Events

Lummi carvers transport an orca totem pole, salmon carvings, and our award-winning “Whale People” exhibit to communities throughout the Salish Sea and Snake River bioregion, drawing attention to the extinction crisis facing Pacific Northwest salmon and orcas, and building support for the movement to remove the Snake River dams.

Thousands of mountains, valleys and rivers located on public lands have names that are derogatory, misogynistic, racist or just plain offensive. Join us for a conversation with grassroots advocates working to change offensive places nearest them, and learn about what you can do to help.

Place-names encode a way of seeing, understanding, and relating to the land. They inscribe our social values on official maps for the future generations. Like the movement to topple Confederate and colonial statues, renaming campaigns demonstrate how oppressive word-monuments–as symbols of extraction, erasure, and enclosure–can be replaced and reclaimed as life-affirming sites for cultural resurgence and #landback.

The broader community has a lot to learn from the Coast Salish peoples, and a lot to gain by collaborating with them in efforts to protect and restore the Salish Sea. This panel convenes people who have undertaken cross-cultural collaborations in tribal government, environmental design, activism & cultural interpretation to ask how can we build the capacity for difficult conversations, healing and reciprocity, and collaborative processes.