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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JANUARY 23, 2018
Oregon may join national popular vote compact
By PARIS ACHEN
Capital Bureau
SALEM — A bill intro-
duced in the Legislature
Monday would enlist Oregon
in the National Popular Vote
Compact contingent on voter
approval in November.
By joining the compact,
states agree to cast their Elec-
toral College votes only for
presidential candidates who
win the national popular vote.
A national popular vote
would have changed the out-
come of the 2016 general
election, which put President
Donald Trump in office.
Since 2009, state Sen-
ate President Peter Court-
ney has blocked similar pro-
posals four times in Oregon.
Last year, the Salem Demo-
crat said he would support a
bill to join the compact, only
if the decision was endorsed
by voters.
“I would be open to …
sending the question to the
ballot,” Courtney said in May.
“If you believe in the popular
vote, then let the popular vote
decide the issue.”
This year’s bill, filed by
the Senate Rules Commit-
tee, meets that condition: It
requires voters to approve or
reject a referendum to enact
the national popular vote.
Ten states — including
Washington and California —
and the District of Columbia
have already signed the com-
pact. They represent 30.7 per-
cent of electoral votes.
The agreement takes effect
when enough states have
joined to cumulatively make
up a majority of the electoral
votes.
The popular vote move-
ment took on new life after
Trump won election by a
77-vote margin in the Elec-
toral College, but lost the
popular vote to Hillary Clin-
ton by almost 3 million votes.
Rep. Bill Post, R-Keizer,
said he opposes the bill. Any
attempt to obligate votes to
the national popular vote
would likely face a challenge
in court and be overturned.
“Are you kidding? No, it is
unconstitutional,” Post said.
University of Washington groups work
to keep indigenous languages alive
Informal classes
are a labor of love
for volunteers
By KATHERINE LONG
Seattle Times
Westport Winery
New site of the Westport Winery in Seaside.
Westport Winery
gets OK for new
tasting room
Venue to open
in Seaside
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
SEASIDE — Westport
Winery moved ahead with
a new retail location in the
Salmonberry Square build-
ing Monday night.
A winery sales license
approved by City Council
allows direct sales of beer
and wine to consumers.
“We’ve had a commit-
ment to not only the qual-
ity of our products, but also
responsibility to our pub-
lic and employees as well,”
winemaker and co-owner
Dana Roberts said in
addressing the council.
“We’re incredibly excited to
be here.”
The winery, based in
Aberdeen,
Washington,
launched in 2008. Its success
led to a satellite tasting room
in Cannon Beach, which
closed earlier this month.
The Seaside venture
brought co-owners Blain
and Kim Roberts out of
retirement after the sale of
a commercial building in
Hawaii, Kim Roberts said
before the meeting. “It all
kind of coalesced in Sea-
side. We looked in Cannon
Beach but couldn’t find any-
thing affordable there. We
looked in Seaside and found
810 Broadway. It provided
us greater visibility, greater
space and parking — the
gold standard of retail.”
Seaside’s tourism indus-
try provided a draw, she
added. “We’re a year-round
business and we really want
to be involved in a year-
round community.”
The location will repli-
cate the Washington state
tasting room, featuring
fine wines, a line of oils
and vinegars and gourmet
food items. The winery will
occupy one portion of the
building. Three other shops
will be available for rent. A
parking lot on Oceanway is
also owned by the winery.
The
two-story,
10,500-square foot Salm-
onberry Square retail and
office building, transferred
this month for $868,000,
was constructed in 1965 and
renovated in 2006, accord-
ing to county records.
Two full-time employees
from the Cannon Beach tast-
ing room, Brian Hammock
and Ben Hunter, will con-
tinue at the Seaside location.
The upstairs is rented to
the nonprofit FosterClub.
Kim Roberts said she hopes
to team with other nonprofits
in the community.
“Our family’s been really
devoted to nonprofits in our
community here,” she said.
“We’ve been able to donate
$400,000 to local nonprofits
in 10 years.”
In reviewing the floor
plan, Seaside Detective Cor-
poral Bill Barnes observed
an alcove by the front door
in which there is not a clear
line of sight for servers to see
who is consuming alcoholic
beverages. He suggested
either eliminating this area
for seating or taking precau-
tions such as a security mir-
ror or video surveillance.
“It’s not a disqualifier,
but there was concern about
it,” Police Chief Dave Ham
said.
City councilors unan-
imously
endorsed
the
application.
“On behalf of the coun-
cil, I want to welcome you
to Seaside,” Mayor Jay Bar-
ber said. “Your organiza-
tion has a great reputation
and it’s going to be great to
have you on Broadway and
see the Salmonberry thriv-
ing again.”
The tasting room is sched-
uled to open with an 11 a.m.
Saturday ribbon-cutting.
Feds make over $2 million
available to reduce bycatch
Associated Press
Federal ocean manag-
ers are making more than
$2 million available to try to
help fishermen catch less of
the wrong fish.
“Bycatch” is a long-
standing issue in commer-
cial fisheries, and fishermen
have long sought solutions
to the problem of catch-
ing rare species when seek-
ing exploitable ones. The
National Oceanic and Atmo-
spheric
Administration
says it is providing about
$2.4 million for “projects
that increase collaborative
research and partnerships
for innovation” in reducing
bycatch.
The agency says it is
prioritizing projects such
as gear modifications,
avoidance programs and
improved fishing practices.
NOAA also says it wants to
learn more about possible
reduction of mortality of fish
that are released.
The agency is looking for
pre-proposals by Jan. 31 and
full proposals by March 30.
SEATTLE — When Alyssa
Johnston and members of her
tribe speak to one another
in Quinault, they are often
moved to tears by the knowl-
edge that, at the turn of the
century, the language was all
but dead.
The last person who spoke
fluent Quinault passed away
in 1996. By using recordings
of those who spoke the lan-
guage in the 1960s, a hand-
ful of people in the Olympic
Peninsula tribe are slowly and
painstakingly piecing it back
together — and teaching it to
a new generation.
Last year, Johnston was the
first person in recent mem-
ory to earn a world-language
credit at the University of
Washington by showing she
had achieved “intermediate
low-level proficiency” in that
language.
“It’s everything to me,”
Johnston said of the impor-
tance of reviving her tribe’s
native tongue. “Language is
culture,” she said, and the tribe
“right now is literally making
history” by bringing it back.
That history is also being
written on the UW’s Seattle
campus.
Every two weeks, two sep-
arate groups gather around
a table in one building or
another to practice one of two
indigenous languages: South-
ern Lushootseed, the common
tongue of the Native American
tribes that lived in this region,
and Hawaiian, the native lan-
guage of the indigenous peo-
ple of Hawaii.
Chris Teuton, chair of
American Indian Studies at
the UW, hopes students even-
tually will be able to learn
both those languages in for-
credit courses, joining the 55
other languages already taught
by the university.
In the meantime, the infor-
mal classes are a labor of love
for the volunteers who teach
them. Nancy Jo Bob, a mem-
ber of the Lummi Nation, and
Tami Kay Hohn, of the Puy-
allup Tribe, both drive up
from Auburn every month
to offer several hours of lan-
guage instruction, using a sys-
tem they devised that helps
students think and speak in
complete sentences from the
outset.
Lushootseed was revived
by Upper Skagit author,
teacher and linguist Vi Hil-
bert, who died in 2008 at
the age of 90. Hilbert taught
Lushootseed for credit at the
UW until her retirement in
Alan Berner/The Seattle Times
Joe Concannon, left, Holly Shelton, Ashley Mocorro Powell, and Ken Workman practice
Lushootseed, the common tongue of the Native American tribes that lived in the region,
at the Burke Museum in Seattle.
1988, and it has been taught
intermittently at the university
since then, along with Navajo
and Yakama.
Lushootseed’s sentence
structure is different from
English, and includes sounds
that don’t exist in English.
“It’s like my tongue is
tap-dancing,” one speaker
marveled during a recent lan-
guage table session.
Sentences start with a verb,
rather than a subject, and the
form the verb takes, gives
information about the man-
ner and time of action, said
UW English Professor Colette
Moore, who is taking part in
the language table.
“By the time a speaker gets
to the subject in a Lushoot-
seed sentence,” she said, “he
or she has already given a lot
of other information.”
The language’s history in
the Puget Sound area dates
back thousands of years.
English, in contrast, has been
spoken around here for fewer
than 250.
“Sometimes it can be
a perspective shift for stu-
dents to see English as an
immigrant language,” Moore
added, “but, of course, it is.”
Forced English
America’s past is threaded
with a long, ugly history
of white settlers separating
Native Americans from their
languages and cultures. In the
1900s, many Native American
children were sent to board-
ing schools, where they were
forced to speak only English.
Johnston, of the Quinault
tribe, says her grandfather
spoke the language, and her
mother asked him to teach it
to her. But he refused — the
older generation feared their
children wouldn’t be suc-
cessful if they spoke a Native
American language, she said.
“By revitalizing lan-
guages, that’s part of the heal-
ing process,” said Teuton,
who is Cherokee and began
learning that language at the
University of North Carolina,
where he taught before he
came to the UW. “We are try-
ing to recover from that colo-
nial history.”
Native American knowl-
edge, he said, “is really
grounded in our language —
the grounding of stories, our
storytelling traditions, our
words for the natural world,
words that describe our social
relations.”
Language is also a vital
cultural connection for many
Native Hawaiians and Pacific
Islanders, said Manuhuia Bar-
cham, a UW lecturer who
helped organize the Hawai-
ian language table. Bar-
cham hopes to also start one
for Samoan and Chamorro,
which is spoken in Guam and
the Northern Mariana Islands.
Both Pacific Islander and
Native American populations
have low levels of enrollment
in higher education, and part
of the goal of teaching lan-
guages is to make the UW “a
more open and friendly space
for our youth and our commu-
nity,” he said.
Among the state’s other
higher-education institutions,
Lushootseed has been taught
at Pacific Lutheran Univer-
sity and at the UW Tacoma,
as part of a summer insti-
tute. Wenatchee Valley Col-
lege in Omak teaches Salish;
the Northwest Indian College
in Bellingham teaches Native
American languages.
Credit requirement
Johnston learned Quinault
from Cosette Terry-itewaste,
a linguist who is her tribe’s
most fluent speaker, and who
was able to administer the test
that allowed Johnston to get
UW credit for knowing that
language.
The UW requires enter-
ing students to have com-
pleted two years of a foreign
language in high school, and
to take a third quarter while
in college — or to demon-
strate that they have acquired
“intermediate low-level pro-
ficiency” in a language other
than English.
The university had to cre-
ate a new way to test profi-
ciency in languages that are
not commonly taught.
“This provides an aca-
demic incentive and estab-
lishes it as an equal language,
a world language,” said Rus-
sell Hugo, a linguist in the
UW’s language learning cen-
ter. “Hopefully more students
can do this, so we can build
stronger ties of support and
recognition” for local indige-
nous languages.
Because she lives on the
Olympic Peninsula and works
full time with two young
children at home, Johnston
earned her undergraduate
degree from the UW mostly
online. She’s certified as a
language apprentice, and she
will be helping the Quinault
tribe launch family language
classes in January.
While some tribal mem-
bers grew up knowing the
Quinault words for colors and
other nouns, these language
classes aim to teach them how
to have simple conversations.
“It’s amazing how it’s been
almost lost,” Johnston said. “I
can feel it getting back to nor-
mal, and that’s a really sacred
thing.”
T he D aily a sTorian ’ s
c utest B aBy c ontest
WANTED
Alder and Maple Saw Logs & Standing Timber
Northwest Hardwoods • Longview, WA
Contact: John Anderson • 360-269-2500
If your baby was born
January 1st &
December 31st , 2017 ,
between
EMERALD HEIGHTS
APARTMENTS
503-325-8221
2 & 3 BEDROOM
APARTMENTS
EQUAL HOUSING
OPPORTUNITY
All Rents
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Include:
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you can submit your
newborn’s picture either
via email at:
classifieds @ dailyastorian . com
or drop by one of our offices in Astoria or
Seaside and we can scan in the photo for you.
Deadline to enter is
Thursday, January 25 th at 5 pm
Entries will be printed in The Daily Astorian
on January 31st.
*Human babies only please!*