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Teaching Academy inducts 32 new members

The Teaching Academy at Washington State University added 32 new members to its membership roster at its first induction ceremony since 2020.

“The organization is made up of educators from every college and campus who provide advocacy, expertise, and the resources to enable faculty to engage students in transformative learning experiences and achieve academic success,” said Kara Whitman, academy chair and faculty member in the School of the Environment.

“New members infuse energy and ideas into the group and make valuable contributions to teaching and the scholarship of teaching across WSU. “We are very pleased that so many talented and qualified educators applied for membership this year.”

Induction ceremonies were held April 13 in Pullman, led by Whitman and Ashley Boyd, vice chair and faculty member in the English department.

The roster of new members includes from CAS:
Lisa Carloye, Biological Sciences; Blythe Duell, Psychology; Robin Ebert Mays, English, WSU Tri‑Cities; Brigit Farley, History, WSU Tri‑Cities; Leeann Hunter, English; Sergey Lapin, Mathematics and Statistics, WSU Everett; Yimo Liu, Biological sciences, WSU Tri‑Cities; Allison Matthews, Psychology, WSU Tri‑Cities; and Michael Pieracci, Languages, Cultures, and Race, WSU Tri‑Cities.

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WSU Insider
Big Country News

History graduate to speak at World War II conference in Washington, D.C.

History scholar and 2023 WSU graduate Alicia Callahan’s Honors College thesis about the heroic efforts of World War II soldiers has drawn national attention, earning her a summer speaking engagement in Washington, D.C., and a trip to Normandy, France.

Callahan, who was honored as this year’s Department of History Outstanding Senior, will present her thesis about the U.S. Army’s heroic 6th Armored Division’s service at the Friends of the National World War II Memorial’s annual teachers conference in July. She is one of eight presenters selected to speak at the conference and the only presenter not already working in academia or a similar field. Her presentation will occur at the Military Women’s Memorial.

Callahan’s undergraduate research efforts also gained the attention of the Best Defense Foundation, a non-profit organization created in 2018 to honor and commemorate veterans, often returning them to battlefield sites. She has been invited by the foundation to join military veterans who survived the D-Day invasion in 1944 for a special week-long trip to Normandy, to mark the invasion’s 79th anniversary.

“It’s exciting. I’m honored,” said Callahan, who is from the rural central Washington community of Royal City and whose own great-grandfather fought in World War II. “I know it’s going to be emotional. Hearing their stories is going to bring me to tears.”

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WSU Insider

Frank S. Matsura: Portraits from the Borderlands photo exhibit to open at the MAC

Photographer Frank Sakae Matsura spent less than a decade in northern Washington state in the early 20th century but left an unforgettable visual legacy of the Okanogan River Valley.

Matsura, born in Japan in 1873, grew up in Tokyo. His family, from a line of samurai warriors, was aristocratic but he was orphaned and raised by an aunt and uncle, who taught him English at a school they started.

At some point, he was trained to use cameras and process photographs, and his prospects changed.

It’s not clear why, but Matsura left Japan in his 20s, and traveled to the Seattle area, and he briefly visited Alaska. In 1903, he answered a newspaper ad for a cook’s helper in the Elliott Hotel in Conconully, Washington, and stepped off a stagecoach in a frontier area where farmers were planting orchards, workers were building an irrigation dam and small towns were popping up wherever settlers put down roots.

While working at the hotel, Matsura also snapped photos and processed them in the hotel laundry.

Around 1907, Matsura opened a two-room photography studio in the town of Okanogan, where he did portrait sessions, sold postcards, novelty photos and scenic pictures. The diminutive man mostly used a 5-by-7 view camera to document the people and landscape of the Okanogan Valley for several years, creating an impressive portfolio of work that is still treasured today for the depth and breadth of the subject matter and the detail of the photos.

Michael Holloman.
Holloman

Washington State University art and history professor Michael Holloman, who is also an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, has edited a group of Matsura’s portraits of American Indian neighbors into a new exhibit called “Frank S. Matsura: Portraits from the Borderland” which opens Saturday at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

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The Spokesman Review

QAnon Is the Latest American Conspiracy Theory

The rise of the right-wing paranoid fantasy, egged on by Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, reflects deep currents in American politics.

America has a long history of conspiracy-theory-based movements that initially seem too unhinged to take seriously. But amid a wide-ranging distrust of traditional sources of public authority, they have come to acquire a perverse sort of legitimacy for a segment of the citizenry clinging to dogmatic skepticism of a hostile, faithless, and nonwhite social world. The pattern goes back to the nation’s founding: As historians like Bernard Bailyn have documented, the Revolutionary-era mindset of colonial revolt against the crown was steeped in lurid fantasies of the organized British defilement of Protestant virtue. Nineteenth-century anti-Catholic fantasies of libertine monks and priests sexually violating white Protestant women took root in anonymous pamphlets—the bygone equivalent of an Internet discussion board—before burgeoning into mass nativist political movements under the direction of the Anti-Masonic and Know-Nothing parties. Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan himself, while no LaRouchite, was an enthusiast of end-times speculation and its signature theme of noble Protestant innocence besieged—a fact that the president’s advisers jealously guarded from the public at a point in Cold War hostilities when the genuine threat of nuclear apocalypse didn’t need a spiritual imprimatur from the leader of the free world.

Against this historical backdrop, QAnon’s apocalyptic fever dreams are less the disease than a symptom—one among countless recent augurs of severe democratic decline and fascist ascension in America. In a more immediate sense, QAnon is the digital offspring of the Tea Party movement and birtherism—militant, conspiracy-theory-steeped uprisings that began on the right fringe to similar choruses of dismissal from traditional political gatekeepers and steadily grew into mass mobilizations behind the Trump presidency.

Matthew Avery Sutton.
Sutton

“The very first time I heard of QAnon, an academic colleague had pulled up a chart showing all these arrows and lines of influence, and I was amazed how similar it was to the apocalyptic charts from the late 19th-century millennial movements,” says Matthew Avery Sutton, a historian at Washington State University and the author of American Apocalypse, a landmark study of Protestant millennialism. Sutton notes that QAnon’s origins in the shitposting world of right-wing discussion boards call to mind other paranoid turns in the country’s past that drew on mass hatreds and religious bigotry to fuel their sense of millennial certainty: “There are parallels here with things like the Illuminati, the anti-Masonics, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There have always been these things that are sort of secular but sort of not. They offer something secular people can buy into but religious people can also buy into. It works both ways.”

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The Nation

Denied, dispersed, disadvantaged: Chinook tribe pursues centuries-old fight for federal recognition

Sam Robinson, vice chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation, is “telling the story”

When Sam Robinson arrives at a public event in his distinctive cone-shaped Chinook hat to sing, play his drum and tell stories, what seems like a cultural, broadly spiritual moment is something else too: a political protest.

Vancouver resident Robinson, 66, is vice chairman of the Chinook Indian Nation. His frequent personal appearances aim to reunify and strengthen a tribe that’s been denied, disadvantaged and dispersed by government repression and intertribal competition for close to two centuries.

More than 100 Chinook tribal members and allies gathered outside the Marshall House on Vancouver’s Officers Row to press Congress to pass the Chinook Restoration Act, a law that would bestow federal recognition and start the process of establishing a Chinook reservation.

The Quinault Indian Nation has its own federally recognized reservation, but over the years, ongoing treaty negotiations also designated some Quinault land for several other tribes — first the Quileute, Queets and Hoh people, then later the Chehalis, Chinook and Cowlitz, according to Indian Country Today.

All of those other tribes, except the Chinook, have since succeeded in gaining federal recognition and establishing their own reservations. But Chinook land allotments and hunting and fishing rights on Quinault land remain in dispute. In 2018, Quinault officials said they still want the Chinook to waive any and all rights to their land.

Steven Fountain.
Fountain

“The conflict, from the Quinault perspective, has … centered on tribal sovereignty, specifically whether non-Quinault tribal members can exert their hunting and fishing rights there,” said Steve Fountain, an assistant professor of history at Washington State University Vancouver. “In short, if the Chinook Nation is recognized, Quinaults argue that they will lose control of their own reservation lands and resources.”

The Columbian requested comment from the Quinault Indian Nation and received no reply.

“I think you will find it hard to get anyone to go on record who is directly involved in the opposition,” Fountain told The Columbian.

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The Columbian