Leah Altman, an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, stated she owes a lot of her dynamic success in life to assist from nonprofit businesses geared toward city Native American children who wrestle with issues like medicine, crime and invisibility.
Native invisibility is what Altman, 39, plans to deal with as the brand new govt director of Confluence, a small however influential Vancouver nonprofit that promotes Columbia River basin tribal historical past and up to date tribal tradition.
Which means rising the group’s funds considerably, Altman stated, one thing the skilled fundraiser and grant author feels properly geared up to do.
“That’s why they hired me,” she stated with a smile. (Based on a public doc, Confluence’s grant-and-contribution revenue, which makes up the overwhelming majority of its funds, was $562,000 in 2022.)
Addressing that invisibility additionally means shifting Confluence’s audience towards Natives and away from interpretation and rationalization for “mainstream culture,” Altman stated.
After focusing largely on training and storytelling for white folks, she stated, Confluence’s new focus might be “Native stories for Native people.”
It’s as much as native Natives to determine precisely how that may work, Altman stated. Confluence plans to undertake an intensive outreach and planning course of subsequent 12 months.
Altman stated she was raised by a single, adoptive mother and solely superficially related to Native tradition as she grew up in Portland. She turned to ingesting and medicines and acquired kicked out of a number of excessive colleges. Her psychological well being wasn’t good. She was arrested a number of instances, she stated.
“It was a difficult path I was on,” Altman stated.
Luckily, Altman additionally discovered her method to quite a few applications and companies that helped her plug again into faculty, get sober and even specific herself as a marginalized younger author.
“There were arts organizations and homeless organizations,” she stated. “There was NAYA (Native American Youth and Family Center), where I connected with other Lakota people. There was a lot of help that wrapped around me and saw me through.”
In school, Altman labored on a NAYA neighborhood survey of Native folks in Portland. The survey discovered that native Native folks lack assets and really feel invisible, Altman wrote in a 2021 essay in Oregon Humanities journal.
Altman has constructed an extended observe document of writing grants and managing nonprofit and social-justice businesses, together with NAYA, Pals of the Youngsters, Ecotrust, YWCA Clark County and the Intertribal Agriculture Council. She’s additionally a journalist, poet and editor whose work has appeared in a wide range of publications, from Portland Month-to-month to Indian Nation At present. A memoir about her quest to find her tribal ancestors might be printed subsequent 12 months.
“I want to go way beyond what Confluence has been so far,” she stated. “I mean to reach out and build the organization and have a real community approach.”
Confluence affect
What’s Confluence? Throughout its two-decade historical past, the group’s mission and identification have already advanced.
What was first referred to as The Confluence Challenge was based by Vancouver’s Jane Jacobsen, a history-minded civic activist who died in 2021. The nonprofit was a everlasting inventive follow-up to the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial observances of 2002. Jacobsen led the best way towards elevating hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for a string of commemorative public artworks at key historic websites alongside the Columbia River.
In an actual coup for Confluence, the fledgling company managed to enlist Maya Lin, the well-known designer of the Vietnam Conflict memorial in Washington, D.C. She envisioned what grew to become 5 accomplished riverside websites from Cape Disappointment on the Pacific Coast to rural Clarkston in Japanese Washington.
Vancouver’s website is the largest and stateliest of the Confluence websites. Often known as the Land Bridge and designed by Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones, it’s a 40-foot huge pedestrian walkway with interpretive panels, native plantings, historic pictures and inventive touches that embody phrases of welcome from many native tribes. Opened in 2008, the Vancouver Land Bridge curves over state Freeway 14, symbolically reconnecting the Fort Vancouver Nationwide Historic Web site (and Vancouver as an entire) with the river shoreline the place tribal canoe visitors as soon as got here and went.
The opposite Confluence websites embody:
Putting in this community of everlasting artwork websites was Confluence’s founding mission, after which the company was anticipated to wind down, leaving it to native landowners or neighborhood companions to have a tendency the websites. However as a substitute, in 2013, the Confluence board of administrators determined to pivot towards an ongoing, bigger instructional and cultural mission to maintain spreading the phrase about Native historical past and Native tradition now.
The underlying level of Confluence, former govt director Colin Fogarty stated in 2023, has all the time been correcting a whitewashed historic document and constructing consciousness of tribal life and tradition all through the area immediately.
Removed from “discovering” an empty Pacific Northwest, Fogarty stated, Lewis and Clark have been newcomers in a busy area filled with thriving Native communities, cultures and economies.
“It’s sometimes politely said that story has been ‘overlooked,’ but the truth is it was systematically erased from public discourse and from the history books,” Fogarty stated.
To counteract that, Confluence’s second chapter noticed the company embrace public programming by way of storytelling gatherings, movie screenings and Native educator appearances at native colleges. Confluence has constructed an in depth digital library of tales, website guides, interviews, podcasts and picture galleries. Most lately, the company facilitated the publication of the autobiography of a Heat Springs elder referred to as “My Name is LaMoosh” (Oregon State College Press) and has printed three annual problems with its personal journal of all-Indigenous articles, poetry and artworks, Voices of the River.
Subsequent chapter
Altman stated she moved to Vancouver a few 12 months in the past and has been visiting all of the Confluence websites. Not too long ago she took her two youngsters (ages 8 and 6) to The Listening Circle at Chief Timothy Park close to Clarkston. Her ideas about that website — and about one which’s been proposed however halted at Celilo Falls, close to The Dalles — underline how Altman means to be a distinct sort of chief for Confluence.
The remoteness and silence of the Confluence website at Chief Timothy Park could make it troublesome for some people to succeed in, and a bit overwhelming to absorb, Altman stated. The location appears to move naturally from the land, she stated, and makes few concessions to mainstream wants for explanatory placards and close by parking. Some have complained that the positioning is “a best-kept secret” deserving higher infrastructure and data for vacationers.
However these points of the positioning are precisely why it supplied the right expertise for Indigenous folks in search of to attach with their roots, Altman stated.
“It puts the Native perspective first,” she stated. “It doesn’t explain much. It messes with your head and you’ve just got to deal with it.”
Altman stated she and her children loved a significant second combining their voices in concord at Chief Timothy Park and absorbing the spirit of the place, which appeared to say, “We were here long before you were.”
In the meantime, Altman additionally famous that plans for a Celilo Falls public park and academic website close to The Dalles have halted as a result of one of many 4 tribes whose approval is necessary has modified its thoughts. Based on a 2019 story in The Confederated Umatilla Journal, the Yakama Nation withdrew its assist as a result of Celilo stays an lively tribal fishing website.
It’s additionally the positioning of still-fresh trauma, Altman stated, as a Native village there was submerged by the rising waters of the brand new Dalles Dam in 1957. All tribes need the destruction of Celilo to be higher identified, however not by making the positioning a white-oriented vacationer attraction, Altman stated.
Altman famous that she’s the primary Native chief of a Native-oriented group. Working step by step and politely towards what the white company world calls “diversity, equity and inclusion” isn’t her model, she stated.
“I’ve always been a different kind of leader,” Altman stated. “I’m a Native person and I am committed to working on behalf of Native people.”