In the Media

Some government agencies and universities in Washington state continue to hold the remains of Indigenous people, despite a 1990 law that requires them to work to return those remains to tribes.

By the numbers: According to ProPublica's database, 10 institutions in Washington state still had the remains of Indigenous people in their possession as of December.

• Of those, some have made the vast majority available to tribes for repatriation. For instance, the University of Washington had only one Indigenous person's remains, after making the remains of 281 others available for return to tribes, according to ProPublica's data. UW didn't provide details about why that last set of remains was still in its collection.

Meanwhile, Western Washington University had returned only 3 sets of Indigenous remains, while 89 remained in its collection, per the database.

Western Washington University has a new chief of police, as Katryne Potts was sworn in this week, WWU said in its email newsletter, Western Today. Potts is a 22-year veteran of law enforcement, WWU said. She takes over from former Bellingham Police Department Chief Cliff Cook, who was the campus interim chief during a national search after former WWU Chief Darin Rasmussen was named WWU’s assistant vice president for risk, ethics, safety and resilience.

Remind Students to Think.

Johann N. Neem, professor of history, Western Washington University

With ChatGPT, a student can turn in a passable assignment without reading a book, writing a word or having a thought. But reading and writing are essential to learning. They are also capacities we expect of college graduates.

ChatGPT cannot replace thinking. Students who turn in assignments using ChatGPT have not done the hard work of taking inchoate fragments and, through the cognitively complex process of finding words, crafting thoughts of their own.

With an hour or so of work, a student could turn an AI-generated draft into a pretty good paper and receive credit for an assignment they did not complete. But I worry more that students will not read closely what I assign. I fear that they will not be inspired, or challenged, by the material. If the humanities grew out of the study—and love of—words, what happens when words don’t matter to our students?

Professors should find new ways to help students learn to read and write well and to help them make the connection between doing so and their own growth. I anticipate offering more opportunities for students to write in class. In-class writing should not just be additive; hopefully, my classes will in time look and feel different as students learn to approach writing as a practice of learning as well as a demonstration of it.

I distinctly remember the day my younger brother, Wayne, first came home from the hospital. I was 4 years old and sitting on my front steps when my mom laid that little baby in my arms, and I thought: He's mine. Wayne and I were close our whole lives. I could talk to him about anything.

I was there with Wayne when he passed away from complications of a severe spinal cord injury in September, 2021. The assisted living facility where he lived only allowed one person to be there at a time, due to the pandemic. In the middle of the night, while I sat with my brother, there was this terrible silence and I knew he had stopped breathing. When the spirit leaves the body, it is so profoundly silent. I called Wayne's husband, Larry, and we called the rest of the family.

Wayne and I had talked about what he wanted to happen to his body years previously. I'm a volunteer at the Palliative Care Institute at Western Washington University, which was how I first heard about a cutting-edge body disposition alternative to cremation or traditional burial. Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, came to the Institute to give a presentation on her company, which composts bodies and turns them into soil.

Lack of access has stymied Western Washington University students from conducting research projects or taking field trips to the park. 

“Access to the forest supports the commitment to hands-on experiential learning via course-based field trips, group projects, and faculty-guided individual graduate and undergraduate research opportunities,” said Teena Gabrielson, dean of the university’s College of the Environment.

She said the biodiversity of the forest and alpine wetlands offer opportunities for invaluable research, including comparative studies of the climate impact of old-growth and regenerated logged trees.

Marco Hatch, an associate professor of Environmental Science at Western Washington University and a member of the Samish Indian Nation, works in the Pacific Northwest with regenerative clam gardens. He spoke about the systems at play in “eco-colonialism,” which highlights the interconnected ecosystem and why regenerative practices are so important.

“Eco-colonialism is typically defined as extra territorial pollution impacting indigenous people in their practices. You can think of this as upstream from a tribal community there’s a large industrial facility dumping toxins into the water that are flowing to that reservation community.”

About a quarter of all white Bostonians who had estate inventory taken between 1700 and 1775 owned enslaved people, according to Western Washington University history professor Jared Ross Hardesty, who is quoted in the resolution. At the peak of slavery in Boston in the mid-18th century, Hardesty estimates more than 1,600 Africans were enslaved in Boston.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

You've heard of white snow, maybe even gray snow, but what about pink snow? High up in the mountains across the U.S., rapid growth of algae, or algal blooms, are turning melting snow pink. They further darken the surface of the snow and make it melt more quickly, and scientists are trying to understand what's causing them and how they impact water levels in drought-prone areas. One of those scientists is Robin Kodner, an associate professor of environmental science at Western Washington University. And she's here to talk with us today. Welcome to the show.

ROBIN KODNER: Thank you.

Professor Steven Hollenhorst of Western Washington University's College of the Environment wants outdoors people to acknowledge their contribution to climate change and then take measures to decarbonize society.

Hollenhorst has promoted “locavism,” the idea of creating outdoor adventures at home. But we all know how difficult it is to forgo international travel or even stop driving to Artist Point to hike to Ptarmigan Ridge or Lake Ann.

Hollenhorst gets it. Really. He does.

“It is so beguiling because it looks sustainable,” Hollenhorst said of wilderness recreation. “We’re out there human-powered, moving ourselves up the mountain or skiing. Pull away the veil and you see right away that the entire enterprise is fossil-fuel driven.”

It’s the most northwestern university in the mainland U.S. and it sits right under the nose of a major mystery.

“We have these active volcanoes right in our backyards,” said Susan DeBari, PhD, Professor of Geology, Western Washington University.

Western Washington University hosts a geology program dedicated to putting together the puzzle of what makes up some of the most dangerous volcanoes in the United States.