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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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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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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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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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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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.

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.’”

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!

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.”

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.”

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.”

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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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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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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