Native Portland Series, 5: Lillian Pitt Convention Center Installation and the Tilikum Crossing

Find all Native Tour stops on the tour map.

Convention Center Art

One of the blessings of my Native Portland tour has been learning something about celebrated Northwest Native artists.  Among them is Lillian Pitt, a Wasco elder, whose works are featured at multiple locations on the Native Portland tour.  Pitt's website notes that her ancestors have lived in and near the Columbia River gorge for some 10,000 years.  She works in clay, bronze, glass, and paper, and sees her work as directly relating to her ancestors, people, the environment, and animals. This exhibition of bronze panels at the Oregon Convention Center is a stunning series of images set to poetry by Native poet, writer and artist Gail Tremblay, sculpted by Pitt, and fabricated by Ken MacIintosh. You can spend many hours studying them--they are amazing.

Photo, Lillian Pitt.

We will see more art from Pitt on the Native Portland tour.

Tilikum Crossing

Not far from the Convention Center is a new Tri-Met pedestrian/light-rail bridge (that is, no cars) that will cross the Willamette River, opening in Summer of 2014.  After the gathering of names from the public, the name "Tilikum" was chosen as a finalist, a Chinook word for "people." At this point, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, home to some of the Chinook bands and a center of efforts to restore tribal status to the Chinook, stepped in to consult with Tri-Met to share their feelings about the name and spelling: Tilikum was chosen, and the tribes helped inaugurate the naming ceremony with drumming and prayer.  When many tribes were consolidated at Grand Ronde, they did not all share the same language, but shared a common trading language called "Chinook Wa-wa," which is the focal point of efforts to keep the language alive at Grand Ronde.  The name thus honors other local tribes who were not Native Chinook speakers, who still might have used "Tilikum" in their shared jargon.  We can hope that at its opening, we will have an opportunity to learn more about the people whose language contributed the name Tilikum Crossing.