Clifton and Christine Bruno adjusted the large filets of skewered Tribal-caught salmon. As the fish slow-cooked around the fire outside the Tryon Creek Visitor Center in Portland, a hard spring rain fell on the pop-up tents erected over their traditional salmon bake.
Around the fire were several coolers filled with 50 pounds of salmon — enough to share with the hundreds of guests who would be visiting Friends of Tryon Creek’s sixth annual Indigenous Culture Day event Saturday.
“We get motivated to show the public that Indigenous people are still here,” said Christine Bruno, who works alongside her husband, Clifton Bruno, to bring education about Indigenous culture to Oregon schools.
“It’s carrying on the traditions from the ancestors and passing them on to the younger generation.”
In the visitor center only a few hundred feet from the Brunos, the Indigenous Culture Day was well underway.
Almost a hundred people, many of them with their children and families, milled around as members from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz, the Chinook Tribe and other tribes demonstrated Indigenous arts and crafts, gave language lessons, and hosted the salmon bake organized by the Brunos.
“Friends of Tryon Creek has been doing a lot of awesome work … to make sure this is a place where Indigenous people, and all people, can come and practice their culture and traditions,” said Jakob Foley, an intern with Tryon Creek’s Green Leaders Workforce Development Program and a member of the Yup’ik Tribe from Alaska. “There’s an abundance here.”
Gabe Sheoships, executive director of Friends of Tryon Creek, said that the inter-Tribal event’s location at Tryon Creek State Natural Area is culturally significant and described the area as a snapshot into what the Portland area looked like prior to colonization.
The region was once the home of the Willamette Tumwater, the Clackamas Chinook, the Multnomah, the Wasco-Wishram and other Chinookan peoples, as well as the Tualatin Kalapuya, the Molalla, the Cayuse and others, according to Friends of Tryon Creek’s website.
“There’s a lot of history right here at the park,” Sheoships said. “For a long time that history wasn’t being told, or it wasn’t being told in a good way.”
Friends of Tryon Creek seeks to highlight Indigenous narratives by combining cultural education and practices with ecological conservation. A former fish biologist, Sheoships said that he made the shift into environmental education and stewardship at Friends of Tryon Creek after becoming disillusioned with an exclusively Eurocentric approach to conservation. Sheoships, who is Cayuse and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, said he combines Indigenous practices with Western science.
“Having both mindsets, I think, has really helped me solve problems in the contemporary world,” Sheoships said. “Western science is great for so many things, (but) I think it has some limitations with working with living systems.”
Lili Yazzie, who works as Friends of Tryon Creek’s Green Leaders coordinator and is a member of the Navajo tribe from Arizona and New Mexico, also believes in a cultural approach to ecological conservation.
“Some folks don’t understand why an environmental nonprofit would be hosting a culture day,” Yazzie said. “But to me, environmental preservation is cultural preservation as well. … All of these crafts are dependent on the natural landscape, and if you don’t have a healthy environment to support these cultural activities, then your cultural life will be impacted in a really negative way.”
Clifton and Christine Bruno said that non-Indigenous Oregonian’s knowledge of these cultural practices is limited, largely by the way the state’s public education is structured.
“There always will be a gap,” Clifton Bruno said. “The way they have schools structured, their priority is hitting all these marks, checking all these boxes. That restricts any other thing out(side) of what they want.”
Christine Bruno added that there is simply not enough funding or people to effectively educate students on the Indigenous cultures of the region. But she said that she and her husband have stepped in to try to raise awareness through educational programs.
“We are in a position now in our lives that we can focus more on these things,” she said.
The Brunos hope events like Tryon Creek’s Indigenous Culture Day will help bridge the gap in awareness about Oregon’s Indigenous cultures, one visitor at a time.
“Anytime we can reach a kid or their parents, it impacts them,” Christine Bruno said. “Broadening their worldview, understanding that Indigenous people still exist.”
— Tanner Todd covers crime and public safety. Reach them at [email protected], or 503-221-4313.
