"All My Relations" is a virtual spin-off program for Native youth and families

SOU retreat for Native American youth spins off multigenerational program

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Southern Oregon University’s Konaway Nika Tillicum wasn’t what anyone expected last summer, when the seven-day academic and cultural enrichment residential camp for Native American Youth was shifted to a virtual version of itself because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then the totally unexpected happened: the Oregon Community Foundation, a longtime supporter of the Konaway program, reached out to its organizers at SOU to find out if there were any plans to continue supporting pre-college Native youth in Oregon at the conclusion of the one-week program. Serious conversations began, the foundation offered a new $50,000 grant and a virtual offshoot program for Konaway students and their family members was born.

“All My Relations” – the English translation of the Chinook Trade Jargon phrase, “Konaway Nika Tillicum” – was launched on Oct. 28 with seven students and has rapidly grown to include more than 33 students and their families in six states. There are currently 19 students from seven Oregon counties in the program. Another eight participants live along the Oregon border in Washington or California and have tribal connections to the region. The program runs through fall, winter and spring terms, offering biweekly, virtual longhouse gatherings to provide academic encouragement and support, and discuss everything from beading moccasin ornaments to traditional story-telling to maintaining cultural identity during a pandemic.

“It was clear that students and families were hungry for this kind of connection and assistance, and when we were approached by OCF it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get something going,” said Katherine Gosnell, assistant director of youth programs at SOU.

“OCF is keenly aware of the disproportionate impacts of COVID on Native communities and were seeking ways to address the situation,” said Rachel Jones, SOU’s director of outreach and engagement. “We shared with OCF the wish list of ideas that the Konaway team had created during the virtual Konaway, for ways that we could continue working with the students.”

Jones and her staff put together an outline and projected cost for the program, and the foundation backed the proposal with a quick-turnaround grant.

“It was a great testament to OCF’s exceptional role across the state during this challenging year – they were extremely responsive, had a quick turnaround and eliminated lengthy application processes,” Jones said.

All My Relations was originally seen as a one-time project, but has now transitioned into a pilot for what organizers hope will be an ongoing program to support and enhance the original Konaway residential offerings. Organizers at SOU are seeking additional funding through grants and donations from foundations, organizations and individuals to support a second year of All My Relations beginning in fall 2021.

“Not only are we serving Native American Youth but we are serving their families, their friends, and their communities as well,” said Tamara Ellington, an SOU adjunct instructor and residential coordinator for the Konaway program.

“We have students that join with their parents, their foster parents, their closest trusting neighbors with good internet connectivity, their cousins, their friends, and their elders,” she said. “This is truly a multigenerational program modeled and influenced by the original Konaway Nika Tillicum Native American Youth Academy.”

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Shannon Luders-Manuel has found her voice as a mixed-race writer

Finding her voice: Addressing race with creativity and compassion

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Shannon Luders-Manuel (2007 alumna) wasn’t sure what a thesis statement was when she came to SOU as an English major. She now makes her living as a writer, essayist and critical mixed-race scholar who has been published in a number of academic, news and creative publications.

Luders-Manuel garnered national attention in 2017, when the New York Times published her essay, “My Grandmother’s Story is Ending as Mine Begins.” It is true that the piece in the Times increased her audience base, but it is equally true that Luders-Manuel’s other works are where she earned her writing chops. 

Luders-Manuel has found herself at the epicenter of some of the nation’s most polarizing race issues as a public speaker and author of “Being Biracial: Where Our Secret Worlds Collide: Educators’ Guide.”

“When I talk about my family culture, I’m mixed,” she wrote on For Harriet, an online community for women of African ancestry. “When I talk about racism, I’m black. When Trayvon Martin was shot for wearing a hoodie, I was black. When Eric Garner was choked to death for selling cigarettes on the street, I was black. When Sandra Bland was arrested for failing to turn on her blinker, I was black. When churchgoers were shot for being black, I was black.”

Luders-Manuel found her voice while sharing her experience as a mixed-race woman at SOU and during graduate school at the University of Massachusetts. She has been researching and writing the biracial experience for more than 10 years. The essay posted on For Harriet was shared over 50,000 times on Facebook when it was published in 2015.

Luders-Manuel originally chose SOU because it was an easy drive to visit family in California, but she realized shortly after arriving in Ashland that she had found her place.

“There was such a welcoming community,” she said. “I lived in Baker dorm, and it had a real family feel. Also, I had a work-study job at the library, and we really had a tight-knit community of students working there. Some of us still stay in touch.”

Though she has been away from SOU for 13 years, she still draws on the lessons she learned here. Luders-Manuel recalls one of her favorite instructors, Alma Rosa Alvarez.

“Professor Alvarez used to make us write short-response papers,” Luders-Manuel said. “After we turned them in, she would offer feedback and keep giving them back for rewrites until they were correct. She’d do this as many times as needed.

“If she did like it, she would put a tiny check mark at the top of the paper. I remember when I got the checkmark, I would be so excited. It was one of the most effective ways of learning to write well. She wouldn’t just tell you about your errors, she’d make you work to change them.”

Alvarez, says Luders-Manuel, was also the first teacher of color that she ever had. “It was important to me to see a woman of color in that position,” she said. “Even though we are different ethnicities, I could see myself in her. She was also my biggest advocate. Professor Alvarez was the one who encouraged me to go to graduate school, and I’m so glad I did that. I am so grateful to her.”

Luders-Manuel, who earned a master’s degree from UMass, said she hadn’t always seen college in her future. “It wasn’t something my family encouraged at first, and it took me a long time to take the leap,” she said. 

She credits SOU for giving her the foundation to write in a variety of genres, including business, news, academic and marketing.

“I am able to write in many different genres because I had so many different classes and opportunities while I was at SOU,” Luders-Manuel said. “That has helped me more than anything.”

This story was repurposed from the fall 2017 issue of SOU’s alumni magazine, The Raider

SOU's Amber Reed publishes book on apartheid

SOU anthropologist’s book: Black South Africans wary of apartheid reforms

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(Ashland, Ore.) — Post-apartheid reforms in South Africa have failed the country’s rural Black citizens and led to a longing for some aspects of life under the system that once oppressed them, according to a newly published book by Southern Oregon University anthropologist Amber Reed.

“Nostalgia After Apartheid” examines the reluctance of teachers and students in the Eastern Cape province to embrace South African democracy, which they see as restricting their cultural practices. Democracy has imposed a brand of freedom whose liberal standards clash with the customs and traditions favored in the former rural homelands.

“When I started research in this region, I was interested in the role non-governmental organizations were playing in youth political activism,” said Reed, who has done fieldwork in the country off-and-on over the past 11 years.

“The project took on a life of its own, however, as people kept steering our conversations away from the future of politics and back to nostalgic renderings of the past,” she said. “Why would Black South Africans wax nostalgic for life during one of history’s most racist and repressive regimes?”

Reed’s book answers that question by showing that many Black South Africans embrace conservative ideologies and are opposed to reforms that don’t align with their beliefs, such as the right to abortions and a ban on corporal punishment. The country’s Department of Education requires the teaching of ideals that include civic responsibility and liberal democracy, but both teachers and students often see it as the imposition of “white” values.

“’Freedom, it turned out, did not feel so free; instead, it rested on Western ideas of personhood and subjectivity that felt confining, imposing and alien,” Reed writes in the preface to her book.

“Nostalgia After Apartheid” was published last month by University of Notre Dame Press as part of the Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development. It is available in hardcover or as an eBook.

The book has been praised by other authors and researchers of South Africa and apartheid.

“Amber Reed compellingly reveals how the transition from apartheid to liberal democracy has failed the rural youth who now regard the Mandela miracle of 1994 as a betrayal and have developed a bizarre sense of nostalgia for life under apartheid,” said Leslie J. Bank, co-editor of the book, “Migrant Labour Under Apartheid.”

Reed has been a professor of anthropology at SOU since 2017, and has taught a variety of anthropology and African studies courses. She received her bachelor’s degree from New York’s Barnard College, and her master’s degree and doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles.

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SOU's Chacon studies representations of violence in Latin culture

SOU’s Enrique Chacón researches representations of violence in Mexican music

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SOU Assistant Professor Enrique Chacón enjoys teaching Spanish language classes, but his focus is on teaching how violence is represented in Latin culture – and how those representations have changed.

“I’m teaching this course on the representations of violence in Latin America and I think those kinds of topics are quite interesting, because they’re directly related to my research topics,” Chacón said. “What I do through these classes is I present some examples and some theory to my students, so we can approach art, literature, film, etc., and understand not the violence itself better, but how and why it’s represented as it is.”

His research coalesced into “La Estética Perversa del Movimiento Alterado, Violencia y Música Transnacional,” which roughly translates to “The Perverse Aesthetics of the Altered Movement, Violence and Transnational Music.” The paper combines Chacón’s interest in music and representations of violence by detailing how a specific genre of Latin music has shifted over time.

“There is a traditional music in northern Mexico that is very popular, and there is a tradition in the lyrics that comes from the (1910 Mexican) Revolution where these songs praise the heroes,” he said.

“There was a shift 30 years ago where they started talking about drug traffickers – narcos. So that shift from a hero to a narco, and then there was another shift 10-15 years ago that is not only praising narcos but are sung in first-person. I study the aesthetic implications of that shift.”

Chacón talked about his research at last spring’s César E. Chávez Leadership Conference, a gathering of regional Latinx high school students and student leaders that is hosted by SOU. He presented his research both to help educate SOU-hopefuls and to get more information on the topic from a younger generation.

“I played a song, and most of (the students) knew the song,” he said. “So I asked these students, ‘what is this? What is this kind of music?’ And one of them said right away, ‘this is the music from Mexico. That’s our music.’

“For me, that was very surprising because for my generation what TV and ideology and all those things sold as the music from Mexico were mariachi bands. But now young people perceive this to be the music of Mexico.”

Students at the conference participate in workshops focusing on leadership, cultural arts and college preparation. Chacón values the conference’s intent, hoping to see more Latin American students succeed in higher education.

“It’s very important that (colleges and universities) reach people from (minority populations) in general,” Chacón said. “It’s proven that the output of studying higher education is that you become a better citizen. I think it’s a way of transforming yourself and impacting the world in a different way.

“Just 2 percent of professors in the whole country are Hispanic. I think we need to change that.”

Chacón has personal experience with crossing cultures and succeeding in American academia. A first-generation immigrant, he earned a master’s degree in Mexican literature from the Autonomous University of Puebla before studying at the University of Pittsburgh for his doctorate in Hispanic languages and literature. Chacón’s studies across the continent give him particular insight into the differences between Mexican and American colleges.

“(In Mexico) you choose what to study from the very beginning, there was no general education or possibility for you to explore other topics,” he said.

“You had to make the decision of what you’re going to be specializing in for the rest of your life when you’re in high school … and that is good and bad. It’s good to have more information about one topic, but on the other hand it’s not that good because you don’t know anything about any other topics.”

Chacón’s initial pursuit of journalism led him away from what he wanted to do, and after some introspection he realized that he wanted to return to college to study Mexican culture and language. His research led to an opportunity to study in the United States. Chacón liked the diversity of US academia, and bounced around in different higher education positions before eventually settling at SOU.

“I’ve worked in the past in bigger universities, and you don’t really get to know your students,” he said. “For example, I had students at the University of Tennessee taking intermediate Spanish, they were going to be majors and minors, but we had so many professors that I didn’t see them again.

“That is what’s so important about SOU, that it’s a smaller community, and you get the chance to help students and help them better.”

Chacón teaches lower- and upper-level Spanish language and culture classes at SOU, and fosters an atmosphere of collaboration among students and faculty.

“It has been proven that people who speak a second language develop more cerebral connections, and it’s been proven (they) make more money,” he said. “At SOU, we offer different languages – Japanese, Spanish, French – and I think it’s important that people learn a second language.”

Chacón enjoys playing music, meditating, exercising, cooking and watching films in his spare time.

Story by Blair Selph, SOU Marketing and Communications student writer