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Spring 2024

Native Americans

Bob Brumblay (left) and Dave Fitzsimmons holding works by Griffin
Spring 2011

An art history

Worth D. Griffin stepped off the train in Pullman in the fall of 1924 to find Washington State College’s art department barely four years old and with just one other full-time faculty member. Prior to that, the only art instruction offered was painting lessons for students with the pocket money.

But Griffin had come to help teach design and creative composition and build a program. The Indiana native had studied commercial and fine art in Indianapolis and at the Art Institute in Chicago. In addition to working as a magazine illustrator, he trained among American realists, artists focused on rendering unidealized scenes of daily life. … » More …

Spring 2010

A Cascade Pass Chronology

A timeline of the Cascade Pass from 15,000 years ago to the present.

 

North Cascades National Park, National Park Service

by R. Mierendorf and J. Kennedy, 2009

 

The events below, based on calibrated radiocarbon ages, are in calendar years before present:

15,000?
Glacier ice melts out of the pass.

9600
Early indigenous people camp at the pass and make and repair stone tools, some made from locally-collected stone. Other tool stone is carried in from distant sources, including Hozomeen chert from the upper Skagit River to the north and the Columbia Plateau to the east.

8500
Intensive use … » More …

Spring 2007

Foraged foods: Serving up a traditional meal from the Columbia plateau

In a wooded spot a half-mile from Washington State University’s Pullman campus, an older woman with long braids and an apron emblazoned with the words “got buns?” tended an alderwood fire. Geraldine Jim, a salmon expert from the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon, used the back of a pickup truck as her staging area. She threaded the salmon halves lengthwise onto long, stripped sticks of dogwood and ironwood. While the fish roasted, she circled the fire, running her hand up the skin side to feel for doneness. She pointed out how a half-section of the fish is threaded down the stick, the thin tail end … » More …

Spring 2007

Just like it was yesterday

“We were living a good life,” said Albert Redstarr Andrews in a meditation concluding the second Plateau Conference, “and we were disturbed.” What might be taken as gracious understatement also resonated with profound loss.

In spite of a generally liberal sensibility and Native great-grandmother, I confess there have been times upon hearing Native Americans speak of the injustices of manifest destiny and conquest, I’ve wondered when they will finally accept, no matter the past injustice, that this is simply the way things are. Having attended the conference in October, however, I find I am still capable of learning.

The focus of this year’s conference was … » More …

Summer 2007

She's home

When her husband-to-be Michael Pavel took her home to the Skokomish reservation in the summer of 1996, it was revealed that Susan Pavel (photo, center) couldn’t cook.

“The attitude,” she says, “was, well, let’s teach you some useful trade. Like weaving.”

And with that, Susan Pavel (’99 Ph.D.) joined the revival of Coast Salish weaving.

Susan and Michael, a Washington State University faculty member in education, were living with his uncle, Bruce Miller, a master weaver.

“He started me at the beginning, carding the wool, spinning the wool, dyeing the wool, working up the loom. Actual weaving was maybe a third of the process.”

Susan … » More …

Spring 2003

Sherman Alexie: “It’s all good”

It may look the same today, but as Sherman Alexie walked down the aisle of the Kenworthy Theater in Moscow, Idaho, he realized his last memory of the place was, well, a little bit hazy.

“I was just recalling with a friend of mine who I went to school at Wazzu with that this is the first time I’ve been in this theater sober,” Alexie said, glancing around the old theater at the Palouse premier of his second movie, The Business of Fancydancing, last September. “And I’ve been sober a long time.”

Eleven years, actually, he says with pride, urging other young tribal members in … » More …

Winter 2002

Lone Star Dietz left a football legacy

“That was the game which was to change the face of New Year’s Day in the years to come.”—Rose Bowl historian Rube Samuelsen

In the first four decades of the 20th century, hardly a week went by during football season when the name of William H. “Lone Star” Dietz’s didn’t appear in the nation’s sports pages. Today it’s rarely heard in Pullman, or anywhere else. In spite of that near silence for 60 years now, the one-time Washington State College football coach (1915-1917, 17-2-1 record) left a legacy that could land him in the College Football Hall of Fame next year.

He began his coaching … » More …