Children of the Setting Sun shares Indigenous stories with an eye to the future - The Seattle Times

Children of the Setting Sun shares Indigenous stories with an eye to the future | The Seattle Times

NISQUALLY — Chinook Middle School students ran their hands along a horse’s speckled body as Keoni Kalama described how his people, the Nisqually, became one of the few tribes with horses west of the Cascade crest.

As the students stood rapt, the horse’s eyes darted to a looming sound boom hanging overhead.

On the other end of the boom was Jordan Riber, productions director for Children of the Setting Sun, an Indigenous-led and -centered nonprofit based in Bellingham. The crew was there to capture the Nisqually’s relationship with the school district as part of a documentary tracing the history of Billy Frank Jr., the legendary Nisqually treaty rights and environmental advocate, through the design and creation of his statue — for eventual display in the nation’s Capitol.

More than 200 of the students had descended on Nisqually in early April to learn more about the people whose traditional territory their school occupies. They moved through pastures and beading and carving rooms, learning about the history of the Nisqually people and how they preserve their culture and govern their territory.

Frank left many who remember him with the instruction: “Tell your story.” It was this teaching that reinforced the work of Jerad Koepp, who is Wukchumni and a 2022 Washington state Teacher of the Year, to immerse students in Indigenous culture and policy rather than rely on textbooks.

And it’s why he invited the crew from Children of the Setting Sun.

Sharing oral histories, gatherings and events through film, podcasts, live events — and soon a digital library — Children of the Setting Sun defies the traditional categories of a “media” group. The cadre of Coast Salish youth, Indigenous artists and creators from across the region and beyond are guided in the projects they pursue by a sounding board of local elders and others.

They’re documenting the return of salmon to people and rivers once impounded by dams built to serve settlers’ economies. They’re sitting and sharing stories from traditional ecological knowledge-keepers in a podcast that examines our relationship with plants. They’re offering lessons of reciprocity in a world yearning for solutions to a changing climate.

Their goal? To educate the greater community, empower the next generation of Indigenous storytellers and offer knowledge and expertise for today’s most-pressing problems.

Now, with the help of a $2 million donation from MacKenzie Scott secured this year, they’re hoping to share their stories more widely.

“If you’re going to learn about community, you need to be in community,” Koepp said. “For a good couple of centuries, Native people have been studied and researched and talked about and rarely if ever taught with.”

Children of the Setting Sun’s presence at Chinook Middle School’s field trip was all of the work coming together.

“We’re bringing hundreds of students out here today so that as Native people, we can reclaim our stories and have a rare opportunity to tell our own stories,” Koepp said. “And so when you have Native storytellers and Native media groups documenting that, they can maintain that authenticity, that lens, that sensitivity in ways that a non-Native lens is likely to miss.”

Create, share, educate

Inside Children of the Setting Sun’s Bellingham office last month, some were editing video of the Elwha River restoration in dim, quiet rooms; others were storyboarding or planning events over a meal of fish and chips; and some were quietly clicking away at the design of a new online library.

Fish leapt from the rippling water in a brief video clip on Luke Bonilla’s screen.

“It’s about what’s happened on the Elwha River since the dams were removed,” Bonilla said as he slid footage into place with his editing software. “It’s a story about the ecosystem, the natural world, centered around the river’s healing as well as the Native people: the Klallam people who live on the river, and their cultural resurgence as well.”

The film he’s editing follows natural resource specialist and Lower Elwha Klallam tribal member Vanessa Castle, first counting fish in her field work and later participating in her tribe’s first salmon harvest since the dams fell.

Downstairs, Debora Riber rewatched a brief clip of Whe-Che-Litsa, also known as Marilyn Scott, describing how traditional names are given. Riber is part of a team building the digital library in collaboration with the community that they hope will help educators in local school districts implement the Since Time Immemorial curriculum, and serve as a resource for researchers and others in the community.

The Legislature in 2015 passed Senate Bill 5433 to require the Since Time Immemorial tribal sovereignty curriculum— endorsed by all 29 federally recognized tribes — or other curriculum developed by tribes be taught in all schools. In 2024, the Legislature passed a bill to name the curriculum in honor of longtime Sen. John McCoy, lulilaš.

Everyone at Children of the Setting Sun has a “double major” in the Western model and the model for knowledge-sharing they’re building, said Sky Scholfield, executive director of the education arm of Children of the Setting Sun who is Wintu/Pit River.

“Fundamentally we do three things here: We create, share and educate,” said Darrell Hillaire, a former Lummi Nation chair and founder and CEO of Children of the Setting Sun.

Nearly a century ago, his great-grandfather, Frank Hillaire, formed a Lummi dance group called Children of the Setting Sun. In an era when religious and other traditional cultural practices were outlawed, there he was in broad daylight, singing song, sharing dance with the public.

Nearly 10 years ago, Darrell Hillaire decided to do a stage production of the treaty signing called “What About Those Promises.”“Of course I’m not anything you know,” he chuckled. “I just know how to convince people to do things. All of a sudden I had a top-notch director from the theater guild.”

Hillaire hired a mix of professional actors, and Lummi Nation members who had never acted.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we just have them speak from the heart?’ ” he said. “When they spoke from the heart about it, boom, it all just came together.”

He knew he had to sell 250 tickets to break even, but the show sold out.

The thirst for knowledge and relationships from the broader community helped Children of the Setting Sun take off.

Indigenous wisdom for an uncertain future

If you are harvesting wild rose, only take a few petals so the pollinators can still find them. When harvesting nettle, only take the top so they can have new growth in the next season. For licorice fern root, only harvest one for every 10 so there are nine more able to grow.

Young and Indigenous, a podcast produced by Children of the Setting Sun, launched the new series “PLANTS” earlier this month. The team’s vision was to help elevate Native science and ecological knowledge to be held in the same respect as Western science and shift conservation philosophies to center reciprocity and relationships with plants and the greater natural world.

“And so practice reciprocity, give back to the land for what you can take,” Anna Cook, a Swinomish tribal member, said in an interview with Free Borsey, Tsuxvilum, of Lummi Nation on the podcast. “Some people leave a gift, a song, a prayer or an act of kindness as thanks for the gifts they have received. And so for me, one gift that I often like to give is just time and space.”

Borsey had for a long time envisioned a special podcast on plants, and was recently awarded the funding to do it.

Through different conversations, he realized the podcast was more about people’s relationship with plants, not just harvesting and using the plants for food or medicinal purposes.

As the world warms to levels that exceed internationally pledged limits, policymakers and international leaders are increasingly looking to Indigenous knowledge for solutions.

“That’s why we’re doing everything that we’re doing,” said Joannah Thomas, Children of the Setting Sun’s community outreach director.

The team is developing a catalog of video interview excerpts, podcast audio, images and written words that will launch as a digital library in the summer. It builds from a wealth of knowledge shared in gatherings, conversations, film and audio recordings.

Children of the Setting Sun’s film “Our Sacred Obligation” captivated the attention of Indigenous leaders and environmental organizations across the Pacific Northwest last year. The story recounts the history of the Yurok Tribe’s struggle against the colonization of the Klamath River, which has sustained them for thousands of years. And now, thanks to the leadership of the Yurok and Karuk people, the Klamath dams are coming down.

“We’re in this massive climate crisis. And the idea that you can just extract, extract and pollute and pollute and consume and consume without consequence is over,” Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok attorney and founder of an Indigenous conservation group called Ridges to Riffles, said in “Our Sacred Obligation.” “And I think the rest of the world is seeing that, and they’re now looking for the Salmon People to say: What were the sort of grounding principles about how you interacted in balance with the natural world, and how can we apply those to get better environmental outcomes, and to pull us out of this climate crisis?”

“That’s my hope,” she said. “And that’s where I think we’re going in the future. And the only thing is … can we act fast enough?”