauzy layers of her head scarf brushing against my cheek, then holds me at arm’s length to study my face. We grin at each other a little foolishly, neither of us sure what to say next, with no common language to bridge the distance.

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The Crossing

A two-week journey toward hope and home

Vicente Martinez

This essay, adapted from a longer unpublished work, chronicles the fifth border crossing to the United States by Vicente Martinez (a pseudonym). Oregon Humanities magazine editorial advisory board member Camela Raymond worked with Martinez on editing this essay for publication. Some names and details have been changed.

On Wednesday, February 4, 2009, I said goodbye to my family. I didn’t want to leave, but the thought of getting sick was often on my mind.

I’d been looking for work since arriving in Las Calandrias in October. But the economy was in terrible shape, and I wasn’t an ideal job candidate. I couldn’t do hard labor with my health condition, and I was too old to be considered for most jobs; the cut-off was typically forty, and I was forty-one. I hoped my English language skills might help me find a job with a company that needed bilingual people in Guadalajara—the capital of Jalisco state, where my family lives—but my application was turned down. Ironically, it was far easier for me to find work as an undocumented worker in Portland than as a legal citizen in Mexico.

To control my HIV, I needed a regular supply of medicine and periodic blood tests. I could get these for free at a clinic in Portland, but here in Mexico, although I could get my medicine free of charge at a local hospital, I had to pay for my own lab work—500 pesos every three months. Even if I found a full-time job, which seemed increasingly unlikely, this would be difficult to afford. Minimum wage was 700 pesos a week, barely enough to get by.

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Far from Home

The history and future of Slavic refugees in Oregon

Susan W. Hardwick

A few years ago a pro-immigration rally in Salem crowded the front steps of the Capitol and spilled across the street onto the Capitol Mall. Almost everyone in the crowd of about three thousand mostly Latin American immigrants and other supporters were wearing red, white, and blue shirts and waving Mexican and American flags. Scenes like this, along with daily news stories, political debates, and dinner table conversations are reminders that issues surrounding immigration have become one of the hot button topics of our times.

Latino immigration issues have dominated recent news headlines, but about a week before that rally, a smaller but equally engaged group of Slavic Christian fundamentalists and other supporters gathered on those same steps with a protest of their own against proposed legislation in support of gay rights. This less-publicized event not only provides evidence of the increasing numbers of Russian-speaking residents here, but also signals their increasing involvement in American politics and culture. Much like immigrant groups who arrived in the early twentieth century, newcomers from the former Soviet Union are not only finding ways to adjust to their new lives in the United States, they are also becoming active players in reshaping the landscape of the place they now call home. Because of their relatively large numbers and well-organized networks, and the availability of instant communication systems and high-tech media exposure, Slavic refugees and their families have the potential to make their mark on local landscapes more rapidly than did earlier groups.

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Here, Not There

A wife looks to the Greeks when her husband is called away to war.

Sarah Gilbert

At first, I found my solace in Penelope. It was May, and I was in my garden planting radishes when I learned that my husband would be leaving our home in two months and ten days, headed to Iraq to serve as a truck driver in an Army infantry unit. He would be almost seven thousand miles away. In my state of astonishment, I imagined it as a trip through time, too: he would be “over there,” engaged in a medieval battle in camouflage and chain mail. I would be sitting on a cliff somewhere north of Dublin, my brown wool skirt billowing in the wind, listening for the echo of my husband’s voice in the spray off the ocean’s cold waves, knitting socks for our three sons.

Conflicted, in denial, mixed up, I turned to the Greeks.

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Distance as an Illusion

John Yeon and the landscape arts of China and Japan

Kevin Nute

The self-trained Portland architect John Yeon is probably best known as a designer of houses that seem made for the landscape of the Northwest. Less well known is his passion for an art that was anything but local: Far Eastern landscape painting. In John Yeon’s mind, however, these seemingly remote landscapes were very closely related. “People sometimes ask me why I got interested in Oriental art,” he explained in a 1983 interview. “It’s because I knew the Columbia Gorge very well, and when I first saw a Chinese painting, which had crags and twisted trees and tall, vertical waterfalls, it was not at all strange. I just walked right into the painting. I was completely at home.”

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Irreconcilable Dissonance

The threat of divorce as the glue of marriage

Brian Doyle

I have been married once to the woman to whom I am still married, so far, and one thing I have noticed about being married is that it makes you a lot more attentive to divorce, which used to seem like something that happened to other people, but doesn’t anymore, because of course every marriage is pregnant with divorce, and also now I know a lot of people who are divorced, or are about to be, or are somewhere in between those poles, for which shadowy status there should be words like mivorced or darried or sleeperated or schleperated, but there aren’t, so far.

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Modern Gladiators

Football has changed a lot—maybe too much—over the past fifty years.

Rich Wandschneider

Football grew up as I grew up. As a small boy, I read the sports pages and listened to the radio, wanting to be a baseball catcher for the New York Giants like my local Minnesota hero, Wes Westrum. In high school, I played football and idolized Otto Graham and Johnny Unitas. I played in college, too, though it was a small college without scholarships or even a phys ed major. But by my sophomore year, my football friends had graduated, and I discovered rugby and hung up my helmet. The sport alone was not enough to hold me.

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Putting Central Oregon History on the Map

Jarold Ramsey works on archiving materials from Oregon’s historic Hay Creek Ranch.

Ellen Santasiero

When Jarold Ramsey, president of the Jefferson County Historical Society, got word that an anonymous donor planned to give three boxes of valuable maps and papers from Oregon’s historic Hay Creek Ranch to the organization, he was thrilled—but he knew he’d need outside archival help. Ramsey, a Madras native and emeritus professor of English at the University of Rochester, is perhaps best known for Coyote Was Going There, his anthology of Oregon Indian legends. But now he’s bringing the same attention to Central Oregon’s Anglo history and helping preserve the ranch’s archive is his latest project.

Established in 1873, hay creek grew in the early twentieth century to be the biggest sheep operation in the world. Through the decades its various owners produced plot maps, deeds, stock certificates, and business records, some of which ended up in those three boxes. In 2009, Ramsey found the help he needed in archivists at Lewis & Clark College who are donating their time and expertise to process the more than fifteen hundred documents.

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Book Publishing as Common Ground

Matthew Stadler and Patricia No’s Publication Studio makes books while you wait.

Caroline Cummins

Mid-morning on a typical rainy Portland day, Matthew Stadler is trying to publish a book. It’s a novel—Stacey Levine’s _The Girl with Brown Fur_—and Stadler is publishing it the way he does every morning, Monday through Saturday: with a laptop computer, a laser printer, manila folders, a glue binder, and a paper trimmer. Add a rubber stamp or two—for printing the title, the author, the ISBN—and he’s done.

But he’s having trouble this morning. First he puts the printed pages into the glue binder backward, so the book gets glued and bound back to front. “A typical day,” he sighs. After he gets it bound correctly, he gauges the measurements for the paper trimmer incorrectly and chops the book in half. The third time, though, is the charm, and Levine’s novel—austerely bound, in what Stadler calls a “jank edition”—is ready to go.

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Douglas County Thinks Local

Oregon Humanities grant brings community together.

Caroline Cummins

“Some people argue that it’s a yuppie thing, to be into local food,” says Lily Brislen, who runs Douglas County’s Think Local Umpqua program. “And this is not a yuppie community. But connecting with your community spans all ideologies.”

Supported by an Oregon Humanities grant awarded in March 2009, Think Local Umpqua is, according to its downloadable buying guide (http://www.thinklocalumpqua.com/localpages.html), “a coalition of farmers, business owners, and community supporters who encourage our community members to ‘Think Local First’ when selecting goods and services.” Local food is a big component of the program—the guide lists everyone from the gargantuan Umpqua Dairy to the teensy Arrow’s Delight Chocolates—but Think Local Umpqua embraces all independent, locally based businesses in the county.

Nearly a quarter of the program’s grant award went to licensing the rights to screen the popular documentary Food, Inc. At the film’s November 2009 showing, Brislen says, the room was so crowded the organizers had to turn people away. “We had locally grown popcorn with Umpqua Dairy butter,” Brislen says. “But what was most exciting was that all ages were there—middle schoolers, some Girl Scouts serving popcorn. And that’s rare to see.”

Beyond the local boosterism, Brislen adds, lies a possible shift in outlook among community members. “It’s easy to live in your own bubble,” she says. “But we’re seeing and hearing our messaging coming out of other people’s mouths, in the newspaper, or at community meetings. People are taking ownership of the whole think-local idea.”

Humanities Front and Center

OSU–Cascades professors mobilize to offer American Studies major.

Ellen Santasiero

Last fall, Oregon State University–Cascades English professor Neil Browne posted on his office door an excerpt from Harper’s magazine describing the marginalization of humanities programs in academia. That trend, Browne says, weakens graduates’ grasp of civic values and their ability to express them.

Such concern is part of what motivated Browne and his colleagues to propose a new American Studies major, one grounded in the humanities and heavily guided by interdisciplinary principles. “We’re trying to put humanities back in the center of civic discussion,” Browne says. “The humanities teach people how to think and communicate from multiple perspectives. Students need that to succeed in the twenty-first century.”

To test student interest, last fall the professors taught four courses focused on the 1960s. The courses—one was on the Vietnam War, another on the Grateful Dead—proved popular, fueling the professors’ hopes for an official major in 2010.

Browne and Henry Sayre, distinguished professor of art history, already teach a popular year-long sequence of courses called A Cultural History of American Art and Literature. Sayre, who will co-teach in the program with Browne and others,
points out that OSU–Cascades’ program will be global in scope. “You can’t talk about twentieth-century America without talking about Dresden, Hiroshima, or Japanese technology.”

Telling It Straight

Eugene’s Telling Project goes to D.C.

Caroline Cummins

Tension. Laughter. Absurdity. Sadness. Connection. Over and over, theater directors strive to bring these things to an audience. In the Telling Project, a “witness theater” production begun in Eugene in 2007, neophyte actors—all members of the U.S. military who have served mostly in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars—do just that, drawing on their firsthand experiences.

Boredom. Fatigue. Enthusiasm. Frustration. In a video of the Eugene production, which traveled to Washington, D.C., in November 2009, a man recalls taking the edge off his overseas posting with a recurring practical joke: posing a Strawberry Shortcake pillow next to sleeping comrades, then snapping photos of them. Drool was a plus. A woman recalls a superior officer, late on a lonely night watch, making a pass at her—even though both of them were married at the time.

“I was working with people who had dealt with both the extremes of boredom and the extremes of terror and grief that most actors never experience,” recalls John Schmor, the University of Oregon theater professor who directed the Eugene production. “It isn’t about ‘pretend’—it is about a truth in action. And it’s rough.”

After Eugene, the performance was re-created in Portland, with new actors telling new stories. Now the project is going nationwide, with versions under way in California and Mississippi. The goal, as the group’s website (thetellingproject.org) makes clear, is to have a project in every state.

Terror. Grief. Return. “They were waiting in line when it happened—chow line. They were just waiting to eat,” recalls Shirley Cortez, a Navy electrician on night watch, about the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. “One of the people that died that day, she was my age, and I remember she’d just found out she was pregnant. And I remember thinking, you know, I bet they didn’t wake up this morning and think, ‘This is a good day to die.’”

Remembering the Dead

Film tells story of Portland’s earliest Chinese immigrants.

Caroline Cummins

They came by ship. They worked gruelingly hard. And when Portland’s earliest Chinese immigrants died, they were dumped, anonymously, into graves at the city’s Lone Fir cemetery.

“Chinaman, Chinaman, Chinaman”—that’s who was buried in Lone Fir according to a list kept by Multnomah County. A man reads these names aloud—or rather, these non-names—in Ivy Lin’s 2009 documentary film about the fate of the workers, Come Together Home. He continues, “The funeral home knew their names. The Chinese Benevolent Association knew their names. But the county just never thought it was important.”

The nameless dead were unearthed more than half a century ago and shipped back to China, where their remains got stuck in the limbo of a Hong Kong warehouse. Lin, a filmmaker who came across the story of Lone Fir’s exhumed Chinese workers while working on an earlier documentary about Portland’s Chinatown called Pig Roast and Tank of Fish, traveled to China to see what had become of the bodies.

“I think it was my personal transformation from being an Asian in America to an Asian American that inspired me to become interested in the stories of Chinese immigrants who arrived in Portland before me,” says Lin, who came to the United States from Taiwan in 1989. “Early Chinese immigrants endured a tremendous amount of hardship to pave the way for newer immigrants like myself. The very least I can do is to tell stories of their lives and raise awareness of their contribution in helping to build the city of Portland and the state of Oregon.”

Trailers for both films can be viewed online (http://www.vimeo.com/6226018), but full screenings of the movies are rare. The Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery showed Come Together Home in October 2009, followed by a December showing at Portland State University and a February 2010 screening at Portland’s White Stag building. But something more permanent may soon come out of Lin’s work: an official monument to the workers on the empty cemetery block where they used to lie.

Giving Kids a Choice

Redmond turns a four-day school week into a learning experience.

Caroline Cummins

Last summer, when budget constraints pushed Central Oregon’s Redmond School District into a four-day school week, the community decided to try to make that fifth day into a different kind of learning experience. The results, dubbed Choice Friday, are giving some five hundred Redmond students a new kind of education.

“It’s about schools getting out into the community and the community getting out into the schools,” says Choice Friday’s volunteer chair, Jamie Christman. “It’s a new paradigm.”

Some of Choice Friday’s offerings are essentially traditional after-school activities: crafts, sports, the sorts of things kids do in summer camp. But other programs—an academy with the Redmond Police Department, a buddy program with disabled children—have proved both unconventional and popular.

The creativity and big-picture thinking that Christman is trying to build shows in such programs as Global Nomads (a cultural exploration for the area’s international exchange students) and Literature and the Outdoors (a course combining leadership, English, science, and physical education).

Choice Friday, says Christman, isn’t about simply filling in an empty day. “This is about creating an entire learning community beyond the classroom,” she says. “That means adults as well as kids. And what’s really exciting are the students from middle and high school hopping on board and creating those next-level programs. But it’s like trying to build a jet while you’re flying it. It’s innovative, but very challenging.”

From the Director

Cara Ungar-Gutierrez

As a preface to meeting with our federal delegates and asking them to support funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, I’ve met with some of our board members to determine why the work of Oregon Humanities is important at all times but especially right now. Board members noted that this seems to be a time of political and social divisiveness, as well as economic uncertainty. Given this context, what can we offer?

Oregon Humanities is committed to bringing diverse Oregonians together. Each summer, our Happy Camp gathers urban, rural, high-achieving, and at-risk students to reflect on topics like consumerism, religion, and politics. It’s been a powerful experience for me to see the next generation come together, across their differences, to consider these subjects in such healthy, reflective, and compassionate ways.

Our statewide Conversation Project reaches Oregonians across the state, convening neighbors to discuss the economy, citizenship, the urban/rural divide, land use, the environment, and Iraq. Oregon Humanities also serves as a moderator: last year, we produced responsive programs that helped divided communities discuss issues like censorship and political scandal.

My point here is that in this complex time, the work of Oregon Humanities helps us move forward, provides us with insight, compassion, and understanding. I hope you’ll support us by contacting your delegates when we ask you to do so later this spring and at the end of the summer. In the meantime, enjoy the magazine, enjoy the weather, and be in touch—I love hearing from folks about their experiences with Oregon Humanities!

From the Director

Cara Ungar-Gutierrez

By now, many of you know about changes that we’ve undergone here at Oregon Humanities, formerly Oregon Council for the Humanities. (See full story on page 5.) How we embarked on making our work and our programs more accessible and relevant in response to a board-directed vision. How we worked with advertising superstar Jelly Helm this year on creating a new image that mirrored these changes, which in large part hinges on three letters: O. Hm., which is not only an acronym for the organization but what we like to say is the sound of hearing a new idea.

But “O. Hm.” suggests more than just a moment of clarity; it represents a moment of insight that changes the way you think about something. For example, when one of our Conversation Project scholars, Elliott Young (see profile on page 10), led a group in Lincoln City on an exploration of thorny topics—immigration, ethnicity, and culture—they began by listening to each other’s stories and slowly realized that, in some ways, they were all immigrants. When seventy high school students from Ashland to Pendleton to Astoria gathered in Portland this summer at Happy Camp, they asked questions, listened closely, and began to consider how they would move forward with their lives. After a Humanity in Perspective student read about and talked with his fellow students about questions of power, justice, and language, he went on to become a vocal advocate for HIV awareness. And when twenty-five high school teachers (who collectively reach 9,000 students each year) gathered at our Teacher Institute to consider class, mobility, and the American dream, they reimagined how they might inspire their students to become better citizens.

Oregon Humanities is doing good, important work. My hope is that the refocusing we’ve done these past few years will be meaningful to Oregonians and will provide us all with a sense of deeper understanding, insight, and connectedness.

The Road to Oregon Humanities

Behind the scenes of our recent adventure in branding

Kathleen Holt

Maybe you’ve noticed: we’ve changed. Maybe you’ve seen and read about our new look in the September Oregonian article, or on our new website, or at one of our recent events. Maybe you’ve watched our short films on YouTube or our website. Maybe you picked up our new business cards or pins at Wordstock or a Conversation Project program. Maybe you’ve received correspondence from us on our new stationery.

You may wonder how this all happened. It wasn’t a quick, sudden process, but more of an evolution, a gradual response to changing times, values, and experiences. Here’s the short version of the long story of how the Oregon Council for the Humanities became Oregon Humanities.

June 2008: Based on discussions at winter retreats, board and staff prepare a three-year vision and planning document that focuses on program responsiveness and improved access to all Oregonians, and the value of inquiry and conversation as tools for transformation and growth. This vision, these plans, were a long time coming: For years, staff had been thinking about how the humanities could be seen as tools of change and how our programs and publications could better engage more Oregonians. How can Oregon Chautauqua be redesigned to encourage dialogue among participants? Could we start a discussion series held in a bar? How should the magazine model and inform humanities inquiry? As part of these plans, staff and board prioritize organizational branding and website redesign to better communicate the new direction.

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A Borderless World

A Lewis & Clark College professor wants Oregonians to talk about immigration, globalization, and changing communities.

Eric Gold

On September 15, 1891, the Mexican journalist Catarino Garza put down his pen and picked up a Winchester rifle. It was the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day. Garza led a band of peasants, merchants, and former soldiers from both sides of the border across the Rio Grande from Texas into Mexico with the aim of overthrowing the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Their hatbands bore the words libres fronterizos—“free border-people.” The Garzistas, as the group was known, battled the armies of both nations, as well as the Texas Rangers and local police, for two years before their revolution was put down. In 1895, Garza was killed while in exile in Panama.

Though Garza’s story lived on in border community song and legend, his failed revolution was largely forgotten by history until, in 2004, Lewis & Clark College professor Elliott Young published the first lengthy study of the man and his mission: Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border. The book isn’t just about rescuing this fascinating, if short-lived, movement from obscurity. Young sees parallels between that time, more than a hundred years ago, and today. “It was a moment when the border [between the U.S. and Mexico] didn’t really exist, or was just coming into being,” Young says. “It existed on the map, but the cultural and economic connections across the border meant that people living on the border lived on both sides. And today, despite the militarization of the border, because we live in such a globalized world, borders are becoming less meaningful, or meaningful in a different way.” By studying the genesis of the border, Young hopes to better understand how the boundary was and is used as an instrument of nationalism, and how, in spite of that, many people continue to live transnational lives.

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Telling the Story

Board member works to ensure a healthy economy for Oregon’s future.

Raina Hassan

Gillian Floren admits she is a little uncomfortable about being interviewed. As a communications professional with a lengthy background in journalism, she hasn’t been on the other end of the microphone very often. Her life’s work has centered around telling other people’s stories.

“What I’ve always appreciated about journalism,” she says, “is the opportunity to find ways to tell stories that are compelling, share important ideas, and try to make those stories and ideas accessible to your audience.”

But Floren, who has been an Oregon Humanities board member since 2008, has an interesting story of her own. A meandering path through early adulthood began with her first job as an auto mechanic. She later worked in a medical lab examining cancer cells and then for the Arizona state Senate on the research staff of the education committee.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at the age of thirty, Floren immediately entered graduate school and earned a master’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina. “I saw journalism as a career choice that would open up worlds, rather than narrow them, and that suited me well,” she says.

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