Meet our Guests: Angela Bombaci

Angela Bombaci

Executive Director, Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland

Wallowa County, Oregon

08/26/21

Passion lights up Angela Bombaci’s faces as she talks about her role as Executive Director of the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland, a nonprofit that manages a 320-acre property in Wallowa, Oregon, that aims to reconnect Nez Perce people with their ancestral homeland. With miles of walking trails, a longhouse and beautiful dance arbor for gatherings and ceremonies, and a major salmon restoration project, the Homeland has become a hub for native culture in Wallowa County.

In 1877, the Nez Perce people were violently displaced by white settlers and the US government from what is now Wallowa County. Angela believes that the mission of the Homeland is even more important because of this. She is dedicated to helping provide the Nez Perce people the platform to tell their own story and a physical place to gather on the land that was once occupied by their ancestors since time immemorial. 

Angela says that “The highest priority [of the Homeland] is to create space for people to celebrate their culture.” This has included large, joyful gatherings like the Tamklik powwow, smaller events like naming ceremonies and celebrations of life and death, and groups like Semester in the West visiting to learn about Nez Perce story.

Angela has worked hard to facilitate positive relationships between current Wallowa residents and Nez Perce tribal members and has been thrilled by the joy and excitement she has received in response.

By Livvie Bright

Photo courtesy Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland

Meet our Guests: Montana Pagano

Montana Pagano

Watershed Restoration Specialist, Nez Perce Tribe Department of Fisheries

Wallowa, OR

8/25/21

Montana Pagano covers a lot of ground with her work for the Nez Perce Tribe as a Watershed Restoration Specialist. Her project area encompasses 3 million acres in Northeast Oregon and Southeast Washington where she focuses on salmonid (salmon and trout) habitat restoration. Semester in the West was able to visit one of her recent projects on a site owned by the Nez Perce Tribe where her team is in the final stages of creating a side channel on the Wallowa River to enhance native fish habitat. More than 100 years ago the river was straightened by non-native residents, destroying much of the river’s fish habitat. The Nez Perce’s side channel project reintroduces refuges for juvenile salmonids that are quickly vanishing from streams due to the prevalence of dams and warming stream temperatures caused by climate change.

It took several years before the project received approval and the Tribe was able to break ground. Montana reflects, “habitat restoration work takes a long time. It takes a long time to get this habitat to the level of degradation that it’s in, so you can imagine it takes a while to rehabilitate it.” Currently, the river is showing signs of improvement. The side channel has already created mellow stretches of stream for fish to rest with ample shade from transplanted willows, and the river will continue to evolve as natural processes take over the restoration work. A long time in the making, the persistent efforts of Montana and her team are beginning to pay off.

By Ruthie Colburn

Photo credit: Phil Brick

Meet our Guests: Joe McCormack

Joe McCormack

Tribal Fisheries Biologist, Nez Perce Department of Fisheries

Wallowa, OR

8/26/21

The Nimiipuu people, known by most as the Nez Perce, were forced from their homeland in what is now Wallowa County, Oregon in late 1877 by white settlers and the US Army. Since the infamous Flight of the Nez Perce, most tribal members live on a reservation in Idaho, hundreds of miles from their traditional territory. Joe McCormack is a biologist for the Nez Perce Department of Fisheries and one of the few tribal members still living in Wallowa County, working to revive populations of the salmon his ancestors subsisted off of since time immemorial.

Salmon historically spawned in the Wallowa River basin, but more than a century of stream channelization and habitat degradation has pushed their numbers close to extinction. After earning a degree in fish biology from Washington State University, Joe moved to a ranch in Wallowa County and today spends his time working to restore salmon to the Wallowa River. Most days, that means monitoring fish populations or adding structure and native vegetation to river banks. Joe considers himself lucky to have studied fisheries biology, as it gave him the privilege of living in his ancestral homeland, and he thinks education is an important step for other Nimiipuu to return to their ancestral land: “Young people now are getting undergrad degrees, graduate degrees, doctorate degrees... and that I think is key to people moving to Wallowa County, with those tools.” Joe is using his education and Western science as a lever to return culturally significant animals and tradition to his people’s home.

By Kevin Faeustle

Photo credit: Phil Brick

Meet our Guests: Matt Howard

Matt Howard

Fire Manager, Oregon Department of Forestry

Wallowa County, OR

8/24/2021

Standing in the hot sun on a bed of dry pine needles, Matt Howard, Fire Manager with the Oregon Department of Forestry, emphasizes that this place, the Lostine Canyon in northeastern Oregon, is only accessible by a one-lane road. The nature of the road and its users means that a wildfire evacuation would be difficult and slow. Traffic could create a bottleneck at the bridge and block emergency vehicles. Matt describes that thinning the forest around the road by cutting small diameter trees would give firefighters a chance to hold back a blaze during an evacuation.

Working with homeowners in the area, Matt educates on fire preparedness. About half of the residents in Lostine Canyon participate in the Firewise Community program which involves creating a “defensible space” without burnable debris around their homes so that wildfire or flying embers do not ignite the building as easily. Why don’t more people take action to protect their (and their neighbors’) homes? Matt explains in a resigned tone that people just do not think fire will come to them. He also mentions that it is hard to get second homeowners to care for a property they only visit one or two weeks in a year. Matt speaks from experience when he says “I can educate, I can regulate, but people aren’t going to do things unless they believe in them.”

Matt loves these woods, and understands why people would risk living here. Even considering the persistence of fire in the area, Matt believes that “people can live here and be safe…knowing there’s inherent risk.”

By Reya Fore

Meet our Guests: Nils Christoffersen

Nils Christoffersen

Executive Director, Wallowa Resources

Wallowa County, Oregon

8/24/2021

     After Wallowa County lost 20% of its jobs due to its sawmills shutting down in 1996, Nils Christoffersen stepped up alongside other citizens to regrow the community. Now the Executive Director of Wallowa Resources, a local environmental stewardship and economic development nonprofit, Nils believes that if people didn’t step up to steer the community in a positive direction, some other boom-and-bust investor would have capitalized on the in-need populace by staking ownership over a new economy in tech, heavy tourism, or energy development.

     What Nils and others had in mind for Wallowa County’s rural wellbeing was a new economic model that balanced the vitality of the community’s economy with its environment. They established a vision for a “stewardship economy” that creates jobs while respecting ecosystems or even actively restoring them. As Nils spoke to Westies on the Goebel-Jackson Tree Farm, the students looked around at an embodiment of that vision: a vibrantly diverse landscape on which the Goebel and Jackson families thinned and sold small diameter, dead, or downed trees to both protect against high-intensity fires and secure their retirements. Wallowa Resources is a collaborative conservation group, meaning that it works with partners like the Forest Service, the Nez Perce Tribe, Wallowa Land Trust, and private landowners to meet intersectional goals while building trust and resiliency at a local level. It’s easier said than done, Nils will tell you. There is no project that wholly meets each goal, and yet the community is empowered to make many important decisions themselves.

     Nils encouraged Westies to look beyond the strict division between preservation and extraction. In his work lies “the third way,” a different strategy that roots itself in the particularities of his region’s peoples and non-peoples alike.

By Fielding Schaefer

Meet our Guests: Liza Jane McAlister

Liza Jane McAlister

Rancher, The 6 Ranch

Wallowa County

8/21/2021 

Liza Jane McAlister defies most stereotypes of cattle ranchers. She is the fourth generation to raise cattle on her family ranch, The 6 Ranch, a legacy she secured after buying the land from her family. Wearing denim and a radiant smile, Liza Jane shared with Semester in the West her passion for the land and her aim to preserve Western traditions while ranching. It’s clear as she speaks that she has a deep connection to the animals she cares for, “I make their life super good; my cows are happy cows.”

In addition to the full-time job of maintaining the ranch, Liza Jane has worked to add stream meanders and complexity back to the section of the Wallowa River that runs through her property in partnership with the Grande Ronde Model Watershed and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). Inspired by her neighbor Doug McDaniel’s re-meandering work upstream of her property, Liza Jane completed two separate projects on the river to recreate side channels and deep pools for fish habitat. She chose to graze her cattle along the riparian area of the second project, a controversial decision due to cows’ tendency to degrade stream habitat. According to Liza Jane, without using grazing as a management technique invasive reed canary grass crowds the stream bank and becomes “a nasty-ass monoculture that’s ten feet tall”. ODFW did not initially allow her to graze here due to the grass’s ability to stabilize stream banks, but Liza Jane insisted grazing rights be included for the re-meandering project to continue. ODFW agreed to Liza Jane’s terms and her hard work came to fruition. These days, she keeps her eyes peeled for salmon returning to her stretch of the Wallowa.

By: Claire Warncke

 Photo credit: Elio Van Gorden

Meet our Guests: Kathleen Ackley

Kathleen Ackley

Executive Director, Wallowa Land Trust

Wallowa County, Oregon

8/20/21

Kathleen Ackley is the Executive Director of Wallowa Land Trust (WLT), a nonprofit focused on conserving land and maintaining its ecological health. In Wallowa County, where private land is tightly woven into the fabric of the valley, the land trust works to conserve parcels of land for myriad purposes, from grazing to recreating, for both people and wildlife. They rely on the voluntary participation of landowners to carry out their work in protecting lands identified as significant in terms of biological diversity, cultural connections, and educational value. Preserving the prominent glacial moraine on the east side of Wallowa Lake is a major project championed by WLT and for good reason: it is a window into our geologic past and keeps the skyline free of imposing mansions.

Through Kathleen’s eight years with WLT she has seen a shift in their responsibilities and practices. Maintaining workable land has become more of a central tenet in the land trust sphere, along with movements to return land stolen from indigenous peoples and take action against systemic racism. Kathleen knows that land trusts are not exempt from addressing these societal reckonings. In a statement released on their website, WLT lays bare the inequities they continue to hold central to their work. Kathleen engages with such issues through her efforts with the Oregon Land Justice Project, a group which works to amplify indigenous stewardship knowledge and provide a space to hear from Native American leaders and allies about making land management more equitable. Kathleen made it clear that this work is vital, saying “it is not just about taking their knowledge for our benefit, it is about facilitating reconnections…for people with their land and for people with people. This is the right way to move forward, but it is far from easy.”

By Ani Pham

Meet our Guests: Ellen Bishop

Ellen Bishop

Geologist, Writer, Photographer

Wallowa County, OR

8/20/21

Gathered atop a hill that overlooks Wallowa Lake, Ellen Bishop (with her dog Pepper at her side) introduced Semester in the West to the local geology of Wallowa County and the nearby Eagle Cap Wilderness Area. From our perch at the Old Chief Joseph grave site outside of the town of Joseph, Oregon, Ellen pointed to the southeast and directed our attention to the large hill that makes up the perimeter of nearly half the lake. Called a lateral moraine, the feature is a signature geologic landmark of the area. Ellen encouraged us to imagine the geologic structure that lies beneath the dry grass. The moraine is composed of compacted gravel that originated in the nearby Wallowa mountains. It was transported by glaciers that covered the area until the end of the Pleistocene Era. These same glaciers are responsible for many of the geomorphological features of the area, but Ellen pushes us to think even further and consider how the features might be viewed and understood by the long held indigenous understandings of this place. That consideration is at the heart of the work Ellen now does. A former geology professor turned full-time author and photographer, Ellen has recently embarked on a new project in the field of ethnogeology: the study of how geological features are understood by indigenous communities around the globe. By pairing her geology expertise with the creation stories of the Nez Perce, Ellen hopes to acknowledge the overlap of indigenous knowledge and stories with geologic history. Through her work Ellen brings a deeper understanding of the Wallowa Valley to the people who call this place home, both past and present.

By Alli Shinn