Leah Altman, an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, said she owes much of her dynamic success in life to help from nonprofit agencies aimed at urban Native American kids who struggle with problems like drugs, crime and invisibility.
Native invisibility is what Altman, 39, plans to tackle as the new executive director of Confluence, a small but influential Vancouver nonprofit that promotes Columbia River basin tribal history and contemporary tribal culture.
That means growing the organization’s budget substantially, Altman said, something the professional fundraiser and grant writer feels well equipped to do.
“That’s why they hired me,” she said with a grin. (According to a public document, Confluence’s grant-and-contribution income, which makes up the vast majority of its budget, was $562,000 in 2022.)
Addressing that invisibility also means shifting Confluence’s target audience toward Natives and away from interpretation and explanation for “mainstream culture,” Altman said.
After focusing largely on education and storytelling for white people, she said, Confluence’s new focus will be “Native stories for Native people.”
It’s up to local Natives to decide exactly how that will work, Altman said. Confluence plans to undertake an intensive outreach and planning process next year.
Altman said she was raised by a single, adoptive mom and only superficially connected to Native culture as she grew up in Portland. She turned to drinking and drugs and got kicked out of multiple high schools. Her mental health wasn’t good. She was arrested several times, she said.
“It was a difficult path I was on,” Altman said.
Fortunately, Altman also found her way to numerous programs and services that helped her plug back into school, get sober and even express herself as a marginalized young writer.
“There were arts organizations and homeless organizations,” she said. “There was NAYA (Native American Youth and Family Center), where I connected with other Lakota people. There was a lot of help that wrapped around me and saw me through.”
In college, Altman worked on a NAYA community survey of Native people in Portland. The survey found that local Native people lack resources and feel invisible, Altman wrote in a 2021 essay in Oregon Humanities magazine.
Altman has built a long track record of writing grants and managing nonprofit and social-justice agencies, including NAYA, Friends of the Children, Ecotrust, YWCA Clark County and the Intertribal Agriculture Council. She’s also a journalist, poet and editor whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, from Portland Monthly to Indian Country Today. A memoir about her quest to locate her tribal ancestors will be published next year.
Now two months into her Confluence job, the veteran of reaching out to people who feel invisible said she’s looking forward to contacting local Native people and communities in many ways — from personal contact at cultural and school events to whole-community email blasts.
“I want to go way beyond what Confluence has been so far,” she said. “I mean to reach out and build the organization and have a real community approach.”
Confluence influence
What is Confluence? Across its two-decade history, the organization’s mission and identity have already evolved.
What was first called The Confluence Project was founded by Vancouver’s Jane Jacobsen, a history-minded civic activist who died in 2021. The nonprofit was a permanent artistic follow-up to the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial observances of 2002. Jacobsen led the way toward raising millions of dollars for a string of commemorative public works of art at key historic sites along the Columbia River.
In a real coup for Confluence, the fledgling agency managed to enlist Maya Lin, the famous designer of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C. She envisioned what became five completed riverside sites from Cape Disappointment on the Pacific Coast to rural Clarkston in Eastern Washington.
Vancouver’s site is the biggest and stateliest of the Confluence sites. Known as the Land Bridge and designed by Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones, it’s a 40-foot wide pedestrian walkway with interpretive panels, native plantings, historical photographs and artistic touches that include words of welcome from many local tribes. Opened in 2008, the Vancouver Land Bridge curves over state Highway 14, symbolically reconnecting the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site (and Vancouver as a whole) with the river shoreline where tribal canoe traffic once came and went.
The other Confluence sites include:
Installing this network of permanent art sites was Confluence’s founding mission, after which the agency was expected to wind down, leaving it to local landowners or community partners to tend the sites. But instead, in 2013, the Confluence board of directors decided to pivot toward an ongoing, larger educational and cultural mission to keep spreading the word about Native history and Native culture now.
The underlying point of Confluence, former executive director Colin Fogarty said in 2023, has always been correcting a whitewashed historical record and building awareness of tribal life and culture throughout the region today.
Far from “discovering” an empty Pacific Northwest, Fogarty said, Lewis and Clark were newcomers in a busy region full of thriving Native communities, cultures and economies.
“It’s sometimes politely said that story has been ‘overlooked,’ but the truth is it was systematically erased from public discourse and from the history books,” Fogarty said.
To counteract that, Confluence’s second chapter saw the agency embrace public programming via storytelling gatherings, film screenings and Native educator appearances at local schools. Confluence has built an extensive digital library of stories, site guides, interviews, podcasts and photo galleries. Most recently, the agency facilitated the publication of the autobiography of a Warm Springs elder called “My Name is LaMoosh” (Oregon State University Press) and has published three annual issues of its own journal of all-Indigenous articles, poetry and artworks, Voices of the River.
Next chapter
Altman said she moved to Vancouver about a year ago and has been visiting all the Confluence sites. Recently she took her two children (ages 8 and 6) to The Listening Circle at Chief Timothy Park near Clarkston. Her thoughts about that site — and about one that’s been proposed but halted at Celilo Falls, near The Dalles — underline how Altman means to be a different kind of leader for Confluence.
The remoteness and silence of the Confluence site at Chief Timothy Park may make it difficult for some folks to reach, and a little overwhelming to take in, Altman said. The site seems to flow naturally from the land, she said, and makes few concessions to mainstream needs for explanatory placards and nearby parking. Some have complained that the site is “a best-kept secret” deserving better infrastructure and information for tourists.
But those aspects of the site are exactly why it provided the perfect experience for Indigenous people seeking to connect with their roots, Altman said.
“It puts the Native perspective first,” she said. “It doesn’t explain much. It messes with your head and you’ve just got to deal with it.”
Altman said she and her kids enjoyed a meaningful moment combining their voices in harmony at Chief Timothy Park and absorbing the spirit of the place, which seemed to say, “We were here long before you were.”
Meanwhile, Altman also noted that plans for a Celilo Falls public park and educational site near The Dalles have halted because one of the four tribes whose approval is mandatory has changed its mind. According to a 2019 story in The Confederated Umatilla Journal, the Yakama Nation withdrew its support because Celilo remains an active tribal fishing site.
It’s also the site of still-fresh trauma, Altman said, as a Native village there was submerged by the rising waters of the new Dalles Dam in 1957. All tribes want the destruction of Celilo to be better known, but not by making the site a white-oriented tourist attraction, Altman said.
Altman noted that she’s the first Native leader of a Native-oriented organization. Working gradually and politely toward what the white corporate world calls “diversity, equity and inclusion” isn’t her style, she said.
“I’ve always been a different kind of leader,” Altman said. “I’m a Native person and I am committed to working on behalf of Native people.”
