Ink People, Wiyot Tribe and City of Eureka Receive $50,000 NEA Our Town Grant

Press release from the Ink People Center for the Arts:

Ink People Center for the Arts has received a $50,000 Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a public art proposal advanced in partnership with the Wiyot Tribe and the City of Eureka, titled “Speaking Soulatluk in Eureka.”

This project, scheduled to take place over a two-year period, from 2022-2024, will bring artworks and wayfinding signs re-introducing names and stories in Soulatluk, the language of the Wiyot people, to places in the Eureka Cultural District, which is located on Wiyot land. The Ink People will be responsible for program design, project management and finances; Wiyot Tribe representatives will provide historical and linguistic advisory and cultural consultancy services, in addition to making the new Da Gou Rou Louwi’ Cultural Center in the district available to function as a programming center and meeting place. The City of Eureka will provide administrative and logistic support.

“The Wiyot Tribe, the Soulatluk Program, and the Da Gou Rou Louwi’ Cultural Center are excited to partner with Ink People on this project,” Atkins said. “Through ongoing community engagement, we will be able to share Wiyot people’s history, language, and lifeways in exciting and engaging ways.”

These institutional partners will work together to design public interventions that center the Wiyot people’s language. Wayfinding placards will restore local landmarks’ original Soulatluk designations and call attention to the Wiyot worldview those place names express. Graphic designs for billboards, murals, and public transit will bring Soulatluk stories, words, and phrases back into the everyday life of this region. Sound art installations linked by QR codes to sites in the landscape will make it possible for contemporary pedestrians in Eureka’s Cultural District to hear the sounds of Soulatluk spoken. The ambient soundscapes will incorporate field recordings made in nature in addition to drawing on archival recordings made by Weaver Denman, Nettie Rossig, and Della Prince, three of the last fluent native speakers of Soulatluk, before they passed away in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These will be accompanied by recordings of contemporary language speakers made by Wiyot tribal member Marnie Atkins, the Tribe’s linguist Lynnika Butler, and other Wiyot community members.

“Over the last couple of years, our community has found several creative ways to embrace our history. I’m continuously impressed with the way our citizens have taken challenging topics and historical experiences and used them to share important lessons,” City Manager Miles Slattery said. “Like the recent Eureka Chinatown project, this new tribute to the Wiyot Language is another great example of our citizens using their many talents to educate and enrich our community.”

The grant proposal reads, in part: “It is important both for Eureka residents of Wiyot descent and for those of other ethnicities to hear Soulatluk spoken and see Soulatluk words in the course of everyday life. This will honor the resilience, creativity and strength that made it possible for Wiyot people to survive the experience of colonization, oppression, and attempted genocide. This project not only answers the community’s need to acknowledge the grievous harm that was perpetrated for generations on the Indigenous inhabitants of this land; it recognizes the vital role that the Wiyot play in this region’s culture, now and into the future.”

“As drought and wildfire reshape California’s ecosystem, the holistic vision of world renewal expressed in the Wiyot language and belief system acquire newly urgent significance,” Gabrielle Gopinath, marketing and resource development director at the Ink People Center for the Arts, said. “In bringing Soulatluk words, phrases, and stories back to Eureka’s streets, this project seeks to bring Indigenous worldviews back to the center of this region’s thought and policy.”

“The Ink People is thrilled to support greater Soulatluk language visibility in Jaroujiji and beyond,” Leslie Castellano, Executive Director of the Ink People, said. “Through this endeavor, we have the opportunity to engage with ongoing efforts to nourish cultural vitality in our community, enriching our sense of place and supporting Wiyot culture as a living presence in our day to day lives.”

Visit www.inkpeople.org or call (707) 442-8413 to learn more.