Tribal Welcome

Sunday, 12 November | 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM PT | Portland Ballroom 253-254, 257-258

A traditional welcome and opening ceremony to the CERF Conference by Davis Washines/Yellowash, a member of the Yakima Nation.

The Portland Metro area rests on many traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, other bands of Chinook, Grand Ronde, Siletz, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia and Willamette rivers. We want to recognize that Portland today is a community of many diverse Native peoples of the Americas who continue to live and work here. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all the Indigenous communities for the bonds they have to this land-past, present, and future. We are grateful for their knowledge, wisdom, and ongoing, vibrant presence in this place we all call home.

We want to recognize that Portland today is a community of many diverse Native peoples of the Americas who continue to live and work here. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all the Indigenous communities for the bonds they have to this land-past, present, and future. We are grateful for their knowledge, wisdom, and ongoing, vibrant presence in this place we all call home.

We acknowledge the systemic policies of genocide, relocation, assimilation, and termination area policies that still negatively impact many Indigenous/Native American families to this day. As settlers and guests on these lands, we respect the work of Indigenous leaders and families and pledge to make ongoing efforts to recognize their knowledge, creativity, and resilience in their ancestral homelands.

But let us be clear and also state that land acknowledgements are not enough. There is nothing we can ever do to make up for the fact that the land we currently occupy is not our own. CERF must continue to work with Tribal and Indigenous groups and center their ways of knowing. As a Federation, we are committed to examining our own colonial structures, we are committed to providing access to all historically excluded groups in the coastal and estuarine sciences, especially for those of us who do work in these physical spaces and ecosystems. We commit to engaging in long term partnership with the Tribal communities and Indigenous groups. This statement and acknowledgement is a reminder to us, not the Tribes and Indigenous groups, that we all have a responsibility and moral imperative to do better every year at engaging and centering the Peoples whose land we occupy.

About the Speaker

Davis Washines/Yellowash

Davis Washines/Yellowash, member of the Yakama Nation, retired from law enforcement in 2014 after 30+ years of service, including three terms as Chief of Police for the Yakama Nation(2)and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission(1). He has served on the Executive Board of the Yakama Tribal Council and on Yakama General Council as Executive Chairman. As a youth educator, he directed the Yakama Nation Youth Summer Camp for several years and was a paraprofessional and middle school guidance counselor for the Wapato School District , as well as a Yakama language instructor at the high school.His current position is a Government Relations Liaison in the Yakama Nation DNR Fisheries Resource Program's Superfund Section. He is on the Board of Trustees for Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences and on the Native American Advisory Board as Vice-Chairman for the Burke Museum at the University of WA. Yellowash is called upon in the tribal communities of the region to conduct traditional ceremonies because of his knowledge of his native language, culture and oral traditional history of native people, land and natural resources. He also carries the Oglala Lakota name of "Yello-Wash-Tay" bestowed by a Lakota elder at Crazy Horse School, Pine Ridge, SD, in 1995 at a traditional gathering.