Celebrating 30 years of The Museum at Warm Springs, while looking to its future

In March 1993, The Museum at Warm Springs opened its doors, becoming the first Tribal museum in the state of Oregon and changing the way institutions represent the Native American historic and cultural record. Today, the museum boasts an extensive collection of artifacts, artwork, photographs and heirlooms that the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs started acquiring more than five decades ago from Tribal members and families. It also provides a space to showcase temporary exhibits and contemporary work, such as “An Eye for the Rez,” a retrospective of Warm Springs Tribal member and photographer Edward Heath currently on display as part of the programming to celebrate the museum’s 30th anniversary.

Joining us to talk about the museum’s legacy and share her vision for its future is Elizabeth Woody, executive director of The Museum at Warm Springs and a former Oregon Poet Laureate.

But first, we hear from Central Oregon Bureau Chief Emily Cureton Cook who recently paid a visit to the museum to learn about its enduring cultural impact. Warm Springs Community Radio K-W-S-O provided archival recordings for this radio story, and KWSO journalist Will Robbins contributed to the reporting.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. The Museum at Warm Springs turned 30 this year. It was a historic milestone for the first tribally owned museum in Oregon that became a model for Native representation in other institutions around the country. We’re going to talk with the executive director of the museum in just a few minutes. But first, OPB’s Emily Cureton Cook paid a visit and brought us this story.

Emily Cureton Cook [narration]: Inside the Museum at Warm Springs, 13 year old Mason Frye gravitates to the things he recognizes.

Mason Frye: It’s a grinding rock for grinding herbs and spices.

Oh, baby boards. Most kids around here have baby boards when they are born, and they’re placed in them for a while.

Oh, this is luksh. It’s a native root that grows around here. There’s actually some behind our house, we pick it every year.

Cureton Cook: Who taught you to look for luksh, and other first foods?

M. Frye: My mom did. She just taught me what they look like, what are signs of where they’re growing. Then of course, you always have to plant the seeds back.

Janaea Frye: [He’s been] digging luksh since he was, I don’t know, seven years old.

Cureton Cook [narration]: Mason’s mom, Janaea Fry, is an artist. She looks forward to entering paintings in the museum’s annual Tribal Member Art Show. This year, she had an entire wall of work on display.

J. Frye: I just feel really inspired to keep going now. Like oh my gosh, am I an artist now? Have I arrived?

Cureton Cook [narration]: Frye remembers being around Mason’s age when the museum first opened 30 years ago.

J. Frye: The entire tribe showed up for that, the grand opening of this museum. And it was pretty spectacular.

Cureton Cook [narration]: In an archival recording of that day in 1993, then Tribal Council Chairman Raymond Tsumpti Sr asked the crowd to bear witness to the dedication of the museum.

Raymond Tsumpti Sr [recording]: A museum that holds our treasures of our past, of who we are.

Cureton Cook [narration]: He described how distinct tribes, the Wasco and Warm Springs, signed a treaty with the US government in 1855, and moved on to a tiny fraction of their homelands. Then the US military forced a third tribe, the Paiute, to move hundreds of miles and live on the same reservation.

Tsumpti Sr [recording]: By 1879, our reservation featured three tribes, with three different languages, different customs, traditions, and lifestyles. But we learned to get along with each other. We learned that our diversity could be an asset.

Cureton Cook [narration]: At the museum today, that diversity is heard in recordings of elder storytellers.

Woman [recording]: My life here on Tenino Valley was always something doing.

Man [recording]: All you had to do was go down over this hill here, and come back with 20 fish whenever we wanted them.

Woman [recording]: A lot of fish. Lotta bears.

Cureton Cook [narration]: This type of first person storytelling marked the beginning of a profound shift in how museums represent tribal cultures.

Rick West: Native people had always been interpreted in the third person. Nobody ever asked us what we knew about our own selves and our own material.

Cureton Cook [narration]: Rick West is the Founding Director and Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Years before it opened a space on the National Mall, Warm Springs paved the way.

West: Warm Springs was sort of the first on the block in that regard, and it was very important to us. Cultural continuance and preservation was not going to be centered in New York City and Washington DC. Culture is preserved in community.

Sunmiet Maben: We are still living, breathing, existing people.

Cureton Cook [narration]: Warm Springs Museum operations manager Sunmiet Maben hopes this year’s birthday milestone can be a turning point for needed repairs, things like a new HVAC system, and preservation work for the exhibits.

Maben: Well, at the moment, it’s a struggle, because we are an aging building.

Cureton Cook [narration]: After years of COVID related closures and staff shortages, she says staying open is a financial challenge.

Maben: We fall into that category with a lot of museums where you just want to bring in enough money to keep the doors open and keep the mission going.

Cureton Cook [narration]: The mission reaches about 12,000 visitors annually. Maben hopes they leave with a sense of how the cultures in the museum aren’t in the past tense.

Miller: Thanks to Will Robbins at Warm Springs Community Radio, K-W-S-O for contributions to that reporting, and to the station for providing archival audio.

Joining me now to talk more about the 30th anniversary of the Museum at Warm Springs is Elizabeth Woody. She is one of Oregon’s former Poet Laureates, and the executive director of the museum. Elizabeth Woody, welcome back to Think Out Loud.

Elizabeth Woody: Thank you. I’m glad to be back.

Miller: It’s great to have you on again. I’m just curious, going back to the beginning of that story from Emily, what was it like for you to hear a 13 year old Mason Frye as he was recognizing objects and plants from his own life, his own culture, in the museum?

Woody: That was a really good reflection of the authenticity of the museum, because in his experience, his cultural experience, family experience, he can relate to what is in the museum. And it excites him, and makes him feel happy. And I could tell by his voice that he was quite proud of knowing these things, but he was also pleased to be able to see them.

Miller: Going back in time, members of the tribe approved a referendum in 1988 to allocate $2.5 million for the museum. And then another three quarters of a million dollars or so were added. At the time, it was the most money that a tribe anywhere in the country had committed for their own museum. What do you think was behind that support?

Woody: Well, the museum had been conceived many decades earlier. There was a recognition that our family heirlooms and different things were being sold out of the reservation, and that the antiquities market of American Indian art was a multibillion dollar industry. There was different times that this was brought up, and it all culminated I think at this particular point of the tribal history, because we did have more revenue, we had successful enterprises at that time. And there were a lot of driving forces besides just tribal council, the tribal membership also had input into the museum all the way through, even to the design and concept where Don Stastney and his team of architects had community meetings to talk about what was important architecturally, as well as aesthetic qualities to the museum that he needed to incorporate or recognize.

Miller: And my understanding is that one of the events as part of this 30th anniversary celebration is actually going to focus on what you’re talking about there, on the design of the museum, the architecture of it. What makes it special from your perspective?

Woody: What makes it special from my perspective is that it changed Donald Stastny’s life. He said this at one of the award dinners we had where we gave him recognition. He said that after he had worked for the tribes, he began to look at the work he was doing with a different perspective, and that he was enriched by the cultures of the tribes at Warm Springs, and he developed a lifelong relationship post being the one of the architects. So I think that that’s what impressed me a lot, what we’ll be able to hear about when he gives his lecture this summer. And the theme is to be determined.

Miller: How did he incorporate the existing, longstanding designs from the different tribes, that together make up the confederation? How did he incorporate them in the final museum?

Woody: The tribal members he met with, people he talked to, they looked at the land not as an aesthetic, but as something that was in them and part of them: the river systems that of course we’ve lived by for millennia, the Cascade Mountains, which we have ancestral stories about the the eruption of Mount Mazama, long standing mountains who had correlating stories from the tribes. So the volcanic rock that you see here is really significant, the basalt that was put into it, the types of wood, the shapes of the structures. Like the old fashioned long house that was made out of tules, and later made out of canvas. The Wasco people lived in cedar plank houses, and the Paiute people had what I think they called wickiups, which were smaller houses.

So when they talked about these things, that’s what he listened to. That is the comfort that people had from the land. The land gave us protection, and also brought to us our food sources and what we call our little relatives, which are the salmon and the roots, the luksh the young man mentioned, the berries which are huckleberries, chokecherries, and so on, up to the deer and the elk.

And then of course, the mountains again, which the water comes from, to the rivers. And then we go further, the weather that’s brought in from the Pacific Ocean that nourishes us. And that’s our first medicine is water, and that’s our first food. So I think that he began to see this interconnectedness. It wasn’t necessarily a perfect harmony, but it was something that was brought to the tribes as a teaching or as a belief system. We call it the natural laws of the creator.

So I think that he looked at those things, and they found people willing to help them. Like for example, I think my Uncle Louis Pitt said that he needed to find a good source of basalt, and it just wasn’t there at the time. And they found somebody who was actually dealing with basalt, and he said “I’ll get you all the basalt you need. If it’s for the museum, you can have it. It’s just a matter of hauling them because they’re pretty heavy.” And that community really made a difference for Don.

Miller: In that story from Emily Cureton Cook at the beginning, we heard from Mason Frye’s mother Janaea, who she told us was excited to be featured in an exhibit of local artists. In fact, one of the exhibits up right now is the photography of another Warm Springs tribal member, Edward Heath. How much has that been a priority for the museum over the years, featuring art by tribal members?

Woody: Well, we have a tribal member art show every year. We have a children’s art show every year, and it’s probably one of the highlights for our community to get together and see what the artists have produced. And of course, we have workshops and sessions that we’ve had in the past before programs became a little tight, to do artwork, to paint, to learn how to weave all different things. So I think that the artists who come here love having their work shown and presented in a professional way.

And we do have very outstanding Warm Springs artists who are professionals. You know, we have Lillian Pitt I’m thinking of, and our ancestor Pat Courtney Gold who passed away, she was a traditional basket weaver. Two young women, Roxanne Chinook and her sister, they were excellent painters. Of course they aren’t with us anymore, but we do have their work here. And so it’s not just the older artifacts, we have contemporary items that have been donated to the museum as well, including contemporary bead work and whatnot.

Miller: We also heard about some of the challenges, including physical plant challenges, that the museum is facing right now about better ways to preserve all of the many artifacts in the collection, in addition to an HVAC system. What do you see as the biggest challenges the museum is facing looking towards the next 30 years?

Woody: Well, the museum was built to the Smithsonian Museum standards. So the collections area is a place that is pristine and protective of the artifacts that we have, the archives and library is similar. So over the 30 years, there’s things that we have to be conscious of, like the humidity factor. When we have touring art exhibits we have to make sure that there’s enough humidity in the exhibits area so that these things are preserved well, they’re not going to be under any stress. In the collections room, we finally were able to get a grant that we received to redo some of the shelving that we had that were hanging areas. We’ve turned them all into shelves, and we went into the vault area and built in a bigger, better complex shelving system for some of the artifacts that need to be extremely protected because they’re rare. We bought a table with sliding doors in it so that we can work on the artifacts and take inventory, and look towards what state they are in.

These are living objects, they’re not things that are static. We have to be able to have them come out once in a while, be handled and looked at. We need to make sure that the bead work is still good, because sometimes threads deteriorate. So the standard for us going forward will be going back to the Smithsonian quality. And that requires us to particularly look at the HVAC system. It’s 30 years old, and we no longer have the boiler turned on, and we need to replace all the things that you normally need to replace. And because of COVID, we also need to be considerate of the situation here with circulation of air, that type of thing.

Miller: That’s the building, and also the life of the objects within it. What about people? What are you hoping people will be able to experience or see or learn over the next 30 years?

Woody: Well, for one thing, we are considered a tribal museum, but we were one of the first tribally designed museums. We should be recognized throughout the world, because the Columbia River Plateau, the Warm Springs tribes, the Wasco tribes, and the Paiute tribes really are rare in the world Indigenous population, and culture that we still practice and we still participate, the natural laws, are handed down through thousands of years, and we still continue to observe them. So people have a lot more to learn from the tribes in the future, and that could be digitally, that could be through tours. There’s some very amazing areas in our ceded territories, which is 10.5 million acres, that we could take our own children to and to other people who are interested, and going and looking at a specific area, and learning about its ecosystem. The museum itself is in a cottonwood ecosystem right next to creek, and we have 22 acres. And the land is populated by otters, by birds, by kestrel, by eagles. We have all kinds of amphibians and reptiles. So there’s just a lot that people can come here to experience.

And a lot of times I hear from people, as an author and as an artist myself, is that they want to feel connected. And the best connection I think they can have is through family and through their awareness of their environment. And some of it’s not productive, but a lot of it is. And even in the city, I had one person ask me “how does it feel to be removed from your homeland?” And I kind of stopped and almost gasped. And I said “I’ve been out of my homeland. This is my homeland.” And he said “that was a stupid question.” And I said “well you can call it that, but it was certainly not well thought out.”

Miller: Elizabeth Woody, it was a pleasure talking with you again. Thanks very much.

Woody: Oh, thank you. It’s good to talk to you.

Miller: Elizabeth Woody is one of Oregon’s former Poet Laureates. She is the executive director of The Museum at Warm Springs which opened 30 years ago.

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