Dropping a late Friday afternoon sneak peek at our Spring issue cover, featuring a gorgeous photo of artist Marie Watt, photographed by Mason Trinca.
Inside the issue are plenty of thoughtful stories about labor, exploring the experiences of Columbia River pilots, queer family making, African immigrant entrepreneurs, community journalists and publishers, and Indigenous farmworkers in the Willamette Valley.
If you subscribe by April 7, you'll get the issue delivered straight to your door, free of cost.
Cover design by @darseylandoe .
As long as humans have sought to honor the present and remember the past, we have built monuments and memorials. Today, each monument prompts many questions: What should be remembered, and why? How should it be remembered? Where should a monument or memorial be built, and when? And who gets to decide?
Most of us rarely get a say in how people and events are memorialized. Facilitator Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. opens these questions to community discussion in the Beyond 250 conversation Monuments and Memorials.
What monuments or memorials would you like to see in your personal life, home, or local community?
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#Beyond250 #OregonHumanities #MonumentsAndMemorials #PublicMemory #CivicDialogue
"Our culture and traditions are like a compass—they connect us to our past and show us where we come from."
In “Preserving Our Culture and Traditions,” facilitator Hilda Leon helps people explore their connections to their roots and discover meaningful ways of reconnecting. This conversation is offered in both Spanish and English.
Visit our website to learn more about this conversation and request it in your community. Link in bio.
Our spring fundraising campaign is underway, and this year, we’re focusing on the possibilities that open when we get together to share stories, ask questions, listen, think, and grow.
In March, our executive director Adam Davis visited students at Adrienne C. Nelson High School in Happy Valley to record an episode of The Detour podcast. Just in this small group of five young people, there were stories rooted in Ethiopia, Ukraine, Mexico, Kenya, Arkansas, and Oregon. The conversation that took place was full of reflection, curiosity, and care, and it’s exactly the kind of conversation we work to foster and create in communities all around the state.
That work came under serious threat last year when federal funding was cut, and we’ve been able to continue in large part because of our community of donors. This spring, gifts are being matched dollar-for-dollar up to $25,000 by Paul and Lory Utz. Help us bring more conversations to communities around Oregon by making a gift today.
oregonhumanities.org/donate
What does it mean to preserve our languages, customs, and traditions while living in places where they may not be present? This is the question at the heart of one of our Beyond 250 conversations, facilitated by Hilda Leon in both English and Spanish.
Here are a few books, films, and a podcast that take up these questions:
📚 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
📚 Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
🎬 El Norte (1983)
🎬 Dreams of Chonta (2020)
🎙️ Many Roads to Here, a podcast from The Immigrant Story
What would you add to this list?
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#Beyond250 #OregonHumanities #CulturalHeritage #CivicDialogue
"We the People" is among the most powerful and most contested phrases in American civic life.
Eliot Feenstra facilitates a Beyond 250 conversation that examines the gap between the founding promise and the historical record: who has been included in that phrase, who has been excluded, and what it means for our communities today.
Eliot Feenstra is a community organizer, artist, gardener, and facilitator. He's led conversations for Oregon Humanities since 2015 and currently works with Oregon's Kitchen Table, a statewide community engagement program that creates ways for Oregonians to participate in public decision-making.
To request this conversation for your community, tap the Beyond 250 button in our link in bio.
#Beyond250 #OregonHumanities #WeThePeople #CivicDialogue #Democracy
A poem from Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston, to close out this National Poetry Month.
Travel Delay
The astronomer was there that night to raise money
for an observatory that crowned a nearby butte in otherwise
flat desert country. The guests, if pressed, would confess
to feeling weary of being seen as dollar signs, not stars.
But the featured speaker knew this so dazzled them with the notion
that some of the starlight overhead was but a gleaming echo,
a radiant dirge birthed by something long gone; that diamond
in the sky nothing more than an ember of time-delayed memory…
Wait. What if we’re already dead, you and I, the illumination of a life
already spent? I used to fear death, feared tumbling, lost, through
grotesque galactic nebulae, the leering gargoyles of the infinite.
But now I clearly see my task for the next million years is to reflect
the life I had, one that was and is as bright and real as a beam
of pure light. We are all stars. I write a check.
Join us this Thursday for a conversation with labor organizers Reyna López and Ramón Ramírez and historian Joaquín Lara Midkiff.
We'll explore the many ways that the mid-Willamette Valley has been home to powerful farmworker and solidarity movements that transformed the lives of migrant laborers and reshaped Oregon's political and economic landscape.
This event is part of By the People: Conversations Beyond 250, a series of community-driven programs created by humanities councils across the United States, its territories, and the District of Columbia in collaboration with local partners. Together, these programs explore 250 years of the nation's cultural life and imagine its shared future. The initiative was developed by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage as a complement to the 2026 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. #ConsiderThis #CommunityOrganizing #OregonHistory
When it first appeared in the Constitution, the phrase "We the People" did not extend to everyone living on this land. Yet it's become an important phrase signaling the democratic right to protest and self-governance.
Who Are "We the People"? is a Beyond 250 community conversation facilitated by Eliot Feenstra that aims to examine who has historically been included in that founding phrase, how its meaning has changed through struggle and legislation, and what it asks of us today.
What do you think of when you hear the words "We the People"?
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#Beyond250 #WeThePeople #OregonHumanities #CivicDialogue #Democracy
In our spring issue, historian Joaquín Lara Midkiff considers how immigrant farmworker communities have shaped the history and environment of the Pacific Northwest, and describes these communities as part of a legacy of Indigenous labor exploitation that dates back to the the earliest European settlements in the region—"a widening system of extraction that would bound Indigenous peoples from distant lands to the Northwest for centuries.”
Read the full essay, online now.
oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine
"Stepping into these stories can dare us to challenge oppressive rhetoric, calling out the privilege that often disregards empathy for others, while calling in a movement of care." —Jorge Herrera Caro
In this piece, Nicholas Hengen Fox, Jalen Rose, and Jorge Herrera Caro revisit some of the books they read in "Working Class Literature" at Portland Community College. In the process, they reflect on how reading about the lives of working people can help us build a better, fairer world.
To read the full essay, visit oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine
"Most of the details of this time are lost to me. Did my brain bury them because the emotional weight was too much to bear? Or maybe, once our baby was born, a kind of blissful postpartum amnesia took hold, the elation of finally having a child sanding off the most jagged edges of the pain."
In this moving photo essay for our "Labor" issue, Lindsay Trapnell reflects on the fifteen-year process of trying to have a child with her wife, Melissa.
To read the essay and see the photos, visit oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine/
