OPB's daily conversation covering news, politics, culture and the arts. Hosted By Dave Miller.
When the gates on The Dalles Dam closed in 1957, Celilo Falls was flooded and a vital salmon fishery for Yakama and Warm Springs tribal people was forever changed. Warm Springs Tribal Elder Linda Meanus was a young girl at the time, being raised by her grandparents, Flora Thompson and Chief Tommy Thompson, in nearby Celilo Village. In that bustling community along the Columbia River where salmon provided sustenance and a way of life, she learned about the importance of first foods, and gained an abiding reverence for her Indigenous culture and language. More than six decades later, Meanus has written “My Name is LaMoosh,” a chronicle of her early life in Celilo Village and a tribute to the legacy of her grandmother to whom the book is dedicated. We first spoke with Meanus in June 2021 about the release of her book which as published by OSU Press in collaboration with Confluence and historian Katy Barber.
Behind the Wok is a new digital archive from APANO that looks at the six historic Chinese restaurants that helped form Portland’s Jade District. These include Hung Far Low, Canton Grill, Chinese Village, New Cathay, Legin and Wong’s King Seafood. The archive explores how these restaurants became community hubs and how early restaurateurs leaned on one another. Suenn Ho is a principal urban designer at Resolve Architecture. Brian Liu is the community development manager at APANO. They both join us to share more on the project.
Perched high on a ridge in the South American Andes, a new observatory aims to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos and unravel some of the mysteries it holds. Featuring the world’s largest digital camera, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will spend the next 10 years continuously surveying and recording time-lapse movies of the stars, galaxies, asteroids and other objects moving across the southern hemisphere. The ultra-high-definition images will help create a kind of “Google Maps” of the night sky, according to Mario Jurić, a University of Washington astronomy professor and member of the observatory’s international science team.
Jurić and his team are creating an online database that amateur and professional astronomers can access to track changes across space and time and zoom into celestial objects of interest – including asteroids that may be on a collision course with Earth. Jurić joins us to share more about the observatory’s capabilities and the first set of images it will reveal on June 23.
In early June, a federal judge found the state in contempt of a court order that requires people with severe mental illness in custody to be quickly admitted to the the Oregon State Hospital. Now, the state is appealing that decision and has asked the court to pause the contempt ruling. Amelia Templeton is OPB’s health reporter and has been following this story. She joins us to share more on what is happening at the state’s psychiatric hospital.
Eugene accordionist Maria Telesheva won her first competition when she was just 6 years old. Now a rising senior at North Eugene High School, Telesheva has traveled the globe performing and competing as both a solo artist and as a duo with her father, Sergei. As recently reported by KLCC, she’s also a fellow with NPR’s performance program “From the Top” and a 2025 recipient of the Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award.
Telesheva joins us for a performance and to share what she thinks makes the accordion so special.
We do not need any more nonprofits in Oregon,” Libra Forde wrote that recently in an op-ed for The Oregonian/OregonLive, calling it a “difficult truth.” She’s the executive director of Women’s Foundation of Oregon, a philanthropic organization which does grant-making, research and policy advocacy. We hear more from Forde on how nonprofits should move forward as federal funds shrink and how merging organizations could serve communities better.
In 2012, then Oregon governor John Kitzhaber announced a lofty goal: by 2025, the state would achieve a 100% high school graduation rate. That hasn’t happened — the state’s graduation rate is around 82% — but the goal sparked the creation of a 12-year reporting project at OPB called “Class of 2025.”
OPB journalists began talking to 27 students who were then in kindergarten at Earl Boyles elementary school in Southeast Portland, and have followed most of them through to 2025. Back in 2014, “Think Out Loud" spent an hour with the first graders, their teachers and parents after an early pizza lunch at Earl Boyles. We listen back to that show.