Planting The Seeds

Growing up, Athena Rilatos' auntie used to tell her, "When you build the fire, people will come."

It's a saying Rilatos '20 M.Arch '24, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, took to heart as she emerged as a student leader helping to ignite Portland State's efforts to create spaces and expand curriculum grounded in Indigenous values.

"The fire was lit and it just spread," Rilatos says.

Now-retired PSU Indigenous Nations Studies Professor Judy BlueHorse Skelton put the kindling in place more than a decade ago when she began teaching classes focused on the traditional and contemporary uses of native plants for food, medicine and ceremony. Through the years, her classes gathered on an outdoor learning and community space - now known as the Oak Savanna - to share the natural history of the Willamette Valley, provide space for reflection and healing, create wildlife habitat and demonstrate Indigenous land practices.

The efforts of BlueHorse Skelton and students like Rilatos are bearing fruit today as PSU charts a path to become a destination of choice for Indigenous sciences - a place that attracts and supports more Native students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) programs and that bridges Indigenous and Western approaches to science. ​​STEM is also sometimes referred to as STEAM, an acronym preferred by some leaders as art, the A in STEAM, is considered a science in Indigenous communities.

ROOTED IN THIS PLACE

In late 2019, plans began to take shape for the renovation of PSU's aging undergraduate science building, now known as the Vernier Science Center. Campus leadership saw it as an opportunity to upgrade the space with contemporary labs and learning spaces and use the building as a vehicle for transforming student outcomes for Oregon's most diverse student population in STEM.

The design process centered the voices and lived experiences of students from groups historically excluded and underrepresented in STEM. Rilatos and a dozen of her peers, all students of color, were tapped to serve on a student advisory board, bringing student perspectives to a year's worth of meetings with Bora Architects, campus planners and facilities management.

The students dreamed up a space where they could navigate easily, take care of their needs and connect to nature - a space where they would feel like they belonged and could see a future for themselves in STEM.

"It can be hard to find those areas of respite where you feel comfortable and safe and like you can just be," Rilatos says. "There's been so much intention in making the Vernier Science Center feel like that."

The building's design reflects a desire to expand the understanding of what science is and what research looks like at PSU. It draws inspiration from and uplifts Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge, or ITECK - a body of continually evolving observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices and beliefs that tribes have developed over many generations about the relationship of living beings with one another and their environment.

A First Foods classroom features a medicine-making area with plant drying racks, a demonstration kitchen and classroom technology that will connect PSU classes to Indigenous communities around the world.

"ITECK invites us to do things in a different way," Rilatos says - and the Vernier Science Center embodies that approach. She and BlueHorse Skelton worked closely with Bora's project team to incorporate Indigenous design and perspectives into the space.

"This way of understanding our place in the world and where we are and how we interact with it and the relationships we have doesn't have to be this one way that we've been taught from a Western perspective," Rilatos says. "What is really nice and different about the new science center is that it's pushing against the mindset that one is better than the other."

Inside the center, the color scheme of each floor is rooted in the ecology of the Pacific Northwest - coastal wetland, oak savanna, Willamette riparian, coastal rainforest, high desert and the Cascades. The directional signage features animal and plant relatives from each ecoregion accompanied by a QR code to hear their names in local Native languages.

The first floor features artwork created by Indigenous artists and walls painted green and purple - a nod to camas lilies. Wood paneling mimics the design of traditional Native basketry and a wood ceiling feature honors the four directions, a culturally significant symbol. Outside, native plantings represent four local ecoregions, helping create a strong sense of place.

EXPANDING ITECK

Beyond the building's visual aesthetics, dedicated space on the second floor supports the expansion of ITECK, including a first-of-its-kind certificate for students and working professionals. A First Foods classroom features a medicine-making area with plant drying racks, a demonstration kitchen and classroom technology that will connect PSU classes to Indigenous communities around the world.

An Indigenous library uplifts Indigenous voices and provides room for ceremonial objects and regalia, and a community gathering room offers space for the ITECK program to continue cultivating relationships with tribes, Portland's greater urban Native community and local and federal agencies that are increasingly turning to ITECK to improve their management of natural resources.

Rilatos says she hopes ITECK's visibility in the science building can become a jumping-off point for others to integrate Indigenous perspectives and approaches into their own fields of study and research.

"I'm most excited about ITECK as a catalyst for relationship-building, and being able to really learn and uncover new Native sciences in our way of observing and understanding the world in a relational way," she says.

Emma Johnson MS'23, a Cowlitz tribal member, is helping to nurture those relationships with students, faculty and community partners in her new role as the ITECK coordinator.

Realistically, ITECK can be in everything. There's a lot of potential there and having so much of the second floor dedicated to our program will open up more conversations.

"Realistically, ITECK can be in everything," she says. "There's a lot of potential there and having so much of the second floor dedicated to our program will open up more conversations."

Johnson says quarterly tea time gatherings have already brought in faculty from different disciplines to learn about ITECK and where they might find synergy. That's where she first connected with Biology teaching professor Steffi Kautz, and now the two are working together this fall on an urban farming project that will integrate ITECK and food sovereignty.

Students are also becoming champions for ITECK's expansion, inviting their friends in and advocating for ITECK courses to count as electives in their programs. At an end-of-year gathering on the Oak Savanna, students from majors as diverse as architecture, biology, environmental science, geography and social work shared how ITECK classes reinvigorated them and gave them a different lens through which to view the world and their work.

"I'm really excited for all the future students, both Native and non-Native students, that ITECK brings together - to have the space for them to come together and learn from each other and hopefully make some ripples out in our communities and our world," Rilatos says.

DESIGNING WITH THE LAND

Perhaps nowhere have those ripples been more visible than in the School of Architecture as students and faculty embraced the Oak Savanna as a collective focus for classes and studio projects.

For Rilatos, who started in PSU's master's in architecture program in 2020, it's a project that brought her two worlds together. She still remembers touring the Oak Savanna site in 2019 with BlueHorse Skelton and Sergio Palleroni, a professor of architecture who, at the time, had funding from the city and PGE to build an emergency preparedness hub on campus.

"I was a fly on the wall listening to Sergio and Judy imagine what that could be, and then we kept meeting and envisioning and dreaming up what it could be," she says.

What came out of their collaborative process was a desire to instead support the ongoing restoration efforts on the Oak Savanna as a way to address resilience. PGE supported the change in direction, allowing the team to keep the funding and help bring to fruition a vision years in the making for an ITECK building that would foster land-based learning and provide space for cultural practices, ceremony and other events like traditional salmon bakes. In spring 2021, Palleroni's studio class focused on creating designs for an ITECK Center from the existing but underused building on site.

That was the start of a partnership between the School of Architecture and Indigenous Nations Studies that has only deepened as faculty and students continue to share workshops, classes and seasonal events on the Oak Savanna.

"It's been really cool to have our students work together and for our ITECK students to share what they see or what needs to be in this space and then the architecture students to actually create the design," Johnson says.

I'm most excited about ITECK as a catalyst for relationship-building, and being able to really learn and uncover new Native sciences in our way of observing and understanding the world in a relational way.

During one term, graduate students drew up innovative designs for the center, while undergrads developed detailed construction models. During another term, the Oak Savanna was the focus of undergraduate studio classes around urban design, landscape design and table design. Last year, students designed and built a stage for the Pickathon music festival that is being repurposed as an outdoor pavilion on the savanna and, earlier this year, a class explored the use of natural materials for the future center's walls.

After taking a year off from the architecture program in 2021, Rilatos returned to school rejuvenated and had the opportunity to continue working on the Oak Savanna with her cohort. She says it transformed their approach to design.

"The biggest thing that I really felt and noticed was just how much more care and intention people were considering land and our history and bringing that into their investigations," she says. "Every single person in my cohort is well-versed in what an Oak Savanna is and the history of this place. These are design professionals that will now go out into their respective firms or however they use their degree, and they'll be another voice at the table that gets to consider that."

Rilatos herself won't be heading far away. After graduation, she landed a job at PLACE, a Portland-based landscape architecture firm that will be working with Opsis Architecture on the design and build-out of the ITECK Center, helping bring to life what she and her peers have been working on for years.

"It feels like a dream," she says.

The project will continue to engage faculty, students and community members - and even bring students from the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science into the fold.

ENGINEERING A FUTURE FOR INDIGENOUS STEM

It's only fitting to involve engineering students as Joseph Bull, dean of Maseeh College and the first Native dean of an engineering school in the nation, is on a mission to make PSU a home for Indigenous STEM. He jokes that if people didn't know that was his intention when he arrived on campus in 2022, then they weren't paying attention during his interview.

"I wanted some place where I felt like I could make a difference in terms of students and where there was a Native population that I felt I could engage to do this type of work," says Bull, an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. "I felt we had a critical mass here at PSU that we could really do some cool things."

Bull says Indigenous people have always been scientists and engineers. Take canoe-building, cultural burns and salmon fishery management as just a few examples. He says centering Indigenous values and approaches - like the importance of relationships among living beings and the wisdom of the seventh generation to consider the impact of any action or decision on future generations - will only make science and engineering more innovative, creative and productive.

"All these things that are related to traditional ways of doing things are actually STEM and there's a lot of value from that approach," he says. "If we centered some of those values in how we do STEM for everybody, it would make the disciplines better."

Bull says Maseeh College will look to do just that as part of a larger curriculum revision process. Bull is also working to build a stronger sense of community and belonging through cohort programs - from undergrad through doctoral programs - and events for Native students, connecting them with faculty, staff and local CEOs who are Native.

"I think in five years, our curriculum will probably look a little different, how we approach some things will be different and we hopefully will have more Native students who will really feel like they belong here," he says.

Bull and Tim Anderson, who leads the Engineering and Technology Management department as one of the few Native engineering chairs in the country and a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, are also finding as many opportunities as possible to bring Indigenous students to campus. Earlier this summer, PSU hosted students attending the national UNITY conference, one of the largest Native youth leadership gatherings in the country, and CyberPDX, a five-day cybersecurity camp that for the first time was open only to Native and Indigenous high school students and brought students from as far as Louisiana.

"There's an opportunity for us to partner and engage with the community and do things in a way that is not just us showing up with a solution but collaboratively working with Native folks in Oregon and around the country to build something that really addresses their interests and needs," Bull says.

He says they're working on articulation agreements with tribal colleges that would make it easier for students to start at a tribal college and finish their degrees at PSU, which offers a breadth of degrees in engineering, science and public health not often available at tribal colleges.

"I want us to attract Native people from Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, but also to nationally be known as a place for Indigenous STEM," Bull says.

And with the work that he, Rilatos, BlueHorse Skelton, Johnson, Anderson and others are doing, PSU is moving closer to that reality.

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