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On a day of pounding rain, after a drive on roads that could hardly be seen for a thick curtain of water, I entered the Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. I stepped out of the rain and into a timber structure through a round opening cut in cedar planks, and was met on the other side by a warming fire.
Cultural Hubs: An Occasional Series
Ahead of me, in the old school gymnasium, past a vendor selling gluten-free bread, I could hear the pattering of children’s feet and idle conversation as families greeted friends and artisans sold their wares. On this rainy day at the end of October, Chachalu was holding a marketplace.
The day before, the museum had held an arts summit, inviting Native artists, including past and present Indigenous Place Keeping Artist (IPKA) Fellows as well as marketplace vendors, for a closed session to connect through conversation and ceremony.
The day of my visit was an open house, an invitation to the public to see the past, present, and future of Native art and craft. In the gym, basket weavers, carvers, fur tanners, seamstresses, sculptors, writers, and other artists displayed their skills. In the museum to the rear, tribal history and cultural objects were displayed in close proximity to the work of contemporary Grand Ronde photographer Leland Butler.
As I moved through the marketplace, I could see the meetings between one generation and the next. Parents followed toddlers chasing balls across the floor. A young girl with ribbons in her hair moved on unsteady legs, holding half a banana and bearing a huge smile. And in the booths, grown children, artists in their own right, shared space with elders, mentors, and family.
One such artist was Douglas Jan Burgess II, or Slaay Sliinlass (Haida, Dakota, Umpqua), a Tacoma-based glass artist and one of the 2025 IPKA Fellows. Douglas was seated at a table next to his mother, basket weaver Nancy Burgess, and aunt Fay Smith, a sewer of shirts, dresses, and other clothes.
Douglas, wearing an old glassblowing hoodie, sat behind a table covered with glass slugs, cups with noses pressed into their forms, and a design he keeps coming back to, “ghost shirts,” named for the protective garments blessed in Ghost Dances, a peaceful protest against the treatment and subjugation of Native Americans. Burgess explains, “When I first started making the shirts, they were dedicated to John T. Williams, the man who was shot [by a police officer in 2010]. If he had been wearing a shirt, he would have been protected, like our ancestors were.”
Burgess has used the time and resources of the IPKA Fellowship to create a mobile glass art studio, purchasing a small mobile furnace and a collapsible bench, as well as torches for lampwork and bead-making. The inspiration for this comes from his own experience: “I grew up in southeast Alaska in a really small village; we moved to Tacoma when I was 10, and I started working with glass when I was 12. It was a pretty big shock to be removed from my culture and my community, like being placed in a foreign land. To find community in that glass-blowing pocket, it was exactly what I needed. I wouldn’t have known that I was an artist if I didn’t get exposed to this medium when I did.”
Burgess explained how inaccessible glass is as an artistic medium, requiring large furnaces, expensive supplies and safety equipment. His goal, with this mobile glass studio, is to share the art form with communities that wouldn’t otherwise have access, including his own Native community. Glass, he finds, is healing, and this small glass studio is one step towards his vision of creating centers and spaces for cultural healing.
Throughout our conversation his mother, Nancy, looked on, occasionally interjecting gentle reminders or words of support, and telling me that his business, Creative Hands, is a translation of his Haida name, Slaay Sliinlass. It is clear that there is a collaboration between generations. Nancy herself has ventured into the world of glass art, and one of the baskets she had on display was woven around a vessel made by another glass artist, Jen Elek. Douglas regularly receives baskets as gifts from his mother, including the small earring he wore as we spoke, and the traditional forms that Nancy weaves influence the designs that her son carves into glass.
Across the room, Chantele Rilatos (Takelma, Tututni, Galice, Molala, Yurok, and enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians), is a mother of two beaming with the promise of the child she is carrying. A traditional basket weaver, Rilatos is the other 2025 IPKA Fellow.
Spread before her were two works in progress: a length of peeled and prepared maple bark being woven into a skirt, and a round basket cap with an intricate pattern made of spruce root, Douglas fir, beargrass, maidenhair fern, and Woodwardia fern that had been dyed rust-red with alder. The maple bark was unbelievably fine, thinner than paper, thinner than grass. It rustled with a stray touch. The basket cap, not yet finished, revealed its Douglas fir spokes, hanging from the bottom like small fishbones. Once complete, both garments will be danced in a world renewal ceremony on winter solstice. They are the result of the exploration Rilatos has been doing over the past year, during the course of her Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship.
Rilatos began weaving relatively recently, but she fell in love with it quickly: “I care for it like it’s my child. I really genuinely love this, and I love doing it.” She spoke of her mindful process of working, of picking up her baskets only when she holds good intentions, or “right mind, good heart.”
She is the careful steward of an old craft, and when she describes what it means to her, she is conscious both of its history and its future: “I haven’t had a basket weaver in my family in over five generations, so I never got to meet any of the weavers in my family. We had family baskets that have been passed down, or that we bought from other weavers over time, so I grew up with baskets, but not seeing them being made by my family.”
This is especially true of the time-consuming, specialized art of weaving ceremonial caps: “We have hardly any cap weavers left. Lisa Moorehead-Hillman, who is a mentor and friend of mine, is one of the few today who makes basket caps; she’s a Karuk weaver. But there’s really nobody left.”
Rilatos, however, is changing that within her own life. Her children help her gather and process supplies. They are growing up in a house with weaving projects on couch cushions and kitchen counters, knowing what it is to tend to a patch and to venture out for harvest at all times of year.
And this is perhaps the greatest hope of the pregnant mother: “Knowing that these things are going to be able to outlive me, and that I’ll be able to pass them down to my family, or my children and our community to be danced, that’s also — I have no words to even describe that amazing feeling.”
Across the room from Rilatos and her young son, busy playing on an iPad, sat a Native Hawaiian printmaker, Kanani Miyamoto, surrounded by colorful prints and huge carved panels of tropical flowers. Next to her was the playwright and director Amber Kay Ball (Dakubetede, Shasta, Modoc, Klamath, enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians), offering stories to share.
To their side, the sculptor and mixed-media artist Leonard D. Harmon (Nanticoke, Lenape) sat surrounded by jokes and colorful artwork, goading me to ask him what is the secret of the doglike turquoise and red “Spots got a secret.” (For the record, Harmon says he doesn’t know the secret, either.)
The purpose of the Arts Summit is clear: Artists are able to connect, inspiring each other, honoring each other, and sharing experience and resources to help each other out. Unanimously, I heard words of support and appreciation from one artist to another. Leland Butler and Lenny Harmon were, at one point, caught in a contest of self-negation, with each saying of the other, “Nah, he’s so amazing,” before finally giving way to say, “Oooh, talk to Chantele – she’s incredible!”
The connections built through the Arts Summit and the IPKA Fellowship have a long life, creating a network of support and building grounds for future collaboration. “I think that’s the most important part, is how we can show up for each other and support each other’s brilliant, beautiful work,” Amber Kay Ball, 2023 IPKA Fellow, shared. “Since the summit last year, I’ve been engaging more with the artists since. This past summer we had an event at PICA [Portland Institute for Contemporary Art]. Kenani was part of it, we had Leland, we had Anthony Hudson, and Steph Littlebird in it. We’re all working together now, which is really sweet. The Fellowship just built up a stronger connection between us all.”
Through the Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship and other programs, including the purchase and display of tribe members’ artwork, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde is using art to invest in its future, cultivating leaders and building grounds for a rich, connected community among Native artists. As the Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship is announced for its fourth year, it is also worth asking what is “place keeping,” and what does this term mean to current and past IPKA Fellows?
Mack McFarland, Arts Administrator with the Cultural Resources Department of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, describes how culturally significant sites often have a storytelling plaque marking a fraught and painful past. These can come across almost as tombstones, as if the cultures and the peoples only lived within the past. The IPKA Fellowship, however, exists grandly and fully within the present tense. The artists selected may draw upon tribal resources, including a library and a trove of artifacts to inform their art, but it trusts them to use these resources to speak to their own experience as residents of the 21st century.
Leland Butler (Grand Ronde, Siletz, Yurok), a 2024 IPKA Fellow, is a photographer who grew up in Grand Ronde and attended elementary and middle school in the building that has become Chachalu. It is a place he knows well, and Butler’s photographs, displayed earlier this year in the Chachalu exhibit MY ANCESTORS ARE HERE, sometimes casually and sometimes confrontationally enter into dialogue with a place.
In one image, a black banner with words hand-painted by the artist hangs across a barrier that blocks a logging road, limiting tribal access to the peak beyond. In another picture, taken atop Table Rocks in Southern Oregon, the artist’s brother wears ceremonial pieces alongside sneakers and modern pants. In yet another image, Butler’s sister, visibly pregnant, stares head-on at the camera. The sign behind her, for Fort Yamhill, is covered up with Butler’s black-and-white banner, reading “MY ANCESTORS ARE HERE.”
In his black-and-white photographs, recalling the problematic portraits of Edward Curtis, friends and family members are invited to be themselves, to have an agency in their depiction that was denied their ancestors. Butler’s brother, hair half-bleached, wears sneakers and a ceremonial necklace. A friend wears a T-shirt, looking across clearcuts and hills. Speaking to his subjects, Butler shares, “I want to capture who you are in this current day. They told us who to be for a long time, or who we’re supposed to be. I want you to do what you do, to just wear what makes you you.”
The banner that his sister stands in front of, and which covers the barrier, appears again and again in this series, giving title to the show. Butler made it clear that his word choice was deliberate. Speaking skeptically about the “old-timey photos” taken of Indigenous people, he acknowledges, “The first thought was ‘were,’ but I don’t like the way that sounds. I’m going to say, ‘are.’ It’s more bold. It serves as a reminder to non-Indigenous people that this isn’t something of the past. This is a living people that will continue on, and that we’re still here, and that we’re still connected to these different places, and will be.”
To an artist working in a traditional medium, like Chantele Rilatos, place-keeping is lived as a part of her practice: “We say it takes a year or more to gather everything you need to be able to make something, because they each have their own season. The sticks you get in the spring, your black fern and your grass you get in the summer, your roots you can get year-round, and red fern we get in the fall. If you want to be a basket weaver, you don’t get to go to a craft store to pick up your materials. You have to be out regularly checking your plants, gathering, tending to your patches — it’s a big, big commitment.
“As Grand Ronde and Siletz people, we were forcibly removed from our homelands here, and that’s what I love about being a basket weaver. It forces us to visit our homelands and our home places, and to have relationship with these places, and my kids get to grow up knowing that this is where our family has lived for thousands and thousands of years, and we come here regularly, and we get basket materials here, or we get acorns here still. That — that means everything.”
So what is place-keeping? It is clear that this is a concept and an experience that the fellows can live with and determine for themselves, with all the care and support of a community. Perhaps it is as simple and complex as these words from Leland Butler: “I’m from here.”
Things to watch for
- Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center will be hosting its next marketplace on Friday, December 12, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Chachalu Museum is located at 8720 Grand Ronde Road, Grand Ronde, Oregon.
- The Indigenous Place Keeping Fellowship will accept applications between November 17, 2025 and January 19, 2026. More information about the 2026 IPKA Fellowship is available at this link: https://www.chachalu.org/programs/ipka-fellowship/
- Douglas Jan Burgess II is an educator with Hilltop Artists, a nonprofit educational center in Tacoma, Washington, that offers glass art workshops to art-risk youth.
- Chantele Rilatos is exhibiting basketry in a group show at Coos Art Museum through January 25, 2026: https://coosartmuseum.org/event/roots-and-visions-celebrating-tribal-art/
- Amber Kay Ball and Anthony Hudson are planning a theater festival which will be held at the Dolores Winningstad Theatre in downtown Portland in May 2026.
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