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Street Roots • July. 6-12, 2018
Culture
5
A place for
healing
Cully neighborhood celebrates
the opening of Portland's first
Native Gathering Garden
BY A M A N D A WALDROUPE
STAFF W R IT E R
long one edge of Northeast
Portland’s Thomas Cully Park, prairie
grasses sway and softly crackle in the
breeze. Shaved tree trunks, tall and straight,
border a graveled circular open space where
the local Native American community will
have a place to gather for celebrations and
ceremony.
Thomas Cully Park, more commonly
known as Cully Park, opened to the public
on June 30 and is the site of Portland’s first
Native Gathering Garden, a combined
garden and open community space for the
Native community to experience and carry
A
o u t cultural practices.
Building and opening Cully Park took
nearly 10 years of community advocacy,
fundraising and planning and is the result of
a years-long, grassroots, neighborhood-level
environmental justice movement that has
championed the priorities and needs of the
racial and ethnic minorities who Uve in the
CuUy neighborhood.
Cully Park, 25 acres in size, is on the site
of a former landfill in the CuUy
neighborhood, located in Northeast Portland
directly south of the airport
It is the second park to open in the
neighborhood, which is the most racially and
ethnically diverse neighborhood in all of
Oregon. According to census figures, more
than half of the neighborhood’s residents
are African-American, Latinx, Native
American, or immigrants or refugees from
Africa and Asia.
Cully is also the lowest-income
neighborhood in Portland, with the median
income $10,000 less than the city’s average.
That poverty is manifested in the
neighborhood’s historic lack of basic
infrastructure: Many streets remain unpaved
and more than half the neighborhood’s
streets do not have sidewalks.
The creation of Cully Park is a
“significant victory” for Cully’s residents,
given the neighborhood’s history and dearth
of infrastructure, said Tony DeFalco, the
executive director of Verde, a nonprofit that
promotes environmental justice.
“It’s a significant victory in term s of both
of what it did physicaUy, it transformed this
landfill into a park,” DeFalco said. “But it’s
also a victory in term s of showing how
communities like ours, low-income and
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Street Roots • July 6-12, 2018
The Seed Ceremony (at left)
took place at the Native
Gathering Garden during Cully
P ark’s grand opening on
Saturday, June 30. Shawna
Zierdt (top right), a member o f
the Cow Creek tribe who
oversaw the public outreach for
the Gathering Garden stands
with Judy Bluehorse, an
assistant professor o f
Indigenous Nations Studies at
Portland State University.
Children (bottom right) enjoy
the slide at the new Cully
neighborhood park.
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Culture
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people of color, can take charge of their
own destiny when it comes to making their
neighborhood better.
“This landfill was built right up to
people’s backyards in the 1980s,” he said.
“It shows you that company didn’t care. The
city didn’t care. The state didn’t care. To
come full circle and say ‘no, we’re going to
have an asset, rather than a UabiUty in our
neighborhood.’ That’s justice.”
CuUy Park is the capstone of numerous
projects that Living CuUy, a coaütion of
nonprofits that includes Verde, Hacienda
CDC and Native American Youth and
Family Center (NAYA), has undertaken to
reduce poverty in CuUy.
The philosophy of Living CuUy, which has
existed since 2010, is th a t environm ental
and sustainability projects can create equity
- not only through building bike lanes in an
underserved community, but also through
creating jobs for minority-owned businesses
and residents of the neighborhood.
Among other projects, the coaütion, in
2015, bought the notorious Sugar Shack, a
former strip club now known as Living CuUy
Plaza and the future site of 150 units of
affordable housing. And, in 2016, it saved
the Oak Leaf mobUe home park from being
sold to a developer. Living CuUy has strongly
advocated for increasing the number of bike
lanes, sidewalks, bioswales and other green
infrastructure on CuUy’s streets.
Another way the coaütion creates access
is through language and speaking. Many
events Living CuUy sponsors are bilingual,
with English-Spanish interpreters and
speakers, ensuring that the neighborhood’s
Hispanic and Latino residents can
participate equally.
Cully Park’s opening celebration June 30,
which drew hundreds of people from CuUy,
nearby neighborhoods and the entire city,
was no different - speakers either spoke
Spanish or their words were translated into
Spanish.
“Cully Park is ... about a community
claiming it’s rightful share of economic,
educational and environmental benefits,”
Alan Hipólito, Verde’s former executive
director said during the opening celebration.
To say that CuUy’s residents felt thrilled
that the park has opened is an
understatement. “I feel blessed,” DeFalco
said on the day of the park’s opening, nearly
in tears.
“We are so glad to see this one. It’s nice.
Beautiful. We are so happy,” Fakiya Omer,
30, a Cully resident and Ethiopian
immigrant, said.
Omer often takes her 2-year-old daughter
to Peninsula Park and other parks mUes
from her home. “It’s so far away,” she said.
She watched her daughter walk on the
playground as she spoke, saying her
daughter often becomes bored staying at
home all day. She and h er sister planned to
bring their kids to CuUy Park often. “We can
walk,” she said. “It’s reaUy exciting.”
Omer, who is Muslim, also said she and
her famUy might come to the park to pray
or celebrate future Ramadans, the Muslim
hoUday of fasting, at the park.
Community and the value of advocacy
were at the forefront of people’s minds and
words throughout the park’s opening
celebration, for without both, CuUy Park
may not exist
When Portland Parks & Recreation
bureau bought the land Cully Park now sits
on in 2002, the city did not fund the park’s
construction.
The Let Us Build Cully Park! coaUtion,
which included Living CuUy, CuUy
Association of Neighborhoods and a host of
other nonprofits and individuals, was formed
and ceaselessly advocated for the park’s
construction and fundraising.
Verde, which led the coaUtion, raised
more than $7 milUon. Starting in 2014, the
City of Portland began aUocating funding
toward the park’s construction, which ended
up totaling $6 miUion.
Designing and budding the park was a
community effort According to DeFalco, 70
percent of all wages paid for the park’s
construction went to businesses owned by
women and minorities, and 10 percent of
those wages were paid to people who Uve in
CuUy.
CuUy residents were involved in many
aspects of the park’s design. Students from
Harvey Scott Elementary School gave input
on the design of the community garden and
the playground.
And the Native Gathering Garden would
not exist without the advocacy and
involvement of hundreds of Native American
Portlanders.
The original proposal for the Native
Gathering Garden would have been a space
20,000 square feet in size, with
informational signs about plants and
vegetation significant to Native culture -
much like a museum exhibit or educational
programming in other outdoor spaces, said
Shawna Zierdt, a member of the Cow Creek
tribe and who oversaw the pubhc outreach
related to the Gathering Garden.
But after intensive engagement with the
Native American community, the concept
for the Gathering Garden radicaUy changed,
from 20,000 square feet to eight acres and
to space far more reflective of Native culture
and customs.
The overarching desire for the Gathering
Garden, Zierdt said, is “to access cultural
traditions, even in an urban setting.”
Architects designed two large, circular
spaces, which will be used for ceremonies,
events, workshops, bartering and even,
Zierdt hopes at some point, fire ceremonies.
Lines of small boulders transverse from
the spaces throughout the garden, in
straight Unes toward ML Hood, Mt. S t
Helens and the four directions of the
compass, which convey the importance
Native Americans give to their relationship
to place and the natural world.
For the garden itself, Portland Parks &
Recreation deviated from its standard poUcy
by aUowing Native people to pick and gather
plants from the garden.
Picking and gathering plants, Zierdt and
others said, is how Native Americans
traditionaUy gathered food and medicine.
AUowing people to do so at the Native
Gathering Garden, Zierdt said, ensures that
“(people) don’t have barriers to access the
plant when they need i t They can gather
the plant in the way they need it.”
The park allows for “individual ways,
customs, ways of being and interacting with
the natural world,” Zierdt said. “It’s reaUy
about (aUowing) people to be autonomous.”
Isabel LaCourse, a stewardship
coordinator with the parks bureau and who
is a member of the ColviUe Tribes, said the
plants now growing in the Native Gathering
Garden are both native to Oregon and
culturally significant to Native people living
in Portland.
The plants growing in the Gathering
Garden include Camas - a spring herb that
"A healing oi the land. It's also abont reconciliation. To heal the
land is to heal the people. We've heard the elected officials remind
ns of separation of (immigrant) families. One hundred fifty years
ago, the country was doing that to indigenous people right here."
JUOY BLUEHORSE
A S S IS T A N T PROFESSOR O F IN D IG E N O U S N A T IO N S STU D IES A T P O R T L A N D S T ATE U N IV E R S IT Y
grows in oak savannahs, the bulb of which is
edible - Oregon grape, alder trees, lupine,
tarweed, nodding onion - another edible
plant - hawthorn and hazelnut trees.
LaCourse said the plants in the garden
were chosen for numerous reasons,
including their historical use by Native
people as food, medicine or other cultural
purposes.
Other factors included what plants could
grow on the site - as CuUy Park was being
buUt, tons of top soU were added to the site,
to cover the former landfill and adhere to
environmental regulations. In some places,
the soU is 18 inches deep, LaCourse said,
limiting the kind of plants that will grow.
The Gathering Garden is also on a hill,
exposing plants to more wind and sun.
Over time, parts of the Gathering Garden
will be forested and other parts will be
grassier and more open, like a prairie.
When speaking about the significance of
the Gathering Garden as the first such
space in Portland, Zierdt and others were
almost at a lost for words.
“The significance is that it exists, period,”
Zierdt said. “That there’s space made here
for people whose culture is tied to this place
since time immemorial... that our
connection to plants is still relevant today.”
Portland Parks & Recreation now plans to
create gathering gardens in other parks
throughout the city. Those efforts are just
beginning, but LaCourse said the process
that led to the creation of the Native
Gathering Garden in CuUy Park has set the
course.
“The model is perseverance and
continued engagement and keeping that
long-term vision aUve,” she said.
Speaking during a seed spreading
ceremony at the garden on the day of the
park’s opening, Judy Bluehorse, an assistant
professor of Indigenous Nations Studies at
Portland State University, said the garden is
ultimately about healing.
“A healing of the land. It’s also about
reconciliation,” she said. “To heal the land is
to heal the people. We’ve heard the elected
officials remind us of separation of
(immigrant) fanulies. One hundred fifty
years ago, the country was doing that to
indigenous people right here.”
Healing was emphasized during a seed
gathering ceremony, on the day of the
park’s opening, which aUowed participants
to scatter seeds throughout the garden.
The ceremony began with a procession
from the opening ceremony, on a large field,
to the Native Gathering Garden, led by
members of the Portland AU Nations Canoe
FamUy, an intertribal group connected by
canoeing and a relationship to water.
“These seeds are healing,” Lukas Angus,
said during the ceremony. “When we plant
these seeds, the world changes.”
Angus, who is a member of the Canoe
FamUy and of Nez Perce, Tlingit and Haida
descenfi led the procession. He was
foUowed by dozens of Native American
people with 100 or more people behind
them, walking to the slow, steady beats of
drums and singing. They sang a paddle song
with lyrics written by Angus’ daughter,
which would be sung while paddling in a
canoe.
When the procession gathered on top of
the hill overlooking the rest of the
Gathering Garden, the group finished
singing. The drumming ceased. LaCourse
encouraged everyone to spread the seeds
“with good thoughts and intentions.”
Dozens of adults and chUdren took
handfuls of seeds and dirt, scattering and
tossing the seeds throughout th e garden.
It was the first time that Angus had seen
the garden. “It was good to be here,” he
said.