♪ Hello and welcome to another edition of Northwest Profiles.

I'm your host, Lynn Veltrie.

And as always, we're glad you're here.

Coming up in the profiles ahead, see firsthand the impact of hope and kindness on those in need.

Discover how art can be used to reveal community history.

Venture inside a home, celebrating a milestone, And finally, learn the secrets of building traditional Native American canoes.

So let's put our oar in the water and push off, shall we?

For our first story, we focus our attention here locally on the inspirational work of Becky Van Keulen.

Through her story of personal tragedy and resilience.

We learned about her nonprofit organization, Cancer Cant and all of the desperately needed services it provides to those fighting the dreaded disease.

My name is Becky Van Keulen and I am the co-founder of Cancer Cant.

Cancer Cant is a local nonprofit that its mission is to serve adult oncology patients in the inland northwest.

My late husband, Jonathan, was diagnosed with cancer when he was 29.

He was not able to work while he was going through treatment.

So he started Cancer Can't.

And we basically did that together from a hospital room.

He did it to help the people that came after us and give some sort of purpose to what we were going through.

So now that's what I've continued to do.

Since he's passed.

I continue to run Cancer Cant with a wonderful board and people all throughout the community.

Hey, do you have a second?

I am reviewing the grant application that you sent over some of these numbers.

I'm just like, well, where are we pulling them from?

And just making sure that we're verifying with them where they're getting their numbers from.

When we started Cancer Cant, Jonathan was doing treatment at Sacred Heart here in Spokane.

We lived in the hospital like it was like five days in the hospital, a couple days out.

We had two little kids at the time and there were not a lot of amenities.

We worked with Providence to remodel seven South, which was the entire oncology floor.

Getting refrigerators in those rooms.

We purchased recliner chairs for a support person that could stay.

Started out with the hospital being the focus, and then from there, it's just taken on a life of its own.

Oftentimes, patients, when going through chemotherapy aren't able to drive and further, it's not safe to take public transportation when you're immunocompromised.

So your option is to have somebody else drive you.

So we have volunteer drivers.

We're averaging somewhere between like 300 rides a month to upwards of 500 rides a month, getting patients to treatment.

We have a grant program so patients that are in emergent need, you know, you just got a diagnosis.

You weren't planning on losing an income.

All of a sudden you have max out of pocket for insurance.

Mostly this program is paying for things like rent, car insurance, groceries, babysitting.

It's just the basic things that people need day to day.

And we also do a program called Cancer Can't Take Christmas, where we partner sponsor families with cancer, families that have kids.

That's really a fun program where we just get to bless families during holidays.

We also have a lodging program.

So now when patients are traveling from rural communities to Spokane for treatment, we put them in hotel rooms and have a place for them to stay.

Adult cancer patients are kind of looked over group, I think.

Primarily cancer diagnosis has happened later in life.

Not only are baby boomers getting older, but then we also decreased our preventative scanning because of the pandemic.

And so cancer is really going to be something that is going to impact our communities, our families.

And we need to be making sure that there are resources for these people.

Cancer has completely changed my life.

We were pretty young when my husband was diagnosed.

We were 29.

We were living the American dream.

Two little kids, he was making enough money.

I could be a stay at home mom.

Now my whole world is essentially giving back.

So I do this on a complete volunteer basis at sometimes full-time hours.

Not to mention what it's like to raise kids without their dad.

You're constantly dealing with grief.

I've delivered Christmas presents to a family, and the only person that was there was the dad.

And all of a sudden the kids were going to show up with all these gifts.

But he knew my story.

He said, Can I ask you a question?

How do I tell my kids that their mom's going to die?

I just remember having that same question.

You don't have anyone to ask that question.

I live it every day, and sometimes it's not easy, but sometimes it is also very gratifying that, you know, you get a text message or something from someone that you drove that you know, I don't know what I would do without you guys.

I probably wouldn't be here, actually.

So there's highs and lows.

If we didn't have organizations like Cancer Cant, survival rates would be less.

If you don't have the ability to have a resource to get to treatment or you can't pay for something, whether it's financial, whether it's transportation.

There are often situations where people are choosing to just not have treatment at all because they can't overcome the barriers to access care.

I viewed cancer count as kind of a little bit of like a pay it forward movement, whether it's, you know, sponsoring a family at Christmas or shopping and delivering gifts or driving people to treatment.

It's just a collaborative group of people wrapping their arms around each other.

I think moving forward in the midst of something awful is looking outside yourself and doing something for someone else, and you might discover something and that's what I've kind of discovered is uncommon joy.

Going forward, Becky hopes that we all at some point consider reaching out to someone in need to discover our own uncommon joy.

Up next, we transition from one Spokane nonprofit to another that's making a difference within the community.

This time, it's an organization called Terrain that bills itself as a groundbreaking nonprofit that believes everyone needs art.

In 2023, Terrain worked with the East Central neighborhood to design an art display that would tell the story of their own neighborhood.

See what they came up with and discover how this revealing mural now on the wall at the Carl Maxey Center came to be.

[Reinaldo] So, it was around, like, four or five years ago.

That I got approached by Ginger Ewing from Terrain.

Um, she was asking me if I wanted to participate in this community project.

And then I saw in the pamphlets of the advertisement uh, a picture of a guy with dreadlocks.

And that happened to be Carl.

[Carl laughing] Thats funny.

My name is Ginger Ewing, and I am the co-founder and executive director of Terrain.

[Music] So we originally conceived of the idea about four years ago.

We were really inspired by J.R., who is a French artist who's really known worldwide for going into neighborhoods and communities and doing kind of large scale photographs and in celebration of those communities.

And my father grew up in East Central.

It is a special place for him and his story.

And so when we conceived of the idea, I thought about kind of a storytelling project in the neighborhood East Central was kind of a no brainer for us.

[Reinaldo] I love when Ginger comes with challenges, like, I love that I get really excited every time that she reachs out to me because I know that she trust that we can make it happen.

And there is always something that we need to figure it out and it's going to make us better.

[Ginger] I didn't grow up in the neighborhood.

So a big part of this is relationship building.

We didn't want the neighborhood to feel like we were coming in and trying to do something to the neighborhood No, we wanted this to be a reciprocal, meaningful thing that was happening to the neighborhood.

And so a lot of it was just trust building and that takes time.

[Ginger] ...your time.

Really we want this to be an opportunity for people to come together, to gather, to celebrate each other.

[Reinaldo] So, one thing of like the mastermind of Ginger Ewing and Terrain, is like she is always thinking about like how to engage the community even more.

There is definitely plenty of murals.

Right?

Like something that beautifies a wall, and that's the experience that you have to just looking at something.

But you wanted to go a little bit beyond that.

[Ginger] One of the things that was really important for us was to not only celebrate the people of the neighborhood by, you know, having something that's gorgeous and that they can see themselves reflected in, but also the collection of the neighborhood stories.

And so the idea is, is we're going to launch a website.

It's going to start with 20 people's stories, but we are building the wireframe of the website in a way where we can add hundreds of stories if we want to.

So not only is there a digital website, not only is there a physical mural, but you can raise your phone up to the people who stories that we have on the website, you can raise your phone up to their their photo and it will take you directly to their landing page on the website so you can hear their story.

[Carl] Doing the photographs with the community was fun because you're in the space, you're taking photos of TV, you're clowning around, you're getting to know people.

And we just started talking while they were in front of the camera.

And I was trying to capture them as they were.

I wasn't trying to pose them.

Some people felt more comfortable than others, and so I just captured them as they were.

Like, some people wanted to smile.

Some people throw their hands up, like, do what you do.

I want you on the wall.

I don't want some type of pose picture.

And so I was able to, I think, capture people as they were.

[Ginger] So, Carl, Reinaldo and I spent hours and hours and hours printing out those large scale photographs, then cutting them out and then putting together the composition of the piece.

[Carl] So we laid them all out on the Terrain gallery floor and trying to figure out our composition, [Ginger] It was just trial and error.

Who looks good here?

Let's do this.

It was mostly kind of just playing around with the composition of the piece.

[Reinaldo] It was kind of like trying maybe to find sizes that can fit in the space that we have available.

Uh, we have a wall right here that has a lot of like holes and also windows that we need to work around.

So it's not really like to created a hierarchy.

It was just to also like develop a sense of movement in the piece.

Like if we put everything the same size, it just looks kind of like monotonous.

[Carl] Like Reinaldo was saying, We were thinking about composition, like, how is this going to look from a distance?

Like creating some type of dynamic in the composition.

As you're looking at the piece.

[Reinaldo] There is plenty of people living in this community, right?

And it's really hard to like, reach out to everybody.

I want people to understand that, even when they are not in the, in this wall.

This is a sample and a tribute to everybody who has been living here.

[Ginger] This is really like a show, not tell a project.

And we anticipated that once the mural would go up, there would be this excitement and people wanting to participate.

And that's what is happening is people are excited, but they're also maybe disappointed that their loved one or they didn't get to participate.

[Carl] It's a pretty diverse group of people that are on the wall right.

And like you say, we can't fit everybody on the wall.

We got as many as we could in the amount of time that we were given to represent the community.

[Ginger] So, longer term goal is that this is just a start.

And if we have the funding and we have the spaces and the places to continue this mural, we absolutely will do that.

[Music] [Reinaldo] I mean, it's an honor, though.

Like, I feel that's great that we can use our skills to somehow highlight people, make them feel visible.

They feel that this is kind of like a small tribute to what they have been doing.

When people pass by and they are excited about had they come and tried to like, see themselves reflected on the wall, um, its just great.

[Carl] Yeah, I was - when we started putting the people up, I was putting Larry up and a lady walked by and she was like, That's Larry.

I was like, Yeah.

She's like, I love Larry.

And then she just kept walking and so, to me, that's what it's about.

Like just bringing a little bit of joy.

I mean, I'm sure people already have a lot of joy in their life.

But just to add to it, um, and like Reinaldo is saying, its an honor to to be able to be a part of that.

[Ginger] I think one of the things that was really important in this process is oftentimes east central neighborhood is talked about, about like what isn't present.

And one of the things that we were pretty adamant about is despite all of the challenges that the neighborhood is facing, look at how like beautiful and culturally rich and all of like the love and joy and the good things that are happening to the neighborhood.

[Betsy] Thank you everyone.

Welcome to East Central.

This is what community looks like.

[Ginger] And that was really important for us to capture that energy.

There's so many incredible people doing really incredible work.

I think you're going to see East central um, change in really incredible ways.

And, um, we are proud to just be kind of a small part of being able to reflect their own brilliance.

Now, I have to say the mural looks good on video, but it looks even better in person.

So I encourage you to go and see for yourself.

And here's a tip.

When you do, be sure to use the digital technology there to hear all of the wonderful stories that make up the East central neighborhood.

Now for our next story.

We shift our attention from local history depicted in art to local history.

You can see and feel.

Built in 1898, Spokane's charming Campbell House is the only historic home owned by the state of Washington that is open to the public.

Now, if you've never been there before, you're in for a real treat because we're about to take you there.

As the revered home celebrates a special anniversary.

We're in Browns Edition, which is one of the earlier neighborhoods of the city.

J.J. Brown himself, who the neighborhood is kind of named for, lived just down the way the Campbells had this home built in 1898 by a fellow named Kirtland Cutter.

Was a pretty well-known architect around Spokane here.

A lot of people recognize him from the historic Davenport Hotel project for people like Kirtland.

Cutter, that revival is the important word.

They were really looking at pre industrial eras and cultures, different parts of the world, and have pulling inspiration from that for not just the exterior of the house, but also every room in here is designed completely, uniquely and to reflect a different time, a different part of the world.

And that was not an accident.

They wanted to explore what these different cultures would have had and also maybe make you seem a little more well-traveled than you necessarily are.

Some of the things that we take for granted now would have been pretty fancy to have quite the volume of in a house like this when you built it at the time.

I mean, electric lights everywhere.

That was pretty recent.

And you'll notice them not just on the family side, but on the working side of the house as well.

And so everywhere you see a bulb throughout the house.

There originally was one, though, a little bit brighter than they likely would have had them.

We also have a call button system that during the restoration, they got to completely work again, which is good fun, as well as a telephone that was built by the front door.

And I always tell school kids it's my only secret door because they wanted it to feel like a medieval castle.

When you came through that front door.

You can't have anything as modern as a telephone.

So slides quietly away behind a little panel.

So Campbell House was built in a really interesting time for Spokane and for the Pacific Northwest, and it's really illustrated really well in the different kind of lives and stories of Grace Campbell and Helen Campbell.

So Grace was more from this Victorian era where there were certain standards for for women of their class.

And then Helen was much younger and she was out doing sports and camping and, and things like that.

And kind of along the same vein, this house was built at this time when things were changing from gas power to electric and from horse drawn carriages to automobiles.

And actually we have a great illustration of that in our carriage house, which is called the Carriage House, because it was built to house a carriage with a horse.

But by the time they were really in here, maybe barely even used for a carriage.

And so there was this transfer from the carriage driver to the chauffeur who would drive your automobile, which interestingly may have even been electric at the time.

The Campbells lived here until 1924.

So it was just Mr. Amasa Campbell, Miss Grace Fox, Campbell and their only child, their daughter Helen.

And they were here those 26 years, at which point Mr. & Mrs. Campbell had both passed away.

Helen was married with a home of her own and didn't need this one necessarily when it was left to her and she was a member of the historic society and the art society here in Spokane.

So she knew they were looking for more formal building space.

And so she donated it in honor of her mom.

And we originally opened as the Grace Campbell Memorial Museum, because when it was the museum, I mean, the house was only 26 years old.

They painted, they built walls, put up beautiful exhibits all over the place.

So kind of steadily working and all the research, I mean, 15 layers of wallpaper and paint down to find the original and really confirm what existed there kind of a 20 year or so effort to get it arguably restored.

It was definitely an effort to get it looking quite like it does now.

And now it's restored to how it looked when the family all lived here.

So we call it our largest artifact.

And so to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Campbell House this year, my favorite thing we did was we installed reproduction wallpapers in the yellow and pink bedrooms.

And so it's this really dramatic transformation if you've visited before, and especially if you look at before and after photos, the new wallpapers, they're not exact replicas.

While, we have really wonderful records about Campbell House.

We actually don't have great large swatches of the original wallpapers and we don't have photos that really give us enough information, but you can tell that they're pretty close and they're based on vintage wallpapers, so they really give that feeling of, you know, this is what homes use to look like.

You wouldn't walk into a home and see just a painted wall.

There would be wallpaper.

And so it really just warms those rooms up and helps you see them the way that the family saw them.

We also, in addition to the wallpaper, brought in some new original furniture that's especially apparent and what we call the yellow bedroom.

One of the main guest bedrooms we brought in large pieces of furniture like a bureau and a couple of other pieces.

In the eighties and nineties, we had this major restoration effort where you were rebuilding walls and doing major, major construction.

And now the restoration effort continues on a smaller scale with things like wallpaper and furniture.

We're really fortunate we have William Otis was the interior designer that worked with Kirtland Cutter to design the house, and we have his Swatch book.

He made meticulous notes about furniture and wallpaper and even sometimes where it was supposed to go.

And it's been an invaluable resource for the restoration of the House to have this really concrete example of what would have been in some of these spaces.

One of the sort of magic secrets of Campbell House is that many things are things that the Campbells had here.

Some things are not original to the Campbell's, but they are original to the era, or this neighborhood or this city or this region.

And so they fit because of that.

Some of them belonged to other families of the time.

And then we have things that aren't really either of those.

And so things that kind of fit in, but are more contemporary reproductions.

This house is not being used for anything than as a historic house.

So some of the other historic homes in this neighborhood and throughout the city are used as event spaces, or they have offices upstairs and here this house is being kept as a museum piece.

There's not a lot of historic houses in Spokane per say, but like the Glover Mansion has been open to the public and like the Corbin Art Center.

And so, I mean, there are some other from this era homes that have been used in different ways.

I would say Campbell House is arguably one of the few being used quite as a historic museum like this.

In town, though.

There's a lot of mythmaking about Campbell House.

So people will tell you, I heard there's a secret passageway and there aren't secret passageways in this house, much to my disappointment.

You hear things about, you know, stories that never happened here.

It feels like an old, scary, spooky, haunted mansion.

But only one family ever lived here.

So it even is kind of unique in that way among historic homes in that it didn't go through multiple families or multiple generations.

It was one family, one generation, and then became a museum.

Mostly we get the memories of people who haven't been here.

You know, maybe they moved away and they were it was that third grade field trip when they were small, and they have not visited the house since.

And that is always really fun to hear.

And we get a lot of grandparents who are bringing grandkids.

Everyone has been here and has these memories and it makes it really fun to watch those family groups get here and share those stories together.

Something to take note.

A visit to the charming Campbell house is included with admission to the Mac Museum.

And it's also available for self-guided tours Tuesday through Sunday afternoons.

Moving on now to our final profile.

We revisit a story that will take us into the rivers and lakes of the Pacific Northwest to meet an artist who's inspired to reclaim his heritage by building traditional style canoes and fishing implements.

My name is Shawn Brigman.

I'm a Spokane tribal member, and I also descend from many of the regional plateau tribes so that means I descend from the Arrow Lakes, the Kalispell and the Shuswap.

And all three of those groups are actually documented as employing historical Bark Sturgeon Nose Canoes.

Well, I make two canoes, I make a Bark Sturgeon Nose Canoe, which was founded by the ancestors since time and memorial.

And I also make a contemporary canoe, which I have named the Salishan Sturgeon Nose Canoe.

And both canoes actually have two separate techniques with a Bark Sturgeon Nose Canoe.

The technique is you're basically harvesting and then hand splitting every material for that canoe.

Now, with my contemporary Salishan Sturgeon Nose Canoe, I'm using contemporary materials.

The technique I'm using there is kind of like a drum.

I'm stretching ballistic nylon onto a frame.

I studied abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, and while in Copenhagen I visited the Viking Ship Museum for like a class project to write an essay.

And the moment I walked into that museum and I saw their Viking ships recovered from the fjord and then displayed in that museum of space and so I knew immediately that that's what I wanted to do was recover our plateau tribal canoe culture back home.

Well, without the canoe culture, we lose our ties to the land, to the waterways, to those marriage patterns those food gathering patterns.

And so to bring that back and starting in 2012 to now, 2022, that's what we're doing we're bringing back the memory of the food gathering patterns, our historical marriage patterns and our attachment to the geography.

With the Spokane River, this is one of the historical salmon fishing sites here at the confluence of the Latah and Spokane River.

And so some of the fishing implements that we would employ here would include the salmon dip net and the two pronged salmon fish spear.

Well, for me the fishing implements complete the circle.

The canoes were historically used to travel from village to village, and we would pack those canoes with all of our tools, our housing and our salmon fishing implements.

So everything would get packed into the canoe.

I actually view my canoes as adult baby boards.

I remember returning home from elementary school, like in the first, second and third grade.

And every time I would get home, I would pull my baby board off the wall.

And my baby board is one of the most important items of my youth.

And on that baby board, there was a piece, it's called a face guard.

It's like a wooden willow piece on there.

And I used to rub my hands on that piece wondering, wow, how was this made?

How was that piece of wood bent?

And then sure enough, you know, as an adult and when I started making canoes about ten years ago, the very first piece that I bent on my very first canoe was no different from that piece that was on my baby board hanging on the wall.

Well, since 2012, you know, my main focus was on the integrity of the Bark Sturgeon Nose Canoe.

My work has evolved since then by looking at opportunities to manifest our traditional Bark Sturgeon Nose Canoe heritage and a new art disciplines.

So for example in 2020 2021 I had an opportunity to be an artist in residence at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma and then working with the hot shop team at the Museum of Glass, we were able to collaborate on glassblowing, a piece that really represented the Bark Sturgeon Nose Canoe, but manifested in a new media.

Well, I want people to know that the Plateau Cultural Heritage has sustained the indigenous people since time and memorial.

And I just want people to know that that our Plateau Culture is not this static relic of the past.

It's actually culturally relevant today in the present.

What keeps me going is just knowing that all of that material that I harvested and I spent all that love, blood, sweat, and tears and in processing that material, and it's now sculpted into a beautiful sculptural form.

It's amazing to know that all those materials were once alive in the forest, and now they've been sculpted into a new form.

They can live in a new way.

The canoe lives on.

And with that, it's time to close the book on this edition of Northwest Profiles.

But rest assured, there's more ahead with our next show coming in April.

Until then, this is Lynn Veltrie saying, so long.

And keep in mind, here in the Inland Northwest and in western Canada, there's always plenty to explore and discover.

So venture out.

And of course, when you do, be sure you take time to enjoy the view.