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Thorough, conscientious research
Interviews with community leaders and archival inquiries informed reporting on the Snoqualmie Tribe’s triumphant land reclamation.
Struggles to preserve ancestral lands are unfortunately routine, and it’s not often that a tribe gets a win. That’s why, when the Snoqualmie Tribe announced that they’d purchased a parcel of land that included their most sacred site, Snoqualmie Falls, it was huge.
But these battles aren’t won overnight. The purchase came after decades of work. To learn about the history of Snoqualmie Falls and its surrounding area, I dug through the Seattle Public Library’s special collections for archived photos and old clips. In them, you can see the falls as they once were, before the waves of tourism and renovation: overflowing and largely left alone. You can see a treeline on either side of the falls in a photo from the early 1900s, the water cascading down, before it was partially torn down to build a resort.
“Our work isn’t done,” Lois Sweet Dorman, a Snoqualmie tribal elder, told me at the announcement. “But today we’re celebrating. We’re here and we’re not going away.”
Link to original article:
https://crosscut.com/2019/11/after-reclaiming-its-sacred-falls-snoqualmie-tribe-looks-toward-future
Representing the full diversity of the Pacific Northwest
The Crosscut documentary The Rising is the result of a year of gaining the trust of a community whose stories are often mishandled or remain untold.
On this podcast, Science & Environment producer Sarah Hoffman and editor Ted Alvarez talk about how they made The Rising, a new Crosscut documentary that chronicles one tribe’s efforts to escape the rising sea in a changing climate on the Olympic Peninsula.
Ted Alvarez: After a year of reporting, your first documentary, The Rising, is out in the world. How does it feel?
Sarah Hoffman: After spending so much time out there, it feels amazing to share it with everyone in the Quinault Indian Nation who was part of the story. For Washington and the Northwest as a whole, it was great to introduce them to a community that maybe they’ve driven by, or were vaguely aware of, without realizing what was at stake.
TA: What was the hardest part of the story to get?
SH: The hardest part was having patience, because there were certain spaces and places, like ceremonies, that weren’t for us. We wanted to earn permission and access to those sacred spaces where appropriate, so it took a long time.
Link to original articles:
Local public policies and holding elected officials accountable
Homelessness is often discussed in the abstract, but reporter David Kroman has been able to highlight the concrete human impact of our regions policies and economic changes in his “On the Margins” series.
It wasn’t supposed to be a series. I wanted to write one story about how Seattle’s homeless population was aging and becoming less healthy.
The idea was borne out of a conversation in City Hall about how the Seattle Fire Department should respond to “low-acuity” calls — 911 calls that maybe didn’t need to be 911 calls. Many of these fire department responses were going to the city’s largest shelters, and the mayor and city council wanted to find an alternative to sending a whole crew to answer a call.
But what I heard was larger than just the burden on 911. What I heard was that shelters were overwhelmed, increasingly tasked with looking after people who could not or should not be looking after themselves.
What this represented was a weakened safety net not set up to deal with what were really end-of-life issues. As the cost of living across the county has skyrocketed in recent years, we’ve seen a widening of the margins of who’s vulnerable to losing their housing.
Link to series page:
Highlighting the work of creators in our community
Through her connections in Seattle's art community, Arts & Culture editor Brangien Davis was able to report on the early stages of an exciting project from an emerging filmmaker.
During the shoot for The Paper Tigers, local director Bao Tran’s forthcoming kung fu comedy, the haze machine set off alarms at the community center in Shoreline, where a critical fight scene was about to unfold. “I’m surprised Bao didn’t write that into the script,” joked Doug Palmer, a lifelong Seattleite and student of Bruce Lee. Palmer, who helped fund the film, was hanging around the set, thrilled to watch the work in progress. “I think Bruce really would’ve liked this,” he said.
The Paper Tigers has a ways to go — months of post-production, submissions to film festivals, trying to get picked up for distribution. And who knows where the cast and crew will be 40 years from now. But that day on set, possibility and promise hung in the air along with the manufactured haze.
Link to original article:
Thorough, conscientious research
Interviews with community leaders and archival inquiries informed reporting on the Snoqualmie Tribe’s triumphant land reclamation.
Struggles to preserve ancestral lands are unfortunately routine, and it’s not often that a tribe gets a win. That’s why, when the Snoqualmie Tribe announced that they’d purchased a parcel of land that included their most sacred site, Snoqualmie Falls, it was huge.
But these battles aren’t won overnight. The purchase came after decades of work. To learn about the history of Snoqualmie Falls and its surrounding area, I dug through the Seattle Public Library’s special collections for archived photos and old clips. In them, you can see the falls as they once were, before the waves of tourism and renovation: overflowing and largely left alone. You can see a treeline on either side of the falls in a photo from the early 1900s, the water cascading down, before it was partially torn down to build a resort.
“Our work isn’t done,” Lois Sweet Dorman, a Snoqualmie tribal elder, told me at the announcement. “But today we’re celebrating. We’re here and we’re not going away.”
Link to original article:
https://crosscut.com/2019/11/after-reclaiming-its-sacred-falls-snoqualmie-tribe-looks-toward-future
Representing the full diversity of the Pacific Northwest
The Crosscut documentary The Rising is the result of a year of gaining the trust of a community whose stories are often mishandled or remain untold.
On this podcast, Science & Environment producer Sarah Hoffman and editor Ted Alvarez talk about how they made The Rising, a new Crosscut documentary that chronicles one tribe’s efforts to escape the rising sea in a changing climate on the Olympic Peninsula.
Ted Alvarez: After a year of reporting, your first documentary, The Rising, is out in the world. How does it feel?
Sarah Hoffman: After spending so much time out there, it feels amazing to share it with everyone in the Quinault Indian Nation who was part of the story. For Washington and the Northwest as a whole, it was great to introduce them to a community that maybe they’ve driven by, or were vaguely aware of, without realizing what was at stake.
TA: What was the hardest part of the story to get?
SH: The hardest part was having patience, because there were certain spaces and places, like ceremonies, that weren’t for us. We wanted to earn permission and access to those sacred spaces where appropriate, so it took a long time.
Link to original articles:
Local public policies and holding elected officials accountable
Homelessness is often discussed in the abstract, but reporter David Kroman has been able to highlight the concrete human impact of our regions policies and economic changes in his “On the Margins” series.
It wasn’t supposed to be a series. I wanted to write one story about how Seattle’s homeless population was aging and becoming less healthy.
The idea was borne out of a conversation in City Hall about how the Seattle Fire Department should respond to “low-acuity” calls — 911 calls that maybe didn’t need to be 911 calls. Many of these fire department responses were going to the city’s largest shelters, and the mayor and city council wanted to find an alternative to sending a whole crew to answer a call.
But what I heard was larger than just the burden on 911. What I heard was that shelters were overwhelmed, increasingly tasked with looking after people who could not or should not be looking after themselves.
What this represented was a weakened safety net not set up to deal with what were really end-of-life issues. As the cost of living across the county has skyrocketed in recent years, we’ve seen a widening of the margins of who’s vulnerable to losing their housing.
Link to series page:
Highlighting the work of creators in our community
Through her connections in Seattle's art community, Arts & Culture editor Brangien Davis was able to report on the early stages of an exciting project from an emerging filmmaker.
During the shoot for The Paper Tigers, local director Bao Tran’s forthcoming kung fu comedy, the haze machine set off alarms at the community center in Shoreline, where a critical fight scene was about to unfold. “I’m surprised Bao didn’t write that into the script,” joked Doug Palmer, a lifelong Seattleite and student of Bruce Lee. Palmer, who helped fund the film, was hanging around the set, thrilled to watch the work in progress. “I think Bruce really would’ve liked this,” he said.
The Paper Tigers has a ways to go — months of post-production, submissions to film festivals, trying to get picked up for distribution. And who knows where the cast and crew will be 40 years from now. But that day on set, possibility and promise hung in the air along with the manufactured haze.
Link to original article:
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