Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2015: Move

Move

Fall/Winter 2015

Whose state is this?
The flow of traffic,
trash, laws, and fish

Moving between
languages to find a voice
Leaving and staying gone
$8

2

Oregon Humanities (ISSN
2333-5513) is published triannually by Oregon Humanities,
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150, Portland, Oregon 97205.
We welcome letters from
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may be edited for space or
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edit or
Kathleen Holt
a rt di r e ct or s
Jen Wick
Taryn Cowart
a s sista n t edit or s
Eloise Holland
Ben Waterhouse
cop y edit or
Allison Dubinsky
com m u n ications/
pu bl icat ions i n t er n
Julia Withers

Oregon Humanities

edit or i a l a dv is ory
boa r d
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Greg Netzer
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Dave Weich
Matt Yurdana

3

Fall/Winter 2015

Departments

Features: Move

4
Editor’s Note

12
Whose State Is This?
by br en t wa lt h
Legal measures targeting
Latino Oregonians reflect fears
of change.

6
Field Work
Partnership with Portland
Playhouse  ✢  Pints and
Pulitzers  ✢  Power and Place
✢ Joaquin Lopez ✢ OH News ✢
Thanks to our funders ✢ Talking
about Dying
11
From the Director
40
Posts
Readers write about “Move.”

17
Community in Flux
by l is a l ov i ng
A long-persecuted people
begins to speak out.
22
This Way through Oregon
by e r ic g ol d a n d ta r a
r ae miner

27
So to Speak
by l a i l a l a l a m i
Moving between languages to
find a voice
31
Getting Out
by l or et ta st i ns on
A shift in perspective helps a
woman move on for good.
36
All the Same Ocean
by ja s on a r i a s
Finding the horizon in a life
rocked with waves

The flow of salmon, waste,
traffic, and laws

44
Read. Talk. Think.
At the Hearth of the Crossed Races
by Melinda Marie Jetté ✢ Marie
Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw
Passions by Michael Helquist
✢ Landfall by Ellen Urbani ✢
Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas by
David Banis and Hunter Shobe
✢ People Like You by Margaret
Malone ✢ The Last Love Song by
Tracy Daugherty

PHOTO BY INTISAR ABIOTO

46
Croppings
Contemporary Native
Photographers and the Edward
Curtis Legacy: Zig Jackson,
Wendy Red Star, Will Wilson at
Portland Art Museum

4

Oregon Humanities

Editor’s Note
Objects in Motion

T

H E L A ST T I M E I S AW M Y DA D ON T H E M A I N L A N D
A couple of weeks ago, my stepmom called to say they were
was when he and my stepmom were taking a cruise to
talking to a gerontologist and putting together end-of-life
Alaska from Seattle. My husband and kids and I drove up to
plans. She and I consulted in a strangely businesslike fashion
spend some time with them before their ship left. Traversing
about my dad’s do-not-resuscitate requests; she warned me
the hilly downtown streets, it was obvious that my dad’s Par- that she needed me to stick to the plan if she, in that future
kinson’s was progressing, as that disease does. While my young
moment, vacillated. I assured her I would hold steady, even as
children zigzagged up and down the sidewalks—peeling off to
I wondered if I could.
climb sculptures, steps, and planters—my dad shuffled behind,
When my dad got on the phone, I asked him how things were
using their side trips to rest and catch his breath and crack a joke. going. He made light, as he always does, except when we talked
My stepmom fretted that he didn’t want to use a walker or a
about important things like money, bad weather, and sports. He
wheelchair, which would make the going easier. Though it was
joked about how my stepmom wasn’t letting him eat foods he
difficult to see him struggle against his new physical limita- liked, about how she was a bully, making him stick to his physitions, I understood why he stubbornly did so: his identity has
cal therapy regimen. He sounded like the dad of my youth.
always been grounded in his body—as a soldier, a police officer,
Earlier this fall, a friend reminded me that the word ineran athlete.
tia didn’t mean only what I thought it meant. I’d been thinkIn his pre-Parkinson’s life, he was six-foot-one and two
ing about it exclusively as meaning immobile. I’d forgotten the
hundred pounds. On the days he picked me up from elemen- other definition from high school physics class: “the tendency
tary school, fresh off the day shift, he’d unfold himself from
of objects to keep moving in a straight line at constant velocity.”
his patrol car and loom above us, formidable in his dark blue Though either definition describes the life I sometimes live, I’m
uniform. The kids—small and weary from a day of jostling for
not sure which should bother me more: being stuck or being on
knowledge and power and allegiances—looked up to him, mar- a track, resistant to changing course or speed.
veled at him, feared him. Later at home, he would change into a
On the phone with my dad, I pushed a little, asking pointedly
t-shirt and be the easygoing father I adored, the one who’d let
about the meetings with the gerontologist, and he simply said,
me draw on his long brown arms and legs when I was bored, the “It’s hard.” His voice quavered a bit—the Parkinson’s? This day?
one who’d warm up tomato soup and cocktail wieners and call This life? Those two words seemed loaded with weariness and
it dinner. I remember him being playful and relaxed with me, resignation.
even in those days, when he and my mother were going through
Then he quickly reverted to teasing, saying loudly that my
a painful divorce.
stepmom and his gerontologist were ganging up on him. I heard
That afternoon in Seattle, we stopped to rest in my par- laughter in the background, and he shifted topics, asking about
ents’ hotel room. My son continued his antics, climbing on and
the kids. I mentioned that Emmett was doing well in soccer and
touching everything he could. My husband and I grimaced and
basketball; he expressed no surprise, chuckling about my son’s
scolded, hustling around the small room trying to prevent dam- activity in Seattle. We laughed. We joked. We were back on track.
age. My dad rested in an armchair, jovially remarking on how
k at h l een holt, Editor
many years of trouble we had in front of us.

[email protected]

Cover Art Ideas for “Root”
This issue’s cover, “In Search of Tomorrow,” is by photographer Minh Carrico from
Edmonds, Washington.
If you’re an artist and have work that we
might consider for the Spring 2016 issue,
on the theme “Root,” we’d love to know
about it. Please familiarize yourself with our
publication (back issues viewable online at
oregonhumanities.org), then send us the
following by February 22, 2016:

• A high-resolution digital image (300 dpi at
8” x 10”; scans or photographs, JPEG or
TIFF)
• Your name, the title of the work, the type
of media, as well as contact information
(email and phone number)
• Description of the relationship of the
image to the theme

Please consider the constraints of a
magazine cover (e.g., vertical orientation,
nameplate, and cover lines). We are most
interested in works by Oregon-based artists.
Submissions can be sent to
[email protected] or by post
to Oregon Humanities magazine,
921 SW Washington St. Suite 150, Portland,
OR 97205.

5

IN

Fall/Winter 2015

TWANG WE TRUST.

Youinfund
You fund The Trust. We,
turn, fund the strummers, writers,
cloud dancers and dreamers who make Oregon, Oregon.

DONATE + DONATE = FUEL
$ TO AN ORG
$ TO THE TRUST
OREGON
AND GET THE
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our 1,400 cultural nonprofits, donate that same amount to the
Cultural Trust. 3) Take that same amount off your state taxes.
Easy! Learn more and donate at CulturalTrust.org

6

Oregon Humanities

Field Work

KIM OANH NGUYEN

H U M A N ITI E S ACRO S S OR E G ON

Donnell Alexander leads a
conversation about hip hop on
the stage of Portland Playhouse’s
production of How We Got On

How We Got On

“How We Got On: A Hip Hop Conversation”
was organized by Oregon Humanities and
Portland Playhouse to bring residents
together to talk about some of the themes and
ideas presented in the play How We Got On.
N E E V E N I N G I N O C T O B E R , P O R T- One of Portland Playhouse’s goals, says Artisland Playhouse’s stage was set, not for the
tic Director Brian Weaver, is to engage audiproduction of How We Got On by Idris Goodwin, ences beyond traditional theater talk-backs.
which opened at the end of September, but for
Donnell Alexander, who leads an Oregon
a conversation about local hip hop culture, rap Humanities Conversation Project called
music, and how musicians break into the scene. “Northwest Mixtape: Hip Hop Culture and
A s more than sixty people—including a
Influences,” facilitated the conversation and
couple of groups of teens and adults of all
designed the evening’s program. While planages—found their seats around the stage, DJ ning the event, he brought on Verbz and upVerbz set the tone of the evening with a mix of and-coming Portland rapper Glenn Waco, who
local hip hop music.
performed a short set. The cast of How We Got
Oregon Humanities and Portland Playhouse
partner for an evening of hip hop and
conversation.

O

7

On also performed a scene from the play.
What started as a conversation about
what makes Portland hip hop unique evolved
into a discussion that touched on everything
from redlining—the practice of denying mortgages to people who live in certain areas based
on the racial makeup of those areas—to the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, to what it’s
like to be an artist—particularly an artist of
color—in Portland.
Ithica Tell, an actress who performs the
role of the Selector in How We Got On, talked
about the difficulty of seeing hip hop music
thrive in the Northwest while the black culture that created it is rejected. “It’s hard
for black culture and communities to take
root when they’re not nurtured,” she said,
referencing an 1857 exclusion clause in
Oregon’s constitution that prohibited black
people from living in the state and that wasn’t
repealed until 1926.
Alexander, who is relatively new to Portland, was excited by the opportunity to have
people in a room talking about a topic he’s
passionate about and one that—especially
when it comes to the Pacific Northwest—he’s
still learning about himself. “In this age of
the Internet, we all think we know everything, but we don’t. It’s a living history,” he
said. “It’s important that we understand our
environment, and the way we start to do that
is by talking to each other.”
EL OISE HOL L A N D

Pints and Pulitzers
Think & Drink 2016 brings Pulitzer Prize
winners to Oregon.

O

R EGON H U M A N ITIES’ THIN K &

Drink series will feature Pulitzer Prize
winners and finalists in eight events around
Oregon in 2016. Conversations with four
renowned writers will take place in Portland,
Astoria, Bend, and Eugene.
Think & Drink, which sparks provocative conversations about big ideas, began as a
happy-hour event at a Portland bar in 2009.
Although it has since grown to fill larger venues, the series remains more intimate and
casual than traditional lecture programs.
Past guests include Cheryl Strayed, Ursula
K. Le Guin, and Barry Lopez. While Oregon
Humanities has presented individual Think

Fall/Winter 2015

Think & Drink
2016
A Special Pulitzer Prize Series
FEBRUARY 16

Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account
February 17 in Bend

APRIL 19

Héctor Tobar, author of Deep Down Dark:
The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in
a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set
Them Free
April 20 in Eugene
JULY 20

Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of
Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s
Great Migration
July 21 in Astoria
OCTOBER 19

Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful
Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a
Mumbai Undercity

Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 NE Alberta St., Portland
7:00–8:30 p.m. Doors at 6:00 p.m.
Minors with parent or guardian
Series tickets ($50/$100) available now at
oregonhumanities.org

& Drink events outside of Portland, this is
the first time the series will feature the same
guests in multiple communities.
The 2016 Think & Drink series will feature
appearances by novelist Laila Lalami in Portland and Bend (read her essay on page 27); journalist and novelist Héctor Tobar in Portland
and Eugene; journalist and historian Isabel
Wilkerson in Portland and Astoria; and journalist Katherine Boo in Portland.
Think & Drink 2016 is made possible by a

Want to keep
up with the
humanities in
Oregon?
• Visit oregonhumanities.org
to sign up for our monthly
enewsletter
• Like us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter

8

Oregon Humanities

$30,000 grant from the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative, a $1.5 million effort
to generate conversations across the country
about the impact of journalism and humanities
on our lives in observation of the hundredth
presentation of the annual awards. The Pulitzer Prizes, established by newspaper publisher
Joseph Pulitzer in his will, recognize excellence in journalism, letters, and music.
Season tickets to the Portland events, which
will take place at the Alberta Rose Theatre, are
available now at albertarosetheatre.com. Tickets for events outside of Portland will be available through local venues.
BEN WAT ER HOUSE

Power and Place
Oregon Humanities launches a project to
explore land loss by communities of color.

A

F T E R R E C E I V I NG A N OV E RW H E L M-

ingly enthusiastic response to the video
Future: Portland, Kathleen Holt—who coordinated the production of the video for Oregon
Humanities—knew there were more stories
like this one that needed telling. The video,
which was made by magazine contributor
Ifanyi Bell and Brushfire Creative Partners,

tells the story of loss and hope in Portland’s
black communities. It was powerful, Holt says,
because it showed the effects of displacement
on people, and how that experience feels.
Inspired by the impact the video had on
Oregonians, Oregon Humanities is launching a new multimedia project that will collect
and connect stories about the loss of lands and
power by communities of color. Combining
technology, arts, and the humanities, the project will culminate in a website featuring videos,
photos, maps, timelines, graphics, words, and
other content created by artists and writers of
color to express Oregon’s stories of land and
power loss as well as people’s responses to this
loss, including thriving and resistance.
Holt says the goal of this undertaking is to
share with Oregonians the sometimes hidden
histories and contributions of communities
of color. “It’s important for citizens to understand how the world takes shape around us.
Once we have that awareness, we can take
steps to change and improve our community,”
she says. By creating a space to express many
different stories side by side, Oregon Humanities aims to help build a broader understanding of how policies and legislation influence
systems of power and landownership in Oregon’s past and present.

Oregon Humanities News
THINK

&

DRINK

RETURNS

Oregon Humanities’ Think & Drink
returns in 2016, engaging the public to
think and talk about big ideas. Thanks
to support from the Pulitzer Centennial
Campfires Initiative, this year’s series
will bring Pulitzer Prize winners and
finalists to Portland, Astoria, Bend, and
Eugene. The speakers include Laila Lalami, Héctor Tobar, Isabel Wilkerson, and
Katherine Boo. See p. 7 for more details
about the series.
DE A R STR A NGER : MOV E DE A R

Stranger, OH’s letter-writing project,
invites Oregonians to write a personal
letter to someone they’ve never met
and receive a letter in exchange. To participate, write a letter inspired by the
theme “Move” and send it, along with a
self-addressed, stamped envelope and a

signed release form to Dear Stranger, c/o
Oregon Humanities, 921 SW Washington
St., Suite 150, Portland Oregon 97205.
Letters must be mailed by January 22,
2016, to be exchanged. Visit oregonhumanities.org for complete guidelines and
to download a release form.

to the board of directors this September.
Mara has worked in business management and consulting in Oregon since
1994. She works with Volunteers in Medicine and Sudara Corp. and also serves on
the boards of directors for Opportunity
Knocks and 1859 Media LLC.

HO S T A C ON V E R S AT ION P R O J E C T

N EH CELEBR ATE S FIFT Y Y E A R S

Oregon nonprofits and community
groups can apply until January 31, 2016,
to host Conversation Project discussions
in the spring and summer. Visit oregonhumanities.org for more information,
and look out for the application window
for 2016–17 conversation leaders opening in January.

The National Endow ment for the
Humanities, one of the largest funders
of humanities programs in the country,
makes Oregon Humanities’ work possible. This year, the NEH celebrates fifty
years of achievement. Since its inception
in 1965, the organization has awarded
63,000 grants totaling $5.3 billion in
order to strengthen teaching, research,
and lifelong learning around the nation.

W E L C OM E , N E W B OA R D M E M B E R

Oregon Humanities is pleased to
announce the election of Shannon Mara

9

Fall/Winter 2015

Joaquin Lopez

This project, which is made possible by a
$110,000 grant from the Creative Heights Initiative of the Oregon Community Foundation,
will create a place for artists and writers of
color to share their work, and will invite more
stories. Holt says, “This project is just the
beginning. We hope to create a place for these
kinds of stories to live and be shared. By setting up this place, other stories will come to us.”
The website is expected to launch in January
2017. To watch Future: Portland, visit oregonhumanities.org.
J U L I A W IT H ER S

RUSSELL J. YOUNG

The Power of Story
Idea Lab guest inspires students to find meaning
in stories.

W

H E N M USICI A N A N D C OM M U N I T Y

advocate Joaquin Lopez is able to convince youth that they have the power to make
their own lives meaningful, he says, “they
become the owners of their own experience.”

This summer, Lopez shared his story with 120
rising high school seniors from around the
state at Oregon Humanities’ Idea Lab Summer Institute.

A Partnership to Promote Public
Conversation Around Palliative Care

The Cambia Health Foundation is proud to partner with Oregon Humanities to
help communities across Oregon talk about what matters most.
Learn more at oregonhumanities.org

10

Oregon Humanities

Funders
Keep Oregon
Listening,
Learning, and
Exploring
Thanks to the support of
our generous funders,
Oregon Humanities
brings tens of thousands
of Oregonians together—
face-to-face, online, and
on the page—to talk,
listen, and learn from one
another. The following
funders have recently
offered support to make
Oregon a more dynamic
and vital place to live:
• The Oregon Community
Foundation: $110,000
Creative Heights grant
to pursue a multimedia
project that explores land
loss by communities of
color in Oregon
• The Maybelle Clark
Macdonald Fund:
$20,000 for matching
new and increased donations over the last year
• The Rose E. Tucker
Charitable Trust: $6,500
for Conversation Project
• Emily Georges Gottfried Fund: $2,000 for a
pilot project training high
school students to lead
community conversations
• Union Bank of California
Foundation: $2,000 for
Humanity in Perspective

“At Idea Lab I learned to see
the world not just as what it was,
but as what it could be.”
—Mark Delgado, Oregon Humanities Idea Lab alumnus (2010) and counselor (2015)

Help more Oregonians connect to life-changing ideas.
Visit giveguide.org/#oregonhumanities to make a gift
through the Willamette Week’s 2015 Give!Guide.

Idea Lab is a three-day program that brings
Oregon teachers and high school juniors
together to explore the pursuit of happiness
and how it shapes our world. Students from
diverse communities and economic backgrounds engage with big ideas through workshops, lectures, films, and conversations. This
year, the weekend concluded with a special presentation by Lopez.
Incorporating personal narrative, lecture,
and Latin American folk music into his performance, Lopez focused on the power of stories
to connect people to history, themselves, and
the world. Lopez shared with Idea Lab students
how he came to terms with his own identity as
a queer Latino man by realizing that he’s the
author of his own story and the creator of his
own happiness. Students gave Lopez a standing ovation; they appreciated his honesty,
openness, and confidence. Courtney Ford, a
student from De La Salle North Catholic High
School, commented, “He left the audience with

inspiration to truly be themselves.”
Lopez believes in the potential of the
humanities to engage and empower people. In
his work with youth at the Latino Network—
a nonprofit with locations in Portland and
Gresham that promotes social change by uniting the Latino community—Lopez manages
Studio Latino, an after-school program that
focuses on Latin American arts and culture.
The program was piloted last spring, and this
year, it will enter Reynolds High School in
Troutdale, Gresham High School, and Alder
Elementary in Portland. Lopez works to incorporate themes of perseverance, personal character, and cultural identity into the program so
that students can bring those values with them
beyond high school.
For Lopez, creating spaces where youth can
be themselves and connect with each other is
a powerful way to make change: “Stories have
the capacity to heal; they remind us that we are
all in this together.”
J U L I A W I T H ER S

Fall/Winter 2015

KIM NGUYEN

11

What We Pass On
A DA M DAV IS

W

H E N I WA S FI V E A N D L I V ING IN A

small Minnesota city my father’s parents visited from New York. On Sunday morning we went as usual to Perkins, where I did
what my parents had prepared me to do: I asked
for pancakes but no bacon. With enthusiasm
and pride I told my grandparents—Moshe and
Lottie to most people, Saba and Sabtah to me—
that because they were there, I was only having
pancakes, no bacon.
Two decades later I went to visit the family of the woman who is now my wife. While
most of the family ate snappy cheese and corn
pudding inside the Millersburg, Kentucky,
home, my wife’s father’s mother asked me on
the back porch what my belief was about Jesus
Christ. She listened to the first tepid sentence
of my response and thanked me and walked
into the kitchen to urge her granddaughter to
be careful.
A few years ago I went with my wife and
kids to the funeral of my wife’s mother’s third
husband in a Southern Baptist church in a
small town in South Carolina. In a departure
from the church’s usual practice, a wellknown local musician sang “Imagine.” Two

F ROM TH E DI R ECTOR

of the three eulogies were delivered from the
altar by gay men. When the preacher led us in
prayer and song, my kids and I, and I think my
wife, were silent. We knew neither the words
nor the tune.
My kids, now ten and eight, tell people who
ask that they are both Christian and Jewish. I
suspect my grandparents and my wife’s grandparents would have said they are neither.
I don’t think my kids know that they are a
thoroughly contemporary, diluted amalgam
of Presbyterian, Southern Baptist, and Jew.
There’s Scotch-Irish and English and Lithuanian and Polish in there. There’s Kentucky
and Alabama and New York and Israel and
Minnesota and Chicago. There’s other stuff,
too. They see themselves as Oregonians.
In a short essay that’s been on my mind recently, the author, Touré, thinks through how
he will raise children with his soon-to-be wife.
He writes that it will be his job not hers to
bring blackness into the home. He tries in his
essay to figure out what that could mean, but
he seems certain that the job belongs to him.
Earlier this fall at the Confederated Tribes
of Grand Ronde’s Third Annual History and
Culture Summit, there was a good deal of
attention to cultural inheritance—what we
receive and what we pass on. Several people
spoke of thinking seven generations back and
seven generations forward. I can’t go back four
and find the looking forward even harder—and
there we were thinking about this at just the
third-annual summit, an old culture becoming
new again.
This summit got me thinking about how
the more pressure your culture is under—the
more persecution and threat it suffers—the
more likely you may be to think carefully about
preserving it, recognizing it, passing it on.
One thing that’s been passed on to me is
an undiluted commitment to questions. This
time of year, with the holidays and their various rituals upon us, my big question is about
what Touré calls his job.
Merry or happy or bountiful or blessed
whatever, everyone, and also this: what of
what you’ve received do you want to pass on?
What would you be fine leaving behind? And
what can you do to transmit the good stuff,
inherited or acquired later, seven generations
hence?

12

Oregon Humanities

13

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Whose State
Is This?
Legal measures targeting Latino
Oregonians reflect fears of change.
BR EN T WA LT H

I

N T H E AU T U M N OF 198 0, T E R E S A A L ONS O L E ON ’ S FAT H E R DE CI DE D T O TA K E A

rare day off from working in the fields near Clackamas to bring his daughters to what he thought
was a public park. Alonso Leon, who was five, and her sister played catch, their feet crunching
fallen leaves as they ran across the grass. Then a car pulled up. The driver got out and shouted at
Alonso Leon’s father. The man spoke in English, but her father spoke only Spanish—Alonso Leon,
too. They had only recently arrived from the southern state of Michoacán, Mexico, to their new
home in Oregon. The man grew more agitated, gesturing and raising his voice, until her father
gathered the girls and left.
“It was a golf course or someplace people didn’t want kids playing,” Alonso Leon, who is now
forty-one, recalls. “My father couldn’t read the signs, and we had no idea what the man was saying.
But the way the man spoke to my father, that just stuck with me.”
Alonso Leon’s family are modern-day Movers, people who made Oregon their destination of
hope for prosperity, renewal, and survival. But her family would not have fit the original ideal.
Movers was the nineteenth-century nickname for settlers who drove west in covered wagons.
“Restlessness was their dominant trait,” historian Malcolm Clark Jr. wrote in his 1981 book, Eden
Seekers. “The gene of it was passed from father to son as a part of the act of procreation. The frontier was constantly reproducing itself.”
For centuries, the new Oregonians worked to make sure the reproducing gene was white. When
it won statehood in 1859, Oregon was part of the anti-slavery North—if only because its constitution excluded blacks from living within the state’s borders. (The provision wasn’t removed until
1926.) Native tribes were shuffled to reservations, and Chinese workers were attacked by white
residents in Oregon City, La Grande, and several other communities.
The twentieth-century brought more hostility. In 1920, state law required non-English newspapers to print English translations. Portland’s black population swelled when the city’s shipyards expanded during World War II, and city leaders segregated African Americans in North
and Northeast Portland neighborhoods and nearby Vanport, a slapdash public housing project in
a floodplain near the Columbia River. The state didn’t outlaw discrimination in housing, restaurants, hotels, and other accommodations until the 1950s.

14

Oregon Humanities

J IM LU DW ICK SEE S A DAY W HEN A M ER ICA NS W IL L BE

The definition of what
it means to be an
Oregonian has shifted
as the state has seen
immigrants from Asia,
Eastern Europe, and
Africa. The biggest shift
has been in the state’s
Latino population,
which has grown five
times faster than the
state as a whole.
Oregon can no longer look in a mirror and see a bleached face
staring back. In 1980, the first year the first year the Census
Bureau included “Hispanic” as an ethnic category, fewer than 7
percent of people in the state identified themselves as anything
other than “white.” Now, according to the most recent Census
numbers, nearly one quarter identify as something other than
“white alone.”
The definition of what it means to be an Oregonian has
shifted as the state has seen immigrants from Asia, Eastern
Europe, and Africa. The biggest shift has been in the state’s
Latino population, which has grown five times faster than the
state as a whole. According to the Census, 12.5 percent of the
population now identifies as Hispanic or Latino. Several cities
now count Latinos as the majority.
One of those cities is Woodburn, a Marion County town of
24,000, where Alonso Leon now serves as a member of the city
council, and where an acceptance of languages other than English has helped the community deal with change. “If you don’t
have that, you instead have misunderstanding and misperceptions about other people,” Alonso Leon says. “We’re not sitting
down together often enough as it is.”
Oregon has become a state of many languages. But a small,
effective, and (many say) xenophobic group is pushing to put
a measure on the 2016 ballot that would declare English as the
state’s official language. Oregonians will need to decide if fear
will divide the state over race, ethnicity, and how we talk to each
other.

expected to speak both English and Spanish. It worries him.
“Being a bilingual country is breaking down people according to where they came from, rather than encouraging everyone
to be united,” Ludwick says. “It’s a tragedy waiting to happen.”
Ludwick, a retired pharmaceuticals salesman from McMinnville, is cofounder of Oregonians for Immigration Reform,
which is pushing the English-only measure. Since its founding in 2000, the group has argued that the federal government’s failure to enforce immigration laws has wreaked havoc
on the country. The group opposes any government privileges
for undocumented residents, including schools and health
care. Oregonians for Immigration Reform, he says, favors the
deportation of anyone the government discovers is living in the
country illegally. That includes the estimated 120,000 undocumented people living in Oregon—a number that’s actually fallen
in recent years. “This country was founded on the rule of law,”
Ludwick says. “We’re now seeing people openly violating our
immigration laws while trying to impose new laws on us.”
For years, Oregonians for Immigration Reform wasn’t taken
seriously in Salem or seen as a political threat. Its leaders’ tendency to broadbrush Latinos leaves many people uncomfortable. When asked about immigration, for example, Ludwick
steers the conversation to “illegals” stealing Social Security
numbers, Mexicans running drugs, and undocumented residents committing other crimes.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Alabama–based watchdog on issues of discrimination, maintains a
nationwide list of “nativist extremist” groups it says go beyond
advocating on immigration policy to targeting immigrants
themselves. Oregonians for Immigration Reform is one of nineteen groups on the organization’s nationwide list.
Ludwick says this characterization of his group is unfair. “If
I even question our immigration policies, then I’m a racist,” he
says. “That’s not it at all. I want the United States to be a great
country that welcomes people from all over, as we always have.
But it’s foolish to think it will be if we continue with our immigration policies.”
The group’s status as an outsider—and its leader’s view of its
place in Oregon politics—changed in 2014.
Oregon once had relatively lax laws when it came to granting
drivers’ licenses. Starting in 2008, the state legislature required
proof of citizenship or legal residency, such as a Social Security
number or other papers. Latino groups (long courted by the
Democrats who run Salem) spent the next five years pushing
to overturn the law. They succeeded in 2013 when lawmakers
established a “driver’s card” for residents who could not prove
they were in the country legally.
Oregonians for Immigration Reform fought the new law by
gathering the 58,000 signatures needed to put the question on
the November 2014 ballot. A “yes” vote would uphold the legislature’s actions. Backers, including some farm groups, said
the measure was practical and compassionate. But the measure became a proxy for frustration about the nation’s broken

15

immigration system, and Oregon voters crushed the measure
two to one.
The victory, Ludwick says, shows Oregonians agree with his
group’s views that immigration is out of control and that the government should not be rewarding people who are here illegally.
He says much of the country is with his group—and the success of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s
rhetoric about immigrants is proof. When he announced his
candidacy in June 2015, Trump said Mexico was dumping drug
dealers and rapists into the United States. “And some, I assume,”
Trump added, “are good people.”
“When he did that,” Ludwick says, “he shot right up in the
polls. He chose to talk about immigration because he’s a guy who
likes leverage. He knows that’s a subject that appeals to regular
Americans.”
OR E G ON S AW I T S L AT I NO P OPU L AT ION GROW A F T E R

World War II when the United States opened its borders to braceros, guest workers from Mexico who labored in the fields. The
program ended in the mid-1960s but the state’s farmers were
by then dependent on migrant workers. United Farm Workers
(UFW) leader Cesar Chavez often brought his protests to Oregon, denouncing the low wages, unsafe conditions, and abysmal
housing for many of the state’s estimated 40,000 migrant workers, half of whom took seasonal jobs in the Willamette Valley.
The UFW’s actions sparked backlash against Latinos in
many places, but Oregon turned away from a cultural battle. In
1971, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill to stop
farmworkers from organizing. They put intense pressure on
then-Governor Tom McCall—a fellow Republican who grew up
in a ranching family—to sign it. McCall nearly did, but protests
and vigils against the bill moved him (as did Chavez’s threats of
boycotts), and it troubled him that the state was about to deny
rights and protections for people who came here to work. “Hell,”
McCall said when the bill-signing deadline approached, “I’m
going to veto that son of a bitch.” And he did. Over the years,
many migrants stopped moving around and settled in the Willamette Valley, and they beckoned others from their home countries to join them.
Teresa Alonso Leon’s family was among those who heard the
call. Her parents arrived in Oregon without documentation. Her
father left their home in Michoacán in early 1980 and moved
to Clackamas, where relatives had told him he could find better-paying work than he had in Mexico. In Oregon, her parents
worked at least two jobs at a time, often seven days a week. For
four years, her family lived in a ramshackle house in Gervais
without plumbing. They used an outhouse and hauled in buckets of water, filled from a garden hose, to cook and clean. In the
winter, the water stored in the buckets indoors froze.
Her parents wanted their children to avoid the life they had
as laborers, and for Alonso Leon, school was transformative. She
quickly saw the need to learn English—her teachers made her
repeat first grade because she struggled with the new language.
But she soon caught up and became the family’s translator

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

during doctor’s visits or meetings at her school.
“I had to become the spokesperson for the family,” she says.
In 1986, Congress passed an immigration amnesty bill that
offered legal residency to 2.9 million people. Not yet a teenager,
Alonso Leon represented her parents as they met the requirements to earn legal status: gathering work histories from past
employers, studying US history, and demonstrating basic English skills. (Her parents earned legal residency that covered
Alonso Leon. She became a US citizen in 2013.)
Her family eventually moved to Woodburn, where she
attended high school before earning her GED through a program at the University of Oregon. She went on to graduate from
Western Oregon University and Portland State University,
where she earned a master’s degree in public administration.
Alonso Leon has spent most of her career looking for ways to
make school more available to low-income students or those who
are the first in their families to attend college. At Portland Community College, she helped develop a program to guide migrant
students in adjusting to their first year in college. Today, she
runs the state of Oregon’s GED program in the Department of
Community Colleges and Workforce Development, which each
year helps 1,700 students gain their high-school equivalency.
Families like hers have worked here for decades, paying taxes
and working to offer their children better lives. And Alonso
Leon worries that Oregon will declare its government recognizes only English.
“It sends the message that as a state we’re denying that people should be able to live here and speak their native language,”
Alonso Leon says. “It also sends the message that immigrants
arrive and reject the language that’s spoken here. That’s not the
case. People try to learn English because they want to succeed.”
Alonso Leon’s parents still struggle with English, even after
three decades in Oregon. Mastering the language, she says, often
requires education and training—something that her parents
and many other immigrants have lacked.
“My parents worked two or three jobs at a time, at low wages,
all these years,” she says. “You can say to my parents, ‘Why have
you not done a better job of learning English?’ The answer is
they spent all their time making sure their children were fed
and clothed.”
THE ME A SU R E SU PPORTED BY OR EGON I A NS FOR IMMI-

gration Reform would, if passed by voters, require state and
local governments to conduct business in English. Oregon
law already requires that in many cases, even though Oregon
is one of nineteen states without a blanket official-language
declaration.
But the Oregon measure could go beyond what other states
impose: its language suggests that (with some exceptions) it
could become illegal for government agencies to provide communications with the public in languages besides English—
despite the fact that 15 percent of Oregonians speak a language
other than English at home. Portland Public Schools, for example, prints materials for parents in several languages—a practice

16

Ludwick says is a waste of money.
Ludwick recalls an illustration he saw in a social studies textbook he had in high school. “It was of this giant cooking pot,”
he says. “People from all over the world are jumping in—people
with sombreros and so on. And in the picture, Uncle Sam is stirring it—stirring the pot, the melting pot. And the people who had
jumped in earlier are now climbing out dressed like Americans.
They had coats and ties on.”
“The point is,” he says, “it was about assimilation. It used to
be you come to America to become an American. Not a Hispanic
American. New immigrants today don’t want to be assimilated.
They want to divide themselves off from us while imposing their
cultural beliefs on us.”
The threat Ludwick sees is about more than language. It’s
about influence and power—less about reforming immigration
laws than it is about forcing a cultural norm on Oregon’s immigrants. His group’s attention to Latinos in particular is based
in sheer numbers—40 percent of immigrants in Oregon were
born in Mexico—but also on the success of organizations such
as Causa Oregon to push a political agenda. These groups have
had some victories, including a 2013 law allowing college tuition
grants for undocumented students who attended Oregon high
schools. But the doors of power have not been knocked open.
The state has seen only one Latino elected official statewide
(former state schools superintendent Susan Castillo) and only
a handful of legislators.
What Oregonians for Immigration Reform plays on is fear—
the fear of a non-Latino majority losing influence and facing
discrimination for not speaking Spanish. In its troubled history, Oregon has turned on the “other,” foreigners, blacks, any
faceless group accused of stealing something from the rest of us,
including jobs, culture, and—now—language.
The last thing Oregon needs is another dark chapter of racism disguised as nationalistic duty. What the state could use
instead is a moment of illumination and courage.
It’s happened before in another context. A half century ago,
Oregon set out to protect its farms and forests by carefully planning for the rapid population growth that was coming. Its leaders (primarily Governor Tom McCall) engaged in a long, often
rending discussion about the need for land-use laws. Invective
followed—foes called Oregon a communist state, and voters in
many parts of the state would still erase land-use laws from the

The threat Ludwick
sees is about more than
language. It’s about
influence and power.

Oregon Humanities

books in a heartbeat given the chance. But it took someone with
guts to challenge hardened beliefs and prepare Oregon for the
future.
It’s time for another conversation, this one about the changing face of the state. Oregon’s long history with a whites-only
club running things is ending. Imagine seeing a leader in Oregon
brave enough to embrace that future—especially now that the
nation’s political debate is oozing anti-immigrant poison.
A future Oregon leader who gets up the nerve to talk about
the value of a more diverse Oregon—and the need to account
for it—need look no further than Woodburn, a city that thirty
years ago no one would predict would be a model for cultural
tolerance. The town struggled with change as Latino and Russian immigrants came to the area. Today, Woodburn proudly
talks of its “Little Mexico” business district. The school district
has seen enormous success in graduating students from high
school, in large part because of its bilingual approach in the
classroom. The city routinely sends out information about the
library, parks, and water bills in English and Spanish. And the
city’s website has a button that allows visitors to translate its
pages into thirty-six languages.
Alonso Leon says that, despite Woodburn’s progress, the city
has a lot of ground to gain when it comes to making itself open
to everyone. She says the city council rarely sees members of the
Latino community appear before it, and that the only Spanish
speakers who attend meetings on a regular basis are usually her
parents, who like to watch her in action. She says the city has
formed a committee to find ways Woodburn can knock down
cultural and language barriers that keep non-English speakers
from believing they have a role in civic debates.
“We need to do more to make ourselves inviting and available,” she says. “Telling people only English is acceptable in
government runs against the idea that everyone has the right
to be heard.”
Alonso Leon won an appointment to city council in 2013 and
must run for her seat this year if she wants to keep it. She’s never
sought public office before, and she could appear on the same
election ballot as Trump and the Oregonians for Immigration
Reform measure—an irony that isn’t lost on her.
Alonso Leon expects a campaign will test her. She’d be the
third Latino elected to the council (she’s the only one serving
there now), and she says she has never been afraid to tell her story.
“If people are asking questions and scrutinizing who I am,
that means they’re considering me, or someone like me,” she
says. “And that in itself is progress.”

Brent Walth has been an Oregon journalist since 1984. He’s
the former managing editor at Willamette Week and senior
investigative reporter for the Oregonian and author of Fire at
Eden’s Gate, a biography of Oregon Governor Tom McCall.
He’s now an assistant professor in the University of Oregon
School of Journalism and Communication.

17

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Community
in Flux
A long-persecuted people begins to speak out.

L ISA L OV ING

I

N P OR T L A N D, T H E C H R I S T M A S OF 1 9 4 4 WA S BI T-

terly cold and blanketed in white. It snowed for days and
stayed close to freezing as the New Year approached. But Portlanders were distracted from the unusually cruel weather by
news that Portland Mayor Earl Riley was forcing dozens of
Roma out of the city—and, by God, it was about time, the newspapers crowed. Although many members of the local Kalderash
community of Roma had been working in the Kaiser shipyard
factories for the US war effort, elected officials, law enforcement, and the media fell over themselves to justify running the
Roma out of town.
The Oregon Journal reported that, encouraged by police, the
Roma—described as “the gaily dressed wanderers”—asked for
assistance to return to Texas and New Mexico because Portland
was “too cold” for them. Mayor Riley persuaded the US Office
of Price Administration (OPA), the federal bureau in charge of
rationing, to issue special gas rations to the Roma so they could
make the drive south.
The Oregonian considered this a “notable feat” by the mayor,
not only because the OPA’s rationing of items like gas, rubber,
sugar, and butter was so strict, but also because Riley was “getting
rid of at least half the gypsies [who] have been afflicting the city.”
“We are right proud of our mayor,” the paper wrote.
This was the same Mayor Riley who is purported to be one of
the most corrupt mayors in Portland’s history. Though his office
accused the Roma of using fortune-telling as a front for prostitution, Riley allegedly kept a special safe in City Hall just for the
bribes he collected from these same types of criminal operations. He was neither indicted nor punished despite criticism by
the City Club of Portland; instead, he amassed a fortune in illegal enterprises over his lifetime. Meanwhile, the Roma families

18

A detective and two policemen
escort two arrested Romani women
from the paddy wagon into the
Police Headquarters building at SW
2nd & Oak in 1951.

Oregon Humanities

in Portland barely got by, sometimes using abandoned storefronts as homes.
Carol Silverman—a professor of cultural anthropology and folklore at the
University of Oregon who has studied, worked with, and advocated for Roma
locally and around the world for almost forty years—says the group of Roma in
Portland who came to work in the shipyards during the war were turned upon
when the war was over. “Just like Rosie the Riveter, when women no longer were
needed for welding and [were told they] should go back to the home,” Silverman
says, “it was perceived that this group of Roma was no longer needed in the city.
Perceived as foreign, outsiders, dangerous, [they were] given these gas rations to
drive out of state.”

19

COURTESY THOMAS ROBINSON

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Roma in America today are a community in flux. Families
still identify their lineages through distinct ethnic communities sometimes called tribes, including the Sinti, Romanichal,
and Kalderash, and these communities tend to blend in with
the mainstream. In the Northwest, a look through local business listings will not reveal any obvious groups or organizations serving them except a handful of very tight-knit Christian
churches. Most Kalderash would prefer to live under the radar,
says Silverman, for a compelling historical reason: almost
everywhere they’ve gone, Roma people have been oppressed by
both government and society.
Originally from India, Roma communities are traditionally
nomadic. From the fourteenth century until the Romanian
emancipation of 1864, Roma were enslaved and traded by the
local nobility in a large area of southern Romania including
Walachia and Moldovia, with the support of church institutions.
Roma moved to the Northwest in the largest numbers after
1864, with Kalderash families settling in the area between 1880
and 1920. Silverman says, “From the first time they came to
America, there were rules regulating where Roma could live and
where they could settle, and even the kind of work they could do.
Many cities had anti-fortune-telling edicts, fortune-telling policies, on the books. Some cities actually still have them.”
Accused of being naturally inferior and prone to crime, Roma
people in the Northwest have been targeted and harassed by
local law enforcement and negatively depicted in the media. In
1906, the Oregonian wrote, “The police allege that the gypsies
have such a penchant for stealing everything that is not nailed
down that it is necessary always to ‘keep an eye on them.’” And
the Ashland Daily Tidings in 1916 wrote, “True to their inborn
instincts, the horde of gypsies which passed through Ashland
last Sunday failed to get out of the country without committing
a serious depredation.”
No scholar has studied discrimination against the Roma as
fully as Ian Hancock, a University of Texas at Austin professor of
linguistics, English, and Asian studies, who laid out his findings
in a 2007 research paper. He writes that despite five special US
Congressional sessions addressing the increase in anti-Romani
hate crimes in Europe and the correlative increase in Romani
asylum seekers to the United States, “There nevertheless remain
laws on the books in various states and counties that continue
to operate against Gypsies. Many of these laws, a list of which
fills thirty-four pages, were inherited from Europe and were
intended to be used against the earlier Gypsy populations in the
United States; they have since found new application against
the more recently arrived, and more visible, Eastern European
Roma escaping the post-Communist increase in racial violence
in that region, many of whom are seeking political asylum here.”
But despite the hostility they have traditionally faced,
Romani people have also historically been linchpins of their
local economies. Silverman says Roma in Europe worked in
metalcraft, which they applied in the United States to recopper
and re-tin household items at the turn of the century. “Until the
1950s, before stainless steel, in order to have a working kitchen

20

Most Americans
have no idea
that their own
government was
persecuting Roma
people at the
same time Roma
in Europe were
being murdered in
the Holocaust.

Oregon Humanities

you had to have your pots and pans redone,” Silverman says. “This was a real
Romani skill.”
This skill in metalwork was perfect for the emerging car industry in 1920s
and ’30s America. “Roma did this kind of service for many, many Northwest
Americans, and then eventually they got into the car sales business,” Silverman says. The Roma’s family-based car repair operations competed directly
with corporate auto repair shops, offering an alternative to high-dollar services
with the personal attention of a family business. So by World War II, not only
was Mayor Riley’s expulsion of Roma families cruel, but it also likely damaged
the local economy.
Most Americans have no idea that their own government was persecuting Roma people at the same time Roma in Europe were being murdered in
the Holocaust. The Nazis killed an estimated 220,000 to 500,000 Roma men,
women, and children—perhaps 25 percent of the European Roma population—
between 1935 and 1945. Morgan Ahern, a Sinti/Romanichal Roma and founder
of Seattle-based organization Lolo Diklo: Romani Against Racism, believes
the number of Roma killed may be as high as 1.5 million. “Many [were killed] in
concentration camps,” she says, “but many more [were] just shot on the road.”
Silverman agrees that the effect of the Holocaust—known to some Roma as
the Porraimos or “the devouring”—on the Roma has been “a footnote in most
textbooks” and is only starting to be examined in Holocaust museums because
of lobbying by Roma and their allies.
Also overlooked in the history of Roma in the United States: generations of
Roma children taken from their parents and warehoused in foster care systems
because of lifestyle differences and, some families say, racism. Ahern was one
of those children, removed from her family and put into foster care after her
parents were deemed unfit to take care of her because they were Romani and
nomadic.
Even today many Romani individuals and families lack birth certificates
and marriage certificates, making them vulnerable to government officials’
whims. Silverman says, “Things like being fingerprinted, having a birth certificate, might mean that your children are going to be taken away. These historic
memories are very, very, very much alive for Roma.”
After generations of abuse, a modest tide of Roma are beginning to speak out
about their civil rights and demand fair treatment, including fair accommodations in trying to obtain legal documentation for family members who were
born in the United States. Silverman, who is on the board of the nonprofit Voice
of Roma, says she was involved in a case in Portland in which it was argued that
oral testimony in a birth is equivalent to a birth certificate. “When people bear
witness to a marriage,” Silverman says, “it doesn’t matter if there’s no marriage
certificate. It could be issued based on hindsight, on memory.”
For a community that has for generations avoided keeping their money in
bank accounts and sending their children to public schools, social isolation is
giving way to an emerging movement for empowerment.
On the East Coast, Kalderash filmmaker George Eli produces films about
his family and is currently building a media channel on Roma. And at the
University of Texas, Hancock, who is Romanichal Roma, has spent decades
building the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center.
Ahern founded Lolo Diklo, which means “red scarf,” in 1986, along with a
fellow teacher at Seattle Central College. The group’s purpose is to document
discrimination and persecution of Romani. Ahern’s father’s Romanichal family have lived in the United States since the 1700s and were originally sent from
Ireland by the British government as slaves. Her mother’s family were Sinti who

21

No documents
or oral histories
exist showing
what happened to
the Roma families
forced out of
Portland in 1944.

arrived in the United States in the late 1930s,
fleeing the climate in Germany. Her maternal
grandmother pretended to be Italian to get into
the country.
Over the years, Ahern has traveled throughout the West Coast, lecturing about Roma culture and civil rights. She works with Romani
organizations across the United States, South
America, Canada, Europe, and Spain.
Silverman adds that over the past twenty
years, many American Roma have become
born-again Christians establishing their own
churches or joining evangelical congregations.
Some of these church leaders are emerging as
community spokespeople—something very
new for a community that has been persecuted
for so long. “There are Roma who don’t want
to be left alone anymore because they are at a
disadvantage when they are left alone,” Silverman says. “They are being very brave to actually interact with the US court system.”
But despite these efforts, even today the discrimination that Roma face by revealing their
heritage remains very real. “In their historical
memory, interacting with American institutions has often resulted in a form of marginalization,” Silverman says.
For example, Silverman describes ethnic
profiling by police bureaus through what were
known as “bunco squads,” police bureaus in
the South that had “Gypsy units” to focus on

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

“Gypsy crime.” She says, “This is ethnic profiling of crime,
assuming that all Roma commit a certain kind of crime, and
certain kinds of crimes are only committed by Roma.”
The racial profiling of Roma people doesn’t stop with law
enforcement; it is a staple of local news. The language used
in Pacific Northwest news coverage in the past ten years to
describe alleged offenders has hardly changed from what was
written in newspapers in the early 1900s.
In 2007, a “Night Cabbie” column in Willamette Week
sparked outrage. “The Gypsies, apparently, are no joke,” the
unidentified cab driver/writer penned about the apparent ravings of a customer. “Despite what we may think, she explains to
us that real Gypsies aren’t nomadic livestock thieves, but in fact
have been living in her neighborhood for decades. And they’re
very bad neighbors.”
“This is racist nonsense,” a reader responded. “Inexcusable
for a serious newspaper to print such offensive content about a
real living breathing person in the neighborhood, on account of
one of his neighbors. For all we know this bigoted fool is the bad
neighbor.”
No documents or oral histories exist showing what happened
to the Roma families forced out of Portland in 1944. Did they
stay in Texas? Did they return to the Northwest? Did they find
safety? Or were they forced on toward some other location? And,
most important, how, in the Information Age, is it possible that
the Roma experience has been all but forgotten by the mainstream of society?
Silverman holds out hope that organizations such as Voice of
Roma and Lolo Diklo can help Roma keep from getting caught in
unfriendly bureaucratic systems as well as provide an opening
for more outreach and understanding. The Portland Romani
Festival, a one-day celebration featuring food, music, and information on human rights issues affecting Roma people, is tentatively scheduled for late spring 2016. The Festival Romani
Facebook page is a fountain of music and cultural events, particularly music performances up and down the West Coast.
“I think people should become knowledgeable about Romani
history and discrimination in order to combat it,” Silverman
says. “It seems to me that while we’re talking about ethnic and
racial diversity, we can no longer eliminate a large group that
has suffered prejudice for so many years and continues to suffer
prejudice.”

Thanks to Fair Housing Council of Oregon for sharing this
story with Oregon Humanities through its history bus tour.
Lisa Loving has reported on civil rights and diversity in
Oregon for more than fifteen years. She is a news and
public affairs producer at KBOO Community Radio 90.7
FM in Portland and the former news editor of the awardwinning African American community newspaper, the
Skanner. Her new book, How to Be a Citizen Journalist, will
be released in 2017 by Microcosm Publishing.

22

Oregon Humanities

This Way
through Oregon
The flow of salmon, waste,
traffic, and laws
ER IC G OL D A N D TA R A R A E M IN ER
I L LUSTR ATIONS BY BOL O GNA SA N DW ICH

Like all places, Oregon has a brand, an identity that distinguishes
it from other places. This identity is a pastiche of characteristics—environmental and agricultural, urban and rural, intrepid and
entrepreneurial—that become a kind of shorthand that, rightly or
wrongly, insiders and outsiders read to understand what this state
and its people collectively value. But how much do we, the residents of this place, really know about the systems behind these
things that seem to represent our identity?
On the pages that follow, we look more closely at just four of
these cultural identifiers and how they move through their individual systems: coho salmon up the Columbia River past historical
sites; trash, recyclables, reusables, and compost from Portland to
other parts of the state and the world; bicycles, buses, and cars
up a busy corridor through a rapidly changing neighborhood; and
ideas, measures, and laws through what is sometimes called the
Oregon System.

Thanks to sources at the Confluence Project, Death with Dignity, Friends of the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, Heiberg Garbage and
Recycling, Metro, MIG, Northwest Power and Conservation Council, Office of the Secretary of State, Oregon History Project, Oregon Legislature, Portland Bureau of Transportation, TriMet, and US Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station for their help with this story.

23

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Salmon up the Columbia River
AFTER SPENDING sixteen to twenty months at sea, a coho
salmon begins her journey up the Columbia and Sandy Rivers
back to her natal spawning grounds. This amazing biological phenomenon is also rich with cultural significance, and the landmarks
she passes upstream mark the politics and history of her species.

Washington, packing 4,000 cases their first year. In 1895, up to
50 Columbia canneries produced 635,000 cases of salmon. But
by 1977, the pack was just 2,547 cases. The last major cannery
on the Columbia closed in 1980.

4. On November 5, 1805, Lewis and Clark recorded a visit to the
1. Salmon were central to the Chinook that once inhabited villages
along the lower Columbia, and seining was the most important
method used to catch the fish. As runs declined in the early twentieth century, white fishermen drove the Chinook off Sand Island
and Peacock Spit, two of the most productive seining areas in
the estuary. Seining was prohibited by Washington in 1934 and
Oregon in 1948.

2. On March 16, 1806, Meriwether Lewis drew and described a fish
brought to him at Fort Clatsop: “The white Salmon Trout ... has
now made it’s appearance in the creeks near this place. one of
them was brought us today by an Indian who had just taken it with
his gig. this is a likness of it.” The fish was later classified as coho
salmon, Oncorhynchus kisutch.

3. In 1866, the brothers George W. and William Hume and Andrew
S. Hapgood established a salmon cannery at Eagle Cliff,

“Quathapotle Nation,” one of the largest Chinookan villages the
expedition encountered. Today, Cathlapotle is an archeological site
and the home of a modern plankhouse, which serves as an outdoor
classroom and is used by the Chinook Indian Nation.

5. In 2008, Maya Lin’s sculpture Bird Blind was dedicated. The blind
lists 134 plants documented by Lewis and Clark, along with one
word on their status today: thriving, threatened, endangered, or
extinct. Coho are listed as threatened today. 

6. In 2007, the Marmot Dam, part of Portland General Electric hydroelectric project in the Sandy River basin, was removed due to
pressure from conservation groups and rising management costs.
Built in 1913 by Portland Railway, Light and Power Company, the
dam provided hydroelectric power to Portland. Today salmon navigate a free-flowing river.
—TRM

24

Oregon Humanities

Waste from
Southwest
Portland
1. Every week two trucks (a third joins every
other week) from Heiberg Garbage and Recycling, one of a number of independent haulers
in the Metro region, grind their gears uphill,
traveling the narrow streets of Portland’s Hillsdale neighborhood. A family has set out food
scraps and yard waste in a green cart; cardboard, junk mail, and cat food cans in the blue
recycling cart; condiment jars and bottles in
the yellow bin; and garbage in the dark green
roll cart. A truck is designated for each category: recycling, compost and yard waste, and
garbage.

2. The family’s recyclables are taken directly
either to Far West Fibers in Beaverton or Oregon Recycling System, past the airport in East
Portland. Both are “clean” material recovery
facilities (there are a handful in the region),
which then sell the materials based on demand
in commodity markets—some nearby, others
in foreign countries such as China.

5. The ReBuilding Center in Portland might take doors and other reusable household

3. Loaded down with garbage and compostable

items. Other items, like broken porcelain, find a second life as ground-up material
in roads.

waste, the other trucks head to Metro Central
Transfer Station in Northwest Portland or Metro
South in Oregon City, two of six transfer stations in the region. Last year, almost a half a
million tons of trash was processed at Metro’s
two transfer stations. The Heiberg truck joins
other company haulers, contractors with construction waste, and residential customers with
miscellaneous items not picked up through
home collection service. At the transfer station,
the sorting process begins.

4. Mixed food and yard waste is taken to Nature
Need’s composting facility owned by Recology Organics outside of North Plains, about
twenty-three miles away, or to the Pacific
Region Compost Facility in Adair Village, about
twelve miles north of Corvallis.

6. After it’s sorted, the garbage is piled into a mountain and ground by a wheel loader,
then sent up a chute into a compactor. From there, thirty-four tons of trash at a time
is loaded into long-haul trucks. Five days a week, Metro’s Central and South transfer
stations send sixty trucks out I-84 to the Columbia Ridge Landfill near Arlington, a
three-hundred-mile round-trip. The trucks travel to the landfill full and return empty;
no garbage is returned to the Portland area. When the truck arrives at the sagebrush
plains of Columbia Ridge, it is tipped into the landfill and compacted into a “cell.”
According to the Department of Environmental Quality, at the end of every day, the
garbage in the landfill must be buried with dirt or another approved cover material.
The methane that is generated from the decaying waste must be collected and is
often used to generate electricity. Columbia Ridge collects 5,400 cubic feet per
minute of landfill gas from more than eighty-four wells. Some of that gas is sent to
an onsite energy plant, and the rest is sent up in flares. The gas that is sent to the
plant powers twelve engines, which provide 12.8 MW of electricity. This electricity
powers 12,500 homes in Seattle.
—TRM
Tara Rae Miner is a freelance editor and writer in Portland.

25

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Traffic on North Williams Avenue
1. 7,099 cars in a twenty-four-hour period in
winter 2015 (Source: Portland Bureau of
Transportation)

2. 4,745 bicycles in a twenty-four-hour period
in summer 2015 (Source: Portland Bureau of
Transportation)

3. 2,792 riders over a total of 139 bus trips in a
twenty-four-hour period in spring 2015 (Source:
TriMet)

HAVE YOU EVER noticed that sometimes you seem to make
every green light as you drive along an arterial street? That’s intentional, and it means you were probably traveling at a safe speed.
Traffic engineers time the signals on certain streets to encourage reasonable speeds, a phenomenon called the “green wave.”
In Portland, you can ride a green wave downtown, on Martin
Luther King Jr. Boulevard, on Southeast 17th Avenue near the
new Orange Line light rail tracks, and on North Williams Avenue,
represented here. (In Klamath Falls and Astoria, there are even
signs to let you know what speed you should drive to benefit from
the signal timing.) On North Williams, as in downtown Portland,
the signals are timed to a target speed of between 13 and 16 miles
per hour, depending on the time of day.

The green wave is part of a complex system that helps cars,
buses, trains, bikes, and pedestrians share the streets. The traffic
signal synchronization can be overridden by light rail trains and
emergency vehicles. Buses get a little extra time at almost one
hundred intersections throughout Portland.
Once a hub of Portland’s African American community, North
Williams today reflects a different wave of development and
demographic changes. Cars, bikes, pedestrians, and buses share
the busy corridor, recently altered to devote one of its two lanes to
bicycles. Each day, thousands of people use these transit modes
to pass relatively recent arrivals such as New Seasons Market,
the popular restaurant Tasty & Sons, and several high-density
residential buildings in various stages of construction. 
—EG

26

Oregon Humanities

Measures through the Oregon System
IN OREGON, voters have three distinct but related ways to affect
changes to state laws and the Oregon Constitution—initiative, referendum, and referral. An initiative lets petitioners put a proposed
law or amendment on the statewide ballot, to be approved or
rejected by voters. A referendum lets petitioners put a law already
passed by the legislature up for a vote of the people. Finally, a
referral occurs when legislators send an issue to the ballot rather
than voting on it themselves. Ninety-one percent of Oregon voters approved this system in 1902.
This illustration looks at the paths of two measures: 16, an
initiative on physician-assisted suicide, and 88, a referendum on
a law passed by the Oregon legislature that would have provided
drivers’ licenses to Oregonians without requiring proof of legal
documentation of US citizenship status.

4. Measure 16 77,151 signatures are verified, and the measure is
certified with the following language: “Allows Terminally Ill Adults
to Obtain Prescription for Lethal Drugs” (July 1994). Measure 88
58,921 signatures are verified, meeting the 4 percent threshold
of number of votes cast in the previous election for governor to
qualify for the ballot, and the measure is certified with the following language: “Provides Oregon resident ‘driver card’ without
requiring proof of legal presence in the United States” (Oct. to
Dec. 2013).

5. Measure 16 Passes 627,980 to 596,018 (Nov. 1994). Measure 88
Fails 983,576 to 506,751, overturning the law signed by Governor
Kitzhaber in May 2013 (Nov. 2014).

6. Measure 16 Oregon Legislative Assembly refers Measure 51
1. Measure 16 State Senator Frank Roberts introduces three
“Death with Dignity” bills; none make it out of committee (1990).
Measure 88 SB 833 passes in senate 20–7 and house 38–20. Text
of the bill reads in part: “The Department of Transportation shall
issue, renew or replace a driver card without requiring a person to
provide proof of legal presence in the United States” (Apr. 2013).

to the people in an attempt to repeal the law. Measure 51 fails,
666,275 to 445,830 (Nov. 1997). US Attorney General John Ashcroft tries to suspend the licenses to prescribe drugs covered
by the Controlled Substances Act of doctors who prescribed
lethal drugs under Oregon’s law. A federal judge blocks the move
(2003).

2. Measure 88 Governor Kitzhaber signs the bill into law with effec-

7. Measure 16 The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirms the block,

tive date of January 1, 2014 (May 1, 2013).

3. Measure 16 Peter Goodwin of Portland, Barbara Coombs of
Portland, and Elven O. Sinnard of Lake Oswego file an initiative
petition (Dec. 1993). Measure 88 Richard F. LaMountain, State
Senator Kim Thatcher of Keizer, and State Representative Sal
Esquivel of Medford file a referendum petition seeking to overturn
the law (May 8, 2013).

saying the “Attorney General lacked Congress’ requisite authorization” (2004). The US Supreme Court hears arguments in the
case of Oregon v. Gonzales. The Bush administration’s Solicitor
General, Paul Clement, challenges Oregon’s right to regulate the
practice of prescribing federally banned substances (2005). The
US Supreme Court votes 6–3 to uphold Oregon’s assisted suicide
law in the case of Oregon v. Gonzales (2006).
—EG
Eric Gold is a Portland-based freelance writer.

27

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

JEN WICK STUDIO

The Golden
Odes of Love

Al-Mu’allaqat

SO TO SPEAK
Moving between languages to find a
voice

TH E
DAYS

N
PAR

ALEXANDRE DUMAS.

LAILA LALAMI

DRIS S CHRA IBI

LA
CIV ILIS ATI ON
MA ME RE! ...

O T L ON G AG O, W H I L E C L E A N I N G OU T M Y BE D -

room closet, I came across a box of old family photographs.
Taha Husse in
I had tied the black-and-white snapshots, dog-eared color
photos, and scratched Polaroids in small bundles before moving from Morocco to the United States. There I was at age five,
standing with my friend Nabil outside Sainte Marguerite-Marie
primary school in Rabat; at age nine, holding on to my father’s
hand and squinting at the sun while on vacation in the hill station of Imouzzer; at age eleven, leaning with my mother against
the limestone lion sculpture in Ifrane, in the Middle Atlas. But
the picture I pulled out from the bundles and displayed in a
frame on my desk was the one in which I was six years old and sat
in our living room with my head buried in Tintin and the Temple
of the Sun.
A great many of my childhood memories, like this photograph, feature books. Every night, my father would sit on one
end of the living-room divan and my mother on the other, both

Al-Mu’allaqat

Oregon Humanities

28

TH E
DAYS

DRIS S CHRA IBI

LA
ATI ON
ILIS
CIV
MA ME RE! ...

Taha Husse in

PAR

ALEXANDRE DUMAS.

of them with books in their hands. Neither of them had gone to
college, but they read constantly—spy thrillers, mystery novels,
science fiction, comic books, the newspaper, magazines, biographies, memoirs. I don’t know how or why my parents came to
love books so much; perhaps books provided them an education
about the wider world, a sense of adventure that was missing
from their lives, or an escape from the dreary official speeches
that were regularly broadcast on state radio and television during the reign of King Hassan.
It was perhaps only natural that my siblings and I learned
to do the same from an early age. I remember how we passed
copies of Astérix to each other, how we lent to or borrowed from
friends the latest issues of Pif magazine, how we fought about
whose turn it was to read Boule et Bill. When I began to read children’s novels, I found in Rabat’s many bookstores regular new
offerings from the Bibliothèque Rose or the Bibliothèque Verte,
which included series by the Comtesse de Ségur, Jules Verne,
Alexandre Dumas, Georges Bayard, and many others.
Once, when my best friend Nawal and I finished reading Les
petites filles modèles by the Comtesse de Ségur, we wondered why
the title page said “née Rostopchine.” After much discussion,
Nawal surmised that this must have been a disease with which
the author had been afflicted since birth. It hadn’t occurred to
either of us that women in France might take on the names of
their husbands, since our own mothers, following Moroccan
tradition, kept their maiden names. After reading The Three

Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo, we used our bedsheets to make capes, pretended our plastic rulers were swords,
and faced off while screaming, “En garde!”
Of course, none of the characters in these books looked or
spoke like anyone I knew. In those days, in the late 1970s, nearly
all of the children’s literature that was available in Moroccan
bookstores was still in French. The characters’ names, their
homes, their cities, their lives were wholly different from my
own, and yet, because of my constant exposure to them, they
had grown utterly familiar. These images invaded my imaginary
world to such an extent that I never thought they came from an
alien place. Over time, the fantasy in the books came to define
normalcy, while my own reality somehow seemed foreign. Like
my country, my imagination had been colonized.
I began to write when I was nine years old. Unsurprisingly,
the stories and poems I wrote were in French and featured characters who said things like “En garde!” I had just started the
fifth grade when Mère Elisabeth, the school’s director, pulled
my father aside one morning and asked him which junior high
school he had in mind for me. She suggested the Lycée Descartes,
where much of Morocco’s elite—business leaders, doctors, lawyers, intellectuals of every persuasion, government ministers as
well as their political opponents—sent its offspring. My father
said no; he could not afford the school fees at Descartes. In fact,
he had only agreed to send me to Sainte Marguerite because it
was relatively inexpensive and because my mother had insisted.

29

Every time I went back
to Morocco, I couldn’t
help but notice how much
and how often we moved
between French and
Arabic. All of us, whether
we wanted to or not,
went through life
switching between codes.

When my father saw that I was upset about not going to the same
school as my friends, he tried to explain his decision. “Your
father is not a minister,” he said in a soft, apologetic tone. Oum
el-Banin, the public junior high near our house, would be fine.
At the new school, I excelled in all the subjects that were
taught in French (mathematics, physics, biology) but struggled
with the ones taught in Arabic (history, geography, civics). Still,
the change meant that I finally started to receive proper Arabiclanguage instruction. The curriculum focused on excerpts from
the classics of Arabic literature—the Mu’allaqat, al-Mutanabbi,
al-Khansaa—and slowly moved on to modern authors like the
Egyptians Naguib Mahfouz and Taha Husayn; the Lebanese
Khalil Gibran and Elia Abu Madi; and the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish. Because our school did not have a library, some
of our teachers set up their own “lending clubs.” This involved
each student donating one book—any book—in order to form a
classroom collection from which we could borrow Arabic novels. I don’t remember ever being assigned fiction by Moroccan
authors; perhaps Moroccan authors were being taught to Egyptian, Lebanese, or Palestinian schoolchildren.
It was not until the age of fourteen, when I started to read
adult literature on my own, and independently from school, that
I came across novels and stories featuring Moroccan characters in a Moroccan setting. The first of these was Driss Chraïbi’s
La Civilisation, Ma Mère!, which featured a heroine that was so
much like the women in my family—feisty, funny, and with a
sharp sense of repartee. I have a very vivid memory of my cousin

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Hamid giving me a copy of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Harrouda, a book
that felt deliciously transgressive because of its frank treatment
of sex. The work of Leila Abouzeid was also a revelation. To read
‘Am al-Fil was to discover that the ordinary stuff of our lives was
as fertile ground for fiction as any other.
And yet, because of my early exposure to French in literature,
nearly everything I wrote in my teens and early twenties was in
French. This did not seem to me especially odd at the time; after
all, many of Morocco’s writers used the colonial tongue: Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Driss
Chraïbi, Fouad Laroui. My parents thought that my writing was
“adorable,” and praised it the way one might praise a child for a
particularly good magic trick or a well-told joke, but they made
it clear that writing was not a serious option for the future. I
was expected to do something sensible with my life, and train
in a profession that could guarantee a decent living in Morocco:
medicine, engineering, or business.
Of course, their warnings did not stop me. I continued writing poems and stories and reading anything I could get my
hands on at the Kalila wa Dimna bookstore in downtown Rabat
or from the used booksellers in Agdal. Still, my parents’ pragmatic talk had all but convinced me that writing could merely
be a hobby and not a vocation, and so I went to college to study
linguistics. Since I could not make a living from using words in
a creative way, at least I would be able to do it by using them in
an analytical way.
After a bachelor’s degree at Mohammed-V University in
Rabat, I applied for, and received, a British Council Fellowship
to do a master’s degree at University College London. I arrived
in Britain shortly after Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait.
I had been fairly apolitical until then, but the dislocation and
racism I experienced in London, the classes I took at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, and my exposure to the work
of people like Edward Said changed all that. Every time I went
back to Morocco, I couldn’t help but notice how much and how
often we moved between French and Arabic. All of us, whether
we wanted to or not, went through life switching between codes:
Moroccan Arabic or Amazigh in our homes, with our friends, in
our places of worship; but in job interviews, in fancy stores, in
formal soirées, French was de rigueur.
Two years later, I arrived in Los Angeles, to do a PhD in linguistics. I spent most of my days working on research articles
and conference papers that had to be written and delivered in
English, which made me think even more about the relationship
between Arabic and French in Morocco. French was not just a
prominent language in Morocco. It was the language of power;
an indicator of social class; a means to include or exclude people.
The education I had received had emphasized the importance
of French to the detriment of Arabic. French was used in our
media, our government, and our businesses. Nearly half of the
shows on Moroccan television were bought from and dubbed
in France. There were no neighborhood public libraries, so we
often had to depend on cultural centers, like the one sponsored
by the French government, for free access to books. The role of

30

Writing in French came
at a cost; it inevitably
brought with it a colonial
baggage that I no longer
wanted to carry. I started
to suffer from a peculiar
case of writer’s block: If I
could not write in Arabic,
perhaps I should not be
writing at all.

French in my life became clearer. Writing in French came at a
cost; it inevitably brought with it a colonial baggage that I no
longer wanted to carry. I started to suffer from a peculiar case
of writer’s block: If I could not write in Arabic, perhaps I should
not be writing at all.
I went about the business of living. I had a degree to finish,
after all, and I needed to find a job after graduate school. I tried
to steer clear from writing, but writing wouldn’t steer clear of
me. I think that in some way we do not choose stories, but that
stories choose us. A braver writer—a Ngu~gı~, say—might have
immediately cast aside the colonial tongue and returned to the
native one, but my literary Arabic was not good enough to allow
me to produce a novel. The Arabic language is often referred
to as “al-lugha al-’arabiyya al-fusha” or “the eloquent Arabic
language.” I sorely lacked that eloquence. One day I thought,
Why not try my hand in English? I was already spending my
days writing my dissertation in English, so perhaps I could use
English for my fiction too. After a few tries, I noticed that the
linguistic shift enabled me to approach my stories with a fresh
perspective. Because English had not been forced upon me as a
child, it seemed to give me a kind of salutary distance. The baggage that, to me, seemed inherent in the use of French to tell a
Moroccan story seemed to lessen when I used English to tell the
same story.

Oregon Humanities

I have always written, because I have always had the urge to
tell stories, but I cannot pinpoint the exact time when I decided
that I should try to be published. I know now that it had something to do with reading work after work in which men of my
race, culture, or religious persuasion were portrayed as singularly deviant, violent, backward, and prone to terrorism, while
the women were depicted as silent, oppressed, helpless, and
waiting to be liberated by the kind foreigner. I think I had had
enough of “surrogate storytellers,” to use Sherman Alexie’s
phrase in his introduction to Percival Everett’s Watershed.
The surrogate storytellers told a version of Morocco—mysterious, exotic, at once overly sexual and sexually repressed—that
seemed entirely removed from my reality or indeed the reality of
others around me. Until I came of age and started rereading the
works I had approached with great innocence as a child—books
such as Tintin in the Land of Black Gold, for instance, or Tintin in
the Congo—I had not had the desire to go through the trouble and
sacrifice it takes to be a published writer. Still, as I was finishing
graduate school, my writing path became quite clear to me. I had
always told stories, but now I wanted to be heard.

This essay was first published in World Literature Today.
Reprinted with permisson from Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the author of three novels including The
Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, The
Arab American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy
Award, and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction. She is the first guest in Oregon Humanities’ 2016
Think & Drink series, appearing in Portland on February 16
and Bend on February 17. Visit oregonhumanities.org for
more information and to buy tickets.

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

JULIANNA BRION

31

Getting Out
A shift in perspective helps a
woman move on for good.
L OR ETTA STINS ON

I

WA T C H O P R A H O N T V A T 4 : 0 0 P. M .

every day after work waiting for Bruce to
get home from the bar, but today I’m watching
myself watch Oprah on TV. This happens to me
sometimes. I suddenly find myself looking on
from a distance at whatever is happening to
me, like I’m an actor in a made-for-TV movie
and I’m not even the star. Maybe I’m the sidekick of the star or I play a supporting role, but
I am definitely not the star of this movie. The
moment is happening to someone else, and I’m
just watching it all unfold. It’s how I’ve been
able to live with an abusive, alcoholic speed
freak for fifteen years.
Sun through the small rectangular windows glazes the room in gold. This is my favorite place of the close to thirty rentals and squats
we’ve had since we started living together in

1980. I’m waiting for Bruce to get home from
the bar with what’s left of his paycheck. I’m
watching my past, present, and future selves
do this same thing—sit on a couch in one rental
after another, waiting for the next bad thing
to happen and not getting out of the way even
when I see it coming. The habit of living in constant fear and the resignation that nothing can
ever change are the glue that holds me in place.
This will always be my life. I’ll be waiting
on Bruce to change as long as I am waiting on
Bruce to change. I’ve been putting my life on
hold to be lived at some unspecified date in the
future, and it all depends on Bruce. Bruce, who
can only be counted on not to be counted on.
In all the family support programs I’ve
gone to over the years, I’ve heard the spouses
and partners of all types of addicts talk about

32

detachment. I’ve heard people say you can’t
change anybody but yourself, and I’ve nodded my head and smiled sagely like I got what
the old-timers were saying. Needless to say,
I didn’t.
After the meetings and the therapy, I’d go
home and try some new strategy to make Bruce
quit using. I once read a book about how sugar
was the basis of all addictions, so I tried feeding
him (when he’d eat) a sugar-free, high-protein
diet. I bought vitamins and herbs and snuck
them into his food, but speed freaks don’t eat
and beer is a very filling meal in itself. When
he was just high on pot, he’d eat whatever I put
in front of him, but speed and alcohol are his
drugs of choice. They act like rocket fuel, igniting his rage and precipitating his blackouts.
The blackouts last for hours, for days. He never
remembers what he does to me, and since he
doesn’t remember, I have to forget.
It be what it be, Bruce says about all things
unchangeable and unknowable—eye color,
electricity, his need to be high—it be what it
be. Today I see things clearly for the first time.
Today I see myself on this couch waiting for
someone else to do the changing. Today I see
that this stuck-ness is all mine. This will be
my life until the day he kills me or he dies or
I leave. I can’t count on his recovery. I’ve been

Today I see things clearly
for the first time. Today I see
myself on this couch waiting
for someone else to do the
changing. Today I see that
this stuck-ness is all mine.

Oregon Humanities

disappointed too many times. Addiction, his to
drugs and mine to him, are so habitual. We’ve
been doing a dance all these years and I didn’t
see my part until now.
My only friend has been telling me for
months that when I’m ready, I’ll leave, and I
have left many times for a day or a week, but
I’ve always come back hoping he would stop
drinking, stop using, stop hurting me. It occurs
to me for the first time that this is absurd and a
huge waste of time. It occurs to me that maybe
it’s me who needs to change, and not because
that will fix him somehow. Maybe his addiction
is his business.
Soon enough Bruce will come home. He’ll
be wasted because it was payday, and most of
his check will likely be gone. I calculate the
scenarios that may or may not unfold depending on my husband’s chemical screen for blood
alcohol, crank, any stray pharmaceuticals or
hallucinogens he’s traded or bought, and how
those will interact with his mood, the kind of
day he had, and if he’s eaten.
None of it I can control, but I’ve believed for
such a long time that I could. Like every person
who has ever loved an addict, I’ve believed that
if I did all the right things I would figure out a
way to fix him. All my energy was focused on
his recovery, his addiction—his life, not mine.

33

I worked like some kind of crazy statistician,
making up story problems to predict what he
might do: If a two-hundred-pound alcoholic
addict has a shitty day at his shitty factory job
and drinks two six-packs of Budweiser without
eating anything except the gut-wagon burrito
at his 11:00 a.m. break, and then injects what’s
left of a gram of crank at 8:00 p.m. before going
to the bar to drink more beer, and upon returning home mistakes his second wife for his first
wife, how long will it take him to pass out?
Please, show your work.
I have never been able to figure out the recipe for equilibrium. His or mine.
Oprah is over and the news is on when Bruce
comes through the door. He’s drunk but not
wired and hasn’t crossed the line yet. His face
slants from the pitchers of Budweiser. “What
the fuck are you looking at?” he says.
It’s not really a question, but I answer,
“Nothing.” I’m not looking but I’m seeing him
clearly for the first time. I see his addiction in
action and how it’s driving him and how I have
nothing at all to do with it. It’s the weirdest
thing. I feel at peace. There isn’t a thing I can
do for him, so I sit quiet.
It’s best not to say too much and not to look
at him for too long when he’s been drinking,

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

kind of like running into a bear in the woods—
you just back away slowly and try not to piss
him off. The fights can start just by the way I
look at him. He says it’s my face. My face shows
too much of what I’m thinking no matter how
little I say, but maybe that’s just what he needs
to believe because he has to be mad at someone and I happen to be available. Tonight I’m
just watching him start to spin. I can see by
the way he’s crashing around pissed off about
nothing that it was never my face that pissed
him off, never anything I did or didn’t do. He
needs a reason to fight with me so he can leave
to drink more, and that’s what he intends to do
no matter what I do or don’t do. This idea is a
revelation.
He asks me again, “What the fuck are you
looking at?” but this time he’s yelling.
“Nothing.” I’m not sure what to do. I sit on
the couch and pick at the pink chenille bedspread that covers its stained, sagging cushions. The cats are under the bed and our terrier
mutt is curled up small on the rug. They’re
afraid when he’s like this, and they should be.
He’s told me on more than one occasion that
he’ll kill them if I leave. That he’ll kill me, too.
Do I stay because he might? Yes, I do—but what
if he does kill me? In so many ways, I’m already

34

dead, or at least not living, just existing on the
edge of his story. But what’s my own story?
Is this what my life was supposed to be? I’m
suddenly more tired of being afraid than I am
afraid of being killed.
I look around at the junk I’ve collected to
make a home. The china teacups that I strung
together with brass wire and hung from hooks
in the window like a mobile. The plants, my
books—so many books. The orange glow of the
sun as it goes from day to dusk. Cats under the
bed my dad and I refinished before I left home.
The quilt I made for Bruce’s long-ago birthday.
The fifteen years of history we have together,
one year short of half my life tonight, not all of
it bad. He is no monster, just a man struggling
with addiction who’s unwilling or unable to
face it.
He says, “You think you’re better than me?”
He says, “You think I need this shit?”

Oregon Humanities

He says, “Get the fuck out.”
Only he doesn’t just say these words. He
screams them at me, knowing how in the past
these are the very words that made me cling to
him and beg to stay. Love me. Don’t make me go.
Don’t leave me. That’s my usual response, but
this time it’s not there—the ache in my chest,
the shame. There’s not a thing I can do about
his addiction. He’ll do whatever it is he does.
I’m watching myself sit on this couch, and I’m
seeing him clearly for the first time—this man
I’ve tried so hard to please. This man I’ve tried
to help for his own good, right? This man I’ve
tried to save—that’s the truth—like somebody
made me the boss of what’s best for him when
I can’t even figure out what’s best for myself.
Bruce yells and turns red but I can’t muster the
usual response.
I know three things tonight. Number one:
If I stay, this will be my life until I die. Number

35

two: It’s nothing personal. His addiction has
nothing to do with me. Number three: I can
leave whenever I want.
I finally get it.
The sun through the window. The cats
under the bed. The dog on the rug.
He says it again, “Get the fuck out.”
Today I hear these words as an invitation. I
stand and take my purse with the keys to the
car. He’s raging at me as I walk out the door.
No one will ever love you like this again, he
screams at me, and for once I sincerely hope
he’s right.
I don’t look back. I get in the car and drive
away shaking because I don’t know what will
happen now. I drive around not sure where
to go or who to call. Eventually I call my sister. The sun is slowly sinking behind the West
Hills and there’s a lot of traffic. I’m supposed to
work in the morning. I didn’t bring clothes or

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

anything. No toothbrush, no makeup.
I’m not thinking that I’m leaving him for
good. I can’t think that yet.
At first, there are threats to my family, suicide threats, murder/suicide threats. I quit my
job. I move to a place where he won’t find me. I
don’t call him. I never go to the places we used
to go. I never talk to the people we knew. I leave
him with everything including the car, the cats,
and the dog. I hope they’ll be all right. This is
how I move on, headed in a new direction—the
direction of my own sweet life. I don’t look too
far ahead. I keep going by not stopping. I stay
gone by not going back. 

Loretta Stinson teaches writing at Portland State University.
A past recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship,
Stinson published her first novel, Little Green, in 2010
with Hawthorne Books. This essay is an excerpt from her
memoir-in-progress.

36

Oregon Humanities

37

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

All the Same
Ocean
Finding the horizon in a
life rocked with waves
JA S ON A R I A S

PAIGE VICKERS

M

Y GR E AT- GR A N DFATHER TOL D M Y GR A N DFATHER TH AT W HEN

he turned eighteen he’d be on his own. This was by the Pacific coastline,
somewhere in California. My grandfather grew up swimming in the waves and
believing in observing a solid hour of digestion to avoid cramping. When he
turned eighteen he left home. He married a beautiful woman. He had a son and a
daughter (my mother) and another son. Together the five of them left the ocean
for an orchard in Colorado. He gave up the waves for land. He cared for fruit trees
in rows.
My grandfather told my mother and my two uncles the story of leaving home
at eighteen. When Uncle Danny graduated high school he moved to New York
City. When my mother graduated she joined him. They left the rows of trees for
rows of buildings.
“I moved as far east as I could go without crossing an ocean,” my mom says.
In her Far East of America, mom met a young man with a wide smile and dark
skin. They walked through the rows of buildings together. The man was from the
Dominican Republic—a half island in the ocean.
My mother always says, “I don’t know how old your father really was when I
met him. He had good intentions, but problems with the truth.”
My father had other problems too. Problems with women—as in, too many too
often. Problems with property and space perception—as in, an overabundance
of stolen stereos in the living room of their apartment after the ’77 blackout. He
was too virile for his own good—as in, the birth of me in ’78, the birth of my sister
a year later.
My parents were married in a small church. My mother wore a blue dress, my
father a suit. They seem happy in the picture.
Less than a year later my pregnant mother and I flew back to Colorado to put
half a continent, and orchards of trees, between us and her husband.
My sister was born.
My grandmother was sick for years.
My grandmother died.

38

Oregon Humanities

My grandfather said her spirit went to heaven, while shielding his eyes.
My sister kept looking for Grandma under the bed. She kept asking why
Grandma was hiding.
I’m trying to find the rhythm between the downbeats and the upstrokes here.
To see what jigsaw fragments fit into our family’s folklore. We’re horrible archivists. There is no overarching opus to point to and say, “See that? That’s where
we come from.” Nothing to say, “Because of that, this is where you’re going.” We
have dwindling numbers. We have a lack of traditions.
We say, “Time ran away with us.”
We say, “I must have let that slip through the cracks.”
I have a vague recollection of the way things happened.
My mother and sister and I moved from my grandfather’s orchard to the next
closest town: Grand Junction. Lu and I started elementary school, and followed
a giant irrigation ditch into the wilderness with a friend, and from time to time
tried jumping our bikes down half staircases, and somehow didn’t die in the
process.
Mom got a good job with the city and started meeting less-than-desirable
boyfriends.
Eventually we moved from Colorado with one of these boyfriends and his
giant dog, Puppy, to Grayland—a town in Washington that doesn’t really exist
until you’ve been there, and even then becomes hazy when you leave again.
We stayed in a small single-story apartment by a clump of woods, covered in
the mist banking off the ocean, for eighteen months. I can only vaguely remember the town. It’s fractured into three landmarks: the gas station, the Lamplighter Restaurant, and the sheriff’s house (whose daughters all appeared to be
Amazons).
The ocean was a separate place only ten blocks from our front door.
I can remember floating with my sister on a giant piece of foam we found—four
feet by four feet by one foot thick—out into the waves, trying to make it over the
cresting white peaks and into the stillness of the ocean.
“What were you thinking?” Mom said.
We weren’t thinking. Not about our grandfather swimming in the Pacific. Not
about our father crossing a portion of the Atlantic. Not about how it’s all the same
ocean that somebody schismed into different names to try to make sense of. As
kids we were just on a piece of foam, hand-paddling toward the horizon.
I can still remember the way my skin itched like crazy under the warm shower
water after being so cold for so long, after never successfully pushing past the
high tide, after being beached again and again.
One day Mom’s boyfriend and Puppy decided to leave and not come back. Mom
decided we’d move, in case he ever did. We packed a U-Haul and drove to Olympia.

We say, “Time ran away
with us.”
We say, “I must have
let that slip through the
cracks.”

One of my new Olympian friends flicked a
match that started a fire inside my mattress. I
tried to hide it, but it wouldn’t stop smoking.
Mom came home and we put the burning
bed outside.
This isn’t a metaphor.
I slept on the floor of my bedroom that
night, missing the ocean of Grayland, while my
mom and sister shared their bed in the room
next to mine. The next morning my mattress
was a skeleton of scorched springs in the dumpster. The Australian band Midnight Oil had a
popular song on the radio at the time. One of us
would start singing the lyrics,
How can we dance when our earth is turning?
and then we’d all join in,
How do we sleep while our beds are burning?
and then we’d laugh.
But inside I’d feel a little pang of shame.
I’d think of our giant piece of foam in Grayland. That no matter how many times we
were beached we still had that tangible, dirty,
porous flotation device on which to try to
reach the horizon. It felt familiar. It felt safe,
even though it wasn’t. It knew the ocean the
way we did: as something giant and limitless,
something to be feared and conquered, something to be moved by.
In the middle of the night, two months after
moving to Olympia, my sister woke to see a
flicker of light on the bedroom wall. She called
my name and the light receded back down the
hall, disappearing into the living room and
slipping out the front door.
We discovered that the flickering light had
left wax shapes on the carpet of our living
room that could have been bad pentagrams or
the erratic shakiness of an unsteady hand. It
left wax drippings on mom’s ID card, but didn’t
take any money. It left us wondering if some
past boyfriend had found us somehow.
While we were out the next day, somebody
hammered in the dead bolt on our apartment
door. Mom winced at the divots denting the
wood. She covered the hole where the locking
mechanism once was with her hand.
We left the dishes in the sink.
We left no forwarding address.
We boarded a bus.
Two days later we were on the doorstep of
the women’s shelter in Portland, Oregon, with
a backpack apiece, smelling of Greyhound
people and bus and station. In addition to my
backpack I had a faux leather zip-up briefcase

39

in one hand—with every birthday card I’d ever
received inside it—and a sack of plastic soccer
trophies in the other.
At the shelter we met a woman named Jude
who was born without eyes. It’s called anophthalmia. Where Jude’s eyes should have been
there were two concave, smooth-skinned divots. She was always smiling. I liked watching
how Jude listened.
Before long, the four of us moved into an
apartment between Portland and Gresham. It
was right on the MAX line, and right on the city
line. A green sign that read “Welcome to Portland” was a half block to the west of us, a sign
that read “Welcome to Gresham” a half block
to the east. I wasn’t old enough to legally watch
my sister. Jude watched us.
The apartment had only two bedrooms, but
Jude insisted that the walk-in closet was the
perfect space for her. She said it was easier for
her to know where everything was in a smaller
environment. She said she’d rather be in a pond
than an ocean.
One day Jude brought her new boyfriend
home and he said, “They put you in the closet?”
“She likes it in there,” Mom said.
Jude’s boyfriend shook his head at the floor
and said, “White people.”
I remember thinking that was a strange
thing to say since Jude, his girlfriend, was
white. I wondered if she even knew what
“white” meant. How do you describe color to
a blind person?
Red is the rage in your gut.
White is the entrapment of the disabled?
One day Jude moved out with her boyfriend
and her room became a closet again.
We saw her a little, and then not at all.
Eventually I gave my soccer trophies to
Goodwill, the plastic, gold figurines eternally
almost-kicking their little gold balls. I got rid of
my faux leather briefcase but kept the birthday
cards and pictures that were inside it.
Then, one year, I spring-cleaned the birthday cards away.
My wife and I began archiving our new family, and my briefcase pictures got mixed in with
the rest of them. Our sons grew. I became an
uncle. My grandfather remarried and went
crazy. My mother still has the same smile she
had when I was young.
Right now I’m typing this in the place where
I always write. My laptop is in front of me, a
bunch of CDs towering on either side, a couple

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

If you put your finger on
Happy and ride the line
down to six o’clock, between
Accepted and Powerful,
you end up on the line that
separates Fulfilled and
Courageous.
of guitars hanging on the wall, a record player, a thesaurus, an Oxford dictionary.
There is a copy of a “Feelings Circle” tacked to my left. It’s supposed to help
you develop realistic characters. At the middle of the circle are the words Fear,
Anger, Disgust, Sad, Happy, and Surprise, each isolated in its own piece of the pie,
each word splintering off into how it is ultimately played out.
If you follow the word Surprise diagonally, toward eight o’clock, it leads
directly to Confused, and from there to either Perplexed or Disillusioned. The end
points of Anger fan up and out, leading to sixteen possibilities you could probably
guess at. If you put your finger on Happy and ride the line down to six o’clock,
between Accepted and Powerful, you end up on the line that separates Fulfilled
and Courageous.
All of this is printed on a sheet of paper that’s four hundred millimeters long
by four hundred millimeters wide and one millimeter thick. The entire array of
human experience is displayed on what at first appears to be a cheap imitation of
the Mayan calendar.
In about five years, when our youngest son is finished with school, my wife and
I plan to move to the coast—north of where my grandfather swam and south of
the spot where my sister and I found our piece of foam.
When we move, it will be the first time my wife has ever lived outside of Portland. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived anywhere else.
“Think of all the things that had to happen for us to have even met,” she says
one night while we’re lying in bed.
And I do.
I close my eyes. I squeeze my arm tighter around her. I picture everything that
had to happen. I listen to our breath.
In my mind I put one finger on the word Happy at the center of the circle. I
make a diagonal line, through the Mayan Calendar of Emotions, to five thirty. My
finger passes through Peaceful. It lands on the line separating Hopeful and Loving.
And then the line disappears.
And all that’s left is the air we’re inhaling and exhaling, our lungs rising and
falling together.

Jason Arias lives in Portland with his wife and sons. His writing can be found
in many literary publications including Blue Skirt Productions, NAILED, the
Nashville Review, Perceptions Magazine, and in the new anthology (AFTER)life:
Poems and Stories of the Dead.

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Oregon Humanities

Posts

R E A DER S W R ITE A BOU T MOV E 

The Ledger

Y

EARS AGO, WHILE CRUISING

through a yard sale, I picked up an old
ledger book from the Westchester Fire Insurance Company of New York. A large, thin, hardbound ledger, black with a red spine, eleven
inches wide by fifteen-and-a-half inches tall.
It was probably from the early 1900s, used by
insurance agents to track insurers and their
policies, all entries written by hand. There was
only one entry in it when I bought it for fifty
cents; the rest of the pages were blank. After
years of treasuring its antiquity but making
no entries of my own, I tore the one used page
out and decided to start tracking all my moves
before my memory lost track. I sat down and
recorded all the moves I remembered, over one
hundred, starting in 1966, the year I left my
parents’ home.
One hundred moves, and not one of them
associated with the military, a job, or being on
the run. In the beginning it was youthful wanderlust and exploration, then relationships
and social upheaval—a.k.a. “the sixties”—bad
landlords, worse tenants and neighbors, or just
being unable, as a single parent, to bear the rent
and high heating bills. Once, my oldest son and
I landed in a decent house that could hold us
indefinitely. After three months I was drawn to
cardboard boxes and their qualities. I wanted
to gather them, touch them, fill their emptiness with our lives. When I realized what was
going on, I gave the boxes away. We stayed in

One hundred moves, and not one of
them associated with the military,
a job, or being on the run.

that house for two years, then moved to Hawaii.
Now the kids are grown, the grandkids are
teenagers, and I’ve downsized so much there’s
no room for overnight guests in this 450-squarefoot, stand-alone, one-bedroom cottage in a
semirural area. Two years ago a friend chided
me for daydreaming aloud about moving again.
“You move away, but you always come back,” she
said. “Why don’t you just call this home?”
As soon as she said that I felt roots shoot
out of my feet and sink into the ground. I was
so astounded I couldn’t move. I’ve been here
three years now and am getting lazy; I don’t
want to move.
What have I learned through all these
moves? Adaptability, being and living in the
now, and that there is glory in both staying and
moving, but it is much easier and cheaper to
stay and wander.
PA M J. CO OPER , Ashland

Out of the Nest

I

A M W R I T I N G T H I S F R O M THE

back of a fifteen-foot U-Haul. A breeze
tickles my face in the autumn heat. It is the last
time I will lay eyes on the clamshell complex
where we’ve lived for sixteen years.
Or shall I say Michael has lived. I haven’t
stepped inside the apartment for eight months.
To do so would risk my life.
“This is a drop-everything-and-go situation,” my endocrinologist said last February.
I was to depart for my mother’s the following
week—for six months.
Left behind with Michael were our surrogate children—once-abandoned cats Snoopy
and Charlie, plus Franny and Zooey, orphaned
starlings we’d adopted nine years earlier.
It was last October when I first developed
symptoms: shortness of breath, chest tightness, coughing. My doctors paid little heed. So
did I, until it grew worse.

41

Soon, breathing was excruciating. I took
shallow butterfly breaths to lessen the pain.
Paralyzing fatigue set in.
My endocrinologist suspected chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease, which made
little sense given that I’ve never smoked. I
began scouring descriptions of lung conditions.
Nothing fit until I found hypersensitivity
pneumonitis, specifically bird fancier’s lung.
Relief and terror flooded in.
If left unchecked, hypersensitivity pneumonitis progresses to pulmonary fibrosis, a
terminal condition in which scarring causes
respiratory failure within three to five years.
Fortunately, the disease is reversible—if
caught early. But the solution is drastic. We
would have to move.
I had developed a potentially fatal sensitivity to starlings. I could no longer touch or even
be near them. The book I’d been writing on the
parenting lessons of raising pet starlings would
have a new ending.
Within weeks of relocating, my symptoms
lessened. Breaths no longer felt like sandpaper
grating my lungs. I had stepped from a precipice moments before plummeting.
Today, we are moving the last of our belongings into our first house. The kitties and birdies
have already joined us, the latter living in an
elaborate outdoor aviary Michael constructed.
While I cannot hold my babies, I watch them
on a video monitor, speaking soothingly on the
two-way speaker.
From rescue feedings to teenage angst to
nighttime vigils during illness, in caring for
these birds I’ve experienced emotions ranging
from epiphanic gratitude to shattering anxiety.
I’ve felt pride in watching Franny and Zooey
take their first tentative steps toward flight.
Today, I learned the most painful lesson: letting go.
M EL IS SA L . M ICH A ELS , Eugene

Subduction Zones

T

H E H A R D E S T S T E P S I E V ER TOOK

were on an afternoon in early September as I walked away from my son’s grave for
the first time. The cemetery smelled of juniper
and baked dirt and the heat rose up from our
ankles.
All around me were reminders of how the
forces of nature could alter everything: Newberry Volcano lies twenty miles south of Bend

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

This is where the plates, layers of crust,
crashed into each other in a fiery show,
perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. 
and is directly responsible for the creation of
Pilot Butte, a constant presence in my life back
then, one that I sometimes imagined looked
like the backside of a sleepy brontosaurus.
Closer to the cemetery, the elevated peaks of
the Three Sisters aren’t the gentle fairy tale
their name suggests, but the result of plates
shifting deep in the earth. One plate shifted
under another and this process, called subduction, led to the formation of the trio. This is
where the plates, layers of crust, crashed into
each other in a fiery show, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. Subduction zones are places
where great trauma lies.
And here I was, all these years later, in the
shadows of these mountains, loss everywhere.
Later that day, back at our apartment, we
walked into a life that the three of us didn’t fit
into anymore. For more than a year we went
through the motions. We worked, we took
family vacations to the coast and to Southern
Oregon, and we tried to dodge the grief that
followed us. Then one day our four-year-old
daughter started a conversation that shook me.
“Mom, we used to be so happy, huh?”
I nodded.
“And then Dylan died and now we’re all so
sad.”
Six words leapt at me.
“When will we be happy again?”
We moved back to Ashland, where bright
red flags lined Main Street and the lush foothills around us offered a sense of peace. I didn’t
know it then, but we were charting our own
map, however imperfect. Healing crept up on
us, not all at once, but in tiny flashes of kindness. Two more daughters were born and grew.
Above us, the moon kept rising and lighting
up the darkness. Seventeen years passed.
And I learned that the sorrow that most
folks want to flee helps you see things more
clearly and feel things more deeply. Perhaps, in
its wake, it will leave a baffling richness as the
map leads you along.
VA N E S SA HOU K , Ashland

P OSTS

42

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continued from previous page

Dance Church

S

Just to
underscore
how settled we
planned to be,
we unpacked.
Everything.
Even the
heirloom china,
which had never
before left its
boxes. We were
here to stay.

U N D A Y M O R N I N G S I N PORT L A N D I
go to church. Dance church. A church
where there aren’t any hymnals, pews, prayers
to recite. A church where, at first glance, outsiders would believe we are all looney tunes. Upon
arriving, I see a few little munchkins running
around with oversize neon headphones on to
protect their little ears from the DJ’ed music
set that will soon fill two hundred people with
rhythmic bliss. No choreography, no mirrors.
There are flowers, candles, pillow puddles,
beautiful fabrics. Stretching, rolling, some
kind of contact improv—men in tights, kilts,
capes. I spot a ribbon dancer and a huge altar in
alignment with the morning’s intention.
As a survivor of trauma, this space has
become my sanctuary. My lifeline. My container in which I can move once again after
years of chronic freezing and dissociating. A
trapped animal released back into the wild
with new wings. Here I experience freedom
in my body: delight, anger, ecstasy—baptism,
even—without exchanging a single word with
anyone. We, the self-anointed dancers, put our
spirits into motion and receive one another.
Our very own living holy Eucharist.
The music awakens the holy spirit within
me and dances me through throngs of people.
I am an antelope cut loose, checking out the
creatures of Noah’s Ark. Loving it. Patterns,
bodies in motion, all shapes, colors, rhythms.
Each stunning in their authentic movement. I
see people falling in love with each other from
a distance, I see a girl rocking four different
Hula-Hoops at once, I see little girls dressed
like Thumbelina holding their mothers’ hands,
“practicing dancing.”
This is the church of Miriam, the biblical
tambourine rocker, alive and well thousands of
years later. I move here, and I am reunited with
my self, my best self, my most curious, mischievous, sassy, vulnerable, receptive, badass self.
Sanctified. My inner child, the child forgotten,
invited back in the room to whip her hair back
and forth. I throw my head back in delight and
laugh until I start to cry. Does it sound like
hysteria? Maybe it is, but it is the truest form
of worship I know. And, luckily, there are two
hundred more like me who hear the music.
EM I LY I. BEDA L , Portland

Again

M

Y

DAD

WA S

A

P O S T-WA R

upwardly mobile engineer. That translated into at least one move per year until I was
eight and another address for high school. I
moved every year in college, one year twice. I
moved three times during my first stint in Boston; in Florida I managed to stay in one apartment for the whole two years. Then it was back
to Boston, where I lived in five different homes
in five years. 
We’ve now hopscotched around the West for
the last thirty-plus years. California, Santa Fe,
two years back East, then back to New Mexico
in two different cities, three different homes.
Our page in the family address book illustrates
what could be diagnosed as a terminal case of 
“it must be more exciting just over the hill.”
From Albuquerque, we moved to our present
home in Port Orford, my thirtieth. 
Moving has always been exciting, cathartic, freeing. Each time we’ve given away books
by the boxful, emptied junk drawers, finally
donated no-longer-worn clothes, dumped broken dishware. We’ve thrown out accumulated
magazines and emptied bursting file cabinets,
ditching papers we’d held onto for the IRS audit
that’s never happened. In each new house,
we’ve vowed not to get bogged down again with
stuff, not to fill every drawer and closet. It’s
never worked. 
We vowed Port Orford would be our final
“clean slate.” Our last home. Just to underscore
how settled we planned to be, we unpacked.
Everything. Even the heirloom china, which
had never before left its boxes. We were here
to stay.
Except it seems we’re going to have to move
again, but not for the exciting futures we’d
always envisioned before. Now we need doctors
and hospitals and a nearby airport for family
visits and emergencies. Our narrative arc is
on the other side of adventure. Now we need a
place to feel safe, secure.
So the sorting and throwing out is about to
begin yet again. There are closets and drawers
that need to be emptied, dried-up paint cans to
dispose of, and, of course, books—boatloads of
books—to give away. This move, exciting? No
way. The very thought of it exhausts me.
Still, those other feelings: cathartic, freeing,
new? Just maybe.
A N N EUSTON, Port Orford

43

Listen to Your Body

I

R E C E N T L Y T U R N ED SI X T Y-T WO, M Y

mother’s age when she died of heart disease.
Mom was a hoot, a pistol with an acerbic wit
and spot-on timing. Though she was confined
to a hospital bed the last time I saw her, she was
still funny as hell. I inherited a modicum of her
sense of humor along with similar cardiovascular issues. I don’t smoke cigarettes, let alone
have my mother’s two-packs-a-day habit, but
aching joints, diminished strength, and a faltering stamina inhabited my body awhile back.
Those maladies weren’t the result of
chronic disease. More like lack of exercise. At
some point in the past decade or so, I developed
an aversion to any fitness routine. That choice
has taken a toll on my body. So, last January, I
began attending the “Stretch and Movement”
class at Portland’s Northeast Community
Center.
Lynn Boatsman, an instructor with the
center for the past thirty-six years, teaches
the dance-infused workout three days a week.
Ballet, its grace and adherence to balance, is at
the core of each class. She dispenses praise as
we practice basic foot positions and perform
dégagés, pliés, retirés, and other movements,
and she encourages each of us to breathe and
listen to our bodies.
Lynn is ninety-one, but was considerably
younger—fifty-five—when she began studying
ballet seriously. By then, her versatility as an
actress, singer, dancer, and comedian had been
evident in community theater productions in
the Bay Area, Bend, and Portland. Although
not invincible—her right hip was replaced a few
years ago and one knee now causes her fits—she
continues to lead a full life. She can still stand
and press her palms flat to the floor despite
relying on a walking stick. Artificial right hip
notwithstanding, she manages to lift each leg
and stretch at the barre.
A role model for aging with presence and
dignity, Lynn maintains her considerable
charm and elegance and purposely keeps her
body and mind active. Like my mother, she
is also a hoot and a pistol. Her tenacity has
inspired me to accept what my body can do
today and to ask a little bit more of it tomorrow.
Lynn tells us that our class is her reason for
getting up in the morning. And by some measure, it’s become mine as well.
L AVON N E GR I F FIN-VA L A DE ,
Portland

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Over the Hill

I

N M Y MID -T W E N T I E S , I MOV ED

eleven times in three years. I worked spring
through fall as a natural history guide in
Alaska, but the rest of each year, I wasn’t sure
where I lived. I could fit everything I owned
into the back of my Toyota pickup, so I simply
moved around. A lot. With each new temporary house or tent or cabin, I barely unpacked
clothes out of my duffel bag. Moving was
nothing.
At the tail end of those years, I met the
person who would become my life partner,
another seasonal worker. We would move from
Alaska to the lower forty-eight every fall. We
lived one magical off-season on a houseboat
on the Oregon coast, where the moon painted
yellow streaks over Tillamook Bay and the
ocean hushed us to sleep. Alaska had taught
me I loved wide-open spaces. What could be
wider than the Pacific? After one more season
of guiding, I came back to the coast and decided
to stay.
I volunteered my way into one steady job
and eventually landed another at the local
college. After a few more seasons, my partner
came to stay, too. I sold the trusty old Toyota
and we bought another together. He built a
business, I worked my two jobs, and we both
made friends and worked on causes near to our
hearts. Then we married, bought a house, and
had a child. We’d officially settled down.
The economic hardships of rural living,
however, are real; job opportunities decline
and can no longer support the life we’ve built.
The accumulation of years no longer fits into
the bed of a pickup truck. Last year, my partner
took a job “over the hill,” as we say at the coast,
and we lived as a split family. The split was taxing, though, so we decided to make the move
to the city. We left the first community of our
adult lives, the first into which we’d interwoven
ourselves. The only community our daughter
has even known. Friends asked me not to go.
Coworkers wrote me a goodbye poem. My heart
still aches for the smell of the ocean. I miss the
sounds of waves and crickets. Tears fill my eyes
at the memory of that moon over Tillamook
Bay. Twenty-plus years later, moving isn’t
nothing—it’s everything.
NA NC Y SL AV IN, Portland

Next theme: Root
For the Spring 2016 issue, tell
us your stories about rooting
around, taking root, being
uprooted or root-bound, getting
to the root of a problem, being
the root of the problem, rooting
someone on. Share stories and
ideas about beginnings, origins,
and foundations. Analyze a
historical or contemporary
grassroots effort. Describe
the tension between staying
put and being stuck. Send your
submission (400 words maximum) by February 15, 2016, to
[email protected].
Submissions may be edited for
space or clarity.

44

Oregon Humanities

Read. Talk. Think.
t h ing s t h at m a k e you s ay o. h m.

Marie Equi: Radical
Politics and Outlaw
Passions
Michael Helquist
Oregon State University Press, 2015

Michael Helquist’s new biography of Marie Equi explores the
Oregon physician and radical’s
extraordinary experiences,
from her early years working in
a textile mill in New Bedford,
Massachusetts through her
activist years in Oregon, including a three-year term at San
Quentin State Prison. Equi lived
openly as a lesbian beginning in
the 1890s and was one of the
first practicing female doctors
in the Pacific Northwest. She
faced her life with courage and
compassion for others, with a
strong personal belief in social
and economic justice.
—C a r o l e S h e l l h a r t

Landfall
Ellen Urbani

At the Hearth of the Crossed Races
Melinda Marie Jetté
Oregon State University Press, 2015

Melinda Marie Jetté takes a microscope to Oregon’s French
Prairie in this historical study. Originally the home of the
Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans, the area was resettled by bicultural
French Canadian and Indian families in the mid-nineteenth century. By examining the time of first contact between Kalapuyans
and Euro-Americans to the time of statehood, Jetté provides a
snapshot of the advent of colonization in our state.
—E l o i s e H o l l a n d

Forest Avenue Press, 2015

This intertwined story of two
teenage girls and their mothers
is set in New Orleans during
and after Hurricane Katrina.
In her debut novel, Urbani, an
Oregon writer with Southern
roots, brings a maternal touch
to the narrative, handling tragedy with a careful soulfulness
and love. This honest yet brutal
story will simultaneously break
and warm your heart.
—A n n i e K a f f e n

45

Fall/Winter 2015 Move

Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas
David Banis and Hunter Shobe
Sasquatch Books, 2015

Portland State University geographers David Banis and Hunter
Shobe, aided by more than forty artists and researchers, attempt
to illuminate the essential nature of Portland through cartography
in this entertaining and visually delightful book. Each spread offers
a different perspective on the city with maps illustrating hidden
rivers, restaurant density, redlining and gentrification, surveillance,
sounds, smells, and much more.
—B e n Wa t e r h o u s e

People Like You
Margaret Malone
Atelier26 Books, 2015

This debut collection from
Portland writer Margaret
Malone is filled with brief,
bitterly funny stories about the
sort of people who tie themselves in knots in their heads
and feel uncomfortable in their
own skin and can never quite
bring themselves to say the
words they desperately need
to say—which, at some point,
includes all of us.
—B e n Wa t e r h o u s e

The Last Love Song
Tracy Daugherty
St. Martin’s Press, 2015

Joan Didion presents a particular puzzle for the literary biographer.
The great journalist is still living, but chose not to cooperate with
Oregon State University professor Tracy Daugherty in his research
for The Last Love Song. A great deal of her writing has been in the
first person, but usually as a narrative approach rather than a way of
revealing much about herself. Daugherty has nonetheless produced
a comprehensive and readable biography of this fascinating writer
in the cultural context in which she has lived and worked. As he
writes, “Her life illuminates her era, and vice versa.”
—M a g g i e S t a r r

To have a new book by an Oregon writer considered for
Read. Talk. Think., please send review copies to Oregon
Humanities magazine, 921 SW Washington St., Suite
150, Portland, OR 97205.

CROPPING S

46

Oregon Humanities

Wendy Red Star, Untitled

Contemporary Native Photographers and
the Edward Curtis Legacy: Zig Jackson,
Wendy Red Star, Will Wilson
February 6 to May 8, 2016
Portland Art Museum
1219 SW Park Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97205
(503) 226-2811
portlandartmuseum.org

Between 1907 and 1930, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis published more
than 1,500 images of members of more than eighty Native American tribes in a
twenty-volume opus titled The North American Indian. The photographs present an idealized representation of Native cultures—Curtis posed his subjects in
obsolete dress and staged ceremonies—in keeping with Curtis’s belief that Native
Americans were a “vanishing race.” In this exhibition, Portland Art Museum,
which owns a complete set of The North American Indian, will display Curtis’s
photographs alongside portraits by contemporary Native American artists Zig
Jackson, who explores cultural representation and appropriation in series such
as Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian; Will Wilson, whose
project The Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange seeks to supplant Curtis’s “Settler gaze” through the production of large format photos of indigenous
artists, arts professionals, and tribal leaders with items of personal significance;
and Wendy Red Star, a Portland-based multimedia artist whose piece Peelatchiwaaxpáash/Medicine Crow (Raven) & the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation annotates
a portrait of a Crow Nation leader by Charles Milton Bell that has become a ubiquitous representation of Native American culture.

Oregon Humanities connects
Oregonians to ideas that change lives
and transform communities. Oregon
Humanities programs encourage
Oregonians to learn about and discuss
social, cultural, and public issues.
The Conversation Project offers Oregon nonprofits
and community organizations low-cost programs that
engage community members in thoughtful, challenging
conversations about ideas critical to our daily lives and
our state’s future.
Think & Drink is a conversation series that brings
Oregonians together to discuss provocative ideas.
Idea Lab is a summer institute for Oregon teens and
teachers who use the humanities to consider the
pursuit of happiness and how it shapes our culture.
Humanity in Perspective (HIP) is a college-level humanities course. HIP provides economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals the opportunity to study
the humanities with the guidance of college and university professors.
Oregon Humanities magazine is a triannual publication
devoted to exploring important and timely ideas from a
variety of perspectives and to stimulating reflection and
public conversation.

Staff
e x e cu t i v e di r e ct or
Adam Davis
faci l i tat ion a n d t r a i n i ng m a nager
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com m u n icat ions/pro gr a m a s s o ci at e
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edi t or /a s s o ci at e di r e ct or
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de v el opm en t di r e ct or
Kamla Hurst
pro gr a m of f icer
Annie Kaffen
of f ice m a nager
Mikaela Schey
di r e ct or of f i na nce a n d oper at ions
Carole Shellhart
de v el opm en t a s s o ci at e
Maggie Starr
com m u n icat ions a s s o ci at e
Ben Waterhouse
pro gr a m co or di nat or
Kyle Weismann-Yee

Public Program Grants provide financial support for
nonprofit organizations across Oregon to conceive and
implement public humanities programs.
Oregon Humanities also convenes reading and discussion groups, and hosts panel presentations on topics of
public relevance and concern.
Oregon Humanities programs are
funded by the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the Oregon
Cultural Trust, and by contributions from
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more information about Oregon
Humanities, or to learn how you can help
more Oregonians get together, share
ideas, listen, think, and grow, please
contact us at:
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Portland, OR 97205
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Board of Directors
ch a i r
Sona Karentz Andrews, Portland
v ice ch a i r
Janet Webster, Newport
t r e a su r er
Jeff Cronn, Portland
se cr eta ry
Matthew Boulay, Salem
Paul Duden, Portland
Kimberly Howard, Portland
Nels Johnson, Portland
Emily Karr, Portland
Shannon Mara, Bend
Win McCormack, Portland
Alberto Moreno, Portland
Pamela Morgan, Lake Oswego
Ron Paul, Portland
Denise Reed, Astoria
Chantal Strobel, Bend
Dave Weich, Portland