By Erin Hurley
It’s impossible to miss the plastic yard signs in the trees between Thompson Hall and Wyatt Hall, proudly displaying names for plants in Southern Lushootseed, the language of the Puyallup Tribe. Though there were originally thirteen, only a few remain. To redraw attention to the unquestionably important message these signs conveyed, permanent installations of the project are underway. Professor Rachel DeMotts explains, “We’re starting to see in many places initiatives by tribes to make their language visible on their land again, and it’s to me, it’s a really powerful reminder of history that often gets glossed over or erased or told in inaccurate ways.”
The project began in an interdisciplinary environmental policy and decision making (EPDM) and African American studies (AFAM) class co-taught by Professor DeMotts and Professor Renee Simms concerning environmental racism. Their main goal was to include community-facing work with which students could engage. “We wanted to come up with an idea that would amplify something that was important to a community partner and not just be about kind of what we were interested in or what our students were interested in,” DeMotts explains.
The specific idea for the signs was inspired by a similar project from the Puyallup Tribal Language Program and a group of tribal artists in which native art was on display alongside words in Southern Lushootseed. The signs were produced and distributed to members of the community to raise awareness about the language. DeMotts and Simms felt this was a perfect model to emulate for their class, and they approached the Puyallup Tribal Language Program about creating yard signs with Indigenous names for plants on campus printed on them.
Signage programs spreading awareness of Indigenous languages are not unique to this project. DeMotts explains that there are other projects at UW Tacoma involving street signs with Indigenous translations printed alongside them, but the one undertaken at Puget Sound was different. “I think the way that we wanted to go about it by including students and really working with the Tribal Language Program moves a little slower than the University timeframe might always like. But it was really important to us to build a relationship with the language program.” The Seeding Lushootseed project set itself apart by allowing students to apply their learning in class to an important issue, while at the same time fostering a relationship between the class and the Tribal Language Program.
In the class, students were divided into groups and were asked to execute various roles in the project. These roles included working with the tribe to translate plant names, designing artwork for the signs, and planning an event to showcase the work. The project took a little over a semester to complete; the signs finally debuted on campus in spring 2022.
Unfortunately, only a few signs remain. Some have been stolen – and are boldly on display in neighbors’ yards – while others were vandalized and had to be removed. In one particularly hateful instance, a swastika was drawn on one of the displays. “It was at a time at which there had been several other incidents of people putting swastikas on campus which I just, yeah, I just absolutely fail to understand that kind of behavior,” says DeMotts.
Though many of the signs have been lost or defaced, the project has not ceased, and faculty and students have continued to exhibit passion for the project. After a lot of hard work and applications for several grants, the Seeding Lushootseed signs are set to become a permanent installation on campus. “It was our intention all along to work towards having a more permanent version of them,” says DeMotts. Current classes have been contributing to this effort, like finding the exact demarcations of the signs and working to develop a display of the project on the University website.
Sydney Maysmith (‘24) enrolled in Environmental Racism in the fall of 2023, where she and her classmates worked in groups to advance the installation of permanent signs on campus. Part of this work included mapping and finalizing designs, but Maysmith specifically worked to uncover the University of Puget Sound’s ties to the Cushman Boarding School. While it may seem unrelated to the installation of signs, Puget Sound’s involvement in the boarding school contributed to language loss and systematic colonization, among countless other abuses. “This is like a real life applicable thing that fully affects all of us on campus,” Maysmith says about Puget Sound’s historical ties to the Cushman Boarding School. “This school, you know, played a part in colonialism and taking away land from Indigenous people.”
There were 13 signs originally, and depending on funds, that is the goal for the number of permanent signs – thirteen signs for thirteen different plants. Twelve signs have Lushootseed words on them, and 11 of those are native plants. For the sake of diversifying the types of plants showcased, a sign for a non-native plant is included. The last sign (for the Pacific Rhododendron) bears the words “Lushootseed name has been lost due to systematic colonization.”
Grace Playstead (‘24) worked to create a University-wide, public-facing land acknowledgement while she was enrolled in Environmental Racism. She submitted the ten-page document to Dr. Lorna Hernandez Jarvis, Vice President for Institutional Equity and Diversity, and it is supposedly under review. “I was working in establishing the permanence of history and also the connections of our University to this land and its founding to colonization and the active erasure of the Puyallup people’s sovereignty and also history,” Playstead says.
The bottom left corner of the signs read, “University of Puget Sound Needs an Indigenous Studies program.” There were discussions of introducing an Indigenous studies major among faculty and administration at the time the original signs were launched; however, it was quickly revealed that the proper resources would not be devoted to it anytime soon. Hiring Indigenous faculty to center that knowledge and expertise was a requirement, but it became untenable due to a lack of structural support for the initiative. “If we’re not gonna do it properly, then I think a lot of us feel we shouldn’t do it at all, frankly,” DeMotts says bluntly.