Easing the Path to Service

Jay Day, Eastern’s chief of police, is honored for supporting Guard and Reserve members.

As a kid growing up in Blytheville, Arkansas — a small town about an hour upriver from Memphis, Tennessee — and later in Tacoma, Washington, EWU Police Chief Jay Day was always proud to embrace the values he learned from his dad, a service member in the U.S. Army.

“My foundation is discipline and integrity,” Day says. “My dad raised us like little soldiers and instilled all those principles, which have served me well in my law enforcement career.”

As the head of EWU’s police department, Day ’95 has continued to honor those who serve, including the Eastern officers who divide their time between police work and periodic deployments in the Armed Forces Guard and Reserve. In recognition of this support, Day recently received the U.S. Armed Forces Guard and Reserve Employer Patriot Award, an honor reflecting the commitment he has shown toward easing the path to service for his employees.

The award was announced at the EWU Board of Trustees meeting on Feb. 24 by Dave Millet, director of the Veterans Resource Center at EWU. Day, who is also an Eastern alumnus, was nominated by Deputy Chief Sean O’Laughlin, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve.

“It was a complete shock and surprise, I wasn’t expecting it but it was probably one of the top honors of my life, I should say, having grown up military,” Day says.

Military service was originally going to be his own career path, Day recalls. But at Eastern he chose the route of law enforcement. “Law enforcement mirrors the military in a lot of ways,” he says. “It’s selfless service, there are a lot of sacrifices that not only yourself but your family makes in service of others.”

“I’m very appreciative of our troops and the tremendous sacrifices that they give every day in support of our country,” Day adds. “My debt of gratitude to them is immeasurable.”

Aiming High

A mentoring program connects Eagle undergrads with high school students.

For many high schoolers , particularly those from families who’ve never sent a kid off to college, attending a university like Eastern can seem like the impossible dream. Completing the right classes, preparing for aptitude tests, touring campuses, completing federal financial aid forms and admission applications: for the uninitiated, it’s a lot to ask.

Guidance counselors can, and do, provide help. But what if there was someone else to talk to? Someone who might be closer in age, maybe with similar life experiences?

Eastern’s new Aspire Program aims to provide those voices. The program, funded with grant support from Innovia and the Washington Student Achievement Council, puts Eagle undergraduates in local high schools to support, advise and mentor college contenders who might not otherwise make it to matriculation.

Along the way they are also there to provide guidance for those students whose best move might be military service or vocational training.

Mentoring is an excellent way for college students to give back to their communities while enhancing their resumes, says EWU’s Jasmin Davis, an MBA student who serves as Aspire’s manager. Students earn a stipend while working six hours per week, helping to make participation more manageable while not interfering with their academic pursuits.

“The Aspire Program is about connecting college students with high schoolers to help them figure out what they want to do after high school, whether that be a two-year or a four-year college, a vocational school or the military,” says Davis. “We want to help them navigate that pathway.”

In 20052006, EWU’s Archaeological and Historical Services did a dig at People’s Park. It uncovered 60,000 artifacts. Radiocarbon dating found some of them to be more than 8,000 years old.

Ghosts of Salmon

EWU’s Paul Lindholdt introduces a new generation to a park’s hidden history.

Few places in the nation can match the cultural and historical significance of the small patch of verdant land lying slightly upstream from the confluence of Latah (Hangman’s) Creek and the Spokane River.

Paul Lindholdt, author and English professor at EWU, has long worked to ensure that his students — and others in the wider community — more fully appreciate the significance of this pretty peninsula, today known as People’s Park. As part of this effort, each spring he takes students in his honors course to the site for a “First Year Experience” alongside the river.

The field trip includes on-site discussions of material from The Spokane River , a 2018 book that Lindholdt edited and contributed to — material that touches on a range of issues related to the environmental and human history of Spokane’s once spectacularly rich river ecosystem. (Lindholdt donates all profits from the book to Spokane Riverkeeper, an advocacy group whose experts contribute to the class.)

No issue resonates more for the students than the story of People’s Park. The park takes its name from the World’s Fair hippie encampment created there. But its true significance lies in a much deeper history, one that centers on the almost-unimaginable abundance of salmon that once ascended the river as they journeyed toward their ancient spawning grounds.

That history is deeply entwined with the region’s Native peoples, particularly the ancestors of today’s Spokane Tribe of Indians, who expertly managed fishing and catch distribution at the site for thousands of years. “In 2005-2006, EWU’s Archaeological and Historical Services did a dig at People’s Park,” says Lindholdt. “It uncovered 60,000 artifacts. Radiocarbon dating found some of them to be more than 8,000 years old.”

These artifacts, the students learn, indicate that present-day People’s Park is the oldest continuously occupied site in what is now the state of Washington. According to Lindholdt, salmon were so plentiful prior to the 1911 construction of Little Falls Dam that the three bands of the Spokane Tribe could share their namesake river’s bounty with Native people who came to trade from hundreds of miles away.

The haunting loss of those fish, and ongoing environmental challenges in the Spokane watershed, hold sobering lessons for students. What we do today matters, Lindholdt says. Our actions — or lack of actions — can have consequences that continue to resonate down the ages.

“An old saying from environmental studies is: ‘Think globally and act locally,’” he says. “Community engagement on the local level might translate into greater awareness today of global climate change.”