Ethos Magazine Summer 2021

Volume 12 Issue 4 I Summer 2021

Cover Photo by Julia Page

Way too White

Many Black students at UO feel uncomfortable and unsupported in a predominantly white university and city.

Care for Your Final Days You only die once. Here’s how death doulas in Eugene make that experience count.

A Troubled Industry A UO student shares her trauma from a program for “troubled teens” as the industry faces a nationwide reckoning.

Our Mission: Ethos is a nationally recognized, award-winning independent student publication. Our mission is to elevate the voices of marginalized people who are underrepresented in the media landscape, and to write in-depth, human-focused stories about the issues affecting them. We also strive to support our diverse student staff and help them find future success. Ethos produces a quarterly free print magazine full of well-reported and powerful feature stories, innovative photography, creative illustrations and eye-catching design. On our website, we also produce compelling written and multimedia stories.

Contents.

06 Therapy or Punishment?

A UO student was forced to go to a camp for “troubled teens.”

Here’s her experience.

11 Black in a Sea of White Black students only make up 2 percent of UO’s student population.

16 Last of Their Kind A bookstore, a record shop and a porn shop thrive despite existential threats to their industries. .

Ethos is part of Emerald Media Group, a non-profit organization that’s fully independent of the University of Oregon. Students maintain complete editorial control over Ethos, and work tirelessly to produce the magazine. Since our inception as Korean Ducks Magazine in 2005, we’ve worked hard to share a multicultural spirit with our readership. We embrace diversity in our stories, in our student staff and in our readers. We want every part of the magazine to reflect the diversity of our world.

Email editor@ethosmagonline.com with comments, questions, complaints and story ideas. You can find our past issues at issuu.com/ethosmag and more stories, including multimedia content, at ethosmagonline.com.

22 Beyond Hospice Death doulas in Eugene provide end-of-life care that goes beyond life support and prescriptions.

31 Learning on the Inside

During my time at South Eugene High School, my brother and I were referred to as “The Asians” in our friend group. Other times, people called us “chink” or “Jap.”

28 Circus for All

A UO program lets students and incarcerated people learn together in classes in prisons.

37 Misogyny and Gaming

The summer after my sophomore year, I interned in Oakland, California. The first night I showed up, I went out and found myself in a packed nightclub. And surrounded by sweaty bodies, drunk in an unfamiliar city, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. It was the first time I'd been in a place diverse enough where I didn’t feel like I stood out for not being white.

A circus studio in Eugene provides a space for people with any kind of body.

Female esports players at UO speak about the misogyny in their sport.

Letter from the editor Even though I had a big friend group at South and got invited to all of the parties, I never really felt like I fit in. At the time, I didn’t know why. When I enrolled in UO, that feeling persisted.

That summer, I finally realized why I never felt like I belonged at South or UO: Oregon is way too white, and as a Japanese American, I just wasn’t white enough to fit in.

This year I found out Oregon didn’t just happen to be an extremely white state. After white settlers murdered and displaced the Indigenous people who lived here, they created the only state in the union that explicitly outlawed Black people from living in it.

Oregon was intentionally created to be a white utopia. To this day, it’s a place where white people can live their lives without having to regularly engage with people of other races who might call out their racism.

When people called me “Jap” in high school, I always let it slide because I was almost always the only non-white person in the room. I didn’t have anybody to share my experience with; nobody could tell me it was valid to be hurt by the comments.

Though I didn’t experience the same level of racism at UO that I did in high school, I was still often the only person of color in my workplaces. The journalism school staff and students are overwhelmingly white. Ethos’ staff, thankfully, is much more diverse than the overall UO population. But every professional staff member of the Emerald Media Group, the nonprofit that Ethos belongs to, and everyone on the board of directors that I worked with and answered to as editor-in-chief this year was white.

Oregon and Eugene are extremely white, but that’s not an excuse for UO’s lack of diversity. If it was a welcoming place for people of color, non-white students would come here. UO, the School of Journalism and Communication and the Emerald Media Group need change.

My time as editor of Ethos is over, but I hope it will continue to be one of the few welcoming places for people of color on campus. I hope Ethos will continue publishing stories, like our cover story for this term, that reveal racism and advocate for change.

Jade Yamazaki Stewart

2 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

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Editorial Editor in Chief Jade Yamazaki Stewart Managing Editor Nick Rosenberger Associate Editors Sam Nguyen Caleb Barber Anna Mattson Writers Lauren Brown Clayton Franke Shannon Golden Ella Hutcherson Anna Mattson Emily Topping Mariah Botkin Nika Bartoo-Smith Cole Sinanian Lily Sinkovitz Fact-checking Editor Madeline Ryan Fact Checkers Lauren Brown Noah Camuso Chloe Bryant Rui Lin Bella Zurowski Lily Sinkovitz Lauryn Cole

Photography Photo Editor Jozie Donaghey Photojournalists Amalia Birch Isabel Lemus Kristensen Natalie Myking Collin Bell Johanna Roseburg Henry Cohen Lucy Loftis Grace Hefley Julia Page 4 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

Social Media Social Media Director Chloe Friedenberg Production Assistant Jaila Cha-Sim

Creative Art Director Emma Nolan Designers Emma Williams Kira Chan Crystal Franklin Kaeleigh James Nickolas Guzman

Multimedia Multimedia Director Jassy McKinley Multimedia Assistant Emma Askren Multimedia Producers Natalie Schechtel Kevin Wang

Multimedia Multimedia Director Jassy McKinley Multimedia Assistant Emma Askren Multimedia Producers Natalie Schechtel Kevin Wang

Business President and Publisher Bill Kunerth VP of Operations Kathy Carbone Director of Sales & Marketing Shelly Rondestvedt Creative Director Sam Rudkin Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 5

Lauren Pak, a senior at the University of Oregon, was enrolled in a wilderness therapy program in Colorado when she was 16. After completing the program, she was sent to an all-girls therapeutic boarding school in Utah where she says she endured a traumatic experience.

Troubled Teens Written by Emily Topping Photographed by Summer Surgent

A University of Oregon student shares her trauma from the “troubled teen industry” amid a nationwide reckoning.

As hot water ran down Lauren Pak’s shoulders, the tile floor beneath her feet turned a silty brown. She separated the knots from her jet-black hair and scrubbed beneath her fingernails, removing dirt that had traveled all the way from Colorado to Utah with her.

Across the room, two adult women watched her shower.

Pak didn’t care — it was the first time the 16-year-old had properly bathed in months. She’d spent the last half-year hiking through the sweltering heat of Arizona, then through the forests of Colorado, in an intensive wilderness therapy program. Although she’d graduated from wilderness therapy, her parents still weren’t sure what to do with the “unruly” teen. So instead of returning home to the Bay Area, Pak was transferred to an all-girls therapeutic boarding school in Utah where she now had to strip naked, bathe, then squat and cough in front of staff members before she could be admitted. She had no idea when she could go home.

“At the time, I was just exhausted and relieved to be somewhere new,” says Pak, who is graduating from the University of Oregon. She says she had no idea the next few months at the boarding school would subject her to bizarre punishments at the hands of staff, such as scrubbing bathroom floors and toilets, humiliating therapy techniques that involved degrading other girls and weeks of silent treatment from fellow students.

At age 16, Pak became one of the more than 10,000 young people each year enrolled in the “troubled teen industry.” The industry is defined by the National Youth Rights Association as a range of programs including boot camps, behavior modification facilities and wilderness therapy programs, all “marketed to parents who feel like they need to change their child’s behavior.”

I fe

el lik e there’s hope that things are changing

6 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

At therapeuticboardingschools.org, one of many companies offering desperate parents guidance for their teenagers, an online checklist titled “Behavior Flags that Mean It’s Time to Send Your Teen to a Behavior Modification School” includes substance abuse and illegal activities, along with mental illnesses like anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders as warning signs.

The website says teenagers who have engaged in illegal activity are at a higher risk for arrest, “so it is best to avoid that by sending them to a troubled teen boarding school.”

While people in the industry view these programs as a final opportunity to save wayward children, critics say the industry lends itself to abuse and mistreatment while profiting off vulnerable teenagers. The programs are undeniably profitable — in the state of Utah alone in 2015, residential treatment facilities for teens and young adults brought in $269 million, according to an economic impact study by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.

In Paris Hilton’s documentary “This is Paris,” she describes enduring a nightmare at the Provo Canyon School, a behavioral health center for teens in Utah. In the documentary, Hilton describes being attacked by fellow students at least four times, including once in her sleep, pinned down by her arms and legs nearly 30 times by staff members, and injected with sedatives 17 times over three months at the school.

Former participants of these programs, like Pak, say something must change. Thousands are flocking to social media using the hashtag #breakingcodesilence to speak out about their experiences and even take legal action against the industry they say traumatized them.

In December of last year, a class-action lawsuit of roughly 25 members sought millions of dollars in retribution from Trinity Teen Solutions and Triangle Cross Boys Ranch on charges of “human trafficking and abuse” in Wyoming, according to the Billings Gazette. In March 2021, the owners of Circle Hope Girl's Ranch and Boarding School in Missouri were arrested following a wave of allegations on TikTok. The husband and wife who owned the school are facing a combined 101 felony counts, including charges of child molestation and abuse, according to NBC News.

Now, a lawsuit against the Utah boarding school that Pak attended is in the process of being filed, according to Michael Young, a lawyer who is representing people who are suing the school. Knowing that in the future, children may not have to endure the trauma she did, Pak says, is the first step for her healing. Ethos Magazine is not naming the school here because the lawsuit has not yet been filed.

Once Pak was strip-searched at the Utah school, she says she was given a bright pink uniform to distinguish her from the

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 7

other girls. This meant she had the lowest level of privileges: she had to be within eyesight of a staff member at all times, could not call her parents and could barely speak to the other teens.

“I think they probably thought I would start trouble,” Pak says.

“And to be honest, they were right.”

The students at Pak’s Utah boarding school were sent away from their homes for various reasons. Some had behavioral issues, leaving behind volatile and violent households. Others struggled with eating disorders, thus the weekly weigh-ins the girls were made to take part in.

And some, like Pak, dealt with substance abuse.

Months before her arrival in Utah, while she was a sophomore in high school, Pak became involved with a “really shitty circle,” she says.

While her parents battled through a messy divorce, Pak moved into a new, smaller home with her mother. Money was tight. Sometimes there wasn’t enough to cover lunch, or even a mattress for Pak to sleep on, leaving her to crash on the couch or at friends’ houses.

She began spending more and more time away from home.

“I heard from one of my friends that I could make money selling meth,” Pak says. “I thought, ‘maybe this is a quick way to help myself.’”

Pak soon began moving methamphetamine in the Bay area, trading weeknights studying in her room for hours cruising around the streets of San Francisco, picking up packages and wads of cash. Sure, the money was nice, she says, but perhaps each late night out with her new friends simply meant one less facing her crumbling home life.

One evening, on the way back from meeting with another dealer, the previous few weeks of little rest began to catch up with Pak. She leaned her head against the backseat window of her friend’s car and drifted to sleep, the sound of rap music reverberating in the speakers.

She woke to the sound of the car folding around a telephone pole.

“I guess the driver was really high and lost control,” Pak says.

“Somehow I was totally fine.” Injured or not, the passengers weren’t about to wait around for the police to show up. Pak and her friends ditched the car, leaving behind thousands of dollars in cash and drugs.

The next day, Pak went home and confessed everything to her mother. Within the week, the teenager was being driven to a psychiatric facility by her father and aunt. What she had hoped to be the end of her trauma would turn out to be only the beginning.

“A lot of you have made choices that have taken you down a dark path,” said the middle-aged therapist, leaning forward on his knees and rubbing the back of his bald head in his hands, Pak recalls. A circle of teenage girls faced him.

Pak fidgeted in her seat, glancing out the window toward the Rocky Mountains on the horizon.

“Some of you may even die before you’re twenty,” the man continued, according to Pak. “I want you all to go around the circle and point at who you think will die first.”

This was a typical day of group therapy at the Utah boarding school, says Pak and two other former students who have corroborated Pak’s experience. A student would share something they 8 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

What she had hoped to be the end of her trauma would turn out to be only the beginning.

Pak, who plans on moving to Hawaii to work as a fisherman and obtain her diving certification, begins to pack her belongings. A bin near the closet contains her biology textbooks and a molecular model she accumulated throughout her time at the University of Oregon.

were struggling with, such as connecting with other girls and then receive “feedback” from the other girls. The feedback often took the form of insults: You weren’t connecting with others because you were a liar, and untrustworthy.

In another form of group therapy, girls were made to reveal details of their past trauma, “whether they were ready to talk about it or not,” says a former student, a transgender man named Riley, who has chosen to be identified only by his first name.

Sometimes, he says, students would be crying speaking about their sexual assault while the therapist pressed them for details. If you tried to stick up for another student, Riley says, you would be tagged with the derogatory label “rescue ranger.”

if the student “acted up, AKA told anyone about the abuse,” Riley says.

Had Riley been able to speak freely with his parents, he might have told them about the bullying he was facing. In one instance, the then-16-year-old was instructed to clean the upstairs bathrooms as part of the students’ weekly chore routine. When he went to open the garbage can, it was filled to the brim with rotting, used tampons.

“The whole thing had to be a coordinated effort,” Riley says.

“Since trash was emptied every day and the trash bag and bottom was deliberately taken out.”

The practice of pitting therapy patients, in this case, teenage girls, against each other is known as “attack therapy.” The technique is used in military boot camps, some rehab facilities and throughout programs in the troubled teen industry.

A staff member watched while Riley sobbed, he says, gagging as he fished through the bin of tampons. Some were still warm. He was given only a thin piece of toilet paper to protect his hands, which were stained with blood by the end of the ordeal.

The premise is that to develop a strong moral character, addicts and other troubled persons must have their psyche completely broken down, generally through harassment and ridicule in a group setting, to be rebuilt again.

“When I asked for help, the girls who had hated me the most only smiled at me and said ‘suck it up,’" Riley says. “Till this day the sight or smell of menstrual blood sends me into a panic.”

For many of the girls, it became too much, and they begged for their families to take them home. However, one of the defining characteristics of therapeutic boarding schools, according to interviews with former students across four different facilities, is limited contact with the outside world.

At Pak’s Utah school, the students were allowed one phone call a week, chosen from a list of pre-approved contacts. A staff member would dial the number, then put the call on speakerphone.

Their finger hovered over the disconnect button, ready to hang up

Pak eventually abandoned the idea that her parents would come and rescue her. She continued to rebel, stealing food from the kitchen pantry and refusing to take part in group dance sessions. The school pushed back: As a form of punishment, the other girls were forbidden from speaking to her.

Although Pak put on a tough front, the experience could be lonely. She found a brief glimpse of hope, months into the program when a girl named Emily arrived. The teenager was a year older, with blonde hair and blue eyes that caught Pak’s with a wink anytime something funny happened. The two began to communicate by passing notes.

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 9

“It was such a relief to have her,” Pak says. “We fell for each other.”

The girls began to sneak off during breaks to hide in the school library, stealing kisses between shelves of books. When they were eventually caught, their kiss disrupted by a shout from the bald therapist, the couple was told to stay seven feet away from each other at all times and were banned from speaking with each other.

“When you’re monitored and punished so often, it only makes you want to do more bad things,” Pak says.

The average length of stay at the Utah boarding school is seven to ten months, according to the school’s website. Riley lasted nine, after eventually graduating to “day treatment,” in which a student is placed with a host family to transition back to normal life. There, during his first unmonitored communication with his parents, he successfully begged to be returned home.

Written by Ella Hutcherson Photos by Julia Page

Almost everyone who goes here is white There are only 548 Black students at the University of Oregon.

Pak managed to stay eleven months, before smuggling a small bag of cocaine into the facility following her first weekend home visit.

After another student reported her, Pak was booted from the program.

Partly due to the success of the #breakingcodesilence movement, the troubled teen industry is facing unprecedented scrutiny. On Mar. 3, 2021, the Utah House gave final approval to a bill that greatly increases regulation and oversight of behavioral modification programs. The bill bans strip searches and mandates that children have weekly communication with their families without monitoring from staff.

The bill has gained support from Oregon state Sen. Sara Gelser, who is introducing her own legislation to keep Oregon children safe in out-of-state facilities. According to reporting by the Salt Lake Tribune, Gelser was “shocked and heartbroken” by a story of an unnamed 14-year-old girl with developmental disabilities who was sent to a behavioral modification program in Utah in 2018 by Oregon social workers.

Gelser’s bill would require any program housing children from Oregon to allow Oregon regulators inside the facility to ensure children are kept safe. For troubled-teen-industry survivors like Pak, this is a promising step.

“I feel like there’s hope that things are changing,” Pak says.

Now nearing the end of her degree at the University of Oregon, Pak says she is still affected by her high school years in the program.

For example, she says she still struggles with trusting men and authority figures. After leaving the program, she says she was contacted on Instagram by a male staff member who sent her sexually explicit pictures. Now, she says, the line between someone she can trust and one who will take advantage of her, is blurred.

Pak plans to testify in a class-action lawsuit against the program she was part of, alleging that staff members acted inappropriately and were unqualified to provide therapy.

For the community of thousands of survivors of behavioral modification programs, simply having their story heard can be the first step in healing, Pak says.

Tucked away in the Hendricks Park neighborhood of Eugene, Ore., Pak waters plants in her dining room. A happy birthday sign hangs in the background, leftover from her roommate’s birthday a few weeks prior.

10 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

Instead of the punishment these girls received at these facilities, Pak says, these girls deserved empathy.

Donovan Jones, a third-year student at the University of Oregon, sits in a lecture hall in the Lillis Business Complex where he had classes before the pandemic. “I haven’t had a single Black teacher in any of my classes,” Jones says. “You can feel Summer 2021 |who’s ETHOS 11 you.” much more comfortable reaching out to somebody more| like

%

K

oyin Olopade paused on the floor of the University of Oregon Student Recreation Center as throngs of incoming freshmen milled around her at a college orientation event. Voices and laughter echoed through the cavernous space as students from all over the country jumped at their first opportunity to explore the campus.

Despite the happy environment, Olopade was overwhelmed. Here, she was finally coming to terms with the reality she had spent the entire day trying to rationalize.

Almost everyone who goes here is white.

Olopade, who identifies as Black, had spent the morning and afternoon with a small orientation group, all of whom were white except for her and one other person. She had tried to convince herself that it had just been a small sample size. But standing in the middle of hundreds of people who had chosen UO as their home, she could see this was not the case.

Olopade had chosen UO because it was the reasonable thing to do. She was an Oregon resident. The school had offered her more financial aid than any other school she’d applied to.

Westview High School, her alma mater, was 40 percent white. UO was 60 percent white. From an outsider’s perspective, it sounded like the same thing.

Olopade shakes her head. “It wasn’t the same thing,” she says, laughing.

Olopade is one of 548 Black students enrolled at UO. Black students comprise 2.4 percent of the student population. This percentage has increased by less than 1 percent in the last 27 years. The university’s mission statement says that “we value our diversity and seek to foster equity and inclusion in a welcoming, safe, and respectful community.” And UO President Michael Schill has prioritized “improving inclusion and diversity” during his tenure, according to his UO biography.

But some Black students who attend UO say these statements don’t reflect the reality of their experiences. First-year graduate student Imani Lindberg says she does not see herself reflected in the faculty, and she’s enrolled in classes that scarcely address diversity and inclusion issues in her field. First-year Ellie Akough describes feeling frustrated with a lack of actual changes in campus diversity. She struggles with her racial identity studying at a predominantly white institution and says she has an entirely different racial experience as a discus, shotput and hammer thrower for UO Track & Field than she does as a member of the general campus community. Third-year Donovan Jones says he

experiences a sense of isolation in his student environment that has been exacerbated by events of racially motivated violence in the country.

According to Black Cultural Center Coordinator Dr. Aris Hall, the university’s location in a historically racist and predominantly white state can prevent Black students from choosing UO. But she says the state’s history and demographics are not an excuse for apathy.

Source: inclusion.uoregon.edu/facts-and-figures

“The reality is, we can’t change the context and the demographics of Oregon,” Hall says. “Which means that something else has to change.”

When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union to explicitly ban Black people from living, working or owning property within its borders. Though the U.S. 14th Amendment negated this exclusion law, the regulation remained on the books until 1926, leaving lasting racist ideologies in its communities and institutions.

Mabel Byrd, the first Black student to enroll at UO in 1917, was also the only Black resident of Eugene at the time. Because she was not allowed to live on campus, she lived in the home of one of her professors. Dr. William Sherman Savage, the first Black student to do graduate work at UO in 1926, was also the only Black resident of the city. According to UO Special Collections and University Archives, Eugene was the center of the Ku Klux Klan’s activity in Oregon at the time.

It was not until after World War II that the number of Black Oregon residents and university students began to increase. Even then, the increase was minimal. In 1983, when the school officially began recording racial and ethnic demographics in the student population, 175 of 15,480 enrolled students were Black, making up 1.1 percent of the student population.

In 2000, 259 of 17,843 enrolled students were Black. In 2010, 431 of 23,389 enrolled students were Black. In those 10 years, the Black student population increased 0.4 percent.

Since 2014, the overall student population has leveled out and even decreased while the Black student population has continued to increase slightly each year to reach its current 2.4 percent standing.

The first Black graduate student at UO in 1926 was also the only Black resident of the city.

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Racial demographics of students at the University of Oregon, 2019-2020.

“I’ve always had Black friends growing up. I’ve always been with my family,” Jones says. “Obviously it’s different now at school. Sometimes I feel really alone.”

Today, only 2 percent of Oregon’s population is Black. 13 percent of the United States’ population is Black. And Eugene’s population is only 1.8 percent Black. For Donovan Jones, the small Black population in Eugene contradicts urban Oregon’s reputation as a progressive utopia.

“Oregon tries to make itself seem like such a progressive place, and then you walk five minutes off-campus, and you’re like ‘Wow, I do not feel comfortable,’” Jones says.

Jones grew up playing basketball in San Francisco. His high school was predominantly white, but some of his best friends on the team were Black. Having those connections made him feel less isolated when it came to his racial identity.

But at UO, he says he carries the feeling of being slightly out of place everywhere he goes.

His freshman year, he found comfort playing basketball at the Rec Center with other Black men multiple times a week.

But ever since COVID-19 made these gatherings impossible, he’s struggled to connect with people who understand his experiences, especially after publicized instances of police brutality against Black people and protests for racial justice erupted in 2020.

“When there’s things going on like there are right now, it’s kind of difficult to talk to my white roommates about some of these issues,” Jones says. “Not that they’re not there for me, but they just don’t understand it and can’t perceive it the same way I do.”

Jones says it would help if more Black faculty and staff were available as resources. He has never had a Black professor and says he would feel much more comfortable reaching out to someone who understood his identity.

Only 2.2 percent of faculty, staff and graduate employees at UO identify as Black. And according to a 2020

report from the Division of Equity and Inclusion, among all underrepresented groups, Black faculty are three times more likely to leave the university.

Damien Pitts is the only Black staff member in the Lundquist College of Business. He says that based on what he’s seen, Black faculty and staff are often unsupported and isolated in their departments.

“You can’t depend on one person to do everything for you, because you’re adding more of a burden to that Black faculty or staff member, which is going to burn them out, and then they’re going to leave,” Pitts says. “I think that’s what happens a whole lot. It’s a massive burden on some of us.”

According to Pitts, this burden is not exclusive to faculty and staff. Students feel it too.

Imani Lindberg, a first-year graduate student, says that seeing Black faculty teaching about what she wants to do would make her goals feel more achievable.

“It’s nice to see somebody that looks like you and think, ‘They did it. I can do it too,’” Lindberg says. “Within my program, it’s like, ‘These white people did it.’ But I have to face all these other roadblocks that they may not have to face because of identities I hold that they don’t.”

At the graduate level, 81 out of 3,543 total students are Black. Lindberg says she is one of two African-Americanidentifying individuals in her cohort.

Lindberg is working toward a master’s degree in public administration, and she says her coursework has very little emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion. She says this term is the first time she’s worked on a project that addressed any of these topics directly. In all of her other courses, they never made it to the forefront.

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Elli Akough, a first-year student, stands where the Pioneer Statue once stood on campus before protestors tore it down last June due to its symbolism of white settler violence against Indigenous peoples. The UO refused to remove the statue, among others, after students called for its removal but will not restore the statue to its original display.

UO introduced a Black Studies minor in the fall of 2020.

Demands for the program began in the 1960s and were revisited more recently in 2015. The same year, students also demanded that Deady Hall be renamed. The buidling was named after Mathew Deady, a politician who helped shape the the Oregon constitution that banned Black people from living in the state.

In 2017, President Schill decided not to rename the building, saying “Deady does not represent an example of an egregious case justifying overturning the presumption against denaming.” But when demands redoubled in May 2020 after former police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, Deady Hall was renamed University Hall.

Akough, the first-year thrower for UO’s track and field team, says symbolic gestures denouncing racism won’t solve the issue for Black students.

Akough came to UO because she loved Hayward Field, the temperate weather and her track and field coaches. She says she recalls seeing posts on Instagram and Facebook about the university’s diverse and inclusive campus before choosing the school but says these posts haven’t matched her experience.

Akough is biracial and was born to a white mom and an African-American dad. She was raised by her mom and stepdad, also white, in Omaha, Nebraska. She says her upbringing and attendance at a predominantly white high school have influenced the ways she interacts with white spaces. And she says her socioeconomic background put her in a position to be able to afford the school's high out-of-state tuition.

At UO, out-of-state tuition is almost $40,000. Hall says these costs may deter Black students from attending the university, especially when combined with its reputation as an extremely white college in an extremely white state.

“When you insert the cost of UO to come from out of state and be a non-resident and combine that with the culture shock, I think it makes it harder for Black students to feel like they belong here,” Hall says.

Pitts says even high schoolers in Springfield and Eugene may be hesitant to remain in the area for their secondary education.

“I understand leaving the nest,” Pitts says. “But if you leave the nest because you don’t feel welcome here, that’s a problem.”

Many Black students who do choose UO experience complicated social lives on-campus. Akough says she sometimes feels judged by other students of color for her adherence to white culture, specifically the way she speaks. But she also doesn’t want to be the token Black friend in a group.

Because of that, she says it’s hard to form relationships with other students and feel comfortable engaging with Black culture.

“It almost takes a piece of that Blackness from you,” Akough says.

But Akough has found a community in the athletic department. A large portion of the track and field team, her head coach and two of her close friends who also do throwing events are Black.

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Koyin Olopade, a second-year student, poses in front of University Hall, formerly known as Deady Hall. After years of requesting the name of Deady Hall to be changed due to the racist views of the building’s namesake, Matthew Deady, the University of Oregon Board of Trustees finally voted to rename it in June 2020.

A significant amount of Black student recruitment at UO happens through athletics. At the national level, 13 percent of NCAA Division I student-athletes are Black. After manually counting all Black athletes on UO athletic rosters based on appearance, using athletes’ social media accounts for additional verification, and dividing this number by the overall number of student-athletes at the university, it appears approximately 20 percent of UO student-athletes are Black.

Katie Harbert, the Assistant Athletic Director for UO, says the school is a destination for athletes. The success of individual athletic programs, the allure of expensive facilities and the school’s connections to Nike all act as draws for student-athletes, including Black student-athletes.

By dividing the number of Black student-athletes by the number of overall Black students at the university, approximately 20 percent of the current Black student population are student athletes. Harbert says attending a predominantly white institution where Black students are only strongly represented in athletics can be hard for Black athletes at UO. “We find their experiences within athletics different than on-campus and different than in the community,” Harbert says.

“Many of our Black student athletes are only seeing themselves as athletes.”

But the number of Black students in athletics has also created a much-needed space for conversations about race.

After George Floyd was murdered, Akough says the track team had multiple team meetings to discuss what was going on.

Akough wasn’t even officially on the team at that point but still got to participate in the conversation and share her perspective.

“I definitely don’t feel left behind by the athletic department,” Akough says. “It’s a different story when it comes to the university.”

Akough wants UO to take action. She says while she values the conversations she has in the athletic department and wants those things to happen at a university-wide level, conversations aren’t enough. She says the school’s recent efforts to stand against racism are important, but they don’t amount to anything that will tangibly improve the experience of Black students and faculty on campus.

“It gets to a point, where you have to ask yourself, as a university, as a community — what’s next?” Akough says. “Why don’t Black people want to come here?”

At UO, students and faculty alike have demands. They want to see the recruitment, retention and support of diverse faculty and staff. And they want the administration to share their action plans with the university, not just put out a statement when a racially motivated act of violence takes place. Hall says that if students continue to use their voices, change is possible for the school.

“Students here have a lot more power than any other university I’ve been at, with their activism and their work to get things changed,” Hall says. “Students will continue to have to fight for the things they really believe in.”

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 15

Last Ones Standing Three Eugene businesses in threatened industries thrive during the pandemic.

Written by Anna Mattson Photos by Jozie Donaghey

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lockbuster Video had 65 million registered customers in the late 1990s. Its blue-and-yellow movie ticket sign hung on 9,000 stores across the country. But only a decade later, the business began to fail with the rise of online streaming services like Netflix.

The company filed for bankruptcy in 2010, but one last Blockbuster remains in Bend, Oregon, and is run by a family who cares deeply about the store’s continuation. Ironically, viewers can now watch a documentary about the last Blockbuster on Netflix — the streaming service that put the company out of business in the first place.

This story isn’t unique to movie rental shops. All kinds of brick-and-mortar businesses across the country fell to the rise of the digital age. When Pew Research Center conducted a survey in 2000, only 22 percent of Americans said they had made an online purchase that day. In 2016, that statistic jumped to 79 percent.

Brick-and-mortar businesses selling products like books, pornography and music have been going out of business across the country with the emergence of online competitors like Amazon, Pornhub and Spotify in recent years. The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t made anything easier for brick-and-mortar businesses with constantly changing business restrictions imposed by federal and state governments and a huge shift toward a more digital economy. In 2020, over 12,200 brick-andmortar stores were forced to permanently close, according to a Forbes report.

Tsunami Books has been slowly pieced together since it first became a bookstore in 1995, with many of the shelves and pieces of furniture either having been donated from Autzen Stadium, local school gymnasiums or handmade by Scott Landfield himself as the shop’s owner.

16 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

Many bookshops, DVD porn shops and music stores, among other brick-and-mortar businesses, have closed during the pandemic. But small businesses Tsunami Books, B&B Distributors and House of Records in Eugene, Oregon, have managed to survive as some of the last businesses standing in their respective industries because of community members who still value buying goods in real places, from real people they can see, talk to and support.

“People are getting to know their record collections more because of the pandemic.”

House of Records

House of Records lives in a sage-green house finished with a copper-red trim on 13th Avenue in Downtown Eugene. Inside on May 3rd, 55-year-old Greg Sutherland stood polishing a record with scraps from an old cotton T-shirt. He calls records artifacts and says polishing them is his favorite part of the job.

That morning, he finished sifting through 500 disks. It took him a few days to get through them all. He liked about 300 of them. For Sutherland, this is routine. “I've done the same thing every day for a decade,” Sutherland says.

Sutherland has been the manager of the House of Records for 35 years. He was a big fan of the store while he was in college at the University of Oregon. After three years of being a dedicated customer, the store hired him in 1986.

Records have been important to Sutherland for decades.

And House of Records has a special charm that Sutherland can’t quite put his finger on. But it drew him in 38 years ago. He thinks it’s one of the best in the Pacific Northwest, right up there with popular shops in Portland and Seattle.

The House of Records has had some success in its sales since the pandemic hit Eugene. Sutherland says that a lot of that can be attributed to stay-at-home orders.

“People are getting to know their record collections more because of the pandemic,” he says. “They're not going out and spending money at concerts.”

According to a report by Statistica, record sales have increased 30 fold from 2019 to 2021. The record player trend began a resurgence around 2010. Although vinyl sales have increased, so has the use of music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. The Recording Industry Association of America released a report in 2018 saying that streaming services account for 75 percent of total music industry revenue. But an article from Engagdet speculates that the rise of vinyl sales can be partially attributed to streaming services — streaming allows customers to explore music before purchasing a vinyl copy.

Sutherland says that a lot of recent customers have been younger college-age students. However, this isn’t new. When vinyl record sales took a massive hit during the late 90s and into the early 2000s, Sutherland says it was college kids who brought it all back.

“All the history of the entertainment industries, the movies, radio, television, it's young people who get it moving,” Sutherland says. “They’re the ones who are paying attention and who care the most.”

Sutherland’s favorite part of working in a brick-and-mortar shop is the experience of holding and feeling the record itself.

“I don't necessarily care as much as some people do about the atmosphere of record stores, but it's important,” he says.

“The tactile sensibility of feeling and holding the thing that you're about to spend money on is still powerful.”

Looking at and creating Sleeve Faces is a mini hobby of Sutherland’s, and with employees estimating anywhere from 100,000 - 1 million records available to peruse in the shop that’s been open since 1971, the options for the 3D artwork are limitless.

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 17

Greg Sutherland, manager of House of Records for 35 years, sits in the back office of the 100 year-old-house the store resides in. Sutherland says after graduating from the University of Oregon’s Journalism program he began working in the shop, fell in love and never left. “There’s just something truly magical about places like this,” says Sutherland. “I feel I’m surrounded every day by these cool| pieces of history 18 | really ETHOS Summer 2021 I get to sort through.”

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 19

“We all go home and read books, all of us. And we believe in books. So, we will suffer because of books.”

“I clean the bookstore first thing. I clean the toilets,” Landfield says. “I figured, you know, if a CEO isn’t cleaning their own building’s toilets, they should be fired.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic started in Oregon in March 2020, Landfield says he worked hard to keep business flowing.

But it wasn’t paying off right away. The phone wasn’t ringing.

The bookstore wasn’t making any money. For the first time in his career, Landfield says he hated his job. But he says he knew that keeping the business running would pay off eventually.

“We figured, well, it's books,” he says. “We all go home and read books, all of us. And we believe in books. So, we will suffer because of books.”

Landfield says he was worried about keeping the store employees during quarantine because of the unemployment benefits that were being offered to those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. But most stuck around by choice, and eventually, the shop adapted to the restrictions. The team has since opened up an online store, and they have been shipping books globally.

Amazon has become a powerful company in book sales since the emergence of online retailers — the company accounts for 70% of online book sales, according to a report from Authors Guild, a professional organization for writers. Earlier this year, Amazon reported reaching over $100 billion in sales during the first 2021 financial quarter.

But one of the most important parts of a brick-and mortarshop like Tsunami, to Landfield, is the community. According to Landfield, people stepped up to help the business out when the shop was struggling the most during the pandemic.

As the son of two bookstore owners who is writing several books, Landfield has spent most of his life surrounded by literature. “Some of the books in here are older than me,” says Landfield with a grin.

“Then again, I’m older than a lot of them too.”

Tsunami Books 67-year-old Scott Landfield’s bookshop is well-loved.

Shelves are piled high with classic and new novels, religious texts and historical books. Staff favorites are noted on handwritten cards littered throughout the bookstore. Even the walls themselves are filled with Eugene history: the entire store is built with second-hand wood, with timber from over 75 different Oregon schools. And some of the chairs in the back of the shop are from the original Autzen Stadium.

“We’ve never bought aything new,” Landfield says. He’s been the owner of Tsunami Books for the past 24 years.

Landfield used to have a partner, but he left 12 years ago.

Though Landfield is the only owner now, he stays involved in every aspect of the bookstore.

20 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

“We have been an underdog forever,” he says. “We always saw ourselves as a community bookstore. When we needed money, the community stepped up. Little 7-year-old kids were giving us $10 bills.”

24-year-old Maggie Gebhardt went to Tsunami four years ago for a poetry reading. Since then, she’s been back twice. One of the things she likes about the business is that it feels comfortable and that the selection is hand-picked by staff. Shopping locally is a priority for Gebhart.

“It's not corporate-feeling,” she says. “I just think it's nice that the people who are here curate a lot of the selection.”

For the first time in 25 years, Landfield says the business can pay the rent every month without his help — there have been times when he’s loaned the shop money from own credit card. Looking forward, Landfield says he wants to retire in the next few years.

But he will miss working at the bookstore.

“I got to see kids grow up and the kids continue to come through, you know,” he says. “Books are for the mind and for the heart, to touch things for our inner selves, our best selves.”

Kat Kay, a recent graduate from the University of Oregon, is one of many family members who help run B&B Distributors, a local adult DVD arcade founded in 1995. With her uncle and father, the original owners, now living out of state and nearing retirement, Kay, her mom, siblings and some cousins now help run the shop with Kay hoping to take over one day. “It’s a slightly odd job for a 23-year-old, but I love it and have never felt weird about it,” Kay says.

B&B Distributors B&B Distributors is a small shop nestled near a Taco Bell and a laundromat on West Sixth Avenue in Eugene. The outside of the building is grey with a bright-red sign reading “Adult Store” on the front. Inside, shelves are lined with hundreds of adult DVDs and sex toys.

23-year-old Kat Kay has been around the family business since it started in 1995. Once the pandemic hit Oregon and she graduated from the University of Oregon, Kay became more involved with the shop. She says her dad and uncle are nearing retirement, meaning that Kay and other family members will start taking over the business. Her job right now is manning the register, taking inventory and doing some of the branding work for B&B Distributors.

“I definitely enjoy that I get to help people learn more about themselves and their sexuality,” she says. “This is a place that can cater to anybody because everybody has sex.”

The store is focused on a brick-and-mortar kind of retail, rather than e-commerce, which has become less common since online retailers have grown in popularity. Adam and Eve, a primarily online adult store, has increased 30% in sales during the pandemic, according to a report from the New York Times.

Meanwhile, IBISWorld reports that the brick-and-mortar adult store industry has declined 0.4 percent in profit from 2015. And websites like Pornhub that offer pornography online for free serve as strong competition to stores like B&B Distributors that sell DVD porn.

Kay says that because of the internet, the industry has changed quite a bit — people can have products delivered to

them within just a few days. But there are some benefits to buying sex products in person.

“We get a lot more older males who aren't as able to get their porn online,” Kay says. “It’s definitely catered to people who are not as inclined to use the internet.”

According to Pew Research Center, 25 percent of people 65 and older don’t use the internet. Kay says accessibility is important to B&B Distributors. In the future, Kay would like to grow B&B’s online presence to reach new audiences and people who wouldn’t otherwise come into a brick-and-mortar shop.

“You can have someone who is knowledgeable about the products that you're face-to-face interacting with,” she says. “So if you have questions about which one's best, you can get those recommendations right away.”

Kay remembers helping a customer find products during the beginning of the pandemic. A woman walked into the shop wearing gloves, a mask and a face shield. It was obvious to Kay that she cared about being safe.

“She told me that since the pandemic, she no longer felt safe hooking up with partners anymore since she needed to social distance,” Kay says. “As a result, she needed some toys for stimulation for the first time in her life.”

Kay was happy to make her pandemic situation more comfortable and to keep her safe and healthy. She was able to give suggestions, tips and tricks to get the customer products that were right for her — something websites like Pornhub or Adam and Eve could never offer.

April Anderson (left) stands with her partner, Meg McNabb, in their backyard. “It’s good to think about it, and it’s good to have that choice in case something gets really bad,” Anderson says. “Everybody thinks they’re going to go in their sleep but you never know how long it’s going to be and how much pain you’re going to be in.” Since Anderson’s diagnosis, she and McNabb have gone on bucket-list trips such as visiting Arches National Monument and other national parks around the United States.

Death Doulas

End-of-life caregivers have watched their field grow and diversify as the pandemic made us all think about death.

Written by Cole Sinanian Photos by Natalie Myking

I “

’m scared,” John Garrett says, slipping in and out of consciousness. Garrett is in his mid-sixties, suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and emphysema, and he’s on his deathbed. Amy May is sitting next to him, trying to find the right words to bring him the peace that he needs.

“I hear that you’re scared,” she says. “But I’m here with you.

You are not alone.”

A Willie Nelson song plays softly in the background, filling the silence in Garrett’s temporary housing unit.

May and Garrett had known each other for about a year.

During that time, she’d spent countless hours helping him work through the trauma he’d experienced during a life full of homelessness and addiction. He had been in hospice since before he met May, and while his caregivers were helpful, he told May they did little to help ease his loneliness and anxiety about death.

During their twice-weekly visits, May and Garrett worked together to process the emotions that were bubbling to the surface as he got closer to the end and developed a plan for how he wanted his final days to go. As a fan of old-school country music, Garrett made sure that Willie Nelson and Hank Williams were a part of that plan.

He died that night, a few hours after May left his facility.

But she says she thinks the day she spent at his bedside made all the difference.

“I sat there with him, I held his hand, chatted with him about the day,” she says. “And I was grateful. I am so privileged to be with people at this part of their journey.”

May is a death doula, a type of counselor who provides mental, spiritual and emotional support to the dying and their families. Through her work, she has helped dozens of people like John find peace at the end of their lives.

But with a rapidly aging U.S. population and an increasing demand for end-of-life care, the coronavirus pandemic forced death doulas like May to adapt to an often uncomfortable

22 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

remote work environment. And with 3.7 million people dead from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, death is on many people’s minds. Like no other event in recent history, the pandemic has highlighted the importance of end-of-life workers and drawn attention to their rapidly expanding industry.

Death doulas say the pandemic has led to an increased demand for their services ― particularly in families who lost loved ones to COVID-19 ― and higher enrollment numbers in death doula training programs. The International End-of-Life Doula Association, a nonprofit that provides a comprehensive death doula training course, saw a 29 percent increase in enrollment in 2020 from 2019, according to its operations and training division.

“We’re selling out months in advance,” says Shelby Kirillin, a Virginia-based death doula and a trainer with the association.

“It’s quite startling to see the uptick in people wanting to be trained as a doula.”

Kirillin, who worked as an ICU nurse before becoming a death doula, sees the increased interest in death doula work partially as a result of the pandemic sparking conversations about death. But the shift toward more supportive end-of-life care began with the birth of the hospice industry in the 1970s.

Hospice care is available to terminally ill people with less than six months to live and involves a team of healthcare professionals providing medical care and symptom management meant to improve quality of life, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Association.

The first hospice agency in the U.S. was founded in Connecticut in 1974, and since then, the number of hospices and end-of-life workers has increased dramatically. Now baby boomers, a generation born between 1946 and 1964 numbering 70 million people in the U.S., are starting to die of old age, further increasing demand for hospice services.

According to a 2020 report by the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, there were nearly 1.6 million Medicare-insured people receiving hospice care in the U.S. in 2018, an increase of 4 percent from 2017. In a 2015 report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the number of people Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 23

“What I hope to do is show up and provide some comfort and support and really be with that person and help them be with themselves,” she says.

“When I'm working with families, I try to help them use their imagination, especially during the times of social distancing,” she says.

Like many death doulas, May had to see the majority of her clients remotely over the past year.

She recently worked with the 91-year-old matriarch of a large family who was bedridden in her home, slowly succumbing to COVID-19. The woman had four adult children, all of whom had children of their own. But only one could be present with her during her final days due to the possibility of viral exposure. In her prime she had been known for her cooking skills, so Eaddy suggested that the siblings put together a book of their mother’s recipes and eat one final meal together over a Zoom call.

For her clients whose minds and bodies are quickly deteriorating, it is nearly impossible to arrange a Zoom meeting without help from a caregiver, meaning that only those who were living in a facility or had help from hospice could see her virtually.

And even then the process can be challenging, she says. Discussing intensely emotional topics, like life regrets and death anxiety, through an electronic device can be too much for someone who already has difficulty hearing and communicating clearly.

In the spring of 2020, as tens of thousands of Americans were dying from COVID-19 each week, the number of referrals May got from hospice agencies dropped significantly, meaning she did not receive any new clients. She says one client was referred to her but cut ties after a failed attempt at an online consultation.

Amy May, a Eugene-based death doula, walks with one of her clients, Bill, during a visit. “I am most grateful for the trust extended to me by clients to walk the path with them, even for a short while. I love witnessing the profound love human beings are capable of sharing,” May says.

“Death can open windows to personal power, understanding, and inner knowing that we might have thought weren't possible. I absolutely love talking to folks about these personal insights and transformations.”

receiving hospice care increased by seven times from 1990 to 2013 and that the number of hospice providers tripled during that same time.

But while hospice workers can provide medical support to the dying, Kirillin says they often deal with multiple clients at a time and are unable to offer the same level of emotional and spiritual support as death doulas.

“I think that's why end-of-life doulas are becoming a thing,” she says. “It's this generation, the baby boomer generation, that now is dying. And they're seeing how we treat death and being like, ‘yeah, no. There's more to death than just medicine.’”

Hospice can also fall short in its often restrictive eligibility requirements, Kirillin says. To qualify for Medicare-insured hospice, a person must have a prognosis of six months to live or less. Some hospices also require that the individual not be receiving treatment, meaning that terminally ill people with less than a year to live don’t always have access to the support they need.

“There's people that, let's say, have metastatic cancer everywhere, that are doing radiation and chemo,” Kirillin says.

“They know they're dying, they know that they have less than a year to live, but because they're going through those treatments, they are not eligible to go into hospice.”

There has been a documented need for higher-quality endof-life care since long before there was an established death 24 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

doula community. In a 1995 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a team of physicians from around the country identified significant shortcomings in communication between terminally ill patients and their doctors.

The observational study took place at five major U.S. hospitals over four years and found that only 47 percent of the doctors surveyed knew when their patients wanted to forgo CPR. Similarly, 46 percent of all do-not-resuscitate orders were written within 48 hours of the patient’s death, and family members surveyed reported high levels of physical and emotional discomfort in their loved ones in the days leading up to their deaths.

According to Kirillin, death doulas have existed since long before there was an established community or professional training programs. But since the emergence of the first professional doulas, through the founding of the International End of Life Doula Association in 2015, the field has exploded in popularity.

May, who started working at Eugene’s White Bird Clinic as an intern in 2017, is now the clinic’s only death doula. She created the position after meeting John and realizing there was a need for personalized end-of-life counseling in Eugene, particularly for those who are unhoused or suffer from substance abuse issues.

May says she takes a client-centered approach to her work, so what she does changes depending on each person’s needs.

“It was hard for the person to hear me and understand,” she says. “They weren’t able to sit up and communicate clearly.

And this is a really sacred, delicate, precious conversation. To do it over the internet takes away from that experience.”

Local hospitals closed their doors to visitors when the pandemic hit, meaning that May also had limited access to some of her existing clients as they got close to the end. She was working with two homeless men who were hospitalized right before their deaths, and she couldn’t be there to guide them through their final moments.

“That breaks my heart,” she says. “I feel sad that I couldn’t be there with them.”

Pennsylvania-based death doula Jamie Eaddy, a colleague of Kirillin’s at the International End of Life Doula Association and the organization’s Director of Program Development, says that much of her job involves going over plans with her clients and working with families to commemorate their loved ones in what Eaddy calls a “legacy project.” While COVID-19 restrictions have complicated this process, Eaddy and her clients have found creative ways to adapt.

It took some planning. The eldest child, who was also the designated caregiver, had to gather all the recipes together, which were scattered throughout the house on notepads and index cards, and give them to one of the grandchildren, who then brought the finished book to the other siblings.

The family cooked and ate Mom’s famous mac ‘n’ cheese together over Zoom from their respective homes, laughing and reminiscing about their childhood, all while she watched from her deathbed. By this point, she was no longer eating or talking, but Eaddy believes she knew what was happening.

“She wasn’t giving us much more than an occasional smile,” she says. “But depending on your beliefs, I believe she was still experiencing some of what was taking place.”

While death doulas frequently work with the elderly, Kirillin and Eaddy say they also work with many younger people facing death.

Kirillin says she worked with a 27-year-old mother who had an inoperable brain stem tumor. She hosted a Zoom event for the woman and all her closest friends in what Kirillin called a “circle of love ceremony” — a living eulogy where everyone lit candles, ate food together and told the woman how much she meant to them.

“It was sad, it was happy, it was funny,” Kirillin says. “It was real life. And everything in between.”

She says the mean age of her clients is 40-60, and she believes that if anything good will come out of the pandemic, it will be an increased cultural awareness of the importance of end-of-life planning.

Hospice caregivers suited up in their personal protective equipment — protecting them from both COVID-19 transmission and the wildfire smoke — and made the journey as the sky above glowed orange and ash fell like snow.

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 25

Through their work with the doula training program, Eaddy and Kirillin have noticed a substantial shift in the demographics of the people registering for their courses. According to Eaddy, there were far more young people signing up for the association’s training program in 2020 than in years past, something she and Kirillin say they believe is at least partially due to the pandemic.

“So many people think, ‘Oh, yeah, death will happen when you're like 80 or 90,’” Kirillin says. “But I think hearing about people dying throughout the age spectrum is an eye-opener to people. It really brought mortality to the forefront like nothing ever has for this generation.”

Before the pandemic, May was one of only a handful of death doulas working in Eugene. But with the pandemic sparking new conversations about death, the doula community has grown locally as well as nationally.

Mandy Gettler works in the University of Oregon’s Innovation Partnership Services and volunteers with local hospices. She says death never bothered her, and she felt drawn to a career in end-of-life counseling ever since she lost her older brother to a terminal heart condition as a child and witnessed how unprepared her family was for the loss.

Susan Smith, a volunteer for End of Life Choices Oregon, believes there is a profound connection between people leaving this world and those who help them on their way. “It’s a celebration for me," Smith says. "A person is at the end of their life, and I get to help them have a good, peaceful death, the one they want."

At the onset of the pandemic, Gettler had just completed her training with the International End of Life Doula Association and was flirting with the idea of starting her own death doula business, having provided informal end-of-life counseling to friends and family members in the past. But she says the conversations about death that the pandemic brought up and the extra free time it gave her made her realize it was time to start her own practice.

outreach and increased awareness of Death With Dignity likely played a role, she believes the uptick in prescriptions can also be attributed to the pandemic and other challenging events of the past year.

“Between the politics and COVID-19 and the fires and climate change, we're really being bombarded by challenges all the time, and it's stressful,” she says. “When you're sick, and you're going to die anyway, some people might have said, ‘Okay, I don't want to stick around for the rest of this.’”

“It just kind of all aligned,” she says. “This is my one opportunity to take some time off and rest and figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

Through her practice, End of Life Doula Services, Gettler offers personalized end-of-life support to her clients. She uses guided imagery, meditation and extensive planning to help her clients and their loved ones cope with grief and death anxiety.

Gettler has not yet taken any clients, but she’s working to advertise her services to the community and has hosted events meant to get people thinking about their end-of-life plans.

Smith and her volunteers partner with doctors and work closely with death doulas to ensure their clients have everything they need to make the transition smooth. She says they are often present when their clients take the lethal medication, but that it all depends on the dying’s wishes, and that sometimes, they would rather be alone during their final moments.

“I can't think of another time in my lifetime where everyone from all walks of life were so affected by death and dying,” she says. “But there's some agency in that. I'm not dead yet. I get to make choices. I can start making plans.”

“We’re kind of coaching them on how to take this very bitter medication,” Smith says. “And it all needs to be ingested before they fall asleep. So we’re death coaches, kind of like the doulas.”

In September, at the height of the devastating wildfire season that laid waste to parts of rural Oregon, she visited a man who was dying of cancer and had decided to use Death With Dignity to end his life. He lived in an isolated community in the heart of a fire evacuation zone. His neighbors had fled, but the man wanted to die at home, so Smith, his doctor and a few of his hospice caregivers suited up in their personal protective equipment ― protecting them from both COVID-19 transmission and the wildfire smoke ― and made the journey as the sky above glowed orange and ash fell like snow.

Along with an increased interest in death doula work, 2020 also saw an increase in the number of people utilizing Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act ― a piece of 1997 legislation that allows individuals with less than six months to live to take a lethal dose of prescribed medication with physician approval.

According to the Oregon Health Authority, 2,895 people have received prescriptions since the act’s inception, and in 2020, there were 370 prescriptions written, compared to 297 in 2019.

Susan Smith is a volunteer coordinator for End of Life Choices Oregon, which is a Portland-based nonprofit working to help people navigate the act. She says that while community 26 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

Before the pandemic, May was one of only a handful of death doulas working in Eugene. But with quarantine freeing up people’s schedules and sparking new conversations about death, the doula community has grown locally and nationally.

Death is hard for most people to talk about, but May, Gettler, Kirillin, Smith and Eaddy say the best way to ease people’s anxieties is to normalize conversations about the dying process.

They recognize the fear and intense emotions that accompany it but encourage people to see it as a normal part of life that can be just as beautiful as birth, especially at a time when mortality is so present in people’s minds.

“I think anger and sadness are both responses to pain and fear,” Gettler says. “And what can be more fearful than something that you never get to practice? Nobody gets to practice dying.”

Death will always be sad, Kirillin says, but the best way to make the process easier for both the dying and their loved ones is to recognize the inevitable and start preparing before it's too late.

“I think it's a survival instinct in humans,” she says. “We will fight until the end because we don't want to die. But so far, mortality is still 100 percent, no matter what medicine has thrown at us.”

For May, every client’s death is sad. She says she feels grief for all of them, but more than that, she feels privileged to be able to share such an intimate moment of their lives.

With Garrett, she says the gratitude was mutual. The last time she saw him, she was sure to make that clear.

“I thanked him a lot that day,” she says. “Thank you for letting me be part of your life. Thank you for allowing me into your world.

Thank you for trusting me with your story. It's been such an honor to be here with you through it.”

“There was music on. It was very beautiful,” she says.

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 27

Sakurako Marcello, known as Rocky, holds a wrist belay while doing a split pose, or kite. Rocky joined the Revelers after taking aerial classes in Japan.

Photo by Isabel Lemus Kristensen

Reveling through Circumstance How the circus arts studio Revelers Aerial Works adapted its performances in the era of COVID-19.

S

Written by Lily Wheeler Photographed by Isabel Lemus Kristensen, Grace Hefley and Collin Bell

ally Brewer pulled herself up a swath of ivory-colored silks with her arms and wrapped the silks around her legs to keep her secure. She hung 15 feet above the ground for a moment, then let herself fall. Brewer tumbled downward, the silks whirling around her before becoming suddenly taut as they caught her just a couple of feet above the concrete floor. Brewer finished the performance with the extension of a single arm and pointed toes.

Brewer is the owner and primary instructor at Revelers Aerial Works in Eugene, Oregon. The studio celebrated its grand opening in April of 2020, right as the COVID-19 pandemic started in Oregon.

Despite restrictions, the shop continued to hold virtual events to captivate audiences throughout the year.

Like the aerial, lyra and trapeze arts found at Reveler’s, circus art is a rich part of American history. The art has changed alongside cultural expectations, according to Brewer, and is now making its resurgence as a pathway for body positivity.

Brewer and Revelers Aerial Works in Eugene strive to make circus art inclusive and positive by encouraging people of all ages and body types to get involved in circus performances. This is a stark contrast from the ableist traditions the artform is known for partially due to famous figures like P.T. Barnum, who admitted to exploiting disabled individuals for profit in his autobiography, “Barnum’s Own Story.” Circus is now changing from its darker origins of exploiting disabled bodies, animals and unregulated dangerous stunts to a family-friendly and body-positive artform.

Circus has similar characteristics to theater performance or dance, except its storytelling is woven into various stunts, mainly aerial silk shows where performers use colored silks, hoops and cages to hang from the ceiling.

“When I started doing it, I had just come off major abdominal surgery and couldn’t climb. I didn’t have a strong upper body or

28 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

gymnastics background. I took a class and immediately fell in love,” Brewer says. “That’s something that’s amazing about circus. It doesn’t really matter what body you have.”

As gyms reopened in early February of 2021, Brewer was determined to put together a complete production circus arts show for her studio.

The show itself was built around the circus theme, with its costumes, set, props and story depicting a combination of historical and fantasy themes. The show included the protagonist, a sleepy maiden played by Phoebe Jerome, a jack-of-all-trades performer for the studio. Jerome performed a variety of dream-like and whimsical numbers throughout the show.

In Jerome’s opening performance, she hoisted herself into the air with straps attached to a pulley. Her lavender dress twirled through the stage fog as she kicked off the ground, and she lifted skyward as her body inverted, legs pointed outward into a split as she swung across the stage.

Jerome says the feeling of performing is an “indescribable excitement,” because circus performance allows for its practitioners to experience being in the air. She has been learning from Brewer for two years and has performed in front of both live and remote audiences.

“You can really feed off the energy of a crowd,” says Jerome about performing for a live audience. “You can feel their excitement.”

She says that as an entertainer, she likes the attention of people watching in person, though working through COVID-19 restrictions has been an opportunity to grow.

Another of the studio’s performers for the show, Melissa Barnes, has a similar experience performing with Revelers.

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 29

Barnes is a seasoned performer but has found some aspects of performing under COVID-19 restrictions to be challenging.

“We have to be in character even though there's no one here,” Barnes says. “We still have to have that adrenaline, but we have to create it for ourselves.”

For the studio’s latest performance on May 22, 2021, Revelers offered limited outdoor seating that looked into the studio. Tickets sold out within days of going on sale. Brewer decided to release a recorded version of the full show to make the performances more accessible — recording it for what Brewer describes as the “Revelers family” would be the best way to have people see the performance.

Since its early days in 18th-century England, people have known circus art as a spectacle of live performances. The fully choreographed shows that characterize modern circus performance have only been around since the early 1980s, revolutionized by Cirque du Soleil. The circus group says it was the first to add the element of story to its performances. As popularity grew for circus acrobatics, smaller groups and studios like Revelers made sure anyone was welcome.

“Circus is so new and strange and weird that any body, small, short, tall, long-legs, short-legs, physique, can do something in circus,” Brewer says. “For me, I want people when they come in to know that it doesn’t matter where you’re starting. I can get you where you’re going.”

Zoe Garcia (top), and Laura Shirtcliff , act as strong women on a trapeze during the Reveler’s performance on Friday, May 21.

Photo by Collin Bell

To See Us First As Humans

Photo of Trevor Walraven.

Inside-Out classes provide a transformative experience for incarcerated people and university students.

Sally Brewer, founder of the Reveler Aerial Works, performs during the opening piece of the Reveler’s show. Brewer has been doing aerial arts for over five years. Photo by Grace Hefley

Written by Nika Bartoo-Smith Photos by Collin Bell

T

revor Walraven was sentenced to life in prison in 1998, at 14 years old. He was tried as an adult on an aggravated murder conviction. Walraven says for the first 13 years of his incarceration, education was far from his top priority. Even if he wanted to, he says there weren’t good educational resources he could get involved with.

Walraven bounced around several different facilities in Oregon, both juvenile and adult. But he spent the bulk of his time at Oregon State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison in Salem, starting in 2004.

“I very much lived on the inside,” Walraven says. “I developed a career while I was there and I didn’t know if I was ever going to get out.”

He had a job in the maintenance department in the laundry room in the prison. Trevor decided to learn everything he could to make that job a career.

Walraven and his brother were both incarcerated at Oregon State Penitentiary. They lived and worked together. Walraven’s brother attended the University of Oregon before his incarceration, and he started taking Inside-Out classes in 2011.

30 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

The Inside-Out Program brings together two groups of people with different life experiences — incarcerated people and students from four-year universities. The University of Oregon is one of over 150 colleges and universities around the country that facilitate Inside-Out classes with their local prisons. The classes provide an opportunity for the students to take higher education classes together and learn from each other as people with different lived experiences and life circumstances.

The program helps incarcerated people get an education behind bars, which helps them find a greater sense of selfworth and for some, envision lives outside of prison. This can sometimes help people stay out of prison once released.

According to a report by the RAND Center, 40 percent of formerly incarcerated adults are reincarcerated within three years of release. The study found that when incarcerated people participated in education programs, the rate of recidivism reduced by 43 percent.

Currently, only Oregon State Penitentiary and Oregon State Correctional Institution offer upper-division university classes to incarcerated students. However, a variety of not-for-credit educational opportunities are also offered at the 14 prisons around Oregon, like book donations, book discussions and educational TV programming.

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 31

These not-for-credit programs, through the Prison Education Program, provide incarcerated people an opportunity to learn without the added pressure of for-credit programs or learning with other college students. The leadership of incarcerated students pushed to make these options available and many students who start by taking not-for-credit classes end up taking forcredit classes, says Katie Dwyer, the Coordinator for the Prison Education program at UO. The first for-credit classes in the women’s prison, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, will be offered to start this summer, Dwyer says. The program at UO currently offers classes at Oregon State Penitentiary and Oregon State Correctional Institution.

"I just didn't think that I could fit in, that I could learn alongside students. So there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of questioning my ability."

— Trevor Walraven, former Inside-Out student

To date, the Inside-Out program through UO has served 800 incarcerated students and 800 students who aren’t incarcerated in 62 different classes, according to Dwyer. Worldwide, 150 different higher education institutions run an Inside-Out program, serving over 60,000 students, according to the Inside-Out Program official website.

At UO, most funding comes from specific departments and the Clark Honors College. Dwyer says the UO Foundation, the Office of the Provost, individual donations and the Associated Students of the University of Oregon are some of the major donors.

Walraven’s brother encouraged him to take classes through the Inside-Out program because it had been such a transformative experience for him. Walraven was hesitant at first.

“I just didn’t think that I could fit in, that I could learn alongside students,” Walraven says. “So there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of questioning my ability.”

In 2011, Walraven took his first Inside-Out course. Within the first half of the term, the professor asked Walraven to help facilitate the class the following year because of his level of engagement and his leadership skills.

The program prioritizes people-first language, referring to university students as “outside students” and the students who are in the prison as “inside students,” to recognize the peer relationship between all of the students, says Ellen Scott, a professor of sociology at UO who teaches classes on the inside.

The program could have chosen to differentiate participants as “students” and “inmates” but Scott says this defeats the purpose of the program, which works to humanize all people and recognize that both parties are students of the university.

When students from UO walk into a prison, they are required to walk in a single-file line in alphabetical order. No talking too loud. No running. They pass through a series of checkpoints, the doors locking behind them as they advance. Students are forbidden from wearing blue or jeans because people inside Oregon prisons wear blue.

Katie Dwyer, the coordinator for the Prison Education Program run through the University of Oregon, organizes student work. Dwyer took her first Inside-Out course her freshman year at UO in 2007 and says it changed her life. Dwyer says she hopes her continued work with the program will bring more opportunities to inside and outside students.

32 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

Walking through the metal detector at Oregon State Correctional Institution, Bianca, a current intern at UO’s Prison Education Program, remembers watching students try a variety of methods to make it through without setting off the alarm.

Covering up a button, slowing down, going in sideways — students were not allowed into the prison until they successfully passed through the metal detectors.

Walraven says the Inside-Out program helped him realize his responsibility to his community. Since his release in 2016, Walraven co-founded the Youth Justice Project, an initiative based on advocating for people incarcerated at a young age. “We want to see individuals come out and be successful, contributing members of society,” Walraven says.

Due to the semi-anonymity rule of the program, inside and outside students only learn each other’s first names. To stick with this rule, the program asked that students in this article be referred to by their first names only. Walraven is an exception to this rule because he is open with his story in the work he continues to do for the program and was okay with his last name being shared.

Both inside and outside students can apply to be interns.

This involves helping to lead classes and sometimes providing support for both inside and outside students.

Once the students pass through the security checkpoints, they join a room full of incarcerated people for class. The classes meet once a week for 10 weeks, and the program offers college credit to both inside and outside students.

Each Inside-Out class consists of 10 to 15 students from inside the prison and 10 to 15 UO students from outside the prison. They collectively sit in a circle, and the classes are mostly discussion-based.

The classes are open to all inside and outside students, but they must complete an application and an interview before being accepted.

“There’s a tremendous sense of excitement before each class,” Walraven says. “A sense of challenge, a feeling of hopefulness, a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to be in a room with other individuals who are willing to just kind of see past everything and look to who an individual is today.”

“Wagon wheel” is a traditional icebreaker for the Inside-Out program, according to Walraven. An inside circle of chairs faces the same number of chairs on an outside circle. Students from UO sit on the inside circle, and incarcerated students sit on the outside circle.

The professor asks a series of ice breaker questions, starting simple: If you had a superpower, what would it be? If you could be any animal, which one would you choose? The professor then progresses to questions related to class content.

After every question, the outside ring rotates so that by the end, every outside student has talked to every inside student.

Though Walraven was anxious in these classes at first, the Inside-Out classes became a formative part of Walraven’s last few years in prison. The anxiety lifted for Walraven after his first few classes, and he was able to experience the humanizing nature of the program. His fear of not fitting in was replaced by a feeling of excitement before each class.

“All outside students knew that we had done something that was arguably deservable of incarceration,” Walraven says. “Having conversations with students that were in ways vulnerable, but ultimately just super neutral, non-judgmental, very humanizing conversations around everything under the sun, that in and of itself was transformative.”

Julie, a former intern, knew that the Inside-Out class would change them. Their father was incarcerated and Julie says being in classes with inside students and hearing their stories brought a new lens to view their father’s story with.

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 33

“The classes provided me access to education. Prisoners that receive education recidivate at a much lower level than prisoners who don’t receive education.”

— Shawn, former Inside-Out student

“Folks would talk about their own experiences being in solitary confinement, and my father was in solitary confinement,” Julie says. “Hearing folks tell their stories really just brought a different dimension to that lens because my dad never told me what it was exactly like being in solitary.”

After taking an Inside-Out class, Julie became an intern for the program.

“I just want to make a note that this is not like, an anthropological learning about people,” Julie says. “This is learning with, struggling with, learning together. Each of us being a teacher for one another — through our stories, through struggling with the material.”

Walraven remembers a sociology class he took where the professor said, “once you know, you owe.” That line stuck with him and helped Walraven to recognize his responsibility to the community and to the people he had harmed.

Shawn graduated with an undergraduate degree in humanities from UO in 2019. He was the first student from inside the prison who was able to do so because he already had an associate’s degree when he incarcerated. In July 2020, Shawn was released from prison. He is currently in grad school at UO for Prevention Sciences.

The Oregon State Penitentiary is one of two facilities in Oregon that currently offer college level courses through the University of Oregon’s Prison Education Program. Normally, outside students would travel to OSP once per week to discuss course material and learn with incarcerated inside students. Since the pandemic, the program hasn’t hosted outside students in over a year.

Shawn says Prevention Science is a social work and research program that focuses on negative health outcomes.

Shawn focuses on “juvenile and emerging adult development as it relates to delinquency.”

“The classes provided me access to education,” Shawn says.

“Prisoners that receive education recidivate at a much lower level than prisoners who don’t receive education.”

While getting people degrees is a bonus of the InsideOut program, the overall goal is to get inside students involved and excited about education, Dwyer says. She says all seven people who’ve gotten degrees from inside the prison already had associate degrees.

Dwyer says inside students can only take up to two classes per term, but students are not guaranteed to get into a class or have options of classes they have not taken. Similarly, the 1994 Oregon Measure 17 requires that all inmates work full-time while incarcerated in Oregon. Education doesn’t count toward those 40 hours a week. This means it takes a long time for students to earn a degree if that is their end goal.

Walraven calls the Inside-Out program his “aha moment,” prompting his leadership and involvement in programs such as Inside-Out and the “lifers club” within the prison for the last five years of his incarceration. The “lifers club” is a group of incarcerated people who are serving long sentences, mostly for homicide cases. Walraven served as the president of the club and acted as the liaison between the club and prison faculty.

“Through the Inside-Out class, I recognized that I had potential that I wasn’t utilizing,” Walraven says. “Seeing others value my voice just gave me a different perspective.”

“I was someone who had not taken responsibility for my actions that led to incarceration,” Walraven says.

Walraven is not the only student from the inside who had a meaningful experience in the program. Shawn was incarcerated at 18 years old. He started taking Inside-Out classes in 2007, when he was 31 years old, at Oregon State University while inside the Oregon State Correctional Institution. He ended up being an intern for the program.

“The courses were humanizing,” Shawn says. “To look at us not just as the worst act or our crime, but to see us first as humans, that’s very healing for a prisoner, because as a prisoner, you are ostracized.”

Shawn says the experience was socially transformative because it was a chance to interact with people who had different lived experiences from the people inside the prison. Those few hours in an Inside-Out class with students from the university felt like being outside of prison, Shawn says.

34 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

other, Josh nds next to his br ile they were (Left) Walraven sta wh State Penitentiary other, who (right), in Oregon br his ys sa n . Walrave d 2008, was both incarcerated un aro s ide-Out course started taking Ins ss st cla in 2011. ns he took his fir one of the reaso n. ve lra

by Trevor Wa Photo submitted

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 35

Anna Nguyen, a player for the University of Oregon’s esports program, plays her Overwatch tournament games from her apartment. Nguyen knows firsthand the discrimination women face in esports as one of two female players on the team.

Dwyer holds the graded work of an incarcerated student. Since the emergence of COVID-19, the Inside-Out program has been run entirely by mail, with students inside waiting up to five weeks for professor feedback.

While outside students have the luxury to do their coursework anywhere — on the main lawn at UO, on a plane traveling home, in a coffee shop — inside students are confined to a seven-by-eleven-foot cell, doing the same work.

Over the past year, Inside-Out and the larger Prison Education System have drastically changed as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The classes offered to inside students are taught completely through the mail.

“They are sitting in a cell, they have very few windows, they don’t have a choice of where they go, and they haven’t moved their body by more than one mile in decades,” says Emily, a former Inside-Out intern. “Realizing that was dizzying to me. It made me so uncomfortable and really struggle to handle or process the freedoms I had.”

Dwyer is hopeful that starting next fall, Inside-Out classes will be able to meet in person again.

The process of leaving the prison after the Inside-Out class is mostly the same as entering: a series of checkpoints without needing to pass through a metal detector. But as the outside students and faculty leave, they are barred off from classmates.

And when outside students are not at the prison in classes, they have no contact with the inside students.

One of the main rules of the Inside-Out program is that outside students and faculty are not allowed to stay connected once the classes are over.

According to Dwyer, most Departments of Corrections around the country require that volunteers in the prisons do not stay in contact with incarcerated people except when they are in person for specific volunteer opportunities. The national InsideOut program enforces this protocol through the semi-anonymity in only knowing first names and the no-contact rule, which forbids students from staying in contact after the classes finish.

Dwyer attended the first Inside-Out class at UO in 2007. She remembers it being hard to not form lasting relationships.

“It was really, really hard to know that I was heading out for summer break,” Dwyer says. “And then to know that some of the people that were in that class were serving life sentences.”

36 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

Many of the current and former outside interns express the importance of this program in shaping their future career goals.

The former inside students, Walraven and Shawn, are both still involved in the program as trainers and speakers.

In 2016, Walraven was released from Oregon State Penitentiary after years of not knowing whether or not he would ever get out. After his release, Walraven co-founded the Youth Justice Project and helped the passage of Senate Bill 1008, changing the way youth are tried in Oregon by reversing the waiver mandate that allowed youth 16 to 18 to be automatically tried as adults.

Through his leadership on the inside, Walraven helped push to make Inside-Out classes and programs through the larger Prison Education Program accessible to almost everyone in the prison.

“Our program would not be what it is without people like Trevor,” Dwyer says.

While hesitant at first, Walraven ended up taking as many Inside-Out classes as he could. Although no longer incarcerated, Walraven is still very much involved with the Prison Education Program. He has helped coach future Inside-Out facilitators, spoken to Inside-Out classes around the country and continues to help with planning for the future of the Prison Education Program.

WOMEN IN

ESPORTS

University of Oregon's female esports players share their experiences in the male-dominated sport.

Written by Lauren Yang Brown Photos by Johanna Roseberg

Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 37

A

nna Nguyen was enjoying a casual conversation at a small gathering during her sophomore year. The apartment living room bustled with people chatting among themselves, and Nguyen was off to the side with an acquaintance of her boyfriend. As the two started to get to know one another, the conversation turned to the topic of Overwatch, a popular video game she was very familiar with. Nguyen was a Mercy main, a support hero in Overwatch who can heal, strengthen, and resurrect her teammates.

“What heroes do you play?” he asked.

“I play support.”

“Oh, of course you do.”

Nguyen says she was taken aback by the judgment in his voice. She was used to hearing these kinds of comments in anonymous multiplayer lobbies about how women stereotypically play support characters, but nobody had ever made a comment like that to her face.

“I said: ‘what do you mean?’ But I already knew what he meant.”

Nguyen says it felt like he was trying to discredit her achievements, but she ultimately brushed it off. Nguyen is a Grandmaster, a rank only the top one percent of players can achieve in Overwatch. As a varsity esports player for the University of Oregon, she didn’t take his comments too seriously.

“I try not to take it to heart because I’m probably way better than him at Overwatch, and I don’t need male validation,” Nguyen says.

“Don’t be fooled by the ‘half of all gamers are now women’ statistic. While that is true, the dispersal of male and female gamers remains deeply unequal, especially in popular esports genres like shooters,” Cote says.

According to Quantic Foundry, a market research company studying gamer motivation, women tend to dominate genres that are not normally played competitively. Genres like match-three, where players match the same icons in a row, like Candy Crush, and farm or family simulators, such as Animal Crossing, have the highest percentage of female gamers. According to Quantic Foundry, women make up 69 percent of the match-three player base.

The study found that for first-person shooter and tacticalshooter games, women account for only seven percent and four percent of those player bases. Because genres like firstperson shooters are male-dominated, women often face sexual harassment while playing.

“Female players who engage in more ‘hardcore’ video game spaces, such as esports, are often seen as unusual or out of place,” Cote says. “As a result, they can face both direct harassment and more subtle forms of exclusion.”

In first-person shooter games, players typically play in randomly generated groups. Their ranks increase as they win, so communication and cooperation are highly valued.

Teammates need to relay information to each other to stay on track for success. However, for female gamers, turning on their microphone can lead to uncomfortable interactions with other players.

"Thats why with some games, I don't enjoy playing on my own because the community itself is not fun to be around when you're a girl."

- Kim Ha

“When people realize that you’re a female who’s gaming, you gain a lot of unwanted attention,” says Leyla Gillett, the freshman Overwatch esports player. “People tend to focus more on you being female and not what you have to offer to the game.”

Kim Ha, the esports lounge manager in the Erb Memorial Union, regularly plays first-person shooter games. Although Ha has been playing these games for a while, she says she often doesn’t use her microphone if she isn’t playing with close friends.

According to an article by Statistica, women make up 41 percent of all gamers in the United States. Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, the esports teams at the professional and collegiate levels are still male-dominated. Of the University of Oregon's 46 esports players, junior Anna Nguyen and freshman Leyla Gillett are the only women.

“There are some moments where they would figure out I’m a girl and say things like ‘girls shouldn’t game,’ and ‘you’re so bad,’ or ‘you’re so trash.’ They’ve said some really brutal things that have hurt me,” Ha says. “That’s why with some games, I don’t enjoy playing on my own because the community itself is not fun to be around when you’re a girl.”

Women are underrepresented in esports because they face many barriers to entry, such as gender roles and misogyny. By breaking down these barriers, esports programs like the one at the University of Oregon can make strides to welcome more women in this male-dominated environment.

Nguyen says she even has two Overwatch profiles: one with ‘Anna’ as her username and one gender-neutral username.

Although Nguyen says she plays both accounts equally, players treat her first name account differently from her gender-neutral one. With her ‘Anna’ profile, people make comments toward her unprovoked. Other players will tell Nguyen she’s bad because she’s a girl, or they will make flirtatious comments and act overly friendly.

A common stereotype against female gamers attributes their skill to their gender. But research suggests that there are no biological factors that contribute to which sex is better at video games. According to a 2015 study published in Sage Journals, female players accrue skills at the same rate as males in competitive games like League of Legends.

However, the study also shows that gender roles can deter women from choosing to play first-person shooter games.

Amanda Cote, assistant professor of Media Studies and Game Studies at the University of Oregon, says gender norms “associate competition or computing and technology with masculinity.”

She says the industry has a long history of manufacturing video games to appeal to men and stereotypically masculine interests, specifically within the first-person shooter genre.

38 | ETHOS | Summer 2021

During winter term, the varsity Overwatch team played a competitive scrimmage against another team through a matchmaking Discord server, a popular communication application among gamers. One of the opponents started excessively complimenting Nguyen on her abilities in the public chat, where everyone on both teams could see.

Leyla Gillett is the only other female player with Nguyen on the UO esports team. “In Overwatch especially, people always expect females to play the support role and to play one certain character in the support role,” Gillett says. “But I don’t want to talk in the game and reinforce that stereotype that all girls want to play this one character.”

Nguyen says she felt amused by the situation, and Gillett described the ordeal as bizarre.

Shea Stevens, team manager and player on the Overwatch team, says he and the other members shut down the other player

Kim Ha, the esports lounge manager at the University of Oregon, says despite finding fellow UO students on Discord who welcomed her, she still experiences adversity as a female gamer. "As a girl I'm told you should never speak loudly, you should never play games, you shouldn't be a tomboy," Ha says.

by telling the individual that Anna was one of their girlfriend’s names. Ultimately, Stevens says he told the player to stop.

“Typically in scrimmages that doesn’t happen, but I don't know. Some weirdo saw her username was Anna and started being like ‘wow, you’re so good at the game,’ and I was like ‘no, we’re cutting this off right now,’” Stevens says.

According to Gillett, creating a tight-knit community has been essential to creating an inviting environment for the university’s esports program — surrounding herself with people she wants to play and communicate openly with makes her gaming experience much better.

The University of Oregon’s esports Discord server has laid the groundwork for creating a positive gaming community for varsity and casual players. Matt Rados, the community manager of the Discord server, says it has been a great place for current and incoming students to meet people with similar interests.

“We see people constantly in the ‘Future Ducks’ channel making plans to meet up with each other when they get here, talking or just asking for help,” Rados says.

Gillett says her teammates trust each other enough to voice their frustrations to each other. She says that if one of her teammates opens up about feeling upset about their performance, the whole team comes together to encourage each other to keep trying.

“It’s really nice to queue into these competitive matches with my team,” Gillett says. “Not only are we team bonding, we’re gaming together outside of scrimmages. Also, if someone says something to me or Anna, it’s not just me by myself.”

For more information about the team visit emu.uoregon.edu/esports Summer 2021 | ETHOS | 39

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