Tornadoes cut swathes of destruction through Indian country last week and over the weekend, and on Monday May 20 the midsection of the U.S. was bracing for more.
A half-mile-wide “hurricane” that hit just outside Oklahoma City on Sunday afternoon May 19 was part of the same extreme weather system, Reuters reported. The system stretched from north Texas to Minnesota, with 500,000 square miles and 55 million people in its path, CNN reported.
“You could be killed if not underground or in a tornado shelter,” the National Weather Service said in an advisory on Sunday afternoon, as reported by Reuters. “Complete destruction of neighborhoods, businesses and vehicles will occur. Flying debris will be deadly to people and animals.”
The Oklahoma state health department reported at least 21 injuries, according to The Oklahoman. The main damage over the weekend leveled homes in the area of Carney, Bethel Acres and Norman, The Oklahoman reported. It overturned tractor-trailers on Interstate 40 near Shawnee and damaging roofs and trees in southeast Edmond and leveled a mobile-home park.
Paramedics searched for victims buried under houses of rubble on Sunday night, while Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin declared a state of emergency for 16 counties: Caddo, Cleveland, Comanche, Creek, Garfield, Grant, Greer, Kiowa, Lincoln, Logan, McClain, Okfuskee, Oklahoma, Pawnee, Payne and Pottawatomie. Damaged communities included Bethel Acres, Carney, Edmond, Little Axe, Norman, Shawnee and Wellston.
The Red Cross has set up shelters in Carney, Shawnee and Little Axe, spokesman Ken Garcia told The Oklahoman. The storms touched down not only in Oklahoma but also in Kansas and Iowa, “part of a massive, northeastward-moving storm system that stretched from Texas to Minnesota,” the Associated Press reported. They came right on the heels of devastating tornadoes that hit the town of Granbury in Texas, near Fort Worth and Dallas, earlier in the week.
The weekend’s system involved at least four distinct tornadoes in central Oklahoma, the AP said. The one near Shawnee destroyed most of the mobile home park.
ICTMN is still awaiting news from tribes whose members may have been in the storms’ path.
EVERETT — Weary of waiting for Aaron Reardon to submit paperwork formalizing his plans to resign as Snohomish County executive, the County Council voted 4-0 on Monday to start the process of identifying his replacement.
The council took the step to ensure a timely transition for the next executive to assume office, County Council Chairwoman Stephanie Wright said.
The council hopes to begin interviewing candidates by June 3.
“I think that it’s important that we end the speculation and confusion about the process,” Councilman Dave Somers said.
“We have to do the business of the people of Snohomish County,” added Councilman Brian Sullivan. “We represent over 700,000 constituents.”
Reardon in late February announced plans to step down May 31, promising to assist in a smooth transition for his successor.
Aside from sending out a Feb. 21 press release containing the text of his resignation speech in front of business leaders in Everett, Reardon did not provide any other written notice.
That left other county leaders in limbo. By law the County Council is required to pick Reardon’s replacement. He never answered a May 2 letter from the council asking him to submit a more formal, written resignation.
The motion approved on Monday points to Reardon’s February speech as his notice to the council, noting Wright was in the audience that morning.
The county council “wishes to formally accept the Executive’s (Feb. 21) tendered resignation,” the motion reads.
Reardon’s spokesman, Christopher Schwarzen, said there was “nothing that has prevented the Democratic Party or the County Council from putting together a list of three names as required by law.
“There is nothing in the County Charter or state law that requires a letter of resignation,” Schwarzen wrote. “People want to suggest that this office has held up the process, but that is not true.”
That differs from what Reardon said in March, when asked about the uncertainty surrounding his resignation. “I plan on sending a letter as required,” he wrote in an email to The Herald.
Reardon’s resignation announcement came a day after the County Council voted to strip him of authority to manage the county’s public records and computer system. The council also called for an independent investigation, now being pursued by the King County Sheriff’s Office, into evidence linking two people then on Reardon’s staff to a series of anonymous public records requests, attack websites and other activities targeting people considered the executive’s political rivals.
As The Herald reported Feb. 14, those on the receiving end believed they were being subjected to attempts at harassment and surveillance.
Because Reardon is a Democrat in a partisan elected office, the law says it’s up to Snohomish County Democrats to pick three nominees to replace him. The county party’s central committee will forward the names to the County Council. The council then has 60 days to agree on a successor. If that proves impossible the choice would fall to Gov. Jay Inslee. In the meantime, the county charter says that the deputy executive under Reardon, Gary Haakenson, would assume the responsibilities of the county’s top elected job.
Some in the community had urged Reardon to leave office earlier, giving voters a chance this fall to weigh in on his replacement. With filing already closed for this fall election, that option has passed. That means the person appointed to be the next county executive will serve unchallenged at least into November 2014, when results are certified in a special election expected next year.
An election for a full, four-year term is expected in 2015.
Snohomish County Democratic party leaders have scheduled a formal vote to nominate three candidates for the executive appointment at the Everett Labor Temple on June 1.
“Clearly the council’s motion today expedites our process,” said Richard Wright, the chairman of Snohomish County Democrats and the husband of Stephanie Wright.
The likely nominees are: Sheriff John Lovick of Mill Creek; state Rep. John McCoy, D-Tulalip; and Everett attorney Todd Nichols, a longtime Democratic Party leader at the state and county level. Lovick is said to have locked up support from a majority of local Democrats.
“While clearly there’s a frontrunner in this group, I think this is a good group of nominees,” Richard Wright said.
County Councilman Dave Gossett was on vacation Monday and did not cast a vote in the Reardon resolution.
OLYMPIA — Gov. Jay Inslee signed off on an $8.7 billion transportation budget Monday that puts money toward maintaining state roadways and continues spending on existing big-ticket projects.
But he vetoed some sections, including a proposal to spend $81 million planning a replacement bridge that would extend Interstate 5 over the Columbia River.
“There is no wisdom in expending these funds if the state of Washington does not contribute adequate funding to actually build the bridge,” he said before vetoing the section. “We all need to understand a central fact. This project needs to be funded this year. There is no other option.”
The effort to replace the bridge connecting Portland with Vancouver, Wash., has encountered obstacles in the predominantly Republican Washington state Senate, where several members are opposed to the Columbia River Crossing proposal in its current form. They say it is too low and should not include light rail transit, and are concerned about costs.
The $3.4 billion project would include two new double-decker bridges with five travel lanes in each direction — up from three — and space for pedestrians, bicyclists and light-rail trains. Oregon and Washington are each responsible for $450 million, with the federal government and toll revenue paying the rest. Oregon has already approved its portion, but if Washington state does not, the federal match will fall through.
House Transportation Committee Chairwoman Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, said that veto “makes perfect sense to me.”
“Until we have a revenue package, we don’t really know if we’ll need that money,” she said.
Including the bridge planning money, Inslee vetoed a dozen sections of the transportation budget Monday, including a provision for an audit of State Route 520 that Inslee said duplicated work already being done, and a study of guardrails that Inslee said no funding was available for.
The budget does continue funding for the Alaskan Way Viaduct tunnel project in Seattle, a replacement bridge for State Route 520 over Lake Washington and high-occupancy lanes on Interstate 5 in Tacoma.
Inslee said the budget “makes key investments in our transportation system to keep people and goods moving safely and smoothly throughout the state.”
Earlier in the day, Inslee spoke at a rally in support of a funding package for transportation projects.
House Democrats support a proposal to raise the gas tax by 10 cents per gallon to help maintain existing roads, as well as to fund a handful of pending big-ticket projects, but the plan faces skepticism from the Senate majority.
The tax would provide money for connecting State Routes 167 and 509 to Interstate 5, the North Spokane Corridor and the $450 million needed for Washington’s share of the Columbia River Crossing Project.
Washington lawmakers are in the midst of a special legislative session to address a projected deficit of more than $1.2 billion in the next two-year state operating budget, plus a court-ordered increase in funding for the state’s education system, but Inslee has said that transportation funding must be addressed as well.
Most of the $81 million that had been allocated toward the Columbia River Crossing in the transportation budget would have been withheld until the U.S. Coast Guard looked at how the project design would hamper river traffic and navigation.
Sen. Ann Rivers, a Republican from La Center who has been a critic of the current bridge project, said that she was disappointed by the governor’s veto of that section.
“The Legislature worked really hard to give the governor an option, and he just took it off the table,” she said. “We’ve always said we want a project that works.”
Inslee said that the veto of the funding money for the Columbia River Crossing shouldn’t “be taken at all that we can’t move forward.”
“It would be foolish to turn down $850 million in federal money when they recognize we’re going to end up paying more for this project if we don’t do it this year,” Inslee said. “Washington taxpayers will have to shell out more tax dollars to deal with this bridge if we don’t take this option that is available to us today.”
Rivers debated the notion that the federal money was a sure thing.
“I’m not willing to stake the future of our general fund on these major projects,” she said. “I think we have to proceed thoughtfully and thoroughly. Right now we’re operating on a wing and a prayer.”
Red Eagle Soaring Native American Theatre Group presents Coyote was Going There Native Youth Performance
The premiere performance of an original play created by students and
teaching artist Jake Hart (Blackfeet/Cherokee) in Red Eagle Soaring’s Fifth
Annual Spring Performance Project
The event is FREE & Open to the public – FREEWILL donations will be requested.
Rainier Valley Cultural Center
3515 S Alaska St, Seattle map
(206) 725-7517
Parade, Frogtastic Kids Fair, airplane rides, music, games, food, beer gardens,wine tasting, custom classic car show, river run and championship BBQ cook off!
For 100 years, families have gathered in the historic district of Snohomish for the annual Kla Ha Ya Days. The native word Kla Ha Ya means welcome and we welcome you to experience old fashioned summertime fun and enjoy our town.
Peter Mauney Jeffrey Gibson in his studio in Hudson, N.Y., with his dog, Stein-Olaf.
By Carol Kino, The New York Times
HUDSON, N.Y. — One sunny afternoon early this month Jeffrey Gibson paced around his studio, trying to keep track of which of his artworks was going where.
Luminous geometric abstractions, meticulously painted on deer hide, that hung in one room were about to be picked up for an art fair. In another sat Mr. Gibson’s outsize rendition of a parfleche trunk, a traditional American Indian rawhide carrying case, covered with Malevich-like shapes, which would be shipped to New York for a solo exhibition at the National Academy Museum. Two Delaunay-esque abstractions made with acrylic on unstretched elk hides had already been sent to a museum in Ottawa, but the air was still suffused with the incense-like fragrance of the smoke used to color the skins.
“If you’d told me five years ago that this was where my work was going to lead,” said Mr. Gibson, gesturing to other pieces, including two beaded punching bags and a cluster of painted drums, “I never would have believed it.” Now 41, he is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee. But for years, he said, he resisted the impulse to quote traditional Indian art, just as he had rejected the pressure he’d felt in art school to make work that reflected his so-called identity.
“The way we describe identity here is so reductive,” Mr. Gibson said. “It never bleeds into seeing you as a more multifaceted person.” But now “I’m finally at the point where I can feel comfortable being your introduction” to American Indian culture, he added. “It’s just a huge acceptance of self.”
Judging from Mr. Gibson’s growing number of exhibitions, self-acceptance has done his work a lot of good. In addition to the National Academy exhibition, “Said the Pigeon to the Squirrel,” which opens Thursday and runs through Sept. 8, his pieces can be seen in four other places.
“Love Song,” Mr. Gibson’s first solo museum show, opened this month at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, with 20 silk-screened paintings, a video and two sculptures, one of which strings together seven painted drums. The smoked elk hide paintings are now on view in “Sakahàn,” a huge group exhibition of international indigenous art that opened last Friday at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. And an installation of shield-shaped wall hangings, made from painted hides and tepee poles, is at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.
Mr. Gibson also has work in a group exhibition at the Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba, a longtime East Village multicultural showcase through June 2. Called “The Old Becomes the New,” it explores the relationship between New York’s contemporary American Indian artists and postwar abstractionists like Robert Rauschenberg and Leon Polk Smith who were influenced by traditional Indian art. Mr. Gibson’s contribution is two cinder blocks wrapped in rawhide and painted with superimposed rectangles of color, creating a surprisingly harmonious mash-up of Josef Albers and Donald Judd with the ceremonial bundle.
The work’s hybrid nature has given curators different aspects to appreciate. Kathleen Ash-Milby, an associate curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan, said she loved Mr. Gibson’s use of color and his adventurousness with materials, and that he has “been able to be successful in the mainstream and continue his association with Native art and artists.” (Ms. Ash-Milby gave Mr. Gibson his first New York solo show, in 2005 at the American Indian Community House.)
Marshall N. Price, curator of the National Academy show, said he was drawn by Mr. Gibson’s drive to explore “both the problematic legacies of his own heritage and the problematic legacy of modernism” through the lens of geometric abstraction. (Which, he noted, “has a long tradition in Native American art history as well.”)
And for Jenelle Porter, the Institute of Contemporary Art curator who organized the Boston show, it’s Mr. Gibson’s ability to “foreground his background,” as she put it, in a striking and accessible way. Ms. Porter discovered his work early last year, in a solo two-gallery exhibition organized by the downtown nonprofit space Participant Inc.
“People were raving about the show,” she said. “So I went over there and I was absolutely floored.”
The work was “visually compelling, and not didactic,” she added. And because “he’s painting on hide, painting on drums, you have to talk about where it comes from.”
Mr. Gibson only recently figured out how to start that conversation. Because his father worked for the Defense Department, he was raised in South Korea, Germany and different cities in the United States, so “acclimating was normal to me,” he said. And one of the most persistent messages he heard growing up was “never to identify as a minority,” he added.
At the same time, because much of his extended family lives near reservations in Oklahoma and Mississippi, Mr. Gibson also grew up going to powwows and Indian festivals. He even briefly considered studying traditional Indian art, but instead opted to major in studio art at a community college near his parents’ house outside Washington. In 1992, he landed at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.
There, Mr. Gibson, who had just come out as gay, often felt pressured to examine just one aspect of his life — his Indian heritage, with its implicit cultural sense of victimhood — when what he really yearned to do was to paint like Matisse or Warhol. At the same time, he was learning about that heritage in a new way as a research assistant at the Field Museum aiding its compliance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
As he watched the Indian tribal elders who frequently visited to examine the drums, parfleche containers, headdresses and the like in the Field’s collection, Mr. Gibson was struck by their radically different responses. Some groups “would break down in tears,” he said. “Or there would be huge arguments.”
He came to see traditional art then “as a very powerful form of resistance” and to better “understand its relationship to contemporary life.” And nothing else he’d encountered “felt as complete and fully formed as the objects themselves,” he said. “It certainly made it difficult for me to go into the studio and paint.”
Yet paint Mr. Gibson did — mostly expressionistic landscapes filled with Disney characters, like Pocahontas, and decorated with sequins and glitter. His work continued in a similar vein while he was earning his M.F.A. at the Royal College of Art in London. Although the Mississippi Band paid for his education, the experience gave him a welcome break from grappling with concerns about identity, he said, and a chance “to just look at art and think about the formal qualities of making an artwork.” (Along the way, he also met his husband, the Norwegian sculptor Rune Olsen.)
After returning to the United States in 1999, this time to New York and New Jersey, Mr. Gibson began painting fantastical pastoral scenes, embellishing their surfaces with crystal beads and bubbles of pigmented silicone, recalling 1970s Pattern and Decoration art. Those led to his first solo show with Ms. Ash-Milby in 2005, and his inclusion in the 2007 group show “Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination” at the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as other group shows.
At the same time, Mr. Gibson was making sculptures with mannequins and African masks. While struggling to understand Minimalism, he also began to see the connection between Modernist geometric abstraction and the designs on the objects that had transfixed him in the Field’s collection.
His 2012 show with Participant, “One Becomes the Other,” proved to be a turning point. In it, he collaborated with traditional Indian artists to create works like the string of painted drums, or a deer hide quiver that held an arrow made from a pink fluorescent bulb. And once he set brush to rawhide, Mr. Gibson said, he was hooked. As well as being “an amazing surface to work on,” he said, “its relationship to parchment intrigued me.”
Its use also “positions the viewer to look through the lens that I’d been working so hard to illustrate.”
But the underlying change, Mr. Gibson added, came from his decision to shed the notion of being a member of a minority group. Suddenly all art, European, American and Indian alike, became merely “individual points on this periphery around me,” he said. “Once I thought of myself as the center, the world opened up.”
A former sewage lagoon site and wetlands is planned as a 40-acre refuge for more than 140 species of birds.
By Alejandro Dominquez, The Herald
SNOHOMISH — People are invited to learn the latest details about a proposed wildlife sanctuary at Wednesday’s Parks Board meeting, scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Snohomish Boys & Girls Club, 402 Second St.
The board is expected to make a recommendation to the City Council on the sanctuary steering committee’s plan or ask for changes. The public can also make recommendations, project manager Ann Stanton said.
The wildlife viewing area also has a proposed name: Snohomish Riverview Sanctuary.
The sanctuary would be about 40 acres, including a former sewage lagoon and privately owned wetlands located next to the current sewage treatment plant, along the Snohomish River west of Highway 9.
More than 140 bird species have been seen nesting there or using the wetlands for habitat, including great blue herons, red-tailed hawks, swallows and ducks.
The master plan also proposes adding sidewalk and viewpoint areas on the south side of Riverview Road, Stanton said.
The park would also ban dogs because of the likelihood of harming viewing opportunities and habitat quality, Stanton said.
“The majority of the public comments are against dogs (in the park)” Stanton said.
The Snohomish City Council is scheduled to vote on the plan at a July meeting.
The council is also set to accept a $30,000 donation from a local Audubon Society member in early June. The donation is intended to purchase more land for the sanctuary.
People who want to know more about the park and are unable to attend the meeting can contact Stanton at 360-282-3195 or by email at stanton@ci.snohomish.wa.us.
(Everett, WA) – Every day, our community is changed by difference makers – people uniting for the common good. These difference makers are as diverse as their good deeds themselves: public figures and ordinary good Samaritans, senior citizens and seniors in high school, and individuals and corporations.
United Way of Snohomish County is accepting nominations for Spirit of Snohomish County Awards in four categories: Adult, Youth, Labor and Community Partner. Award winners will be recognized for their efforts to advance the common good and improve the lives of people in Snohomish County. They must also demonstrate a broad and deep commitment to the community.
Award winners will be honored at the annual Spirit of Snohomish County Breakfast, on Sept. 25 at Tulalip Resort Casino.
You may submit your nominations online or download the forms and mail them to Spirit of Snohomish County Awards; United Way of Snohomish County; 3120 McDougall Avenue, Ste. 200; Everett, WA 98201. You can also submit nominations by fax to 425.374.5555 or via email to events@uwsc.org.
Last year’s winners were Dominick Juarez (youth); Mary Jane Brell Vujovic (adult); Allyn Triezenberg (labor), Campbell’s StockPot (community partner) and the Bob Smith Family (Reeves/Sievers Founders’ Award). All of the nominations for the different awards – except the Reeves/Sievers Founders’ Award, which recognizes a lifetime of commitment to our community – are considered by a panel of volunteers.
For questions regarding the nomination process, please email events@uwsc.org.
An Irish company building turbines for the Snohomish PUD visited Everett to discuss the potential for a plant here.
Snohomish County PUD This artist’s rendering shows the tidal energy turbine Snohomish County Public Utility District plans to test to determine if tidal energy is a viable source of electricity.
By Bill Sheets, The Herald
An Irish company that builds tidal-power turbines is exploring the possibility of locating a plant in Western Washington — possibly in Everett.
Representatives of OpenHydro of Dublin visited Everett last week to discuss their technology with political and business leaders from Snohomish County, the region and the state.
The Snohomish County Public Utility District has applied with the federal government for a license to start an experimental tidal-power project in Admiralty Inlet between Fort Casey State Park and Port Townsend.
If the $20 million project is approved — a decision could come this summer — the PUD would buy two turbines from OpenHydro.
A majority interest in the Irish company was recently bought by DCNS, a maritime manufacturer based in Paris. OpenHydro will retain its name as a subsidy of the French company, according to an announcement by DCNS.
The PUD arranged the meeting in Everett, said Steve Klein, the utility’s general manager.
“They wanted to meet with the movers and shakers in the economic development community in Puget Sound,” he said.
Among those who attended the meeting at the PUD’s headquarters were Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson; Rick Cooper, chief executive officer of the Everett Clinic and chairman of Economic Alliance Snohomish County; state commerce director Brian Bonlender, and Sheila Babb from U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s office.
OpenHydro, in business since 2004, has installed turbines off the Orkney Islands in Scotland; the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Canada, and near Brittany in France.
The company is planning new projects in the Orkneys and off the northern coast of Ireland, OpenHydro chief executive officer James Ives said in an email.
Now, the company sees Pacific Northwest waters as a good potential source of tidal power.
“As the turbine manufacturing requirements are of a large scale, OpenHydro plans on assembling all turbines as close to the deployment locations as possible,” he said.
Ives said the company is impressed by Snohomish County’s high-tech industry, including, but not limited to, Boeing.
“The region’s long history of high-specification engineering means that the skills, supply chain and infrastructure necessary to support this type of manufacturing activity are clearly available,” he said.
Stephanson said he made a pitch for Everett in particular.
“I just wanted to make sure they knew we had a nice deep-water port,” he said.
Ives said tidal turbines, electrical equipment and the steel base foundations for the turbines would be manufactured at the new plant. He estimated 300 jobs would be directly created and 600 spinoff positions would result from a plant turning out 100 generators per year.
In addition to tidal-power turbines, DCNS is experimenting with other technologies, including floating wind-turbine platforms, ocean-wave energy and a system that converts temperature changes in the ocean into energy, according to the company’s website.
Stephanson said he’s excited about the tidal-power technology in particular.
“It’s one more very positive opportunity for our part of the world, for growing the economy and jobs,” he said.
Cooper of the economic group said he was impressed by OpenHydro’s presentation.
“This is cutting edge stuff,” he said.
Cooper said plenty of good words were put in for Snohomish County.
“This was more a matter of establishing relationships and introducing people in the region,” he said. “I think the initial contacts have been made. We wanted to convey a welcoming presence, and I think we were successful in doing that.”
In the PUD’s project, the turbines would be placed in a flat area 200 feet underwater. Each circular turbine resembles a giant fan, sitting about 65 feet high on a triangular platform with dimensions of about 100 feet by 85 feet.
Together, the two turbines would generate about enough power for 450 homes at peak output. If the project goes well, the system could grow, PUD officials said.
The project is opposed by three Indian tribes, a cable company and a cable trade group.
The tribes, including the Tulalips, say the turbines could interfere with fishing. The cable interests believe the project could damage trans-Pacific cables that run through the inlet.
The turbines would be placed about 575 and 770 feet from fiber-optic cables owned by Pacific Crossing of Danville, Calif. The cables extend more than 13,000 miles in a loop from Harbour Pointe in Mukilteo to Ajigaura and Shima, Japan, and Grover Beach, Calif.
A federal study recently concluded the project would not affect fishing or the cables.
