Inlander 03/02/2023

Condors used to roam the skies of the Inland Northwest, appearing in both written accounts and oral histories. What happened to them?

THE BEAUTIFUL OF THE COLUMBIA BUZZARDS

BY JACK NISBET

INSIDE

I SAW YOU GREEN ZONE BULLETIN BOARD

EDITOR’S NOTE

On its finest and funnest days, journalism is sleuth work. We gather information, look for themes and culprits, and when we’re lucky, tell people something they didn’t already know. This week’s cover story — THE BEAUTIFUL

BUZZARDS OF THE COLUMBIA — is a great example of this, even if at first glance you wonder if it’s not news, but actually a piece of history. It begins in 1897 just outside Coulee City, with the last official sighting in Washington state of a condor — those massive birds that became synonymous with California and conservation in the 1980s. Digging deep into historic documents, oral histories, photographs, bones unearthed near The Dalles Dam and even stories he heard from a man who came to a recent reading of his work, Jack Nisbet establishes that, yes, the Inland Northwest once had condors. And he takes it further, wondering what happened to them and, better, if they’ll ever return. For me, it’s inspiring to think that we could see those birds, with a height up to 4 feet and a doubly impressive wingspan, roam our skies once again.

— NICHOLAS DESHAIS, editor

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WHAT ARE YOUR CONCERNS ABOUT CRIME AND SAFETY IN DOWNTOWN SPOKANE?

MATT SHELLEY

Most of the time when I come downtown it’s daytime, and I don’t feel any sense of security issues at all. But I understand people who come down at night, it may be a different situation. I’m definitely concerned about it from a livability of the city standpoint.

MEGAN JONES

Honestly, in most metropolitan areas, be it in Spokane or Seattle or any metro area, I’m relatively afraid of just general crimes.

How has being downtown changed?

Between just people walking around and construction in and around downtown, it looks different almost every time I come back [from school in Bellingham].

SERA HATCHETT

As a woman, I am concerned walking around at night since we work late, so I usually have one of the guys walk me out. We have a lot of people that hang out in the alley, and recently someone was going around macing people and maced a couple of the cooks. So that freaks me out. I just think as Spokane’s getting bigger, more crime is happening, and that’s a concern.

SHANNON WHITE

The impulsivity of the homeless population downtown — running out into traffic, I’ve seen some of them pounding on doors of cars…

We’ve looked at a lot of different downtown apartment complexes, and we’ve wanted to try that out for a couple years, but the crime and homeless are very close to those apartments.

ADRIAN WORKMAN

Getting home safe.

Do you ever feel unsafe downtown?

Regularly. There are plenty of scary people who clearly deserve or need to be taken better care of than they are, and they act out violently. It less prevents me from going downtown, and more causes me to be more situationally aware at all times.

INTERVIEWS BY CHEY SCOTT

SARANAC COMMONS

The Salmon Can’t Keep Waiting

Disparate groups found a way to work together to preserve riparian habitat for salmon, but Jay Inslee preferred a regulatory approach

BY BILL BRYANT

Washington had a unique opportunity to return salmon to our streams and rivers and build a model for moving forward on thorny and critical environmental issues. But Gov. Jay Inslee’s opposition doomed it.

The Washington Legislature’s House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, on a bipartisan basis, passed House Bill 1720, which would rehabilitate riparian habitat and help restore salmon runs across Washington. Riparian habitat is the land on either side of a creek, tributary or river. Abundant trees and shrubs along banks cool and filter water. Salmon need cool, clean water, but on some ranch, farm and forest lands those trees and shrubs have been cleared. Under HB 1720 local conservation districts would provide incentives for ranchers and farmers to replant stream and riverbanks and minimize livestock access to flowing water. Doing this is critical, since, as Jamestown S’Klallam Tribal Council Chairman W. Ron Allen told the committee, “Riparian zones are essential to salmon recovery.”

This bill’s impact could have been even greater than repopulating our creeks and rivers with salmon. This bill could have laid the foundation of a lasting, working environmental partnership between the sovereign tribes and Washington’s

farmers and ranchers.

That’s because this bill resulted from negotiations between agriculture and sovereign tribal leaders, and was passed out of committee with both Republican and Democratic supporters. That is rare.

Previous attempts to pass riparian legislation failed for lack of trust between tribes and agriculture, and agriculture’s fear of heavy-handed regulations. Earlier this year, the governor rekindled mistrust and fear when he requested riparian legislation that to some was a throwback to a bureaucracy-driven approach.

Fortunately, the chair of the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Mike Chapman, listened to those supporting and opposing the governor’s bill and realized agriculture and the tribes shared many interests. Chapman, a Port Angeles Democrat, shifted the entire dynamic around riparian restoration legislation when he told the committee there would be “a bipartisan bill or no bill.” His words prompted agricultural and tribal leaders to jointly develop a bill that they and both political parties could support.

A state bill would provide incentives for ranchers and farmers to replant, and limit livestock access to, stream and riverbanks.

After negotiating HB 1720 with agricultural leaders, such as the Washington State Farm Bureau, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe’s Allen testified before lawmakers that salmon recovery was about “building a trusting relationship between all interest groups, whether its ag, whether its developers, the timber industry and the tribes and the state agencies that have responsibility for these affairs.”

Nisqually Tribal Council Chair Willie Frank III told the legislative committee that “solving complex issues like salmon recovery and riparian issues require relationships and trust.”

Trust is huge when figuring out how to restore riparian habitat on private land. Many landowners fear “riparian repair” is code for the state taking their land, and if approached through bureaucratic regulation, it can be. I know it doesn’t have to be that way.

In the 1980s, Billy Frank Jr., a Nisqually tribal elder and nationally honored civil and Indian treaty rights activist, pulled agriculture, forestry and tribal leaders together behind a voluntary effort to restore the Nisqually River’s riparian habitat. I met Frank in the late 1990s on a project to restore Muck Creek, his ancestral home. Over the following years, we collaborated on Nisqually preservation and Puget Sound recovery projects. Because of him, and agricultural leaders like Jim Wilcox, today the Nisqually stands as an example of how trust, relationships and collaborative efforts can preserve a watershed.

With this riparian restoration bill we had an opportunity to scale-up the pragmatic Nisqually approach Frank established.

Rep. Joel Kretz, a Wauconda Republican who cosponsored the bill, explained in an TVW interview that “both tribes and agriculture are frustrated. The tribes are frustrated that we haven’t made as much progress on salmon recovery as we should have… and agriculture is nervous about being told what to do... We’ve tried decades of the heavy-handed regulatory approach, and I don’t think it works. I think we’re going to see some real innovative projects [with this approach].”

The governor, however, wanted his bill, not the bipartisan bill crafted by tribal and agricultural leaders, and he made that known. His staff argued that Olympia regulators, rather than farmers, ranchers and tribes, were better suited to riparian restoration on farm and ranchlands. He wanted to enforce a single standard across the state, even though effective salmon recovery will differ by topography, water flow, tributary, river and species. No matter. His natural resource adviser testified that Olympia regulatory agencies are “the ones most familiar with what is needed.”

LETTERS

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Chapman, the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee chairman, emphasized that the bipartisan bill recognized “the importance of salmon recovery efforts while also respecting… the agricultural community.” HB 1720 passed out of committee, over the governor’s objection, with bipartisan support. Then it was sent to budget writers where the chilling effect of Gov. Inslee’s opposition caused the Capital Budget Committee to let deadlines lapse.

Rather than deferring to the governor, I wish they had listened to Jamestown S’Klallam Chair Allen who told legislators, we do not want “seven generations from now to look back at what we didn’t do.”

Last year, legislators voted 92-5 to place Billy Frank Jr.’s statue in the U.S. Capitol. This year, by passing this riparian restoration bill, they could have honored him not in bronze, but by continuing his work. They didn’t. There is always next year, when likely, there will be fewer salmon. n

Bill Bryant, who served on the Seattle Port Commission from 2008-16, ran against Jay Inslee as the Republican nominee in the 2016 governor’s race. He is chairman emeritus of the company BCI, is a founding board member of the Nisqually River Foundation and was appointed by Gov. Chris Gregoire to serve on the Puget Sound Partnership’s Eco-Systems Board. He lives in Winthrop, Washington.

PUBLIC SAFETY

MEAN STREETS?

BY NATE SANFORD

Suzanne Mittleider works in downtown Spokane, but she doesn’t like spending time there.

“Once we leave for work, we don’t come back,” says Mittleider, who co-owns Litho Art Printers on Lincoln Street next to the railroad viaduct.

Mittleider has worked at the print shop for 24 years, but she says it’s only over the past two or so years things have really taken a downward turn.

Mittleider describes a constant torrent of problems. Drug use in the loading dock. Screaming in the street. The smell of urine and feces in the morning. Graffiti, needles and 11 smashed car windows in a single day. Mittleider knows people who avoid downtown entirely. If she could afford to move her business out of the area, she would.

“Is ‘shithole’ too strong a word?” Mittleider says.

Concern over the state of crime and public safety in downtown Spokane seems to ebb and flow every few years. It was a big issue in 2019, when Mayor Nadine Woodward campaigned on a promise to clean up downtown, and local developer Larry Stone released “Curing Spokane” — a 17-minute video that framed the downtown core as plagued with drugs and crime.

In recent months, the debate over public safety in

downtown Spokane has picked back up — driven in part by a series of high-profile assaults and announcements from several frustrated business owners who say they’re being driven out of the central city by rising property crime.

During her State of the City address last week, Woodward highlighted downtown public safety as a top priority, promising a “a law and order approach” and a new ordinance to prevent drug use in public places.

Earlier this month, Spokane City Council members floated the idea of moving City Hall out of downtown to save money on office space.

But to many downtown business owners, the idea carried a clear subtext.

“All of a sudden the whole message got flipped to ‘You’re fleeing downtown,’” says Council member Lori Kinnear.

Kinnear insists the proposal was purely financial and notes that the proposed new location — in Spokane’s East Central neighborhood — isn’t exactly a “cradle of safety” either.

Still, the optics weren’t ideal.

“If we’ve got to live like this, you can stay,”

Mittleider

says of the City Hall move. “You can deal with it.”

After the backlash, council members released a statement saying they had heard the feedback and understood the symbolic importance of City Hall’s downtown location. Even if the decision didn’t really have anything to do with public safety, perception matters.

BROKEN WINDOWS

The data paints a complicated picture of public safety in downtown Spokane.

A review of crime statistics from 2017 to 2022 shows that property crimes are way up in the city’s center, but crimes against people — like assaults, sex crimes, robbery, harassment and homicides — are down.

Notably, these stats show that both property crime and crimes against people were at their lowest in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The number of reported crimes against people increased slightly in 2021 and 2022, but was still well below historic highs and seems to be on an overall downward trend. The downtown precinct reported 1,017 crimes against people last year — a significant decrease from a high of 1,355 in 2017.

Recent changes in Spokane law made it illegal to camp under viaducts like the one on Lincoln Street. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO

Property crimes are way up, violent crimes are down, and politicians and business owners are waging a war of perception over the safety of downtown Spokane

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Property crimes, on the other hand, saw a huge spike. The number of property crimes jumped from 3,876 in 2021 to 4,987 in 2022. The previous high was 4,505 incidents in 2019. Police spokesperson Julie Humphreys says many of the recent incidents involved car thefts and break-ins.

The numbers might not show an increase in violent crime, but when it comes to public safety, perception is arguably just as important, Humphreys says. Smashed car windows and sidewalk drug use aren’t categorized as “violent” crimes, but seeing those things while walking down the street can make people feel unsafe.

As the pandemic recedes, cities across the country have been working — with mixed results — to draw businesses, tourists and office workers back to downtown cores. Creating a welcoming downtown that feels safe is key to that goal, says Emilie Cameron, president of the Downtown Spokane Partnership.

For small businesses, the costs of vandalism can be debilitating — a broken window can cost as much as $4,000, Cameron says.

“A lot of people, when you think of property it can be easy to dismiss as ‘Oh, it’s just property,’” Cameron says. “But you have to think about the bigger picture more holistically.”

When someone smashed the window of Auntie’s Bookstore in 2021, owner John Waite took to Facebook, asking that people buy extra books and merchandise at the store to help pay for the replacement window.

Today, Waite is hesitant to go into detail about his businesses’ recent experiences with public safety downtown. He says he’s tired of business owners’ frustrations being used as political ammo by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

“All I would say to people is that it’s not something I like to talk about because it’s politically charged,” Waite says. “And frankly, no one in politics or safety is really doing anything about it.”

CRACKING DOWN

The Spokane Police Department says it’s working on it.

In early January, the department doubled the number of officers stationed downtown as part of a larger patrol reorganization. Humphreys says the force also adjusted the hours officers work in an effort to better cover the overnight hours that tend to be troublesome.

Recent changes in Spokane laws have also allowed police to take a tougher approach downtown. In September, police resumed downtown enforcement of the city’s sit-lie ordinance, which prohibits sitting or lying on a public sidewalk. The city also updated its illegal camping ordinance to stop people from camping under downtown viaducts and within three blocks of any congregate shelter.

“That helps, that moves people along,” says Humphreys. “You need to show up to court and find another place to get some services, you can’t just live on the streets.”

During a 12-day period in January, police arrested 77 people downtown for violations — mainly sit-lie, trespass and illegal camping.

The results won’t be visible in the crime data immediately, but overall things are improving, Humphreys says.

SECOND AND DIVISION

Downtown Spokane’s problems are especially visible at the intersection of Second Avenue and Division Street.

There used to be a Starbucks on one corner, but the company closed it last fall, citing concerns about safety for employees and customers. Across the street, there’s Redemption Church. In January, church leadership announced that they were moving out of downtown because of rising crime and insurance costs stemming from repeatedly broken windows. On the southeast corner is La Quinta Inn, bordered by an imposing steel fence.

And then there’s the 7-Eleven, which has long been plagued by drug use and property crime.

Over the past four weeks, Humphreys says police have been treating the intersection as a “priority mission area” — doing regular patrols and interacting with the people hanging outside the gas station. Humphreys says it’s made a big difference. She points to a video the department released last week highlighting the department’s work in the area. The video features an interview with 7-Eleven owner Alex Momand, saying the increased police presence was working and scaring off many of the drug dealers.

Momand said the same thing on Monday, that the area is getting better.

Outside the store, a group of about six people with backpacks were hanging out and blasting music from a loudspeaker on wheels. They said they’d noticed the increased police presence in recent weeks but weren’t all that concerned about it. The group took off a few moments later when a police officer pulled into the parking lot and blasted his patrol car horn. The officer knew some of the people by name and stopped one pair to inquire about a warrant.

In Spokane, talk of rising crime is often connected, directly or otherwise, to the region’s rise in homelessness.

The connection between crime and extreme poverty is complicated. While some business owners are quick to conflate the two, others — like John Allen, who owns the Vino! wine store downtown — push back on the idea that people living outside are making the city less safe.

“There’s an uneasiness about people that are relatively unfamiliar,” Allen says. “And I think that the higher you live on the income scale, the more creepy those people look.”

Allen doesn’t think downtown Spokane has become any more dangerous. His business sometimes has people come in who are clearly unwell, but Allen says he’s mostly been able to avoid issues. Every city has unsavory characters, Allen says, adding that “it’s part of the fabric of life we’ve created for ourselves.

“When we abandon the people who are on the bottom rung… it’s no surprise they might be angry,” Allen says. n

nates@inlander.com

“Frankly, no one in politics or safety is really doing anything about it.”

Parking Breaks

Spokane aims to turn parking lots into housing. Plus, prisoners learn to ride horses; and the city gets two new tenant-landlord laws

Spokane City Council member Zack Zappone has a problem with downtown Spokane parking: There’s too much of it. Even at the busiest time of the day on the busiest day of the week, over 44 percent of downtown parking goes unfilled. “There’s a lot of parking downtown, a lot of available space, and there’s a lot of need in the community for housing,” Zappone says. So on Monday night, the Spokane City Council unanimously passed a Zappone-sponsored ordinance that establishes tax breaks for developers who want to turn downtown parking spaces into new housing spaces. Recent state legislation paved the way for the incentives, but requires 50 percent of the apartment units established to be affordable. Some developers, Zappone acknowledges, think that requirement is too steep, but he believes it remains a step in the right direction. Any modification beyond that is up to the folks in Olympia. (DANIEL

WALTERS)

WILD HORSES AT COYOTE

Eastern Washington state Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy, is one step closer to creating a unique prison training program after the state House unanimously passed House Bill 1543 on Monday. The bill would direct the state Department of Corrections to study the creation of a wild horse training and farrier program at its largest prison, Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Connell

The plan to replicate an Arizona program that teaches inmates to train wild horses captured on federal land was unanimously approved by the Legislature in 2020, but was among many bills vetoed by Gov. Jay Inslee that year as the pandemic raised financial uncertainty. “The program gives inmates hands-on training in the equestrian field, helps them to build self-confidence as they care for the animals, and provides the opportunity for employable skills they can use upon release,” says Dye in a news release, noting recidivism is low for those who’ve participated in Arizona. “We want those people who serve time to be able to positively reintegrate back into society.” (SAMANTHA

WOHLFEIL)

THIS OLD HOUSING ORDINANCE

City Council President Breean Beggs is known for playing the long game. The really long game. So when he recalls the “very robust debate” between landlord and tenants over potential reforms, he’s talking about a debate that happened back in 2018. “We gave up,” Beggs says. “We deferred it.” But this week, the City Council managed to pass not just one but two landlord-tenant ordinances. The first passed unanimously and lays out a plan to actually enforce the existing housing code and levels a new $15-per-unit registration fee to help enforce it. “It’s a sad statement for our city that we have not been enforcing the laws on our books. Shame on us,” says City Council member Betsy Wilkerson. The second includes changes that tighten inspection and records requirements, establishes a background and credit check program, and makes it easier for tenants to terminate their lease for code violations. It passed 5-2, with ‘no’ votes from conservative City Council members Michael Cathcart and Jonathan Bingle. Landlord Steve Wareham echoed those concerns by calling attention to his red Star Trek shirt, referencing the starship Enterprise’s most expendable crew members. “This is how small landlords feel,” he said. Terri Anderson, policy director for the Tenants Union of Washington State, cited a local survey that showed that of the Spokane tenants who responded, 57 percent worried about eviction. (DANIEL WALTERS)

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City Council member Zack Zappone

Another Dam Bill

A plan to save native fish species in Priest River meets resistance from Priest Lake homeowners and the state Senate

BY SUMMER SANDSTROM

Priest Lake is a prime summer destination for many in the Inland Northwest — with cabins and resorts dotting its shoreline and a steady water level maintained by the Priest Lake Outlet Dam, which separates the lake from the Lower Priest River.

Built in the 1950s, the dam makes the lake great for recreation by allowing only a small amount of warm surface water to flow off the lake and into the river. But that warm water has raised the river’s temperature, creating an unsuitable habitat for native species, including native coldwater trout species, such as bull trout and cutthroat trout.

A variety of research studies from local universities and Idaho Fish and Game have investigated possible solutions to cool down the Lower Priest River, including constructing a bypass to move cold water from the bottom of the lake to the river, instead of using warm surface water.

Many of these studies found that a coldwater bypass would be beneficial for the river while still maintaining the lake’s recreational level. Yet groups largely composed of people who own homes around the lake’s edge rallied to oppose the construction of any such bypass and urged state lawmakers to support Senate Bill 1021, which passed the Senate 27-7 and is now in the House.

The bill declares that Outlet Dam is the only structure authorized to move water from the lake to the river, and that any other structure, such as a coldwater bypass, would need approval from Idaho’s Legislature and governor.

Stop the Priest Lake Siphon argues that the bypass would significantly lower the lake’s volume, and harm “this popular and highly used area” at excessive costs to taxpayers.

Idaho Fish and Game says it hasn’t proposed constructing a bypass yet.

“We are in the brainstorming phase and bringing the thoughts on it and ideas before the public, but there is no project that has been proposed,” says T.J. Ross, a spokesperson with Idaho Fish and Game.

As part of its own brainstorming, the nonprofit conservation group Trout Unlimited developed a collaborative Priest River Watershed Group several months ago to involve all of the region’s stakeholders and organizations to find a solution to the warming waters of Priest River that everyone could agree on.

“The overwhelming majority of people I’ve heard from who are against this are all homeowners that surround the lake, and the vast majority of them don’t live in Idaho, these are second homes for them,” says state Sen. Ron Taylor, a Democrat representing Blaine County just north of Twin Falls who voted against the bill. “I think there’s a little bit of a concern on their part as to what this project might do.”

Taylor says that SB 1021 is “redundant, and it’s putting that extra layer of government on something that doesn’t really need to be there. ... I think that it’s more of a local issue that I think should be resolved by getting all of the local interests together and discussing a path forward.” n

summers@inlander.com

Environmental and faith groups oppose plans to pump more gas through an Inland Northwest pipeline

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

Plans to expand the capacity of an existing natural gas pipeline that goes through the Inland Northwest have concerned environmental and faith groups as they worry about climate impacts and resident safety.

TC Energy, the Canadian company that also owns the Keystone Pipeline System, has proposed increasing the capacity of its Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) pipeline that runs from British Columbia to California, going through North Idaho, Eastern Washington and Oregon on the way.

Unlike the company’s scuttled plans for the Keystone XL expansion for its crude oil system, the GTN XPress expansion wouldn’t involve installing a new pipeline.

Instead, compressor stations in Idaho, Washington and Oregon would be updated to increase the pressure so a higher volume of natural gas can be pumped through the existing GTN pipeline.

In a statement, the company says that the expansion is needed to meet demand, and they already have contracts with buyers for 100 percent of the proposed increase.

“Natural gas is a critical component of any strategy to meet North America’s long-term energy needs and has contributed to reduced greenhouse gas emissions across the continent,” the emailed statement says. “[The expansion] is designed to upgrade our system to meet increased demands from our customers in the region, providing the reliable energy to communities throughout the Western U.S. in a safe, responsible, and reliable manner.”

But others are skeptical that the gas will actually be needed in the long run. The attorneys general of Washington, Oregon and California filed a motion last August arguing that the expansion would counteract emission reduction laws in the Pacific Northwest that are meant to combat climate change in coming years.

Burning the increased 150 million cubic feet of gas that would flow each day through the pipeline would be like adding 754,000 more cars to the road every year, according to environmental groups fighting the expansion.

Those opposed to the expansion also worry about the risks of increasing the pressure along hundreds of miles of a pipeline originally built in 1961, as growth has resulted in family homes, schools and other buildings being built nearby. In Liberty Lake, the pipeline runs about 1,000 feet from Ridgeline High School, 250 feet from Cornerstone Pentecostal’s Early Learning Center, and less than 100 feet from homes and apartment buildings. In Spokane Valley, the pipeline appears to run underneath the basketball court and playground at Valley Real Life Church.

“Expansions like this are not in the public interest,” says Helen Yost, community organizer for Wild Idaho Rising Tide, a conservation group in Sandpoint. “In terms of gas leaks, in some ways they’re even more hazardous than tar sands and other oil leaks — they have the potential for fiery explosions that can impact people much farther away from the site of an accident.”

The concerned groups are calling on the governors of Washington, Oregon and California to reject the proposal, as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission could make a decision as soon as this month. Idaho’s congressional delegation and Gov. Brad Little signed a letter in support of the project that was almost completely written by TC Energy, HuffPost reported in December.

Priest Lake homeowners worry about a bill that would help local fish populations.

“It’s locking our region into a reliance on fracked gas for another 30 years,” says Audrey Leonard, a staff attorney for Columbia Riverkeeper. “From what we’ve seen, this looks like a way to pump extra gas into the system that there really isn’t a need for at this point.”

PROTECTING NEIGHBORS

Faith groups organized through Earth Ministry/Washington Interfaith Power & Light gathered with environmental groups multiple times in recent months to protest the expansion.

“This project has great risks to harm our neighbors both in Spokane if there were a potential explosion, and through increasing climate impacts and emissions in our state,” says Maddie Smith, an advocacy organizer for Earth Ministry. “And there would be impacts from fracking all of the gas … that would happen in northeast British Columbia.”

Smith mapped out the pipeline using online tools and was alarmed to see how close it traveled to schools and homes in Liberty Lake and Spokane Valley. Smith says the potential to impact Native American and Indigenous communities’ land and resources is also a concern.

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“If we’re caring for our neighbors as we would want to care for ourselves, that means speaking out against risks and dangers in our communities,” Smith says. “One of the main concerns we have is around safety and preventing harm.”

In 2014, the GTN pipeline leaked more than 1,000 cubic feet of gas near Moyie Springs in North Idaho, with an estimated cost for the incident of more than $575,000, according to federal reports. In 2013 a similarly sized leak was found on the pipeline near LaCrosse, Washington, with the cost estimated at more than $568,000. No one was injured in either of those incidents.

Pipelines are generally considered one of the safest methods of transporting fuels. Still, data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration show that from 2020 to 2022, 11 serious gas transmission pipeline incidents across the country killed seven people and injured 10.

Naghmana Sherazi, who is on the Earth Ministry/WAIPL board and is the climate justice advocate for the Lands Council in Spokane, says she also worries about the pipeline’s climate impacts and potential risks.

“At the end of the day that pipeline is passing through really densely populated areas,” Sherazi says. “We need to get away from fracked gas and cut down on our carbon emissions. The pipeline is old and aging, and we don’t know what disaster is waiting to happen.”

Sherazi, who is Muslim, says the Quran teaches that people are responsible for caring for the world around them.

“We are put on this Earth to be better stewards of what we have and take care of our environment and leave it better than we found it,” Sherazi says. n

samanthaw@inlander.com

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Critics say that burning the increased volume of gas flowing each day through the pipeline would be like adding 754,000 cars to the road every year.

ALIVE ALMOST AND

The last scientifically documented sighting of a wild condor in Washington state occurred in 1897. Can they come back?

BY JACK NISBET

At sunrise on a fall day in 1897,

the morning train from Coulee City to Spokane departed on schedule. C. Hart Merriam rode with a field notebook in his lap, noting the bright yellow flowers of blazing star that still bloomed among the sage and bitterbrush of the shrub-steppe. He tracked ridges of scabland basalt across the countryside, then waited patiently as the train stopped in small towns to pick up carloads of sacked wheat as well as crates of produce to sell farther east.

Merriam, whose friends called him Clint, was riding all the way to Spokane and eventually Washington, D.C. He and his sister Florence had grown up in New York state and were both accomplished naturalists from an early age. As young adults, they had developed a love of bird life and a taste for the American West. Clint had built on that background to rise to the position of director of the U.S. Biological Survey. Florence, for her part, was in that year working with a host of local correspondents on one of the first popular bird guides to our region, A Handbook of Birds of the Western United States. Clint had spent the summer censusing mammals along the Cascade crest, and season’s end found him reveling in open ponderosa parklands of the Okanogan before traversing the Waterville Plateau. The previous day, Sept. 28, he’d climbed out of Grand Coulee and taken lodgings in Coulee City.

That morning on the rolling train, Merriam kept his eyes open for birds. His count included magpies and meadowlarks, a single kingfisher, and numerous sparrow hawks watching for movement in the wheat stubble.

...continued on next page

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While the population of captive condors has remained steady, the wild population has slowly increased in recent years.

It was only after the biologist reached Spokane, in a bracketed addendum to his day’s journal entry, that he added one more species to the list. “I saw a condor on the ground near the train (on northern side of track) just after leaving Coulee City,” he wrote, “but from some caution refrained from recording the fact at the time.”

In the course of his yearly fieldwork, Merriam usually hired a local man to serve as his camp-keeper and guide because he believed in the value of local knowledge, telling friends that he would “prefer to have the farmer’s boy who knows the plants and animals of his own home than the highest graduate in biology of our leading university.” On this day he didn’t have a chance to ask anyone from the vicinity whether they were familiar with California vultures, as condors were known in those days.

But Merriam did have extensive personal experience among the birds in California, and the salient details of condor identification would have been locked in his mind. Although the plumage of an immature condor superficially resembles that of a turkey vulture, the California vulture logs in at almost twice the size of its more common cousin, with a standing height of four feet or more. That’s half again larger than an adult golden eagle, whose feathered head imparts a completely different look.

Or, as soon to be related in his sister’s influential guidebook:

To come upon the California vulture alive and free is like

suddenly coming upon a giant sequoia towering above the forest. The sequoia awes you with a feeling of immensity, and the forest trees that you had looked up to as very large are suddenly dwarfed. The same thrill strikes you when overhead the great wings of the vulture spread out and with mighty strokes carry the huge bird in wide circles up through the sky; and as you look down, the turkey vultures sailing below seem like little more than circling swallows.

On that September day, Clint Merriam mulled over what he knew he had witnessed all the way to Spokane before writing it down. Although there was no way that he could mistake it for any other species, he also was well aware of the fact that as of 1897, no ornithologist had recorded a condor sighting in Eastern Washington for almost half a century.

Resident tribal people and early white visitors to our region saw California condors as an integral part of the Pacific Northwest landscape.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition first encountered them at the mouth of the Wind River, just upstream from today’s Bonneville Dam, in the fall of 1805. On his rough map of campsites and terrain for that week, Capt. William Clark sketched the head of what he called “the

beautifull Buzzard of the columbia.” During the expedition’s winter at Fort Clatsop, he and Meriwether Lewis described condors gorging energetically around a dead whale on the Oregon beach and tearing at caches of deer meat laid up by their hunters. In mid-February, when two men brought in a wounded condor, Lewis weighed and measured the bird from every possible angle and wrote a close description of the bird. It seems to have been Clark who drew the profile of the condor’s head, accurately depicting the strongly hooked beak, prominent eardrum hole and neck feather ruff that clinches their identification.

During the harsh winter of 1825-26, Scottish naturalist David Douglas watched condors feasting on winterkilled livestock at the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver, across the Columbia from modern Portland.

“I have never seen them call except when fighting about food, when they jump trailing their wings on the ground, crying ‘Crup Cra-a,’” Douglas wrote.

Intrigued by the speed at which circling condors appeared on recent carcasses, Douglas and Bay Company agent William Barnston conducted experiments to determine whether the carrion-eaters located prey by sight or by smell, eventually determining that the birds utilized both senses — a conclusion borne out by modern scientific observations.

Barnston later described the simple joy of living with the birds on an everyday basis.

“ALIVE AND ALMOST FREE,” CONTINUED...

John Kirk Townsend’s 1839 illustration of the California vulture, as condors were once called, which have a standing height of four feet or more. COURTESY OF THE ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES

CONDORS RIGHT NOW

The most recent annual reports on condor status from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tell a measured but generally positive story. After several tenuous years in the bowels of the San Diego Zoo and then in dank cages at the World Center for Birds of Prey outside Boise, the world population of living California Condors now exceeds 500. Almost 200 of those birds remain behind bars, but the remainder are flying free. Each year, 15 or so new wild chicks fledge out, and close to two dozen rehabilitated captives are given another chance at freedom.

While the captive population has remained more or less stable for the past decade, the wild population has slowly increased. Currently, over 200 wild condors inhabit three areas in California, with a hundred more scattered between southern Utah and northern Arizona. Under the auspices of Mexico City’s Chapultepec Zoo, the numbers in Baja California are heading toward 50. Four newcomers released on the lower Klamath River last spring represent the first tenuous steps toward a Pacific Northwest population that in time, hopefully, would center on the lower Columbia.

The Fish and Wildlife mortality count is not so uplifting. Stories of cartoonish condor behavior regularly appear in the media, proving that it’s hard to learn how to act when most of the teachers have already disappeared. Many captive release birds die trying to figure things out.

As an endangered species, all deceased condors are by law returned to the agency and necropsied to determine the cause of death. A pie chart of condor mortality over any given year shows numbers of birds clipping power lines, falling victim to predators on the ground, lit up in wildfires, falling ill, drowning and getting shot. Mishaps are bound to happen, but the fact remains that half of condor mortality in the wild is due to lead poisoning. Those birds that track down deer wounded by gunfire ingest lead shot even as they feast on warm entrails, just as they have since the days of Lewis and Clark and David Douglas. We remain the agent of their poisoning and the main obstacle to a sustainable population.

— JACK NISBET

This magnate of the air was ever hovering around, wheeling in successive circles for a time, then changing the wing as if wishing to describe the figure 8… In flight it is the most majestic bird I have ever seen, he wrote.

When Douglas asked tribal people and fur company employees for information about the extent of condor range, one mixed-blood hunter told him that the vultures ventured north to Canada’s Fraser River drainage as well as far up the Columbia and Snake rivers. Other hunters described an entire population that frequented the Umpqua country year-round, which Douglas had a chance to confirm when he joined a fur trade brigade for a fall expedition south. In the upper Willamette he witnessed a single group of nine condors and wrote that “Preceding hurricanes or thunderstorms they are at their most numerous and soar the highest.”

Douglas also heard that condors constructed stick nests in the thickest parts of the forest and laid two jet-black eggs. In fact, the female condor does not build any nest at all, simply depositing a single pastel-shaded egg on the floor of a cave or cliff ledge. Sometimes, then and now, the lore of condors can be hard to tease apart from fact.

Philadelphia ornithologist John Kirk Townsend, well aware of his peers’ previous condor encounters, “kept a sharp lookout for this rare and interesting bird” as he entered the Snake River drainage in 1834. Weeks passed before Townsend finally encountered his first condor wheeling over a crowded tribal fishery at the Falls of the Willamette River, “seemingly intent upon watching the motions of his puny relatives below.” When the vulture plunged toward a freshly beached salmon, the naturalist shot it down. The condor fell on the opposite bank of the river, whereupon Townsend stripped off his clothes and swam after his prized specimen.

through heavy weather in the Umpqua drainage.

Those two incidents entered the lore of bird enthusiasts throughout the region as sad but final end points. But are end points ever really as final as we like to declare them? Both those supposed last records came from out-of-state visitors, without allowing the local observers that Merriam so valued to have their say.

One evening a few years ago, I spoke to an audience in Spokane about how Clark, Douglas and Townsend engaged with condors all those years ago. After I finished the last slide and most people had wandered away, a gentleman named Bill Brown introduced himself.

Brown had been born in Oregon in 1915. His father served as a district warden in the Umpqua National Forest between 1930 and 1935. During those Depression years, the teenage Bill spent his summers manning various fire towers in his dad’s district. Brown told me that during his time in those fire towers, he sighted single condors flying on multiple occasions. Often the birds glided below the level of his lookout, allowing for a clear and unobstructed view of their bald heads. From his perch, Brown regularly observed turkey vultures and golden eagles and assured me that the birds he was talking about were much larger. He emphasized that his fellow lookouts were aware of the outsized birds as well: Early radio “phones” connected the network of towers, so the observers could alert one another to the presence and direction of the condors, passing the birds along as they glided from peak to peak.

That evening I brought up the possibility that time had warped Bill Brown’s memories, but he answered without taking offense or changing a single detail of his account. I came away from our conversation convinced that he had observed condors plying the same Umpqua country where Douglas had seen them a century before, but 30 years after the birds were supposed to have disappeared from the Northwest entirely.

The hunter made it across to discover that he had only winged his quarry. For the next half hour, much to the delight of a large tribal audience, the naked Townsend parried with the injured condor, pelting it with rocks and sand while the bird “sometimes hobbled awkwardly away, and at others dashed furiously at me, hissing like an angry serpent, and compelled me likewise to run.”

Townsend finally clocked the great vulture with a rock to the head and skinned it right there on the sand.

Two months later, he later shot an immature condor at the mouth of the Columbia. Upon his return to Philadelphia in fall 1837, Townsend sold many of his specimens to John James Audubon, who had never traveled across the Continental Divide. Among the last dozen plates that Audubon completed in spring 1838 for his epic “Birds of America” was a painting of a single “California Vulture—Old Male,” perched on a bare branch with its neck craning forward. One of Townsend’s Columbia River condor specimens almost certainly served as Audubon’s model for a credible portrait of a bird that he never saw alive.

The two birds shot by Townsend remain the last recorded wild condor specimens taken from the Pacific Northwest. Although scattered observations from the odd fur trader, railroad surveyor or homesteader dribbled in through the rest of the 19th century, the beautiful buzzard of the Columbia had entered what appeared to be an irreversible death spiral, and the condor that Merriam saw on the ground outside Coulee City in 1897 represented the last generally accepted sighting in Washington state. Oregon’s last official record occurred only six years later, when a father and son team familiar with condors spotted a pair flying

Brown and I wondered exactly what his experience meant in the context of condor life and extinction. We talked about the concerted captive breeding efforts that had been underway for almost two decades at that point, with decidedly mixed results. Going forward, could living condors ever evolve into anything greater than a curiosity? Brown hoped so.

In the years that followed, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Condor Restoration Project gathered steam, I thought a lot about what could make a condor real. I was especially interested in the Inland Northwest, where Merriam recorded his sighting from a morning train.

Language offers one place to begin, because if something as distinct as a condor inhabits a defined area over the course of generations, then a word for the bird will surely follow. That’s the way it works moving upstream through the Columbia Gorge, searching the eras before, during and after Euro-American contact.

When Samuel Black, the Hudson’s Bay Company agent in charge of Fort Walla Walla in the late 1820s, compiled a basic vocabulary for the three main tribal tongues he heard spoken at the post, he included condor words in Walla Walla, Nez Perce and Cayuse languages. Eugene Hunn, an anthropologist working with Yakama people in the 1970s, recorded different words for condor in two other distinct Sahaptin dialects spoken upstream around the Big Bend.

Farther north on the Columbia Plateau the connection is less clear, but bits and pieces have endured: an Okanogan Salish word for a large bird with white under its wings; a story recorded by an anthropologist working with the St. Mary’s band of Kootenai (Ktunaxa) people near Cranbrook, British Columbia, involving a huge raptor that dwarfed all others.

Townsend finally clocked the great vulture with a rock to the head and skinned it right there on the sand.

Then there are the body parts. Before the closing of the Columbia River’s John Day Dam in 1957, an archaeological excavation at the Five Mile Rapids section of The Dalles uncovered thousands of bird bones in a layer that dated back thousands of years. Among them were no less than 63 individual California condors, the fourth-most common bird in the complex. And the landscape that surrounds these rapids, far from the lush greenery of the lower Columbia Gorge, is classic shrub-steppe.

A recent re-examination of the avian remains from Five Mile Rapids revealed several hundred marks consistent with the action of meat butchering in other birds. The people had applied their knives very differently to the condors, however, cutting distinct swipes across the wing bones that appear to have targeted primary and secondary flight feathers.

Such cut marks might lead directly to an Edward Curtis photo taken in the early 1900s of an elder at Wishram Village. The village site is still located on the Columbia’s north bank, hard by the former great fishery at Celilo Falls and only a few riffles upstream from Five Mile Rapids. The elder from Wishram Village holds a gigantic black feather in one hand that could only have come from a condor wing.

Representative art also has to be considered. Wishram Village is also the source for traditional basket patterns studied by weaver Mary Schlick. In the 1970s and ’80s, Schlick noticed figures of large birds with outstretched wings on two different flat twined bags. Striking geometric patterns had been laid into the underwings of both birds. When Schlick showed the baskets to elder Nelson Wallulatum, he said that the bird figures represented condors and that the patterns looked like lightning strikes. He said those birds used to live around Celilo Falls and The Dalles. Wallulatum added that not so long ago, people would occasionally capture a young bird.

“They kept a [condor] chick tied in camp to keep away thunder and lightning spirits,” he told Schlick.

Even the most compelling oral and written histories can be difficult to prove. Climbers have examined cliff ledges from the Columbia Gorge through Hell’s Canyon on the Snake River without finding concrete evidence of condor breeding, and whether condors bred in the Pacific Northwest remains one of the unknown facets of their life history within the region.

place and time, Saluskin shared almost the same story: at Lake Sahalee Tyee, her grandfather killed a condor attracted by a partially butchered elk. After that encounter, Suluskin’s grandfather carried a condor tail-feather as talisman the rest of his life. Lake Sahalee Tyee is located inside the Indian Heaven Wilderness, not far off the western flank of Mount Adams.

In the 1980s, Lila Walawitsa, who lived on what was then called the Yakima Reservation, told Hunn that in the 1890s her father saw a pach’anahúy (condor) at Potato Hill, just north of Mount Adams.

Josephine Andrews was a child in the 1920s when she first saw what she termed a pachanahoo or canahóo — two separate Sahaptin words for condor — at Howard Lake, northwest of Mount Adams and quite close to Potato Hill. When she was in her late 20s during World War II, Andrews saw another bird on the ground near the same location.

Even so, oral accounts of condors, often told long after the fact, seem to have a way of clustering together. The cone of Mount Adams, prominently visible to the north from Celilo Falls, would be easily within reach for a soaring condor sated with fish. The snow-covered peak gives way to green forest and copious lakes that abound with resources long utilized by local people. During one huckleberry picking season in the late 19th century, Yakama tribal member Ellen Saluskin’s great-grandfather saw a “huge black bird” that landed and began to devour a half-dressed deer.

“It had eyes like fire,” Saluskin said, relating her ancestor’s story to a Forest Service archaeologist. “It appeared enormous. Its beak was long and yellow, and it was constantly opening and shutting its beak.”

Talking to basket weaver Mary Schlick in a different

“Grandmother was living; we were all camping at Howard Lake. Jim Kwiyal and Otis Shiloh saw it,” she described. This second bird was “bald headed, like a turkey but smoother; like k’shpali (turkey vulture)” The bird Andrews saw was “much bigger than k’shpalí but almost the same; black and brown; with no white on wing; sitting on horse, he could look you in eye standing.” Andrews’ description fits that of an immature California condor and harks back to Merriam’s vision of his standing condor outside Coulee City.

Directly south of Celilo Falls, Mount Jefferson presents another snow-capped lure. Early one summer day in the 1950s, as Wasco tribal member Ken Kachie Smith walked along the slopes of Jefferson on the Warm Springs Reservation, he was stunned to encounter three California condors at close range. “Each was perched on a different limb” of a large snag 150 feet away.

After seeing the condors, Smith came upon a winterkilled elk in a snowbank on a north-facing slope. A flock of ravens, three bald eagles and two golden eagles were feeding on the carcass. Several turkey vultures were also present. Smith noted the condors’ large size, bald heads and bare necks. He specifically stated that they were different from the turkey vultures.

...continued on page 20

THE FUTURE OF CONDORS

With wild condors conditionally established in wild areas of the Southwest, Southern California and Baja California, the Condor Restoration Project has taken aim at the Pacific Northwest. The most recent release, in partnership with the Yurok Tribe of Northern California, took place last year around the mouth of the Klamath River, a salmon stream of historic importance.

The next release will target the mouth of the Columbia River, in the age-old condor territory documented by so many written accounts. The Oregon Zoo has been raising birds without any direct human contact. Downriver tribes such as the Cowlitz look forward to the return of a bird tribe that long played a lead role in their language and culture.

The Columbia and Snake Rivers represent a huge expanse of salmon habitat that drain long sections of the Rocky Mountains. As soon as condors establish themselves on the lower river, the Columbia’s regular afternoon breezes will carry some adventurous bird upstream, to Wishram Village. Family lore can begin to take shape again from Mount Adams and Mount Jefferson to Hells Canyon, the Grand Coulee country and far beyond.

The timing of these next releases remains undetermined, but if salmon recovery programs led by tribes like the Spokanes find success, there’s a chance that within a few generations, condors might be following fish upriver, touching down to gorge on spawned-out carcasses beside humans who have finally understood that people represent only one element in an unimaginably dynamic world.

— JACK NISBET

“ALIVE AND ALMOST FREE,” CONTINUED...

C. Hart Merriam was the last person to officially see a condor in Washington state, in 1897. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTO

It had eyes like fire. It appeared enormous. Its beak was long and yellow, and it was constantly opening and shutting its beak.

“ALIVE AND ALMOST FREE,” CONTINUED...

But condors can fly so much farther. Catching afternoon thermals, a bird could follow the Columbia’s main stem all the way around the Big Bend to the river’s confluence with the Okanogan. That is where Jackie Cook, growing up in a big family in the southwest corner of the Confederated Colville Tribes Reservation, first heard her condor story.

Cook’s mother told her that back in the 1940s and ’50s, before Chief Joseph Dam was built, her dad used to work for a neighbor as a cowboy, tracking free-range cattle. He often rode the stretch between the Okanogan and Grand Coulee Dam, where he could watch both golden and bald eagles in all their varieties of plumage, as well as turkey vultures during the summer months.

After one early fall stint in the Box Canyon area, Cook’s father came home saying that he had seen a different bird, much larger than the familiar eagles. This bird was flying in close circles, and he was able to watch it for a long time, taking careful note of what made it appear so different. The family kept a good picture dictionary at home, so he and Cook’s mother systematically looked up all the possible birds the father might have encountered. As soon as he saw the condor, her dad said, “That’s it — that’s what I saw.”

Alternatively, condors riding the wind could follow the Snake River, which bends south at the WashingtonIdaho border. Those birds would glide over Hells Canyon and the Seven Devils Wilderness, a world of precipitous cliffs. This is Nez Perce country, and the tribe has both a word in their language for condor and stories that Hells Canyon and the surrounding mountains used to be the place to find them.

The course of the Snake emerges from its great canyon and curves east, where our story circles back to one of the last generally accepted sight records — as least as far as white recorders are concerned — for the state of Idaho.

Jack Nisbet will be talking more about condors at Othello’s Sandhill Crane Festival on Saturday, March 25. For more details, visit www.othellosandhillcranefestival.org.

In a biographical sketch, Gen. T.E. Wilcox, a retired U.S. Army officer who once ran sheep in the Boise Basin, asserted that in the fall of 1879, while patrolling his flock near the hot springs above Boise City, he had come upon “Two California vultures… feeding on the carcass of a sheep. They hissed at me and ran along the ground for some distance before they were able to rise in flight. They were much larger than turkey buzzards, with which I was quite familiar, and I was very close to them so that I could not be mistaken in their identity. The cattlemen said that the California vulture or buzzard was not uncommon there before they began to poison carcasses to kill wolves.”

Wilcox here presents clear details of an outsized bird doing exactly what condors are supposed to do, in territory that Douglas heard lay within their range. In addition, Wilcox provides a particular detail that no tribal source mentions, and that may well hold the key to the condor’s inexorable decline: Cattlemen were lacing dead animals with strychnine for the express purpose of killing wolves. If you want to hurt a carrion eater, there can be no more effective tool than poisoning dead meat.

Condors, wolves and salmon. Three totems that evoke the spirit of the Northwest, their fates linked with humans on so many levels. And we might

Igor Carogodin mounting a condor a decade ago for an exhibit at the MAC about David Douglas. ROB FAUCETT/BURKE MUSEUM PHOTO

MOUNTING A CONDOR

When the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture undertook an exhibit about condor enthusiast David Douglas a decade ago, a replica bird seemed like a natural addition. A determined curator at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum obtained permission to stuff the frozen carcass of specimen No. 431, a captive release condor that had died of lead poisoning in the wild. The curator then convinced renowned taxidermist Igor Carogodin to tackle the restoration.

A meticulous researcher, Carogodin prepared for his task by combing archives for information about condor plumage succession as well as beak, head and foot color in different age classes. He studied every photo and video he could find on the internet. At the first opportunity, he traveled to the Grand Canyon to watch the flight mechanics of successfully released birds.

What Carogodin could not prepare for was the way lab technicians had to remove a large chunk of muscle and bone from condor No. 431 for their necropsy. That forced him to spend many hours sculpting clay into a body shape before facing the aesthetic considerations that would bring the bird back to life.

To create a secure mount in a realistic posture, Carogodin welded a threaded bolt into the back of his sculpted body. He draped the carefully flensed skin around this base like a cloak and sewed it closed with tiny invisible stitches. He airbrushed a conservative shade of orange-red onto the naked head. He bandaged the wings and feet into a dramatic turning position, then carefully combed out all the loose feathers right down to the distinctive neck ruff. After a nerve-racking month to make sure the creation was completely dry, Igor Carogodin’s condor mount arrived in Spokane just in time for the opening of the David Douglas exhibit.

There the beautiful buzzard of the Columbia soared again, with the adult’s lightning-strike black and white pattern clearly visible on the underside of wings that spanned almost 10 feet from tip to tip. Children entering the exhibit could peer over a pair of separating walls and catch a glimpse of the bird’s primary flight feathers, stretched wide like fingers to catch the slightest breeze. A small but steady percentage of those kids left their group behind to spend their hour directly below the feet of the great vulture. Today, people young and old still surround Carogodin’s condor mount at the new Burke Museum on the UW campus. It’s worth a visit.

— JACK NISBET

as well include the American buffalo with them, the foremost symbol of the Great Plains, because condors interacted with them as well.

In the 1930s, anthropologist Claude Schaeffer, working out of the Blackfoot Reservation in Browning, Montana, read about an ornithologist who had sighted a pair of condors in the Bow River Valley near Calgary in 1896 — only a year removed from Merriam’s Coulee City record. Building off that clue, Schaeffer transcribed a remarkable series of oral accounts that span the East Front of the Rockies from Alberta to Montana.

These prairie accounts include language, art and body parts that mirror the Columbia Plateau sightings. Dog Takes a Gun held a 2-foot-long tail feather in his hands. Cree people from the Hobbema Reserve south of Edmonton kept a skinned condor cape that, when draped from a grown man’s head, dragged to the ground. Chewing Back Bones recalled a raid into Crow territory in southern Montana called off because of the appearance of a condor circling their horses. Yellow Kidney described a bird of extraordinary size with white under its wings and a large, hooked beak that shaded from dark blue to yellow at its base. He said that in former times these birds had been attracted to the offal left behind from buffalo hunts.

These four totem species ran afoul of white settlement for very different reasons. After almost destroying each one of them, people decided that they wanted their totems back, often not accounting for what might come along with the bargain.

Salmon, caught and dammed to a fraction of their original numbers, ask an exceedingly high price for anything like a reasonable return. Wolves, poisoned and hunted to virtual extinction before World War II, have come back to affect several ecological equations formulated in their absence. Buffalo graze in large numbers, but the genetics of most herds remains intertwined with domestic cattle. The last wild condors, fading like ghosts in Southern California’s Sespe Reserve, were scooped up from the wild to form the core of a captive breeding program that will soon be half a century old.

Perhaps we should expand our sense of time to think about these elements. Condors fed on the carcasses of large herding mammals during the last Ice Age. As the climate warmed, extreme weather cycles surely decimated their prey base and altered their life history on several occasions, yet the beautiful buzzards found enough food to survive through more than 15,000 years of change. During all that time, they shared their bounty with people: camping beside stranded marine mammals on ocean beaches, harvesting salmon at fisheries located around river blockages, tracking great herds of buffalo across rolling prairies. What is 200 years against time counted in millennia? How does a concrete dam compare to a 2,000foot wall of ice? Who gets to decide what the concept of wildness means in today’s Inland Northwest?

The future of condors remains very unclear at the moment. It’s a difficult proposition for a large carrioneater to survive in the face of drastic change, much less to thrive as a free-wheeling magnate of the air. At the same time, creatures and species exposed to the face of death often show an extreme reluctance to let go of the essential spark of life. Given the condors’ long track record, I’m not sure I’d bet against them. n

Spokane-based writer Jack Nisbet has explored Pacific Northwest condors in two different books: Visible Bones and his forthcoming The Language of Birds. The sources for all the above condor sightings can be found in those essays or in Brian E. Sharp, “The California Condor in Northwestern North America.” Western Birds volume 43, number 2 (2012).

VISUAL ARTS

IF YOU BUILD IT

Spokane artist Audreana Camm is doing whatever it takes to get more people to support the region’s creatives

BY CHEY SCOTT

As a newly arrived, 18-year-old aspiring artist in Spokane more than a decade ago, Audreana Camm quickly realized a path to success in the regional arts scene wasn’t going to magically appear in front of her.

So she carved one out for herself, bit by bit.

Camm is now rooted in the community she once so eagerly sought. Even so, her tenacious hustle hasn’t waned. If anything, it’s only been spurred on by seemingly endless possibilities.

“It’s really hard being an artist in a midsized city like Spokane,” Camm says on a sunny, winter afternoon as she sits in the large, back room of Shotgun Studios. She’s about halfway through a six-month artist residency at the gallery in the eclectic Peaceful Valley neighborhood, nestled in the heart of the Spokane River gorge.

“I do think you kind of have to make your own way,” she continues. “There weren’t really people that helped me, like, ‘Here, we’ll put your work up.’ I definitely had to just drive around in my car and ask people to put my work up, and had to find room for myself in the world, you know?”

Camm’s scrappy approach isn’t just about getting people to pay more attention to her art,

but the whole of our region’s richly diverse artistic community.

Around her, Shotgun Studio’s long, narrow space (the front half was built in 1901 as itinerant labor lodging, while the back was added in 2018) is in transition from February’s psychedelicthemed collection to a portrait-centric showcase for March, both group shows.

Stacks of canvases lean against the wall. There’s still art to be dropped off, picked up, hung or finished — including Camm’s own massive portrait of a beaming Dolly Parton — and jokes to be written.

Yes, jokes.

It’s part of Camm’s latest plan to get more people out to Shotgun Studio’s First Friday gallery receptions.

“The first show I did in December, nobody showed up, which is how a lot of the shows were here,” she says. “And then I just thought, ‘I’ve got to do something! I can’t have no one show up.’”

When she’s not painting, running a gallery, curating art for other venues or working her main job teaching classes at Pinot’s Palette (the downtown paint-and-drink-

wine studio), Camm also dabbles in stand-up comedy. It’s a scene she got into during the slow season at Pinot’s one summer. She decided it could be a hook to get people in the door at Shotgun.

“To my stand-up, open-mic friends, I was like, ‘I have this weird idea, I think I want to do an art comedy show,’” she says. “And they were all immediately like, ‘Yes! Let’s find people right now!’”

Starting with January’s reception, those friends riffed on the art hanging around the studio in an unlikely mashup meant to entice guests with a more approachable, interactive vibe.

It worked.

While some of the artists whose work was featured in that first show were understandably a bit wary of essentially having their art roasted, Camm set some boundaries with the comics that the jokes should be lighthearted and fun versus mean-spirited.

That show’s focus on surrealist art left it wide open for creative and silly interpretation. At the end of each comic’s turn on the mic, Camm shared artists’ statements about their work to reveal which comics were close and which got things wildly, hilariously wrong.

“They’re not making fun of the painting, just trying to figure out what the painting means,” she says. “Even though the gallery owners [John and Kathy Thamm] were like, ‘Do whatever you want,’ I had to talk a lot of people into this. I really believe that if comedians were writing jokes about paintings, it would cause someone to look at it for a second and think about what it meant.”

The idea was challenging in other ways. Suddenly thrown into event planning, Camm had to tap friends to lend a sound system and chairs. She even used her own funds to buy a projector so each painting being riffed on could be seen by the seated audience.

But to Camm, it was all worth it. More people showed up to that first Jan. 6 combo event than she’d ever expected. And for February’s version, it was standing-room only when the show began, with probably more than 100 people in attendance.

“Even though people were like, ‘I don’t know if this is a good idea,’ now of course everyone’s like, ‘We want to be in this!’” she says. “It was really me going out on a limb at the beginning.”

She wonders if March’s event can continue to surpass the turnout.

The comedians have plenty of material to work with, as paintings already hung in the gal-

lery including a massive portrait of Ron Paul by lifelong painter and gallery owner John Thamm, as well as other political figures he’s painted, from Bill Clinton to Joseph Stalin. Spokane artist Travis Chapman, known for his satirical pop-culture art, contributed a few pieces, too: Van Gogh selling Vans shoes, Bob Ross posing a la Bruce Lee, and tatted musician Post Malone working as a postal carrier. Since Camm showed many of her own pieces — surrealism is one of her creative touchstones — in last month’s show, she’s pulled back for this one and plans to just debut her Parton portrait. Other featured March painters include Daniel Lopez and Tom Quinn.

Camm’s residency at Shotgun Studios came about, like most of her art career thus far, as a serendipitous opportunity. She’d displayed some art at the gallery back in 2021, and her tenacity caught the attention of its owners, the Thamms. As snowbirds who spend winter down in Bisbee, Arizona, where they own another fine art gallery, the couple invited Camm to live in the gallery’s attached apartment while they were gone. In exchange for running the gallery, she’d also have a place to paint.

“It’s not like an official program or anything,” she says. “They were like ‘Do whatever you want’ — they’re really kind. Kathy [said] I was doing them a big favor, but they’re the ones really doing it for me. I don’t think they expected me to throw these giant, crazy art shows, but they’ve been very pleasantly surprised about how many people have shown up.”

When her residency at Shotgun wraps up in late April as the Thamms return to Spokane, Camm hopes to stay actively involved and envisions continuing the art-driven comedy shows. When it warms up, the event could spill outside into the gallery’s adjacent sculpture garden.

“I have this weird way I think about art, where I think inspiration is like a butterfly that gently lands on your shoulder and you can decide to take it and make something out of it, or you can ignore it, and it’s going to float on to somebody else,” Camm says. “The idea is just coming from somewhere, you know, like the ether or whatever, and it’s just my responsibility to do the best I can with my ideas. So that’s what I do.” n

FACING PAGE: Audreana Camm paints lots of dreamy, surrealist scenes. ABOVE: Shotgun Studios’ main gallery space. YOUNG KWAK PHOTOS

Sex and the Symphony

What do humble Anton Bruckner and arrogant Richard Wagner have in common? Ecstasy, says Eckart Preu

BY E.J. IANNELLI

When the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner finished writing his Third Symphony in 1873, he dedicated it to Richard Wagner, the creator of the monumental Ring cycle and arguably the preeminent figure in music by that point. The dedication might seem like a touching gesture of friendship, but according to Eckart Preu, labeling the two as “friends” would be overstating things.

“Because Wagner was such a dominant person at the time, nobody could ignore him. Wagner was untouchable — a huge influence, a huge star,” he says.

By contrast, “Bruckner was by nature a guy who was totally insecure and always kind of kowtowing to everyone.”

Later, Bruckner had second thoughts about what would become colloquially known as his “Wagner Symphony.” The work’s premiere, which took four years to bring to fruition, could barely keep the Viennese audience in their seats. Not even the orchestra wanted to stick around when it was over. Bruckner soon began a process of revision that continued almost up to his death in 1896.

“After its first conception, he doctored the symphony for nearly 30 years trying to get rid of the Wagner quotes that were in there and finding his own real voice,” says Preu. “The first version was very Wagnerian, but now it’s Bruckner through and through.”

For all Bruckner’s self-doubt, however, and despite the ambivalence that some classical music aficionados still harbor for the composer, Preu is of the opinion that Bruckner — whether you’re talking the man or his music — is deeply misunderstood.

That’s something he hopes to remedy when he rejoins the Spokane Symphony this weekend for two Masterworks series

performances of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor. It will be the first time Preu has been publicly reunited with the orchestra since his departure in 2019 after serving as its music director for 15 years.

“There’s a lot of bad Bruckner out there. And there are a lot of preconceived notions about how this music is played. It’s like a dish that can be screwed up very easily. It’s actually a simple dish, but if it’s too simple, it’s ugly. And it can be absolutely delicious,” he says, finding some amusement in his own analogy.

Which is to say that Preu doesn’t disagree with Bruckner’s critics. If it’s approached and executed a certain way, he acknowledges that the composer’s work can be “square and boring and long and meandering” for audiences and orchestras alike.

“It can be all of those things, but it can also be all the opposite. He was a very lyrical composer, but that’s often forgotten.”

Preu maintains that Bruckner’s musical language is better appreciated when you consider the composer’s early training as a choral singer and his lifelong practice as an organist. He approached his symphonies as if he were writing for voice and organ.

“It’s less of a blend of all the different instruments than it is instrument blocks — pure woodwinds, pure brass, pure strings. He uses these blocks like building blocks, putting them all together. He piles them up, and that’s what makes his music so incredibly powerful, these piles of sound and piles of rhythm, all on top of each other,” he says.

For the Masterworks concert, Preu has paired Bruckner’s colossal Third Symphony with music from just one other work: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The opera’s opening line has become known as the “Tristan chord,” and the number

of times that simple phrase has been quoted and repurposed in classical, jazz and popular music speaks to Wagner’s enduring influence on generations of composers after Bruckner. “Idioteque” from Radiohead’s Kid A famously sampled an electronic work based on the Tristan chord.

The decision to include the Prelude and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde isn’t meant to invite invidious comparisons to Bruckner, as if taunting him with Wagner’s lasting fame. Far from it. Originally, Preu suggested playing “something happy” to balance Bruckner’s gravitas. But after talking it over with his successor, James Lowe, they thought it might be more intriguing to draw attention to the parallels between the composers instead.

“What’s interesting about Wagner and Bruckner is that they are so different personality-wise, but they have certain similarities. And one of the similarities is ecstasy. In Tristan, it’s basically a composed orgasm. And this forward motion, this drive to a climax is very strong in Wagner and is also very strong in Bruckner,” Preu says,

In Bruckner in particular, “there’s a lot of emotional, sexual unfulfillment, which he poured into his music.” That creates a sense of longing, yearning and ultimately release that lends the music its potency.

“Now, it can be played very straight and very Teutonic, and that’s going to be incredibly boring,” he admits.

So, to counter that, Preu is drawing on the close relationship that he cultivated with the musicians of the Spokane Symphony to showcase what he believes to be the latent, overlooked qualities of Bruckner’s work.

“There’s stuff that I can do with this orchestra that I can’t do with other orchestras. The whole point of conducting is nonverbal communication, and so after 15 years, the orchestra knows exactly what I’m going for, what I want with my motions. It’s like reading each other’s mind, and I hope,” he chuckles, “that there’s some memory left.” n

Masterworks 7: Welcome Back, Eckart • Sat, March 4 at 7:30 pm and Sun, March 5 at 3 pm

$19-$68

The Fox Theater

1001 W. Sprague Ave.

spokanesymphony.org

509-624-1200

Eckart is back, baton in hand. SPOKANE SYMPHONY PHOTO

CONGRATULATIONS TO COEUR D’ALENE CASINO.

The Kalispel Tribe would like to thank Coeur d’Alene Casino for being one of the earliest pioneers in tribal gaming, opening the door to success for so many tribes in need. Congratulations on 30 years in business, and many more milestones to come.

We are Kalispel.

LEARN MORE AT KALISPELTRIBE.COM

Happy Birthday To Us!

This month, we are 30 years old

Things were so different in 1993. The world wide web was in its infancy, and virtually no one understood the revolutionary changes it would bring to business, to people, and to the world. A loaf of bread cost 75 cents, and a gallon of gasoline was $1.17. There was no social media, and the first, rudimentary cellphone debuted that year. Princess Diana, Michael Jackson and the grunge band Nirvana were regularly in the news, and people were flocking to theaters to enjoy the Robin Williams’ movie Mrs. Doubtfire

It’s stunning to think that it has been 30 years since we opened as a modest Bingo Hall that was designed to provide our struggling Coeur d’Alene Tribe and its members with jobs and a source of revenue.

Now we’re among the largest employers in North Idaho, employing roughly 800, and our people have benefited from more jobs, more income, better opportunities, better everything. We’re currently buying back land on our reservation to maintain our land base and provide for our next generations to come. We are a proud, smart sovereign nation that has painstakingly risen from extremely difficult circumstances and is now proactively laying the groundwork for success for current and future generations.

And it’s not just us who have benefited. We’ve donated over $34 million to educational programs and organizations in the region and state. We employ many nontribal members. We work toward the restoration and conservation of our Lake Coeur d’Alene and other area natural resources. We promote and support health care, youth, the arts, and many more things throughout Idaho and Eastern Washington — Make-A-Wish, Meals on Wheels, Coats for Kids and more.

We could not have done any of this without you. We are grateful that you have embraced us since our beginning as a singular bingo entity to now — a premier casino resort destination with amenities that include the world-class Circling Raven Golf Club, two hotel wings, eight dining areas and lounges, merchandise shops, live entertainment and events, an exquisite, enormous 15,000-square-foot spa, and more.

To thank you and celebrate our anniversary together, we have planned many special events, giveaways and activities to ensure that you know how much we appreciate you. Please come visit us soon — and often — and we’ll count our blessings together! Welcome home.

Sincerely,

Laura Penney CEO, Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel

Laura Penney

How It Started; How It’s Going

BY ROBERT S. BOSTWICK

This all began on a wheat field, and not much of one at that. The soil was heavy with clay, covered by seasonal wetlands with thorny wild roses sprouting up all around. But these 80 acres of wheat, nestled near the intersection of highways U.S. 95 and Idaho 58, was to be the place where the Coeur d’Alene Tribe would spin that wheat straw into gold.

And it’s no fairy tale.

The Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel has evolved over these 30 years into a stunning destination resort, with 300-plus rooms, eight dining areas and lounges, 1,200 gaming machines, bingo, approximately 60,000 square feet of gaming space and the world-class Circling Raven Golf Club among its amenities.

Those who visit see the results, and they come from all over the world. Those who were here see a powerful vision realized. They see their children and grandchildren looking hopefully toward the future. They feel their ancestors looking down at them, approving and proud.

Robert Bostwick has worked in public relations for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel since the early 1990s.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Those 80 acres were just enough when the original building, housing only a bingo hall, opened for business in March 1993, offering seating for about 1,000 players. There were a few offices, one meeting room, a small cantina and a lobby. That’s it. To build it, the tribe borrowed $2.9 million from an economic development fund at the Bureau of Indian Affairs — a fund that doesn’t even exist anymore.

David Matheson, a tribal member, former tribal councilman and chairman, University of Washington graduate with a Master’s in Business Administration, was the brains behind the boom.

Matheson, who passed away earlier this year, will always be remembered as the architect who led the tribe to where it is today. As the deputy assistant secretary of the Interior for the Bureau of Indian Affairs under President George H.W. Bush, he learned all the ins and outs of Indian Gaming — and how it could all start with bingo.

“I like to tell the story,” Matheson said in 2017. “I got all kinds of advice from very smart and successful people in the region. They all said the same thing: ‘Don’t build it way down there, build it as far north as you can get.’ Of course,

the three rules of business are ‘location, location, location.’ We had none of the three.”

What the tribe also did not have were jobs, opportunities and scholarship dollars. But what the tribe did have was vision. It had commitment. It had unwavering leadership.

The Tribal Council at the time included Al Garrick, Domnick Curley, Margaret Jose, Lawrence Aripa, Henry SiJohn and Norma Peone. Ernie Stensgar was the tribal chairman. Only Jose, Peone and Stensgar are still living. Their backsides at the time, and no one else’s, were on the line. But their tribe was enduring abject poverty — its unemployment rate hovering around 70 percent.

“Oh, we preferred the money issues to the poverty, so we never hesitated to take the risk,” recalls Jose, who served on the Tribal Council for six years, her eyes lighting up at the memories. “It sure was exciting, and yes, we did have concerns, but everyone came together then. Everybody had a ‘can-do’ spirit, and so much support from all the tribal families was wonderful to see.”

Leaders in Idaho state government were not so pleased. In July 1992, the tribe notified then-

The little bingo hall that started it all (above); and today’s Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel campus, nestled into the North Idaho Palouse.

Gov. Cecil Andrus that it would seek negotiations for a gaming compact, a process required by the U.S. Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. But in those days, it was a process often held up by states dragging their feet.

Andrus didn’t drag his feet. Instead, he called the Legislature into special session, the first one in decades, to take the first required step to write an amendment to the state constitution. That November, the amendment passed as Proposition One, and it came with a whopping 59 percent majority among voters.

Then the compact was negotiated in a reasonably timely manner. Bingo was protected already by federal law, as was Class II gaming. That compact then allowed for the tribe to do any type of Class III gaming allowed in the state — horse racing, mule racing, dog racing (now banned) and lottery. Yes, lottery.

IDAHO ON BOARD

With or without dice, the tribe was on a roll. Then came a few machines, mostly in the lobby, then a few more. Revenue was flowing modestly. Expansion was needed. Remember that $2.9 million loan? The 15-year note was paid off in three years; the “mortgage burning” ceremony was included in a bingo promotion. Other such “burnings” would follow.

But the tribe still faced challenges, as lawmakers, governors and anti-gaming interests were taking notice. Expansions had included a hotel, pool and restaurants, and fur was flying at the state Capitol in Boise. The tribe decided to take its message to the people.

With success growing and glowing, it still took another vote, this time of the citizens of the state, to seal the deal with Idaho for good. The tribe successfully petitioned to put their

proposition on the ballot in 2002, asking the people of Idaho to confirm the legitimacy of lottery-style machines. A statewide campaign was launched, and it passed, carrying a conservative Republican and considerably Mormon state by, guess what? Again, 59 percent.

Idahoans appreciated that the tribe had erased that 70 percent unemployment rate. The tribe today is at full employment, with more jobs, in fact, than it has Indians to fill them.

“WE’VE GOT TO DO THIS”

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe can boast full employment. It can boast a more diverse and a sustainable reservation economy, supporting some 1,800 jobs at the tribe’s enterprises and government programs. It can boast health care not just for tribal members at a tribe-supported medical center that serves the non-Indian public as well. It can boast about a half-billion dollars in new construction over these 30 years — some, but far from all, at the casino resort.

After serving as marketing director since the very beginning back in 1993, Laura Penney was named CEO in October 2019. Her mind goes back to the early ’90s when she was part of a delegation that toured the Oneida Tribe’s casino in Wisconsin.

“I’ll never forget that day when I got off the plane and just a mile down the road was this amazing resort,” says Penney. “I was just in awe. They had a hotel. They had their own senior housing. They had a wellness center, a fitness center. We toured the tribal housing. It was just amazing what they had and what they were doing

with their gaming dollars. So we came back and were inspired and just said, ‘We’ve got to do this.’”

Now, looking back on how the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has done it, Penney says it all started with the people — the tribe.

“We’ve always considered ourselves as family,” she says. “It was easy to maintain those relationships when we started with 90 employees; we now have roughly 800. We make it a priority to provide the culture and environment of ownership and family.

“It has been an honor to serve my tribe and to work side by side with our employees for these many years,” Penney adds. “We have an amazing team that truly cares for their coworkers and guests.”

Chief J. Allan currently holds the reins in Plummer as chairman of the Tribal Council, maintaining the same firm commitment he saw growing up.

“We continue to create opportunities, jobs, education, health care and more,” Allan says. “So many benefit from all this, tribal or otherwise. We have clearly shown that as the tribe benefits, so does the region. As tribal members benefit, so do non-Indians in the region.”

And the tribe can rely, if not rest, on its self-sufficiency. Just as importantly, it has established economic sustainability. Vision is ever present. Ideas will continue to grow, as will the resort.

“It has been rewarding to help contribute towards the betterment of our tribe and future generations to come,” says Penney. “We are a strong, progressive, smart people and will always strive for selfsufficiency.” 

REMEMBERING DAVID MATHESON

Tribal leader David Matheson passed away on Jan. 10, just before the casino he helped create turned 30.

“Dave has left us a profound legacy,” says Chief J. Allan, chairman of the Coeur d’Alene Tribal Council that Matheson also served on. “He was a true visionary who had the foresight to see the great possibilities for the Tribe and Native Americans. He was the architect behind much of our enterprises, endeavors that have enabled us to thrive as we stride forward in the 21st century.”

“Dave was my mentor — I learned so much from him

about how to treat people, how to be a strong but kind leader,” adds Coeur d’Alene Casino CEO and tribal member Laura Penney. “He is loved dearly and will be missed deeply.”

Matheson once shared his personal philosophy: “The Great Creator promised no one a tomorrow, or an easy time… no one. When the new day comes, greet it with great thankfulness. It is a time not used by anyone. Use it for something good, even great. It’s the one life we have. Leave no dream unfulfilled, and no good deed undone.” 

Over the 30 years the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel has had its doors open, one thing comes up again and again. Guests want to learn more about the stories and traditions of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe.

“If we can share with you our foods, our language, our arts, you can understand who we are and why we are, and how we will always be,” says Yvette Matt, a Coeur d’Alene tribal member and the casino’s marketing director. “That’s how it started, our cultural tourism program.”

CEO Laura Penney has been involved in the casino since before it was open in the early 1990s. “I’ve heard

CULTURAL TOURISM

Sharing the Culture

it said many times, and it’s important to repeat: ‘We’re a tribe with a casino, not a casino with a tribe.’

“The sharing of culture comes from our hearts,” Penney adds.

“There are so many myths and misconceptions — even lies — of what our culture and our history was,” says Matt. “Who better to tell our history than us?”

“A lot of guests are coming from the East Coast, and they’ve never even seen a huckleberry,” says Dee Dee McGowan, who manages cultural tourism, tour bussing and sponsorships for the casino. “People always say this is such a beautiful area. We really roll out that red carpet for them. We are doing it because we love where we live.”

Guests who sign up for cultural tourism events can experience parts of the tribe’s history and present-day culture with traditional workshops making Pendleton moccasins, beaded necklaces and more. Watch cdacasino.com for cultural events as they are announced.

There are also cultural dinners with smoked huckleberry salmon, including storytelling and a cultural exhibition performance with song and drum. You can tour an aviary with eagles, hawks and owls that isn’t open to the general public. There are kayaking, canoeing, hiking, bike and boat tours on and around the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes and Heyburn State Park. You can visit the Old Cataldo Mission, where Coeur d’Alene tribal members met Catholic missionaries. You can hear the songs of legendary jazz singer Mildred Bailey, who was a Coeur d’Alene tribal member. Singer CeCe Cook recreates her music in the Mildred Bailey Room, telling stories of the barriers Bailey overcame. All are part of the growing cultural tourism program the tribe has fostered since 2018.

McGowan says the COVID-19 pandemic led to pent-up demand for vacations outside the normal casino experience people get in places like Las Vegas.

“People want to have an adventure,” says McGowan, “and a unique experience.” 

The history of a people is inextricably bound to their language. The words they use to describe their environment, their beliefs, their routines and themselves offer insight into the forces that have shaped their way of life and their identity.

For the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, this is as true as ever.

They call themselves Schitsu’umsh. The discovered ones. Those who are found here.

“One meaning is that other people discovered us living here,

being a little fierce, a little ornery, very businesslike.”

TRADERS AND MISSIONARIES

Yet the history of the Coeur d’Alenes begins long before their contact with early white traders. The land that the explorers regarded as wilderness — roughly 3.5 million acres centered on today’s Idaho Panhandle region — had been home to the Tribe for more than 10,000 years, according to archaeological evidence, though oral history traces the origins much

The Story of the Schitsu’umsh

where we had always been,” says tribal historian Quanah Matheson. “At the same time, there’s a spiritual meaning: Creator gathered up his children and put us on this land.”

It wasn’t until the French Canadian fur traders of the Hudson Bay Company and the North West Company “discovered” the Schitsu’umsh around the end of 18th century that the name Cœur d’Alene, or heart of an awl, was applied to them.

“They called us the pointed hearts because they couldn’t get one over on us,” Matheson laughs. “We were savvy and always won on the business deals. We were known as

30

further back.

“The elders always told us that we’ve been here since time immemorial. We hunted ancient beasts. We took a highly respectful stance toward living with nature. We followed our seasonal calendar. We knew when to get roots when they were ready, knew when to fish, when to hunt, when to gather,” Matheson says. They knew intimately their land’s forests, its camas prairie, its waterways, its mountains.

It was around the time that fur traders arrived that the great chief Circling Raven, who legend says

CONTINUED ON

1988

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act passes Congress, infringing on tribal sovereignty, but also allowing tribes to create gaming operations.

1991-92

Following those new federal laws, a gaming compact is negotiated and finalized between the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the state of Idaho, allowing gaming to start on tribal lands.

1993

The one-building Coeur d’Alene Tribal Bingo Hall opens for business on March 23 — 30 years ago this month.

1998

As the operation grows, the complex’s first full-service restaurant opens to diners. Today there are eight unique dining areas and lounges.

lived for 150 years and ruled the Tribe between 1660 and 1760, issued his famous prophecy: During times of hardship, men with crossed sticks and long black robes will come to the people.

This foretold the two forces that would shape the Coeur d’Alene’s history: illness and religion. Between 1777 and 1842, 90 percent of the Tribe was killed by smallpox and other foreign diseases against which Native Americans had no immunity. The Tribe’s numbers dwindled to around 500.

Then came missionaries like Father DeSmet and other Jesuit priests, who converted all but a handful of the remaining members to Roman Catholicism. As a result, the Coeur d’Alenes began to concentrate around church and school buildings and became Palouse-area farmers.

SHRINKING LANDS

But this way of life didn’t last long. The discovery of precious metals in the region accelerated the migration of Euro-American settlers in the 1860s. The United States government began taking increasing steps to suppress and confine Native Americans.

In 1873, an executive order by President Ulysses S. Grant established the Coeur d’Alene Reservation — just 600,000 acres of what once was millions of acres of ancestral land. The Dawes Act of 1887 later forced the Coeur d’Alenes to become individual as opposed to collective landowners. Subsequent federal acts shrank the size of the reservation even further to just 345,000 acres, much of which was considered undesirable for white settlement.

What followed was more than a century of challenge and further hardship.

“When you think about what can be done to

2001

The Coeur d’Alene Casino becomes a proper resort by adding a hotel to accommodate overnight guests.

THE COEUR D’ALENE RESERVATION

2002

Spokane

Cataldo

Moscow

Source: Coeur d'Alene Tribe GIS-SK, gisinfo@cdatribe-nsn.gov

a people to break them, that’s what was done to the Coeur d’Alene people,” says Matheson. “They destroyed our culture, our language, our heritage, our landbase. They took everything away. But the tribe was very resilient.”

A TURNING POINT

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 was one government initiative that did work in Native Americans’ favor. Within four years, the Coeur d’Alenes had successfully negotiated a gaming compact with the state of Idaho. That led to the creation of a modest bingo hall opening in March

2003

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe wins a spot on the statewide ballot for an initiative to allow gaming machines at their growing operation. The measure passes with 59 percent of the vote.

In August, the Circling Raven Golf Course fills its first tee times; among many accolades, it’s consistently been named Idaho’s No. 1 public golf course, and holds the current title as of May 2022.

1993 — 30 years ago this month.

All these years and several expansions later, the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel is testament to what a proud, resilient and businesssavvy people can build when given the chance. Importantly, more and more Coeur d’Alenes are reconnecting with their ancient Salish language, rediscovering what it means to be the Discovered Ones.

“Our language is based upon our land,” says Matheson. “Our language can be traced back to one place, and that’s here.” 

2011

The Coeur d’Alene Resort Casino expands again, with the Spa Tower, adding 100 more hotel rooms, the new Chinook Steakhouse and a 15,000-square-foot spa.

2017

The Coeur d’Alene Resort Casino launches its Cultural Tourism program, inviting visitors to learn even more about the tribal stories, traditions and values of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe.

ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP

Looking After the Land

Asaying often attached to how Indigenous peoples view the earth is that we did not inherit it from our ancestors; we borrow it from our grandchildren. Similarly, many Native traditions take to heart the so-called seventh generation principle — consider how your actions will affect people seven generations in the future.

Pithy lines are easy. Action is more difficult when mixed with current-day realities and tied up with governmental and political processes.

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe, aided by revenue from gaming and enterprise operations, understands the need for thoughtful stewardship of resources that account for present and future realities.

“We definitely do it all,” says Caj Matheson, the tribe’s director of natural resources. “Whether it’s sitting in a

2019

Laura Penney becomes the Coeur d’Alene Casino’s first female CEO, one of only a handful of female casino CEOs in the nation. Major renovations include stateof-the-art systems for air filtration, sound and lighting in the event center and casino floor.

2020

boardroom or getting our hands dirty [by working on habitat restoration], we’re doing it all.”

Matheson is well versed in walking the fine line between environmental stewardship on the ground and having to navigate complex bureaucracy. The goal: being good stewards of the present reservation and larger aboriginal territory.

As an example of their hard-fought work, Matheson points to Lake Coeur d’Alene, which the tribe had to literally argue for in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to have in its current reservation. The court ruled in 2001 that the tribe had a legal claim to the southern one-third portion of the lake, which the state of Idaho disputed. The original reservation set aside by President Ulysses S. Grant gave the entire lake to the Coeur d’Alene reservation.

2022

Like everyone, the Coeur d’Alene Casino was challenged by COVID-19. It was among the first casino resorts to temporarily close, but after careful planning and quickly applying precautions and protocols over six weeks of closed doors, it was the first casino in America to come back, providing other casinos with a blueprint on how to reopen with safety standards in place.

Coeur d’Alene Casino becomes the first and only casino in the Inland Northwest to offer a video gaming machine testing room, the Discovery Den, where guests try out leading manufacturers’ new machines prior to nationwide launches.

“We say [the lake] has nursed and mothered us, and now it is our turn to care for it. And what we try to do is hold on to that,” Matheson says.

Beyond the lake and the current-day reservation, the tribe promotes habitat restoration for ecologically and culturally important lands and habitat for beaver, trout and salmon. Last year, the tribe stepped in to purchase and preserve 48 acres inside the city of Spokane along Hangman Creek, in the Latah Valley neighborhood.

Matheson says the tribe got involved “at the 11th hour” to save the property, and that the council “didn’t hesitate” to step in and keep it in its natural, undeveloped state.

Preserving the land benefits not only members of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and their future descendants, but all the people who call the Inland Northwest home — and will for generations to come. 

2023

With roughly 800 jobs created and contributions to state and regional educational and charitable efforts surpassing $34 million, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe celebrates its Casino’s 30th birthday — and the entire Inland Northwest is invited to join the party!

Lake Coeur d’Alene

HEALTH AND EDUCATION

Supporting Health and Education

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe has long held education as one of its core values, as it can open doors to success and personal fulfillment that would otherwise remain closed. Coeur d’Alene Casino CEO Laura Penney says the support of education is one of the most profound changes that have come about over the past 30 years.

“In 1991, the gaming compact was agreed and signed off on between the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the state of Idaho. I was privileged to be there during the negotiation,” she says. “A pivotal moment was when I saw a tribal leader speak up and tell the state that they want to put 5 percent of the net profits towards education… Many people think that it was stipulated by the state, but this was mandated by our tribal leaders.”

Since then, the tribe has made good on that commitment, donating $33.3 million to schools, universities and education-related activities across the Inland Northwest. Each year

organizations throughout the region are encouraged to submit a funding application for review by the grant committee.

The tribe’s commitment to the region is evident in supporting health care, as well. For example, its Marimn Health medical and wellness center is more than a health clinic, holding classes on nutrition and fitness that are available to tribal and non-tribal members alike.

In December 2020, Marimn Health’s Coeur Center opened, with 32,000 square feet of indoor health and fitness offerings, from a pool to basketball courts — with sports fields outdoors as well.

“There are many important needs in our community, but none more pressing than preserving and protecting the health and safety of our youth,” said Ernie Stensgar, a councilman of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe who has served in leadership continuously since 1984. “Investing in our youth is an investment in the future of the tribe.”

The August 2019 groundbreaking of the Marimn Health Youth Center, which opened in late 2020 and features basketball courts, outdoor play fields and an indoor waterpark (below).

Tribal Leadership

Most of the key decisions that have guided the exciting developments on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation over the past 30 years started with the Tribal Council.

It’s similar to a city council, with seven elected members who meet every week to deliberate on the business of the day. The chairman, currently Chief J. Allan, leads the council, but only has one vote like the rest.

“We all have different views,” says Margaret SiJohn, who served on the council from 201517 and is currently serving another three-year term. “Even if we disagree, we’re willing to compromise with one another and make a decision that we all feel is best for the tribe.”

Like many things throughout the Coeur d’Alene people’s history, the council was a hard-won gain. First formed in 1947 to align with the self-government provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, it was formalized two years later under a written constitution after fraught negotiations with the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Joe Garry, son of the tribe’s last traditional chief, Ignace Garry, served as the council’s first elected president. Joe would go on to make history as the first Native American elected to the Idaho Legislature, serving in both the Idaho House and Senate in the years that followed. Joe Garry went on to become a hero to tribes across the United States, as he became president of the National Congress of American Indians in 1953. As Congress worked to dissolve tribal governments and liquidate tribal lands — a battle waged on many fronts via a series of federal laws from the 1940s to the 1960s known as “termination” — the man who organized the opposition was a Coeur d’Alene born in a tipi, Joe Garry.

“Past leaders put in their time and their life experience to get us here,” says SiJohn. “Their focus on getting the younger generations educated and aware of what’s happening outside the reservation has really helped put us where we are now.”

The council has oversight and funding authority over many tribal enterprises, from police and justice to public works. One important initiative is the Tribal School in DeSmet, which dates all the way back to 1877. Along with teaching the usual K-8 subjects, the Tribal School is reviving the native language among its roughly 100 students.

“There are no fluent speakers of snchitsu’umshtsn,” the school states, “which makes our school’s mission to create new fluent speakers of the Coeur d’Alene language to protect our language from disappearance.” 

Joe Garry

The 2022 Coeur d’Alene Tribal Council: (left to right) Don Sczenski, Margaret SiJohn, Ernie Stensgar, Chief Allan (chairman), CarylDene Swan, the late David Matheson and Gene James.

People Make the Place

As several Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel team members and longtime guests can attest, any enterprise is only as good as its ingredients

Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel team member FRANCIS DAVISON, the casino floor maintenance manager, began work at the casino in 2007. A “proud Coeur d’Alene Tribal member,” Davison says he loves coming to work as doing so, “gives me purpose and drive — I try to get better every day.” Davison adds that coming through the pandemic was stressful, yet also provided some of his most uplifting moments. “We were the first casino to reopen in the world, and all eyes were on us. We were on the front line, along with housekeeping. We came together as a team, and that comes from having strong tribal and casino leaders and taking pride in our work.”

LONGTIME GUESTS

Marketing project and content manager DEB SHAW thought she was just making a pitstop in North Idaho when she started at Coeur d’Alene Casino back in 2008. Having lived in Minnesota, Seattle and Los Angeles, she was biding her time until she found her next inspiration. “But I fell in love with the workplace and area. I didn’t think I’d stay, but I’m glad I did.” Shaw says career growth potential, great people to work with and a creative job that’s never boring combine to make her professional experience fulfilling.

Gift shop manager CANDI ABRAHAM has worked at Coeur d’Alene Casino for 30 years and describes the casino resort staff and her gift shop team as productive, passionate, accountable, reliable and dedicated to the mission. “We’ve had to fight for our place from the beginning, and we stick together,” she says. “We share our revenue with the surrounding communities because that’s the way we learned to be. I am a proud Native American and proud to be Schitsu’umsh, born and raised on this reservation.” 

SUZIE B. and her husband make frequent one- or two-night stays at the casino resort down from their home in Coeur d’Alene. Though her husband doesn’t game, they both value their experiences. “He enjoys the rooms with the nice views, and he loves the live bands on weekends. While he’s doing that, I get to gamble, so it’s really the best of both worlds. And we both love the spa and the restaurants, especially the Chinook Steakhouse. That place is amazing. It’s a really warm, family-like vibe that you don’t get at any other casino.”

DEB L. says he’s been playing bingo at Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel for 30 years. “I love playing bingo, and 30 years ago it was the only place to play. I haven’t stopped going,” says the Worley resident. “The expansions they’ve done have been amazing. It’s really been a blessing for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and for the entire region because of the jobs it has created and the funds that have gone back to the community.”

STAN H., a retired WSU professor who lives in Spokane Valley, says he’s been going to the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel ever since it was a “tiny stone building with just a bingo hall… It’s been amazing to see the place get bigger and bigger. It’s always nice to go somewhere where you know everyone and everyone knows you. I love the fact that the casino has provided so many jobs and given so much back to the community and to education, especially with me being a former teacher. The tribe is very community-based. I think that’s terrific and wish the rest of the world could be like that.” 

STRONG Women’s Voices

If the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and roughly all its 800 casino-resort team members are a family, then leading that family is a woman with decades of experience fostering empathy.

Laura Penney, CEO of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel, who took the job in late 2019 and is the first woman in that role, has been with the casino from the very beginning 30 years ago. All that existed then was an idea to open a bingo hall in a rural area on U.S. Route 95 south of Coeur d’Alene.

Penney is not the only woman CEO leading a tribal enterprise, but executive roles have long been male dominated both in and out of Indian Country. What Penney brings is more than experience since the tribe’s venture into gaming. She brings a commitment to helping her tribe and mentoring those around her.

“I’ve had a tumultuous life,” Penney says. “In my distant past, I have survived domestic violence. I have grown a lot. It has motivated me to be independent, to reach my goals; I got my

master’s degree. I am truly here invested in my tribe. What we’re doing is affecting generations to come. My belief in this process has gotten me through all of this. I’m willing to put in the work and the time. It has made me stronger and better.”

Penney’s leadership presence comes with other women in critical roles, including Yvette Matt, Margaret SiJohn, Molly Abrahamson, Dee Smith and CarylDene Swan, among many others.

One person who directly credits Penney’s influence is marketing director Yvette Matt, who’s in the position Penney previously held. Matt has been working with the tribe for 20 years, having grown up off the reservation and thinking she’d only work at the casino

briefly before moving on and out to a larger area with more opportunities.

“Laura has been my mentor the majority of my life,” Matt says of her boss, who she credits with being the reason she has stayed for so long. “[Laura] has empathy and drive and strength. When I came on, I definitely had drive and strength, but I didn’t have empathy. Laura taught me that.”

Beyond the casino’s leadership, the Coeur d’Alenes have another notable womenled initiative: a drum group.

The Rose Creek Singers is an all-women ensemble — a rarity among Native American tribes.

Having such a group isn’t just notable for the tribe, it’s key to advancing and preserving their culture for generations to come.

“I say it’s good medicine,” Penney says. 

Charity is everywhere. Name a topic about which you’re passionate, and there’s likely a nonprofit group working in that area that needs your help. The way people donate to charitable causes is changing. You can now text a number and donate to disaster relief. Many stores partner with nonprofits to ask customers to donate when they buy something.

Guests of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel can do the same by donating the value of their winnings to a charity. Many people don’t care to cash out the value of their gaming ticket when they consider it a small amount

COEUR CONNECTIONS

less than $1. Collect all those unclaimed values, and you’ll soon have thousands of dollars for a good cause.

That’s the thinking behind the casino’s most recent charitable partnership program, says Dee Dee McGowan, who oversees sponsorships and relationships with community organizations.

The idea started a few years ago with casino team members suggesting it. Rather than throwing away discarded tickets, they thought, could they pool the money and donate to worthy causes?

At first there was a new nonprofit every month that would benefit. Marketing Director Yvette Matt says each month netted about $3,000 in unclaimed money that went to the nonprofits. More recently, they’ve switched to a quarterly distribution to multiple groups, with casino

nominated nonprofits and individual families that need help during the end-of-year holiday season.

“Donations through these partnerships and from the community go directly toward the support of the animals we care for,” says Kristi Soto with the Spokane Humane Society, which received more than $10,000 last year through the casino’s Coeur Connections program. “We are beyond appreciative of their support and those who donated through their giving program and for the love of our community animals.”

McGowan says the connection between all this work is helping the larger Inland Northwest community. For example, Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel is supporting the new Idaho Central Spokane Valley Performing Arts Center, now under construction.

PAYING IT FORWARD

Pay it forward. That’s not just a movie from 2000 with Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment. Nor is it just a saying about doing kind acts for other people. At the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel it’s a philosophy that drives the entire operation. While the tribe’s enterprises are an economic boon for itself and its members living on and off the reservation, they also provide a key boost to the North Idaho and Eastern Washington region.

In 1993, when the tribe’s original bingo operation opened, there were fewer than 100 people on staff. Now, 30 years later, that number is roughly 800. The economic spillover from that level of employment has ripple effects beyond the reservation.

“Truly, one of our core values is that we are about giving and helping. We’ve always been taught and encouraged to give back,” says CEO Laura Penney. “The casino would not be here without the community.”

Giving back to the community — the larger regional one that includes Spokane, Coeur d’Alene and the surrounding area — involves that concept of pay it forward.

As the casino-resort operation has grown in the past decades, so has the tribe’s economic impact. Expanding the hotel and adding

a premiere golf course next to the casino boosted tourism. A 2014 University of Idaho study found the tribe’s overall economic impact (including business and government functions) for the region was over $330 million per year.

More recently, the tribe’s push to reopen the casino relatively early in the COVID-19 pandemic led to more people with steady jobs. No staff were laid off during that initial six-week closure, meaning people had guaranteed income in a time when millions of people across the country suddenly had none.

Six weeks after shutting down in March 2020, the tribe reopened the casino with strict safety precautions that required masking inside and temperature checks at the door. It was the first in the country to reopen, setting a standard for how to keep business operations going while implementing health measures.

“I know the importance of generating the revenue from the [gaming] machines for the broader community. We’re responsible. We knew we had to do it in a safe way,” Penney says.

Being the first casino in the country to reopen in 2020 meant the tribe could pay it forward. It did so in the ensuing weeks by launching a money giveaway program with that very title.

While thousands of people in the region were still laid off, with many businesses still closed or seeing significantly fewer customers, the tribe’s Pay It Forward program kicked into full gear. Partnering with radio stations owned by Stephens Media Group to publicize it, staff members went around the region with that pay-it-forward philosophy in mind. People at gas stations received free gas. People in line for coffee got free coffee. People getting lunch or groceries got their food paid in full. In each case, the message was the same: Don’t pay us back; pay it forward down the line.

The tribe spent $20,000 on the program in those first few weeks after the casino reopened.

That was nearly three years ago, a time when the future of jobs and the economy seemed very unclear. What’s clear now is it’s a philosophy — and program — that’s here to stay. In both 2021 and 2022, the Pay It Forward program gave away $31,000 in May.

This May, three years after being the first casino to reopen during a time of great uncertainty, the tribe will continue that program and positively affect the Inland Northwest region — as it has for 30 years. 

University of Idaho found the tribe’s overall economic impact for the region was over $330 million per year.

Where Winners Play

Since starting out back in March of 1993 with a single bingo hall, the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel has continued to grow its gaming offerings and wide range of services. Today it’s a worldclass casino offering 60,000 square feet of gaming, featuring nearly 1,200 video gaming machines, a high limit VIP gaming room, bingo, video blackjack and more. It’s where progressive jackpots accrue rapidly and become life-changing max payouts, including three individual $1 million winners. And 5 percent of net proceeds go to local education initiatives, which to date totals more than $33 million.

Coeur d’Alene is also the only casino in the Inland Northwest with a video gaming testing room, the Discovery Den, which offers guests the chance to try out the latest machines before they go into mass production for other casinos. The Discovery Den sees new arrivals every quarter with a complete refresh featuring the latest technology from the likes of Konami, Everi, Bluberi, AGS, Light & Wonder, Gaming Arts and more.

Another new addition is the high-limit gaming room, Hn Lamqe’ (henlam-ka), which means “bear” in the Coeur d’Alene language. That’s where you can find high-limit gaming machines for Coeur Rewards members in the Ultimate and Executive tiers.

Perhaps the most ambitious renovation to date was completed in 2019

and completely overhauled the gaming and event spaces. The expansion allowed for the current tally of nearly 1,200 machines to fit comfortably; state-of-the-art vibrant lighting, sound and ventilation add to the player experience. And the original mural by the late, great Spokane tribal artist George Flett was restored, creating a fitting focal point.

The Coeur Rewards club has grown in popularity over the years as well. Membership gives you the opportunity to receive special offers, get a discount at the gas station and earn points for dining, hotel stays, spa services, Circling Raven tee times and more. Two of the most popular promotions for club members offer a food and beverage credit and Extra Play Cash. “Young at Heart Mondays” are for members 55 and older, while the Birthday Month Celebration can be redeemed any day of your birthday month. Joining Coeur Rewards is free and easy — just be 18 years or older and bring a valid ID to the players’ club booth.

If you have a question, the casino prides itself in helping top-level players experience the best the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel has to offer. Their friendly team of hosts will make you feel at home as they assist you in your hotel, dining, spa, golf and entertainment arrangements — while you relax and enjoy all the casino and resort have to offer. 

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On thirty amazing years to our friends at the Coeur d’Alene Casino!

Circling Raven

Discerning golfers care about great playing conditions, wonderful course designs, inspiring settings, attentive service and the satisfaction derived from money well spent at places that move them. As Inland Northwest golfers have learned since August 2003 when it opened, Circling Raven Golf Club checks all those boxes and then some.

An amenity of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel — owned and operated by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe — the course winds through 620 acres of Palouse terrain. That’s a vast amount of land compared to most courses globally — roughly five times larger than the average number of acres used for golf layouts worldwide — and it ensures that the land unfurls naturally. As the Creator intended.

While both the front and the back nines are filled with ingenious holes, the back nine’s holes have earned a special place of reverence among golf aficionados for their pristine surroundings. Woodlands, wetlands and the heaving Palouse terrain are on glorious display with each hole being an oasis unto itself — a veritable golf heaven on Earth.

It’s an ideal, serene place to play the deeply satisfying game amid pristine beauty in the nearperfect environment. Named for a seminal chief who guided the tribe through some of its most

difficult times, Circling Raven has garnered many honors since opening. Some of the award categories include Best Casino Course, America’s 100 Greatest Public Courses, 100 Best Resort Courses, Pro Shop Merchandiser of the Year and No. 1 Course in Idaho.

Constantly re-tuning the operation and golf course is something the tribe and golf club do annually. Adding or amending services and programs that best appeal to players is a core competency. Social events, Advantage Cards for frequent players, competitions and instruction are just some examples. The Circling Raven staff is ideally configured to deliver first-class experiences and has been honored with accolades including PGA of America’s National Patriot Award winner and as a Top 10 best-in-state golf instructor.

The Circling Raven Championship presented by KXLY News 4 is an Epson “Road to the LPGA” Tour event held at the property each of the past two Augusts. It will occur again this summer and features a field of approximately 132 women professional players striving to earn their LPGA memberships while competing for shares of the $225,000 prize purse. These are not just any pro women golfers — the field includes several of the world’s best rising stars, hailing from various continents and dozens of states.

While the golf is scintillating at Circling

Raven, a Gene Bates course design, many Circling Raven guests visit Twisted Earth, the golf club’s popular bar and grill, before and/or after a game on the acclaimed layout. Twisted Earth was Circling Raven’s son, and like the golf course honoring the chief, the eatery has done its namesake proud as well with its scrumptious food and drink options.

Adjacent to Twisted Earth is the clubhouse merchandise shop. A vast array of high-quality goods let players shop for virtually anything they desire — from apparel and footwear to equipment and accessories. The shop is so well curated and managed that the club’s Director of Golf has twice been named national “Merchandiser of the Year” in the Resorts Category by the PGA of America.

Stay-and-play packages are a great way to experience both the golf club and the casino resort hotel. And spring season rates are value-laden in the extreme — a great way to explore the amenity-rich resort for its other amenities, including its enormous and soothing spa, restaurants, expansive casino and Native American cultural tourism activities. 

A Soothing Respite

At 15,000 square feet, Spa Ssakwa’q’n (pronounced sockwah-kin) is significantly larger than the average resort spa.

Located in the Spa Tower wing of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel, just a 30-minute drive from Coeur d’Alene, it features revitalizing services and soothing areas to relax in before and after treatments. Trained and experienced staff help guests eliminate stress in any of nine different treatment rooms.

With two different quiet lounges offering fruit-infused water, both overlook the co-ed indoor and outdoor soaking tubs. The indoor soaking area has a cold plunge tub (around 70 degrees) and medium temp soaking tub (around 95 degrees). There are two dry saunas in that area as well. One is medium to hot temperature with essential oils of eucalyptus, lavender and peppermint. The other is a hot temperature with essential oils of grapefruit, rosemary and juniper. The outdoor soaking tub is in the heart of the spa. Open every day of the year, its water is 102-104 degrees and is a favorite of spa guests due to the carefully placed jets. Guests especially enjoy the outdoor tub when the snow is falling.

Overlooking the natural indigenous plant walking area, Spa Ssakwa’q’n also has a beautiful Tea Lounge. The natural light, water and stone décor of Spa Ssakwa’q’n creates a calming ambiance throughout. Two facial rooms, six single massage rooms, a couples’ massage suite with soaking tub and a wet room with Vichy shower are adjacent to nine private changing rooms. The spa has one of only two of Vichy treatment rooms in the Inland Northwest.

The Natural Nail Lounge has two manicure and four pedicure stations. Treatments offered include massages, facials, body treatments and nail services with options ranging from 60- to 240-minute full-service spa packages. Additionally, the Spa Boutique store provides an array of elegant items for guests to purchase.

Spa Ssakwa’q’n offers the best spa packages in the Coeur d’Alene area. Whether guests are treating their mind and body to a midweek stress relief or pampering themselves before the big day, there’s a package suited for all tastes. 

Bursting with Flavor

It’s been a long journey over 30 years, from the days in 1993 when hungry visitors to the Coeur d’Alene Bingo Hall could grab a sandwich from the deli counter. Now there are eight places on the casino campus to eat or relax with a drink, featuring local regionally sourced ingredients like bone-in ribeye steaks from the wood-fired grill, new offerings like Asian noodle and rice bowls, and old favorites like their signature nitrogen ice cream dessert for two.

For Kristin Primmer, the food and beverage system administrator and area manager, such success across so many venues is a fast-paced team sport: “Our team members are dedicated, that’s what gets us through.”

And that team extends out to the greater tribe, as culinary traditions are kept alive in the casino kitchens, giving the experience the kind of emotional component that great food can bring.

“The Indian fry bread you can get in the Red Tail Bar and Grill, that has been fun to learn,” says Primmer, who has been with the casino for 12 years. “We have tribal members who come in and have taught our cooks to make sure it’s done correctly.”

When Laura Penney became CEO in 2019, she brought in an old teammate to collaborate. Adam Hegsted traces his connection with the casino back to when their first restaurant opened in 1998. Now he’s working with Executive Chef Tracy Rose and Chef de Cuisine Kristopher Cope on food and service at Chinook.

“We’re all on the same page here,” says Executive Chef Rose, “but it’s good to bounce ideas off another chef — to have a conversation.”

One popular newer dish to come out of the Chinook kitchen is the Hearth Oven Bacon Wrapped Jalapeños appetizer, stuffed with peanut butter (it’s delicious!) and finished with housemade pepper jelly.

So celebrate the Coeur d’Alene Casino’s 30th anniversary with food, drink and tribal hospitality: It may take you the whole year to graze your way through all they have to offer! 

Tasting Menu

CHINOOK

The casino’s flagship restaurant offers an exciting menu of local products, including wild Sockeye salmon and prime beef, all created by chefs Adam Hegsted and our own executive chef Tracy Rose.

RED TAIL BAR AND GRILL

The casino’s busiest restaurant offers a crowd-pleasing menu, big-screen TVs and a patio for warmer months.

LITTLE DRAGON EATERY

The casino’s newest venue offers great rice and noodle bowls, where you pick the protein and the flavors.

TWISTED EARTH GRILL

Located inside the Circling Raven Pro Shop, and open during golf season, offering lots of casual dining options, with a patio offering gorgeous views of the course.

JACKPOT JAVA AND CREAMERY

With customizable options for every taste and dietary need, this is the place for grab-and-go espresso or energy drinks and pastries.

HUCKLEBERRY DELI

Offering a variety of breakfast foods, sandwiches, soups, salads, pizza and snacks, in the Skycatcher Hallway.

NIGHTHAWK LOUNGE

Nightlife happens here with a busy schedule of live music and dancing that both go on into the night.

COEUR CHILL BAR

An extension of Nighthawk Lounge offering slushies, beer, wine and snacks right on the casino floor.

THE WOLF DEN BAR

A newer addition right on the recently renovated gaming floor, featuring deliciously crafted cocktails.

MUST TRY: Northwest Seafood Alfredo, featuring housemade sauce, scallops, shrimp and halibut.

MUST TRY: Indian Taco, with traditional Indian fry bread and housemade buffalo chili.

MUST TRY: Honey Chicken Noodle Bowl, with yakisoba noodles tossed in sesame oil and hand-cut, hand-breaded chicken.

MUST TRY: Twisted Earth Salad, with huckleberries, apples, candied bacon, white cheddar and hazelnuts.

MUST TRY: With nearly 100 syrups and all varieties of milk substitutes, they can make just about anything you order.

MUST TRY: Hamburger with fries, available until closing.

MUST TRY: A rotating selection of beers crafted in the Inland Northwest.

MUST TRY: Frozen huckleberry vodka lemonade in a collector's cup.

MUST TRY: Huckleberry Mule, with huckleberry vodka, housemade huckleberry syrup and ginger beer.

Stay, Play and Win

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s leisure and entertainment business enterprise has evolved nonstop for the past 30 years, to the point where it’s hard to compare the small but mighty bingo hall of 1993 with today’s amenity-rich casino and destination resort.

Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel focuses on providing a warm and friendly experience for your stay by providing a premier hotel experience that makes each guest feel right at home. With 300 hotel rooms and two unique hotel options to choose from, you’ll enjoy deluxe amenities and take in picturesque views of the surrounding hillsides from many of the rooms.

The Mountain Lodge accommodations offer a cozy, rustic ambiance with easy access to the indoor pool and hot tub amenities. Amongst the Mountain Lodge side

accommodations, the presidential suite is a hidden gem.

The Spa Tower is the casino resort’s newest hotel addition. It fuses a modern vibe with an elegant, cozy atmosphere that you simply can’t find anywhere else. Many rooms offering expansive views of the beautiful hills beyond. Upgrade your stay with one of several suite options, including the spa suite, where you will enjoy a king-size bed, two televisions, a sitting area, fireplace, plush bathrobes and an elegant bathroom featuring a walk-in shower and jetted bathtub.

Testament to the recreation venue’s popularity is found in its many awards garnered. Named Tribal Destination of the Year and the Silver Distinguished Dozen award, the property also features multiple distinct food and beverage venues and entertainment, including live music, comedy and hands-on tours and experiences

through the casino’s Cultural Tourism Program.

For those looking to celebrate, the hotel also offers a special occasion decoration service. Be it a romantic occasion, birthday or another milestone, team members can help you surprise your guest with personalized decorations to create a memorable experience.

Now’s an ideal time to visit. Choose a relaxing stay and spa, stay and golf, or win big with a spin and win special. Whether you’re traveling with family, friends or looking for a romantic getaway, we have the perfect hotel special for you. See current hotel specials at cdacasino. com, and begin booking your well-deserved getaway. 

Come on Out!

The Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel will be celebrating its 30th anniversary all year. Visit cdacasino.com/events often as we will continue to add exciting shows that are sure to sell out and you don’t want to miss out!

$300,000 Giveaway

Every Friday in March at 7 pm

Play your favorite video gaming machines with your Coeur Rewards card and earn an entry into the drawing for every 500 points earned. You could be one of three lucky winners of $10,000, or one of 30 to win $1,000 each Friday. See cdacasino.com for details.

Tribal Family Night

Friday, March 17 at 7 pm

A night for families to participate in name givings, rejoinings, memorials and an honoring of our passed loved ones.

30th Anniversary Powwow

Saturday, March 18

Grand Entry at 1 pm and 7 pm

Everyone is welcome, and all dancers in regalia will receive $30 during the 7 pm grand entry to celebrate our 30th Anniversary!

30th Anniversary Bingo

Saturday, March 25 at 4 pm

Back where it started: bingo, but with a $60,000 pot. First bonanza blackout wins $10,000; doors open at 1 pm.

Anniversary Cake

Saturday, March 25, 3-5 pm

Everybody gets a slice of birthday cake, free in the Skycatcher Hallway.

$30,000 Extra Play Cash

Saturday, March 25, 4-6 pm

It’s an old-fashioned paper ticket drawing to celebrate the 30th

anniversary. Get your free ticket at the Coeur Rewards booth and put it in the barrel for a chance to be one of 60 winners to get $500 Extra Play Cash. See cdacasino.com for details.

Fireworks Celebration

Saturday, March 25 at 8 pm

In honor of the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel’s 30th birthday, take a stroll out to the parking lot to view the spectacular fireworks display.

House of Fury & King of the Cage

Thursday, April 13 at 7 pm

A full night of action, featuring seven MMA fights and three boxing matches. $50 and up.

An Evening with Lee Brice

Thursday, June 22 at 7 pm

Enjoy a night with country superstar Lee Brice, featuring songs from his latest record, Hey World and the hit single “Soul.” $71 and up.

Jeff Foxworthy

Thursday, July 27 at 7 pm

Laugh the night away with actor, comedian and outdoorsman Jeff Foxworthy, one of the founding members of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

King of the Cage

Thursday, September 14 at 7 pm

Come experience some knockouts, submissions and the best martial arts our area offers. $50 and up.

Lee Brice

giant milestone.

MOBILE | CHICAGO | RENO | TULSA | GOODGIANT.COM

A Profile in Persistence

THE HALLMARKS OF TRIBAL LIFE during the decades after settlers came West are well-documented and shameful — poverty, despair, alienation, neglect. By the 1990s, if you told anyone that change could come in just a few decades, few would have believed it. But a few did believe, as the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s leadership, with persistence and teamwork, lit the path to a brighter future.

AS STORYTELLERS, we’ve been proud to share this remarkable, inspiring journey with our readers. As the top source of information about where to enjoy our local quality of life, we’ve also been confident in directing them to all the great times to be had at the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel.

THE CHANGE IS PROFOUND. Our region’s tribes have deep connections to the land. Their traditions are to be guided by what’s best for the children coming next, not just what’s convenient today. As we navigate tough decisions together, we can learn from their wisdom, and we’re committed to sharing their perspectives with the Inland Northwest.

WHILE THE COEUR D’ALENE TRIBE traces its history back countless generations, the Coeur d’Alene Casino traces its history back to March of 1993. That was 30 years ago, just seven months before we published our first newspaper — a special connection we feel to this day. So here’s a salute to the Coeur d’Alene Casino, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and everyone who helped make this improbable dream a reality!

THE BUZZ BIN

POETRY FOR THE PRESENT

A local poet muses on Lebron, spy balloons, a tragic movie set shooting, and ol’ Joe Biden

BIDEN’S SURPRISE VISIT

Joe Biden can be a bit freaky

He’s old and just a bit creaky

But his trip to Ukraine

Made it quite plain

He’s also quite brilliant and sneaky

UP IN THE SKY

Up in the sky balloons do fly— The Chinese say they do not spy. And anyway you guys do too Fly your balloons above Chengdu, Beijing, Wuhan, and old Shanghai.

President Biden is not shy; He may be old but he’s quite spry And he knows what to do Up in the sky.

He takes no guff from gal or guy: He’ll squint and look you in the eye. And when you think you got one through, You’ll soon realize he’s bested you And turned your hot air into pie Up in the sky.

BY JONATHAN POTTER

THE SHOOTER

on the movie set

the gun was loaded with blanks they rehearsed the scene did the actor know was it just one of his pranks like a movie set

he picked up the gun did the character give thanks to rehearse the scene a roughhewn cowboy riding horseback spurred the flanks near the movie set

the gun was pointed the river flooded its banks they rehearsed unseen

nothing could be done to stop the shuddering shanks on the movie set they rehearsed the scene n

MY DREAM OF PLAYING HORSE WITH LEBRON JAMES

I was playing HORSE with LeBron James one Tuesday afternoon in the off-season when I pulled out a 14-foot fadeaway jumper and suggested that was the shot that he should pull out when the time came to break Kareem’s longstanding all-time NBA scoring record. Man, he said, that was sweet, you shoot pretty good for a minor poet. And then he took the shot and it bounced off the rim and into this poem.

Jonathan Potter is the author of House of Words (2010), Tulips for Elsie (2021) and Sunrise Hexagrams (2022). His poetry has also appeared on The Writer’s Almanac and in a variety of journals and anthologies. Potter hosted Naked Lunch Break (a lunchtime poetry open mic and reading series), moderated the Poets of the Pacific Northwest and Poetry Salon panels at Get Lit! and contributed work to Hotel Spokane, Only Time Will Tell, Verbatim, Pictures of Poets, and the 50-Hour Slam. He divides his time between Spokane, Kennewick and Montreal.

SUPERIOR SPOOKS

In June 2022, Spokane author Lora Senf’s middle-grade horror novel, The Clackity, hit shelves across the country. Since then, Senf has been met with letters and drawings from young children and adults alike letting her know how much they adored the story of a young girl named Evie who lives in the spooky town of Blight Harbor. On Feb. 23, the Horror Writers Association released their Bram Stoker Award nominees for 2022 and it seems they agree, as The Clackity is a BRAM STOKER AWARD Nominee for Superior Achievement in a Middle-Grade Novel! Don’t let the book’s target demographic deter you from picking it up before winners are announced in late June — this spine-chilling, but also heartwarming, story is for readers of all ages. (MADISON PEARSON)

GET THERE FIRST

The thrill of the treasure hunt has enticed people for generations, and a local radio show in Tennessee has been helping guide adventurous collectors for nearly 70 years. As depicted in Netflix’s SWAP SHOP, the WRGS radio show by the same name allows people to call in every morning (except Sundays) to share what they want to buy, sell or trade. The vintage shop owners, mechanics and side hustlers in the area know that stumbling across the right item could make them some serious cash, if they can negotiate the price just right. They might pick through a barn filled with old knickknacks, find a classic car to restore, snag a rare pair of sneakers or even buy a young calf. It’s easy to get sucked into the excitement as people try to be the first to get somewhere after a tempting listing goes out across the airwaves, with some driving hours in hopes they won’t walk away empty handed. (SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL)

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST

Noteworthy new music arriving in stores and online on March 3.

KALI UCHIS, RED MOON IN VENUS. After breaking out with her 2020 Spanish-language album Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios), bilingual Colombian-American neo-soul singer Kali Uchis switches back to English for her latest LP.

FAKE NAMES, EXPENDABLES. They might not be spring chickens, but the lively music from this punk supergroup (featuring members of Bad Religion, Fugazi and Refused) hardly sounds washed.

BURT BACHARACH & ELVIS COSTELLO, THE SONGS OF BACHARACH & COSTELLO. The famed singer-songwriters’ half-century of collaborations fills this new box set, which sadly arrives a month after Bacharach’s death. (SETH SOMMERFELD)

President Biden, creaky and sneaky! ADAM SCHULTZ/OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO

Fly Like the Eagles

Eastern Washington aims to finish its unlikely journey to a Big Sky title and NCAA Tourney berth

BY SETH SOMMERFELD

As improbable as it might sound, Eastern Washington was the hottest college hoops team in the country this time last week.

While Gonzaga might dominate local hoops headlines, the team from Cheney was riding an 18-game win streak, by far the longest in the country at the time. They’d already clinched the regular season Big Sky title, boasting an undefeated conference record. EWU hadn’t lost since Dec. 13.

So traveling to Pocatello to play a mediocre Idaho State team with a 10-19 record seemed like — pun intended — a layup.

Whoops!

The Eagles’ feathers got clipped with an out-ofcharacter 71-63 loss last Saturday. And despite a raucous crowd for Senior Night at Reese Court on Monday evening, the Eagles weren’t able to pick up a bounceback win against Montana State (the Big Sky’s second best team), seeing a late comeback fall just short in a 79-74 defeat.

Being on the doorstep of perfection only to face defeat twice in a row really underscores how fragile a great year is for small conference teams like Eastern. This season has been an amazing journey for the Eagles, but to realize their NCAA Tournament dreams, there’s still work to be done at this week’s Big Sky Tournament (March 4-8) down in Boise.

If you had told someone in mid-December that EWU wasn’t going to lose another game until late February, they would’ve rightfully thought you were a crazy person. To say Eastern got off to a rough start to the 2022-23 season would be an extreme understatement The Eagles started nonconference play 0-3. After the aforementioned loss on Dec. 13 at Texas Tech, they were sitting with an ugly 4-7 record. To be fair, they played a challenging schedule for a Big Sky school — Tech, Washington State, South Dakota State, Santa Clara, Yale, etc. — but losses are still losses. Yet despite all of the setbacks, EWU second-year head coach David Riley saw positives in his team. They weren’t folding despite the lack of victories.

“We had a talk sometime around the Washington State game about how adversity can do two things — it can tear you apart or bring you together. And we really embraced that adversity. We learned from it,” Riley says. “And what we talked about then was building our season on the house of bricks versus a house of cards. So these good teams that we’re playing were poking holes in our foundation, and we had to get them fixed.”

“We were building in the year on a solid foundation and not kind of getting fake hope that we’re super good because we won all these games at the start the year,” starting sophomore and English forward Ethan Price says

about the positives of the difficult schedule. “Obviously it’s tough. You don’t want to lose these games, you want to be winning as much as you can, but just to trust that process. And Coach Riley kind of reiterated that a lot of the teams that won championships started the season really bad, you know?”

For the players, the switch seemed to get flipped after a victorious journey to the Big Sky State during the last week of December. The Eagles were picked to finish fifth in the conference before the season started, but a hot start with two road wins at Montana and Montana State got the ball rolling in the right direction.

When speaking of the team’s recipe for success, Riley cites unselfishness, depth and competitiveness. Now sporting a 22-9 record, this is not a star-driven squad, but a true team where everyone knows their roles. Four players average double figures — Price, forward Angelo Allegri, and guards Steele Venters and Tyreese Davis — but Venters tops that list at only 15.1 points per game. Nobody on the team averages over six rebounds per game, but five guys snag at least four boards per contest. The only standout team statistics aren’t the typically eye-catching ones: The Eagles’ field goal percentage of 49.1% is 11th best in the country (they rank fourth in 2-pointers at 59.3%) and are 41st best at assists per game (15.4). It may sound overly simplistic and kinda no duh, but the key to EWU’s successes is passing to get high percentage shots.

Part of that comes down to the offensive system Riley has honed since taking over the lead job after Shantay Legans left the program for Portland following the Eagles strong showing in an opening round loss to Kansas in the 2021 NCAA Tournament. For Price and his teammates, the faith Riley has in them to be creative basketball minds in-game rather than cogs in a system really gives them confidence and forms a tight knit bond between the players and coaches.

“I would say [our style] is more concepts than sort of set plays,” Price says. “Our offense is predominately just [based] on concepts of how to read screens, how to come off stuff, just reading the game.

“And early in the season, maybe you make a quarter of those reads right,” Riley adds. “Halfway through the year and making 50 percent of those reads right. When you’re making them consistently, correctly, and you string three or four reads together in one possession, it’s really hard to guard.”

But despite soaring high on the win streak for much of the past couple months, the reality of being a low-major team still exists. Because of the early season struggles, there is no way that EWU is getting an NCAA Tournament at-large bid. The squad is for sure going to be playing post-season basketball — the NIT invites every regular season conference winner who doesn’t make the NCAA Tournament — but that’s not the goal. With three more wins in Boise at the Big Sky Tourney, the Eagles will be flying to the Big Dance. But they can’t afford a slip-up like the ISU or MSU games. There’s a target on their back thanks to being the tourney’s top-seed, but at this point in the season the guys from Cheney are used to it.

“I think there’s always going to be pressure when you’re on a winning streak, but I think the message the coaches have been trying to get across is just take it one day at a time,” says Price. “Just be present. Because no matter what, you can’t predict the future. Just win the day, we like to say. Go 1-0 today.” n

Big Sky Basketball Tournament • March 4-8 • Televised on ESPN+, ESPNU, ESPN2

Steele Venters may lead the Eagles in scoring, but EWU’s attack is very balanced. BRAEDEN HARLOW/EWU ATHLETICS PHOTO

INLANDER RESTAURANT WEEK

MEET YOUR CHEF: Brandon Pham

As a fourth-generation chef in his family, East Pan Asian Cuisine’s executive chef is excited for his Restaurant Week debut

BY SUMMER SANDSTROM

Brandon Pham always had a love for cooking and the kitchen, and since moving to the U.S. from Vietnam 10 years ago, he’s wanted to share that passion with the community. He’s always learning about new cuisines, new techniques and networking with other chefs to keep creating unique and tasty food for the Spokane area.

INLANDER: Why did you choose to become a chef?

PHAM: All of my family’s generations, we’re all chefs, so I’m the fourth generation as a chef. I love cooking, I love the environment, I love to work with the people, and I like the challenges in the kitchen.

What is your culinary philosophy?

I have an Asian cuisine background, and I also worked in multiple restaurants for French cuisine and Italian, but the strongest one is Asian cuisine. I also go to college and get in touch with the Spokane Community College and their culinary classes and the teachers there, so it’s an opportunity for me to learn and meet more people at work and at school as well.

How do you stay creative in the kitchen?

Anytime I’m in the kitchen, I’m ready to cook, willing to learn, to compare my food to myself every day that I come into work. So I put myself in as a regular cook so it’s more motivating for me to be learning, to be friendly with the people, to be not a big head chef, but to be asking for people’s opinions because it’s a large team working at Northern Quest Resort & Casino, so I’m willing to learn everyday and be creative with the teamwork as well.

...continued on next page

Chef Brandon Pham helms the kitchen at East Pan Asian Cuisine. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO

Inlander Restaurant Week continues through Saturday, March 4. Menus at $25, $35, $45 per person. Fore more, visit InlanderRestaurantWeek.com

“MEET YOUR CHEF: BRANDON PHAM,” CONTINUED...

What kinds of places do you look for when you dine out — what excites you?

I like to go pretty much everywhere. I love eating, I love food, and we have a lot of good restaurants in Spokane, so I like to go to sushi bars or to fine dining. It’s good for my experience, for my knowledge, and for the food as well because there’s a lot of new restaurants in Spokane that open monthly or yearly.

What is special about the region’s culinary scene? We have a connection between the chefs, and we [go to] events and pop-up restaurants. We are locally supporting each other, and with Spokane growing so fast for the

last two years, I think our community has been getting better for the connection between local restaurants, even the bigger corporations as well, to be trending and the business opportunity for the restaurants.

Who are your culinary heroes or biggest influences?

I think definitely my mom because I have a lot of passion from my family. But honestly, I learn from and stay in touch with a lot of chefs that I’ve been working with.

What are you most looking forward to during Inlander Restaurant Week 2023?

My opinion for Restaurant Week is that it’s kind of

exciting because it’s our first year and we’re back from COVID-19, so it must be exciting for the people to try out the menu that the chefs created for this year, and I think people are excited for this year.

What’s your favorite dish on your Restaurant Week menu this year?

I think I’d choose the braised pork belly. It’s a combination between Japanese and Vietnamese cuisine that I would like to represent my culture, and the reason I picked that is because we never have it in Spokane, so hopefully people will enjoy it and have a great experience. n

Pham’s take on braised pork belly is featured for Inlander Restaurant Week. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO

Bubbling Up

Revival Tea Co. expands again with a new downtown boba tea bar

BY ELLIE ROTHSTROM

Since its start in 2018, Spokane’s Revival Tea Co. has become one of the fastest-growing tea companies in the U.S., says owner Drew Henry, and it’s not slowing down.

After gaining early success via online sales, Revival Tea expanded in early 2020 with a brickand-mortar shop in downtown Spokane. In the unique, speakeasy-style tearoom customers can order anything from nitro-brewed chai to an Earl Grey mule mocktail.

“It’s pretty amazing how we’ve made such a disruption in the tea world, with such little resources — just being this ma-and-pa shop out of Spokane,” Henry says.

Soon after launching Revival, Henry and his wife, Cerina, began expanding their online selection from their initial spiced chai to a total now of 67 teas. They’ve since shipped Revival’s products across all 50 states and to 24 countries worldwide. Five years later, the couple also continue to operate their thriving physical storefront, which they expanded earlier this year to add a boba bar above the basement-level tearoom.

Before Supper SWEETS

Revival Tea Co. is now serving boba and other drinks above its basement tearrom. COURTESY PHOTOS

In line with Revival’s mission of creating an approachable and fun tea-drinking experi ence, this is not a typical boba bar.

“If we were gonna do boba, it needed to be craft — it needed to be on a whole other level,” Henry says.

Walking into the Revival boba bar, customers enter a light, modern space that bears some familiar hallmarks of the original tearoom downstairs, with exposed brick, industrial fixtures and an open bar where one can watch drinks being made. The boba bar carries an ar ray of drinks, such as Revival’s chai milk tea ($7) topped with cream cheese foam and their tart wild berry taro blended tea ($7). From boiling the boba at the counter to flavoring each drink with Revival’s tea blends, the company maintains a dedi cation to authentic flavors.

Henry says the boba bar is yet another step in making tea more accessible.

“People try to make tea very intimidating and very complex, and it’s

their tea is made in a model similar to Starbucks’ Reserve stores. Other aspirations for Revival Tea include multiple drivethru locations, and even opening tearooms in other metropolitan areas.

Henry explains that the tearoom was never part of Revival’s original business plan, much less the boba bar, but it became reality after the encouragement of so many people in the community.

“Most of the story of our growth has truly just been through people sharing our product,” he says.

Since beginning by selling tea at local farmers markets and online, Revival Tea Co. now has hundreds of wholesale sellers. Henry explains that if the tearoom was going to be the company’s final form, he would’ve been content. However, it’s clear to him that there’s more in store for the future of this

“We’ve always said that we were gonna take this company as far as it wanted to go,” Henry says. “It’s pretty

REVIEW

BOXED IN

ALSO OPENING

DEMON SLAYER: KIMETSU NO YAIBA - TO THE SWORDSMITH VILLAGE

Do you enjoy violent anime sword battles with demons? Then this entry of Demon Slayer might be for you… though good luck jumping into the series’ seemingly inscrutable plot if you’re not already a fan. Not rated

THE MAN IN THE BASEMENT

When a Jewish couple sells their cellar to an old history teacher, they’re unaware that he’s an antiSemetic Holocaust denier. As they struggle to get out of the sale in this French thriller, he begins to influence their young daughter.

Not Rated At the Magic Lantern OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE

Guy Ritchie’s latest action comedy tracks a spy team (Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, Cary Elwes) who blackmails a movie star (Josh Hartnett) to help them infiltrate the operations of a billionaire arms dealer (Hugh Grant). Rated R

Creed III struggles to find worthy new challenges for its titular pugilistic character

Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) may be the title character of the Creed movies, but they wouldn’t exist without Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. The Italian-American boxer from Philadelphia, first introduced in 1976’s Rocky, starred in six movies before passing the torch to Adonis in 2015’s Creed. That movie and its sequel, 2018’s Creed II, effectively balanced storylines about Adonis’ career and Rocky’s struggles, with soulful performances from Stallone as the aging Rocky. Stallone is entirely absent from Creed III, and Rocky barely merits a brief mention, leaving the movie without one of the previous installments’ greatest strengths.

Creed III also suffers from a problem that plagued the later Rocky movies, as its title character is no longer a scrappy underdog. As Creed III begins, world heavyweight champion Adonis is retiring from the ring after a full-circle victory over his first-ever opponent. A few years later, he’s a wealthy, comfortable celebrity, training new fighters and living in a massive house with his musician wife, Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and their adorable daughter, Amara (Mila Davis-Kent). Bianca has shifted gears from performing to songwriting and producing, but she has a whole wall of gold records in her studio.

Writers Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin (working

BY JOSH BELL

from a story they conceived with original Creed director Ryan Coogler) look to Adonis’ past to create a new obstacle for him, in the form of a previously unmentioned childhood best friend. Before being taken in by Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad), the widow of his father Apollo Creed, Adonis grew up in foster care, where he bonded with the slightly older Damien “Dame” Anderson. Dame was a promising amateur boxing champion, but his career was cut short when he was sent to prison.

Now, nearly 20 years later, the adult Dame (Jonathan Majors) is out of prison and looking to resume his career. He comes to Adonis for help, but it’s clear that there’s unspoken bad blood between them, which the movie teases out over the course of several flashbacks that reveal more about the incident that sent Dame to prison. Majors plays Dame with a sense of casual menace, and he’s more of a full-on villain than just another boxing opponent. He seems determined to destroy Adonis’ whole life, and Creed III has elements of a revenge thriller as Dame manipulates and provokes his old friend.

Rated PG-13

it tougher to find him sympathetic, even though he has legitimate grievances. Creed II did a remarkable job of generating goodwill for previously cartoonish Russian boxer Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) and his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu), but Dame comes off as a borderline sociopath at times. Munteanu returns as Viktor, continuing the franchise’s trend of turning rivals into allies, but it’s hard to imagine the same happening for Dame.

CREED III

Directed by Michael B. Jordan

Jordan continues another franchise tradition by taking over as director, as Stallone did for four of the six Rocky movies, and he brings a slick approach that is sometimes at odds with the gritty tone that Coogler established in the first Creed. In particular, the overly stylized representation of the climactic fight turns it into something almost abstract, losing much of the emotional impact.

Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jonathan Majors, Tessa Thompson

Majors, who’s also currently in theaters as the villainous Kang in Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, gives Dame a formidable, scary presence, but that makes

Jordan fares better in the quieter scenes, and the relationship between Adonis and Bianca remains grounded and genuine, with Thompson elevating the role of the supportive, confident partner. After three movies, Adonis is still guarded and insecure, but literally fighting his past isn’t a particularly compelling way for him to move forward. n

Creed III’s punches don’t land with the same impact.

The Before Times

Looking back at the animated joys (and religious undertones) of The Land Before Time as

BY CHASE HUTCHINSON

There is something strange about watching 1988’s The Land Before Time in 2023 after not having seen it for more than a decade. The creation of director Don Bluth, the mind behind everything from The Secret of NIMH to Anastasia and Titan A.E., it is a very short feature at just over an hour. Despite this tight runtime, as a young lad it felt like an epic on par with The Lord of the Rings. It contained terrifyingly massive dinosaurs, beautifully hand-drawn landscapes (that still have more than held up after all these years), and plenty of good-natured charm while also dealing with death in a way that other children’s films did not. It feels like a time capsule of a different era of animation. Sure, it was a little silly with more than a bit of roughness around the edges, but it was a work that had a prominent place in many a cinematic education.

To then see it all again, it is fascinating to see how explicitly it was Bluth telling a biblical story. Skeptical? I would be too, but it is rather clear once you observe the way it all ends up coming together.

As a young child, the film’s story is simply about a young dinosaur named Littlefoot trying to find his way to the Great Valley after the death of his mother at the tiny arms of the villainous “sharptooth” (T-Rex). It had a genuine beating heart to it, but the multitude of religious underpinnings went completely over my head. There is no one interpretation, but it is hard not to see Littlefoot as a messianic figure whose birth itself feels almost spiritual. Following this, he then unites a group of followers and sets out to take them to a promised land of abundance. It requires them to believe and weather many a crisis of faith on the way.

Bluth himself has been quite open about the influence of religion on his work, outlining this in many interviews in his later years. That he is a graduate of Brigham Young University has led some to conclude that Littlefoot could be a specifically Mormon figure in the vein of Joseph Smith. These readings remain a defining aspect

of the first The Land Before Time that is not present in the 13 (13!) direct-to-video movies, TV series and video games (which Bluth was not involved in creating). None of them are really worth checking out as an adult, as they are hollow musicals that can’t hold a candle to the journey that the first takes us on.

While some may bristle at the potential of a film that is geared toward children being haphazardly slapped together as a recruiting tool for religion (looking at you, VeggieTales), the way Bluth filtered belief into his work was never preachy or calculated. Instead, there is just a sincere amount of care for the characters and the craft that is infectious. Though The Land Before Time isn’t as scary or emotional as when seen through the eyes of a child, it is still something that you can get swept up in. Some of this may be because of the residual nostalgic memories for how the movie impacted us the first time around, but it still generally stands on its own.

Be it in the smaller sequences that explore beautiful corners of the world or the overarching expedition the dino characters go on, there is a real vibrancy on display — one that feels like it is missing in modern animation. There are certainly pioneers trying out new techniques to push the form forward, evidenced in 2022’s array of stop-motion features ranging from joyous works like Wendell and Wild and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio to the gritty, dark spectacle of Mad God. At the same time, there are many animated features that feel like they are just fundamentally overlooking the need to bring life to the story via the details of the animation itself. It is in this regard that The Land Before Time remains the pinnacle of what animation can and should aspire to. After all, there aren’t many works out there that can manage to make us still believe that a wet leaf would be somehow delicious to eat. If that isn’t a success of the form, nothing will ever be. n

The Land Before Time screens at all Regal Cinemas from March 3-9.

There’s still hand-drawn warmth to be found with these kiddie dinos.

It’s Still Us

Against Them

In March 2010, New Jersey punk band Titus Andronicus released The Monitor. That grandiose concept album, which used the Civil War as a metaphor for a millennial’s quarterlife crisis, catapulted them from underground darlings to year-end listers. While their 2008 debut The Airing of Grievances established the group’s basement-punk-meets-Springsteenian-bombast aesthetic, The Monitor upped the stakes in every way. It married historic abolitionist writing with philosopher Albert Camus’ absurdism, The Dark Knight references with Walt Whitman’s poetry, Shakespearean verse with singer/guitarist Patrick Stickles’ shout-along sloganeering: “The enemy is everywhere!” “You will always be a loser!” “It’s still us against them!” Given its scope, ambition and realization, there’s little wonder The Monitor is often cited as Titus Andronicus’ masterpiece.

says. “The fierce devotion of our fanbase, modest in size as it may be, is the reason why we’ve been able to continue for so long.”

Titus Andronicus’ songs have soundtracked many of the most significant periods of my adult life. 2015’s The Most Lamentable Tragedy — a 93-minute rock opera exploring Stickles’ experiences with bipolar disorder — helped me cope with my own emerging mental health struggles. When I found myself working over 60 hours a week across three jobs to pay the bills, 2019’s An Obelisk energized me with its raging, stripped-down punk.

BY IAN RIGGINS

Also in 2010, my wife (then girlfriend) and I left our beloved Pittsburgh for Syracuse so she could attend graduate school. (I’d been rejected from all 15 creative writing MFA programs I’d applied to.) Twenty-five — the same age as Stickles — and friendless in a strange city, I spent that lonely, snowy year drinking and feeling bad for myself. For work, I wrote product descriptions for the Home Depot website. I expressed, in sometimes shameful ways, a lot of vitriol about the way my life was turning out.

The Monitor was a reliable companion throughout that year. This was triumphant, celebratory music about feeling bad. Its equal doses of self-critique and blind rage at “the enemy” made me feel a little less alone, a little more understood. When I went to visit my sister in Los Angeles at the end of that year, we got drunk and screamed along to every word.

I don’t think Titus Andronicus has casual fans — it has fans who got on board with The Airing of Grievances or The Monitor and never got off.

“For the most part we are an underground band,” Stickles

The band’s latest opus, 2022’s The Will to Live, arrived at a time of relative stability and maturity for me. Thematically, the album explores many of the band’s evergreen themes, including the idea that the universe is, as Stickles puts it, “a chaotic and absurd place where awesome, catastrophic things seem to happen with no discernable purpose.”

But the anger of those early albums has bloomed into empathy, acceptance and compassion. Stickles says The Will to Live is about exploring the “interconnectivity of all life on earth,” or that “we as living beings are all component pieces, cells if you will, in a much larger, continuous organism.”

This graceful, hopeful response to tragedy — certainly the COVID pandemic, but more personally, the death of Stickles’ cousin and founding Titus Andronicus member/keyboardist Matt “Money” Miller — is new for the band.

When I asked Stickles how he thinks about his 22-yearold self, the one who shouted “F— everything, f— me!” on The Airing of Grievances, he said he validates those earlier feelings.

“I understand why I felt that way, and I understand why people would potentially relate to those sentiments.” (I certainly did.)

Finding reasons to keep fighting via Titus Andronicus’ virulent and philosophical punk bombast

Titus Andronicus has always been a very animated band. NICOLE RIFKIN ILLUSTRATION

Stickles thinks people sometimes have to go on a “journey from a place of real anger and desperation and hopelessness to ultimately arrive at a place of hope and empathy and compassion towards others.” This is true of the narrator of The Will To Live — who Stickles notes is not himself, though they share similarities — and it’s true throughout Titus Andronicus’ catalog as a whole.

“It’s not as cute when you’re 37 years old to be a nihilist,” Stickles says.

One of the most interesting shifts on The Will to Live is a refinement of who “the enemy” is. The album is their most explicitly political, and Stickles is clearly punching up here. The opening track “(I’m) Screwed” mentions “the master” who’s “got the hungry under lock and key” and who “will never let my body be my property.” “Baby Crazy” lambasts “wicked men” who “without a pot for piss… done pissed off the populace and turned ’em to misogynists and homophobes and racists.”

“It’s the classic divide and conquer approach that our oppressors use to pit us against each other,” Stickles says. “They’re very good at distracting us and convincing us that our enemies are regular, decent, hardworking people that are far more like us than they are different. The last thing in the world that they would want would be for us to form some kind of multiracial, genderfluid coalition of working people that could ideally make some sort of series of collective demands that would force the powers that be to give everybody a fair shake in this terribly rigged, sick game that they’ve got us playing.”

This punk commitment to the working class is reflected in The Will to Live’s penultimate track, a cover of English Oi! band Cock Sparrer’s “We’re Coming Back” from the punk group’s 1982 album Shock Troops. Stickles said the song’s “messages of unity, solidarity and togetherness” — particularly the chorus lyric “You’ll never walk alone again” — fit nicely with The Will to Live’s focus on individuals being a part of something larger. It also kept one of their feet firmly planted in the punk world while they explored Stickles’ greater-than-punk aesthetic concept of “Ultimate Rock.”

Ultimate Rock, according to Stickles, is a band endeavoring to make an album that is the biggest, boldest and most impactful version of itself. He cites Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., Metallica’s Black Album and Def Leppard’s Hysteria as examples. These huge, shiny albums might seem the antithesis of punk. But Stickles notes, “Punk is an ideology and an approach to the creation of art that is distinct from any particular orthodoxy or set of aesthetic signifiers. It just means freedom for the artist, and that the artist is not boxed in by any particular expectations.”

Besides, Titus Andronicus is first and foremost a rock band. The TA social media accounts label the group as “The Rock Fan’s Rock Band.” In a recent Instagram post, Stickles called himself “The King of Bar Rock.” To me, there’s something slightly tonguein-cheek — or at least self-aware regarding traditional rock music’s current unfashionable status – about these proclamations. But Titus Andronicus truly does understand the power of legendary, populist rock to reach people. This is a band that on 2018’s A Productive Cough had the audacity to cover Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” shift the perspective from second to first person, and namedrop the actual members of the Rolling Stones. When I saw TA on its (two-year delayed) tour for the 10-year anniversary of The Monitor, the band burst out of their pandemic-forced live show hiatus with a cover of “The Boys Are Back in Town.” If Stickles’ lyrics are going to reach you, it’s going to be via a kick-ass wall of sound as indebted to album-oriented rock as it is to Johnny Rotten.

Fans come to Titus Andronicus for the inextricable combination of philosophy and shredding. Those like me who’ve aged along with them might’ve first seen themselves in Stickles’ younger narrators — angry, hopeless, but determined to push on with life, and happy to have a righteous soundtrack for it. They might now see themselves in The Will to Live, with a bit more clarity and maybe even optimism for the future, but with no less interest in rocking out. This band means something to people. And in an absurd universe, the search for meaning itself is enough. n

RAP ICE CUBE

While youngsters might know him more for starring in family-friendly movies, music connoisseurs will always think of Ice Cube primarily as one of the voices that took West Coast gangsta rap worldwide. From the earth-shaking days of N.W.A. to massive solo success with classics like “It Was a Good Day” and “Check Yo Self,” the restinggrimace-face MC’s smooth and casual swagger never grows old. Cube headlines the stacked lineup of the “Legend of the West Coast” concert, which also features heavy-hitters like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Xzibit. If you snag a ticket to the hip-hop extravaganza, then the day will most certainly be a good day.

— SETH SOMMERFELD

Ice Cube, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Xzibit, Tha Dogg Pound, The Luniz • Sun, March 5 at 7 pm • $47-$177 • All ages • Spokane Arena • 720 W. Mallon Ave. • spokanearena.com

Thursday, 3/2

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Thursday Night Jam

CHECKERBOARD TAPROOM, Weathered Shepherds

CHINOOK STEAK, PASTA & SPIRITS, Kosh

J KNITTING FACTORY, Static-X, Fear Factory, Dope, Society 1, Raven Black

J QQ SUSHI & KITCHEN, Just Plain Darin

THE STEAM PLANT, Tod Hornby

ZOLA, The Desperate Eights

Friday, 3/3

BARRISTER WINERY, The Rising

J THE BIG DIPPER, Kurt Travis, Amarionette, Predisposed, Giveaway, Burn Mona Lisa

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, The Usual Suspects

CHINOOK STEAK, PASTA & SPIRITS, Keanu

CRAFTSMAN CELLARS, Kori Ailene

HAMMERS BAR & GRILL, Dangerous Type

OSPREY RESTAURANT & BAR, Son of Brad

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, One Street Over

THE RIDLER PIANO BAR, Just Plain Darin

Saturday, 3/4

BOTTLE JOY, Wiebe Jammin

CHALICE BREWING CO., Son of Brad

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Cary Fly Band

ELECTRONIC GETTER

Ican already hear all the excited fans at Getter’s grimy, heavy-bass show hitting up their friends with the greeting he coined back in his Vine celebrity days: “Suh dude?” For a preview of the comedic influencer’s vibe, check out his trippy dubstep music videos, which feature things like dogs with laser eyes (“Headsplitter”) and food dripping with colorful cartoon grease (“Rip N Dip”) and generally ooze the bro-dude party lifestyle (like his Borgore collaboration, “Squad”). The show also features local talents SAV, Dirty Vacation and Raskl to get the dancing started at this adults-only night at Riverside Place.

— SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

Getter, Raskl, Dirty Vacation, SAV • Sat, March 4 at 8 pm • $40 • 18+ • Riverside Place • 1110 W. Riverside Ave. • mahalopromotions.com

CHINOOK STEAK, PASTA & SPIRITS, Keanu

HAMMERS BAR & GRILL, Dangerous Type

J KNITTING FACTORY, HIRIE, KBONG, Johnny Cosmic, Vana Liya

J LEBANON RESTAURANT & CAFÉ, Safar

NOAH’S CANTEEN, Rusty Jackson

OSPREY RESTAURANT & BAR, Just Plain Darin

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, The Cole Show

J RIVERSIDE PLACE, Getter, Raskl, Dirty Vacation, SAV

SPOKANE VALLEY ASSEMBLY

CHURCH, David Phelps, Mickey Bell

ZOLA, Blake Braley

Sunday, 3/5

HAMMERS BAR & GRILL, Kicho

HOGFISH, Open Mic

J SOUTH HILL GRILL, Just Plain Darin

J J SPOKANE ARENA, Ice Cube, Bone Thugs N Harmony, Xzibit, Tha Dogg Pound, The Luniz

Monday, 3/6

J EICHARDT’S PUB, Blues Jam with John Firshi

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Open Mic Night

Tuesday, 3/7

LITZ’S PUB & EATERY, Shuffle Dawgs ZOLA, The Night Mayors

Wednesday, 3/8

THE DRAFT ZONE, The Draft Zone Open Mic J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Dr. Don Goodwin

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Titus Andronicus, Country Westerns

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Dwayne Parsons RED ROOM LOUNGE, The Roomates ZOLA, Runaway Lemonade

Coming Up ...

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Alvvays, March 13, 8 pm.

J THE FOX THEATER, Jerry Cantrell, Thunderpussy, March 31, 8 pm.

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Black Belt Eagle Scout, April 1, 8 pm.

J J SPOKANE ARENA, Cypress Hill, Dr. Green Thumbs, Too $hort, April 20, 7:30 pm.

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, The Beaches, April 22, 8 pm.

J J THE BIG DIPPER, The HIRS Collective, Simp, Blacktracks, Spooky, April 25, 7:30 pm.

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Cursive performing ‘Domestica’, April 25, 8 pm.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Hippo Campus, Charly Bliss, May 10, 8 pm.

J J EVANS BROTHERS COFFEE, Dario Ré: Colorwise EP Release Show & Art Exhibition, May 12, 7 pm.

J J THE FOX THEATER, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Deer Tick, July 6, 7:30 pm.

J J PAVILION AT RIVERFRONT, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Ziggy Marley, Mavis Staples, Robert Randolph & the Family Band, July 26, 6 pm.

J J PAVILION AT RIVERFRONT, The Head & the Heart, Father John Misty, Miya Folick Aug. 6, 6 pm.

J J THE FOX THEATER, Jinkx Monsoon: Everything at Stake, Aug. 13, 8 pm.

J = THE INLANDER RECOMMENDS THIS SHOW

J = ALL AGES SHOW

MUSIC | VENUES

219 LOUNGE • 219 N. First Ave., Sandpoint • 208-263-5673

ARBOR CREST WINE CELLARS • 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-927-9463

BABY BAR • 827 W. First Ave. • 509-847-1234

BARRISTER WINERY • 1213 W. Railroad Ave. • 509-465-3591

BEE’S KNEES WHISKY BAR • 1324 W. Lancaster Rd.., Hayden • 208-758-0558

BERSERK • 125 S. Stevens St. • 509-315-5101

THE BIG DIPPER • 171 S. Washington St. • 509-863-8098

BIGFOOT PUB • 9115 N. Division St. • 509-467-9638

BING CROSBY THEATER • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-227-7638

BLACK DIAMOND • 9614 E. Sprague Ave. • 509891-8357

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL • 116 S. Best Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-891-8995

BOOMERS CLASSIC ROCK BAR Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-368-9847

BUCER’S COFFEEHOUSE PUB Moscow • 208-596-0887

THE BULL HEAD • 10211 S. Electric St., Four Lakes • 509-838-9717

CHAN’S RED DRAGON • 1406 W. Third Ave. • 509-838-6688

COEUR D’ALENE CASINO Worley • 800-523-2464

COEUR D’ALENE CELLARS Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-2336

CRUISERS BAR & GRILL • 6105 W Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-446-7154

CURLEY’S HAUSER JUNCTION Post Falls • 208-773-5816

EICHARDT’S PUB • 212 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-263-4005

FIRST INTERSTATE CENTER FOR THE ARTS 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. • 509-279-7000

FOX THEATER • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-624-1200

IRON HORSE • 407 E. Sherman, Coeur d’Alene • 208-667-7314

IRON HORSE BAR & GRILL Spokane Valley • 509-926-8411

JOHN’S ALLEY • 114 E. Sixth St., Moscow • 208-883-7662

KNITTING FACTORY • 911 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-244-3279

LEFTBANK WINE BAR • 108 N. Washington St. • 509-315-8623

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd. • 509-474-0511

MARYHILL WINERY • 1303 W. Summit Pkwy. • 509-443-3832

THE MASON JAR • 101 F St., Cheney • 509-359-8052

MAX AT MIRABEAU • 1100 N. Sullivan Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-922-6252

MILLIE’S • 28441 Hwy 57, Priest Lake • 208-443-0510

MOOSE LOUNGE • 401 E. Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-7901

MOOTSY’S • 406 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-838-1570

NASHVILLE NORTH • 6361 W. Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-457-9128

NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CASINO Hayford Rd., Airway Heights • 877-871-6772

NYNE BAR & BISTRO • 232 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-474-1621

PEND D’OREILLE WINERY • 208-265-8545

THE PODIUM • 511 W. Dean Ave. • 509-279-7000

POST FALLS BREWING CO. Post Falls • 208-773-7301

RAZZLE’S BAR & GRILL • 10325 N. Government Way, Hayden • 208-635-5874

RED ROOM LOUNGE

MUSIC RISE UP

The Palouse Choral Society’s Chamber and Children’s Choirs are kicking off Women’s History Month with a night of interconnected musical performances: All of the featured pieces were composed by women. The program contains a blend of historic pieces from composers such as Clara Schumann, Amy Beach and Ethel Smyth, as well as contemporary compositions from the likes of B.E. Boykin, Tracy Wong and Rosephanye Powell. To close out the night, the Children’s Choir performs a variety of songs, and award-winning author and special guest Diane Worthey (pictured) hosts a book signing for her newly released children’s book, Rise Up with a Song: The True Story of Ethel Smyth, Suffragette Composer — SUMMER SANDSTROM

Palouse Choral Society: Still I Rise • Sun, March 5 at 4 pm • $8-$20 general; free for ages 6-12 • First United Methodist Church • 322 E. Third St., Moscow • palousechoralsociety.org

GET LISTED!

Submit events online at Inlander.com/getlisted or email relevant details to getlisted@inlander.com. We need the details one week prior to our publication date.

WORDS LIFE AFTER LOSS

Hailing from the East Coast, the next guest writer of Eastern Washington Univerity’s Visiting Writer Series is Megan Cummins. Her short story collection, If the Body Allows It, is split into six distinct sections named after body parts — “Heart,” “Eyes,” “Lungs,” “Blood,” “Skin” and “Skeleton” — creating a meditation on loss, grief and chronic illness. Each short story follows Marie, a writer from New Jersey whose life has been struck by insurmountable grief in the form of losing her father to a drug overdose. Cummins explores life after loss, and the idea that life is always unpredictable in the most relentless ways. At her upcoming talk at Spark Central, Cummins discusses her Prairie Schooner Book Prize-winning collection and her life as a writer and editor in New York City.

– MADISON PEARSON

EWU Visiting Writer Series: Megan Cummins • Fri, March 3 from 7:30-9 pm • Free • Spark Central • 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. • spark-central.org

VISUAL ARTS PRINTED PERSPECTIVES

Art has the ability to focus the eye on something otherwise unseen — and to add brilliant perspective to public issues seen again and again. This is the kind of art that Harris R. Wiltsher II generates. As a curator and artist, Wiltsher’s background is wide-ranging. As a Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) recipient, program administrator, professor and art gallery director, Wiltsher has done it all. For his showcase “In What We See: A Printmaker’s Response,” Wiltsher cultivated a group exhibition that highlights artwork from artists with varying backgrounds and experiences, specifically featuring the African and African American experience via print media. Our very own Spokane Falls Community College hosts Wiltsher’s captivating exhibit for a few more weeks, so don’t miss it.

— ELLIE ROTHSTROM

In What We See: A Printmaker’s Response • Through March 16; open Mon-Thu from 9 am-4 pm, Fri from 9 am-1:30 pm • Free • Spokane Falls Community College • 3410 W Whistalks Wy • sfcc.spokane.edu

THEATER THE CANDY MAN

Come with me…and you’ll be…in the Kroc Center watching CYT North Idaho’s production of Willy Wonka! This classic Roald Dahl story adapted for the stage follows the titular, enigmatic candy manufacturer as he stages a contest by hiding golden tickets in five of his delectable candy bars. The winning children are blissfully unaware of what awaits them beyond the factory doors when they show up for their free tour. As they walk deeper into the factory, they learn that they must follow Wonka’s rules or suffer the consequences. Historically, every portrayal of Wonka has been a bit different: Gene Wilder shows the softer, more compassionate side of the character; Johnny Depp’s version of Wonka is vastly different, showing his inability to understand children at all. However, all Wonkas have one thing in common: the ability to transport audiences into a world of pure imagination… and chocolate waterfalls.

— MADISON PEARSON

Willy Wonka • Through March 5; Fri-Sat at 7 pm, Sat-Sun at 3 pm

• Kroc Center

• $15-$20

• 1765 W. Golf Course Rd., Coeur d’Alene • cytnorthidaho.org

FOOD & DRINK BREAKFAST TIME

Breakfast foods are special. So many “morning” dishes can be enjoyed any time of day without feeling off, unlike most traditional lunch and dinner staples. So it makes sense that Garland Brew Werks took advantage of this food flexibility when crafting five breakfast cereal-inspired beers for this special unticketed, two-day event. And there’s something for everyone, from IPAs to sours, stouts to porters, including “Charmed” marshmallow hazy IPA; “Wendell’s Brew” Cinnamon Toast Crunch coffee stout; “O Cap’n! My Cap’n!” Crunchberry sour; “Bedrock” Fruity Pebble citrus hazy; and the “Penny Cup” peanut butter puff chocolate porter. When you get hungry, the brewery is also serving up a complementing special in the form of cinnamon rolls topped with either bacon or fruity cereal.

— CHEY SCOTT

I SAW YOU

DONNA, DESIREE, SHELBY AND GARY...

Thank you for being lights in what was once a very dark future for me and Emily. Sometimes I wonder how things could be so difficult one moment and completely heaven sent the very next. My child and I are lucky to have family like you. You deserve to be acknowledged for making a way for us where there was none for us. I hope we have made the effort worth it. Thank you with everything I am. You changed our lives. <3

STYROFOAM T-REX AT TOSSED AND FOUND

I was a day late in buying you, Mr. T-Rex. Wondering if the lucky owner is interested in selling you to me. I was dreaming of adding you to my school library. Hoping to hear from you, or anyone else who has a Kinner “Rex the Tyrannosaurus” who is looking for a new home in a middle school library.

TO “HIGH CALIBER” FROM “AUNTIE GOLDFISH” I saw u and u saw me a couple of times again last week; I believe you are aware I have quite a crush on you. I have tremendous respect for your position and professionalism and do not want things to be awkward, so asking “anonymously” if you are single?

SUNDAY BINGO AT THE JACKSON To J: The devilishly handsome bloke that allowed me to commandeer his company. You offered me drinks and nachos, but alas, I was prudish in that department. I wish you would have stayed a little longer. I ended

up winning the cash bingo jackpot. I could have bought you a drink! Instead I have to lean into the hope that you read the Inlander and see this blip of gratitude. I really appreciate that you accepted my invitation to sit together. You sheltered me in my social akwardness, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you for it...

**Boop!**

hypocrites. If we are to improve this world, we must do it ourselves, instead of blaming dying people. We can do it. Let us start now - Peace be with you.

CHEERS

EMILY ROSE CARTER Cheer’s to you!...

You’re the No. 1 reason I have to make my life something worth living. You have been through so much and without letting your spirit become dim. We will be in our own place soon, I couldn’t be happier sharing this progress with and for you. Life is about growing and adapting to the changes each day brings; you have inspired me to be brave during hardships and to celebrate the good times. You changed my heart from fear to fierce just by calling me mom and speaking the most beautiful words: “I love you.” I’ll be here when you need me. Keep your head up. And don’t forget to smile!

LIGHTS NOT ABOUT CHRISTMAS Cheers to the person demanding everyone take down their Christmas lights. Not because I agree with you, rather because you need some cheer to fill that colorless, wintry void where your heart was supposed to go. Maintaining light during the darkest, coldest part of the year is an ancient tradition that reminds everyone the human spirit is strong enough to survive whatever harsh circumstances the world throws at us. The practice transcends holidays, and even the concepts of day or calendar, which means the only stopping point is when we have given up on ourselves and no longer care about… anything. So, let me be the first to invite you to remove your head from your chimney and bask with us in the electric radiance of hope, and the knowledge that, whatever darkness is plaguing you to the point of wishing it onto other people, it too shall pass.

NO PARKING MEANS YOU TOO! Thank you to the cool mom at pickup for telling the NIMBY soccer mom not to park in front of a fire hydrant! It was awesome to watch! Way to stand up against the slow erosion of our society!

CHEERS TO THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT OUR WORLD Short and sweet - Millennials and GenZ (including myself) we must not be

CHEERS TO TRADER JOE’S EMPLOYEES

Unlike many big local grocery stores, when you walk into Trader Joe’s you instantly feel welcome and genuinely appreciated by all the employees. That feeling carries through to the checkout. The people are smiling, glad to see you, they are engaging, and they live and breathe customer service with a great attitude. A big contrast to many other stores. Big Store Grocery Management needs to do some secret shopping and see how real customer service works. And then have some training sessions to get rid of the glum and ramp up the service.

CHEERS TO KHQ’S NEWS DIRECTOR

...for hiring the most polished, most professional, national quality TV news reporter on the air in Spokane. John Webb, while likely the youngest reporter in town, is remarkably seasoned. Enjoy him while he’s here because you’ll soon see him on a network newscast, like Ana Cabrera and Peter Alexander.

JEERS

HIGHWAY ROBBERY Jeers to the second hand store who recently moved to a new, northside location. You should be ashamed of your greed! A pair of smelly, used sneakers for $17.99. How about a sweater for your little dog? That’ll set you back about $10! And who is benefiting from this store? The owners, that’s who! Everything you’re selling was donated, and your prices are higher than Macy’s sale prices. On top of that, your cashiers have lost their jobs, being replaced with self checkouts. You won’t be getting any of my donations, I’d rather give to the stores who give back to our community. How do you sleep at night?

LIGHTEN UP ON YOUR NEIGHBORS Your

SOUND OFF 1. Visit Inlander.com/isawyou by 3 pm Monday. 2. Pick a category (I Saw You, You Saw Me, Cheers or Jeers). 3. Provide basic info: your name and email (so we know you’re real). 4. To connect via I Saw You, provide a non-identifying email to be included with your submission — like “petals327@yahoo.com,” not “j.smith@comcast.net.”

neighbors’ lights are still up? What a delightfully charmed, borderline utopian existence it must be to have lingering Christmas decor top your list of woes. While the rest of us decide between fixing

a broken tooth and paying rent, you had not only the time but the honest to god inclination to contemplate, articulate and disseminate a detailed description of the unbearable displeasure you have endured at the hands of your neighbors who are surely being deliberately discourteous and not just busy living a life far more difficult than you could imagine.

LIGHT IT UP, SPOKANE What an awful jeers last week in the Inlander admonishing people who still have Christmas lights up. Spokane is an extremely depressing place to live from November through at least February and some years more than that. The skies are dark. The inversions are awful. To me, there isn’t anything more wonderful than seeing bright lights to alleviate the dullness of Spokane at this time of year. So, “boo” to the person who wrote that and “yay” to those who keep their lights up. Although I don’t live in a place that’s conducive to having outdoor lights, I sure am thankful to those who keep them up long past Christmas. Please, please, please keep it up. You bring some light to an otherwise dreary place. Spokane is wonderful when the sun shines and it’s warm out. Otherwise, I look forward to the lights. The insulting jeer was duh, duh, duh, dumb! Light it up, Spokane, please.

DOWNTOWN LIBRARY Thank you to the Inlander for writing a relevant article about the newly designed multimillion-dollar library downtown. Ironically, my family was just there to use the library for the first time a short while ago. How disappointing to find that it already looks dirty in places, with transients milling about and people eating food, drinking and spilling in multiple places while other people sleep at a table or in a corner. One person had an entire setup in a prime spot that overlooks the beautiful Spokane River. However, we couldn’t really take in the view because

all of their junk was in the way. Then along came the article in the Inlander highlighting some of these issues. Remember when libraries used to be for people to look at and check out books? Boy were those the days! Ray Bradbury even wrote about it in some of his seminal works. Then along came other types of materials like films, which are great too. Then came passes to various activities and events. Those are equally fantastic, and thank you to the library for all of those resources. But, it’s too bad that those who aren’t “paying” for the costs are taking up the most room. I would like to go back someday and find a book to read. I’d also like to see the view someday. Remember the slogan “Spokane doesn’t Suck”? Actually, it does.

FAR RIGHT CHRISTIAN COUP IN COEUR

D’ALENE

A recent Washington Post article about the invasion and takeover of North Idaho in general — and Coeur d’Alene in particular — by “Christian Nationalists” is so not news. Every day the rest of us wonder how long we can last in this poisonous environment. Do we stay hunkered down and hope the occupying army will selfdestruct under the weight of its own hubris and power hunger? Do we put the house up for sale and flee to a saner place? And where would that be? We’re living in a nihilist novel. No Exit.

RE: CHRISTMAS LIGHTS BEING LEFT UP I laughed so hard when I read this! Did you ever think that maybe the person is Elderly or a Disabled Veteran? It must be keeping you up at night, because if that’s your biggest concern my life is awesome. Make a nice neighborly gesture and help them. Good lord, I hope they don’t ever get dandelions in their front yard, you really might lose your s$&@! n

NOTE: I Saw You/Cheers & Jeers is for adults 18 or older. The Inlander reserves the right to edit or reject any posting at any time at its sole discretion and assumes no responsibility for the content.

“

...Bask with us in the electric radiance of hope... ”

EVENTS | CALENDAR BENEFIT

MARDI BRAS This month-long fundraiser aims to provide access to bras, underwear and personal hygiene items to people experiencing poverty and homelessness. Drop off items on March 3 from 2-4 pm at Hope House. bit.ly/3YsbK0O

THE FIG TREE SPRING BENEFIT LUNCH

This hybrid event celebrates the 50th anniversary of the organization’s resource directory. The event features speeches by Malcom Haworth, Mary Stamp, Nicole Bishop and many more. See website for online attendance info. March 3, 11:30 am-1 pm. By donation. Gonzaga Cataldo Hall, Addison and Sharp. thefigtree.org

BUILDING BRIGHTER FUTURES FUN -

DRAISER This annual fundraiser for Northeast Youth Center includes dinner, drinks, a dessert dash, a silent auction and a live auction. All proceeds support kids and families in need. March 4, 5:30-9 pm. $75-$150. Northern Quest Resort & Casino, 100 N. Hayford Rd. spokaneneyc. com (509-482-0708)

WOMEN BUILD This 4-day fundraising building event is a hands-on opportunity to dig into the building process, and partner with hardworking individuals in Habitat for Humanity’s Homeownership Program. March 8-11. By donation. habitat-spokane.org/womenbuild

MUSICAL DESSERT SOCIAL & SILENT

AUCTION This fundraiser for the Deer Park band and choir programs features a dessert social, a silent auction and performances from the jazz band, chorale choir and steel pan band. March 10, 7-9 pm. $15-$20. Deer Park High School, 800 S. Weber Rd. dpsd.org (509-217-7559)

STIX DIABETES PROGRAMS ANNUAL

DINNER & AUCTION This annual event raises funds to continue offering camp experiences and community for children living with diabetes. March 11, 5:30-9:30 pm. $125. Spokane Convention Center, 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. spokanecenter.com (509-484-1366)

SWEETS BEFORE SUPPER GALA A fundraising gala hosted by the Girl Scouts of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho. This event honors women leaders in the community via the annual Women of Distinction award. March 11, 6-9 pm. $100. Davenport Grand Hotel, 333 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. gsewni.org (509-747-8091)

RED RIBBON GALA This annual event hosted by the Spokane Aids Network includes a screening of the 95th Annual Academy Awards, a silent auction, a live auction and more entertainment throughout the night. March 12, 4-9 pm. $110. Highball A Modern Speakeasy, 100 N. Hayford Rd. sannw.org

SILENT AUCTION An afternoon of music, food, and a diverse array of old and new items from local artists including gift baskets, quilt, antiques, pottery and more. March 12, 1-3 pm. Free. Create Arts Center, 900 Fourth St., Newport. createarts. org (509-447-9277)

COMEDY

MIKE E. WINFIELD Mike has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, the Office and Brad Paisley’s Comedy Rodeo. March 2, 7:30 pm, March 3, 7:30 & 10:15 pm and March 4, 7 & 9:45 pm. $20-$32. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

DETECTIVE DO RIGHTS This improvised show creates a mystery-solving case file based on audience suggestions for the

Blue Door Players to crack. March 3-31, Fri from 7:30-8:45 pm. $9. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland Ave. bluedoortheatre.com (509-747-7045)

THE FOLLIES This slightly naughty comedy show is the signature fundraiser of Angels Over Sandpoint, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping the community. March 3 and March 4, 8-10 pm. $30-$50. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. panida.org (208-263-9191)

GONZAGA UNIVERSITY THEATRE

SPORTS Gonzaga’s student comedy improv group showcases family-friendly humor. March 4, 9 pm. $1. Gonzaga University Magnuson Theatre, 502 E. Boone Ave. gonzaga.edu/theatreanddance

SAFARI Blue Door’s version of “Whose Line,” a fast-paced improv show with a few twists and turns. Rated for mature audiences/ages 16+. Reservations recommended. March 4-25, Sat at 7:30 pm. $9. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland Ave. bluedoortheatre.com (509-747-7045)

NEW TALENT TUESDAYS Watch comedians of all skill levels work out jokes together. Tuesdays at 7 pm (doors at 6 pm). Free. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

OPEN MIC STAND-UP Wednesdays at 7:30 pm. See website for sign-up details. Free. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

PHILLIP KOPCZYNSKI Kopczynski is an Eastern Washington native and has been performing standup and recording comedy albums locally for years. All ticket proceeds hep fund the Washington East Soccer Club. March 9, 7:30 pm. $15-$22. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

GINGER BILLY Billy is a comedian from North Carolina who performs stand up about his rural community. March 10, 7:30 & 10:15 pm and March 11, 7 & 9:45 pm. $40-$50. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

ZOLTAN KASZAS The Hungarian comedian is best known for his Dry Bar Comedy Special, Cat Jokes, and his follow-up special entitled Modern Male. March 10, 7:30 & 10:15 pm and March 11, 7 & 9:45 pm. $22-$20. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com

COMEDY AVALANCHE: AUGGIE SMITH

Auggie has appeared on Comedy Central, Last Comic Standing and can be heard regularly on the Bob and Tom Show. March 11, 8 pm. $25-$40. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. panida.org

COMMUNITY

ROLE-PLAYING GAME DROP IN Improve your RPG skills by watching and participating in games. Fridays from 4-8 pm and Saturdays from 1-5 pm. Free. RPG Community Center, 101 N. Stone Street. rpgcenter.org (509-608-7630)

1912 CENTER WINTER MARKET The market includes dozens of vendors selling wares, food and drinks. March 4, 9 am-1 pm. Free to shop. 1912 Center, 412 E. Third St., Moscow. 1912center.org

THE BREAKDOWN: PHOTOGRAPHY

Learn basic photo composition, how to set up lighting and how to confidently capture photos on your DSLR camera. Limited cameras available for use, bring your own camera if possible. March 4, 3-4 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org (509-279-0299)

DROP IN & RPG Stop by and explore the world of role playing games. Build a

shared narrative using cooperative problem solving, exploration, imagination and rich social interaction. Ages 5-105. On the first and third Saturday of the month from 1-3:45 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org

FAMILY CONSTRUCTION ZONE Play with blocks and stretch your imagination to create epic builds. This event also takes place at other SCLD branches, see website for details. March 4, 3-5 pm. Free. Medical Lake Library, 3212 Herb St. scld.org/events (509-893-8330)

PIRATES, PILLAGIN’ & PARTYIN’ MYSTERY & 4 YEAR CELEBRATION Captain Jack Blacksparrow has sent word to the most notorious pirate crews that he’s recruiting for a journey to seek legendary treasures on Parrot Island. Tickets include participation in the mystery game, dinner, a non-alcoholic beverage and dessert. March 4, 6-9 pm. $49-$59. Crime Scene Entertainment, 2775 N. Howard St. crimesceneentertainment.com

DISCOVER YOUR IRISH & SCOTS-IRISH ANCESTORS Join experts from the Ulster Historical Foundation for a day of learning how to get the most out of resources when researching your Irish and Scots-Irish ancestors. March 9, 10 am-4 pm. $50. The Jacklin Arts & Cultural Center, 405 N. William St. ancestryireland. com/2023-coeur (208-771-2912)

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

YWCA Spokane celebrates 120 years of advancing social justice, supporting families and strengthening communities. This party pays tribute to women of the past who paved the way for our futures as well as the 2023 Women of Achievement. March 9, 11 am-1 pm. $135. Davenport Grand Hotel, 333 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. ywcaspokane.com/woa

SPOKANE HOME & GARDEN SHOW This annual show focuses on building, renovation, landscaping, design and home decor and features dozens of vendors and businesses. March 10-12; Fri from 12-8 pm, Sat from 10 am-7 pm and Sun from 10 am-5 pm. $10-$12. Spokane Convention Center, 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. spokanehomeshows.com (279-7000)

SPOKANE MOTORCYCLE SHOW & SALE

This three-day show and sale features new models of motorcycles, financing deals, a swap meet and vendors selling accessories. March 10-12; Fri from 3-8 pm, Sat from 10 am-7 pm and Sun from 10 am-4 pm. $12. Spokane County Fair & Expo Center, 404 N. Havana St. spokanemotorcycleshow.com (509-477-1766)

3RD LEGISLATIVE DISTRICT TOWN

HALL MEETING Legislators from the 3rd Legislative District provide a brief update on budget proposals and discuss legislation to address affordable housing, public safety, education, clean air and water, local jobs and infrastructure, health care and many more issues. March 11, 10:30 am-noon. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. spokanelibrary.org

ST. PATRICK’S DAY PARADE This 43rd annual parade is hosted annually by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. Proceeds are donated to several area nonprofit organizations to support the community. March 11, noon. Free. Downtown Spokane. friendlysonsofstpatrick.com

ST. PATRICK’S PARADE:This 17th annual parade features local organizations and marching bands strolling down Sherman Ave. March 11, 3-4 pm. Free. Downtown Coeur d’Alene. cdadowntown.com

TEXAS HOLD ‘EM TOURNAMENT This event features an all-day tournament, three meals and a full, no-host bar. March

11, 10 am. $100. Southside Community Center, 3151 E. 27th Ave. southsidescc.org

TRACKS TO SUCCESS This event features representatives from the DDA and the DVR discussing how employment can impact disability benefits, what jobs are available, how much can be earned and more. March 11, 9 am-1 pm. Free. Skils’kin, 4004 E. Boone Ave. skils-kin.org

SPOKANE AUDUBON SOCIETY This meeting’s program is titled “A Birder’s Guide to Understanding Bears.” Rich Beausoleil, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife statewide bear and cougar specialist, presents about black bears in Washington. March 15, 6:15-8 pm. Free. The Hive, 2904 E. Sprague Ave. audubonspokane.org (509-444-5300)

FILM

WILD & SCENIC A curated collection of independent films about wild places and the people working to protect them. Film topics are aviation, Paralympian cycling, Antarctica and more. March 2, 7-9 pm. $15. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. panida.org (208-263-9191)

VIDEO & PHOTOGRAPHY SET CREATION WITH CARDBOARD Design and build a backdrop with cardboard and other supplies that can be used for filming videos and taking photos. Some premade cardboard sets available for practice. All supplies provided; registration required. This event also takes place at other SCLD branches, see website for details. March 4, 3:30-5:30 pm. Free. Spokane Valley Library, 12004 E. Main. scld.org/events (893-8400)

MONDAY NIGHT MOVIES Showings of cult classics and B-movies. Check social media (@goldenhandlebrewco) for details on what the movies will be every week. Every other Monday at 5:30 pm. Free. Golden Handle Brewing Co., 154 S. Madison St. golden-handle-project-spc. square.site (509-863-9167)

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: MY NAME IS ANDREA This film highlights the views of one of the most polarizing figures of feminist movements in the US and abroad, Andrea Dworkin. The screening is followed by a performance of poetry in celebration of International Women’s Day. March 8, 7-10 pm. Free. Magic Lantern Theatre, 25 W. Main Ave. magiclanternonmain.com

NORTH BY NORTHWEST This classic suspense film finds New York City ad executive Roger O. Thornhill pursued by ruthless spy Phillip Vandamm after Thornhill is mistaken for a government agent. March 8, 7 pm. $5. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. panida.org

FOOD & DRINK

BRING YOUR OWN VINYL NIGHT Bring your own vinyl to spin while sipping on craft cocktails and listening to music. Every Thursday from 3-10 pm. The Boneyard - Side Hustle Syrups, 17905 E. Appleway Ave. sidehustlesyrups.com

INLANDER RESTAURANT WEEK 2023

The annual 10-day, regional culinary celebration returns, offering three-course fixed-price menus ($25, $35 or $45) at dozens of restaurants in the Inland Northwest. See complete details and menus at InlanderRestaurantWeek.com. This year’s charity partner is Big Table Spokane, which supports hospitality professionals in crisis. Through Sat, March 4.

$25-$45. InlanderRestaurantWeek.com

KITCHEN COOKING CLASS: HANDFORMED PASTA Commellini Estate’s executive chef, Frank, teaches how to create hand-formed pasta. The class culminates in a meal, served family style, inside the historic estate’s main venue. March 2-3, 6:30-9:30 pm. $85. Commellini Estate, 14715 N. Dartford Dr. commelliniestate. com (509-466-0667)

BREAKFAST CEREAL BEER This event features five beers based on sugary breakfast cereals. Beer flavors include a marshmallow hazy IPA, a Cinnamon Toast Crunch coffee stout, a Crunchberry sour, a Fruity Pebble citrus hazy and a peanut butter puff chocolate porter. March 3, 3-9 pm and March 4, 12-9 pm. Price TBA. Garland Brew Werks, 603 W. Garland Ave. garland-brew-werks. square.site (509-863-9419)

WINE TASTING Taste March selections from Vino’s Wine of the Month Club. Reservations not required. Includes cheese and crackers. March 3, 3-6:30 pm. $10. Vino! A Wine Shop, 222 S. Washington St. vinowine.com (509-838-1229)

WINE, STEIN & DINE This event features over 85 participating wineries, microbreweries and restaurants with professional judging as well as a silent auction and a raffle. March 4, 7-10 pm. $45. Kootenai County Fairgrounds, 4056 N. Government Way. pfefwsd.org

WINE TASTING Taste a selection of sparkling wines from around the world. Reservations not required. Includes cheese and crackers. March 4, 2-4:30 pm. $15. Vino! A Wine Shop, 222 S. Washington St. vinowine.com (509-838-1229)

DRAG BRUNCH The cast of Runway performs while enjoying a full breakfast menu and mimosas. Hosted by Savannah SoReal. Sundays from 10 am-2 pm. Globe Bar & Kitchen, 204 N. Division. globespokane.com (509-443-4014)

NOVA KAINE’S DON’T TELL MAMA

CABARET & DRAG BRUNCH Various Inland Northwest drag performers take the stage and perform pieces choreographed by Troy Nickerson. First and third Sun of every month at 11 am. Highball A Modern Speakeasy, 100 N. Hayford Rd. northernquest.com (877-871-6772)

UNIONTOWN SAUSAGE FEED This annual event benefits the Uniontown community building. Meals include a 3/4 lb sausage, mashed potatoes, sauerkraut, green beans, applesauce, a roll and a choice of pie. March 5, 10 am-5 pm. $15. Uniontown Community Building, Hwy. 195 at Montgomery St. uniontowncommunitybuilding.net (208-790-1716)

COOKING CLASS: RAVIOLI Commellini Estate’s Executive Chef Frank teaches participants how to create ravioli. Class culminates in a delicious meal, served family style, inside the historic Commellini Estate. March 8 and March 9, 6:30 pm. $85. Commellini Estate, 14715 N. Dartford Dr. commellini.com

TAPHOUSE BEER DINNER FT. BRICKWEST BREWING This event features four chef-curated courses, craft beer pairings and conversations from brewery representatives. March 8, 5:30-7:30 pm. $55. Coeur d’Alene Taphouse Unchained, 210 E. Sherman Ave. bit.ly/3lN6jue

VEGAN COMFORT FOODS Learn how to make vegan lentil shepherd’s pie, mashed potatoes and no-bake peanut butter chocolate chip cookie bars in this hands-on cooking class. March 8, 5-8 pm. $30. Second Harvest, 1234 E. Front Ave. secondharvestkitchen.org

EVENTS | CALENDAR

MUSIC

GONZAGA WINTER JAZZ SAMPLER This program features all seven Gonzaga jazz ensembles. A wide variety of jazz is performed including classic jazz, big band jazz, contemporary/experimental jazz and jazz-rock fusion. March 2, 7-8 pm. Free. Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center, 211 E. Desmet Ave. gonzaga.edu/ music (509-313-6733)

SPOKANE SYMPHONY MASTERWORKS

7: WELCOME BACK, ECKHART The Spokane Symphony’s seventh Music Director, Eckart Preu, returns with music of drama and depth from composers Wagner and Bruckner. March 4, 7:30 pm and March 5, 3 pm. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. spokanesymphony.org

STILL I RISE Celebrating the start of Women’s History month, the Chamber Choir and the Children’s Choir perform music by contemporary and historical women composers, including Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Ethel Smyth, B. E. Boykin, Tracy Wong and more. March 5, 4 pm. $8-$20. Moscow First United Methodist Church, 322 E. 3rd St. palousechoralsociety.org

COEUR D’ALENE CHORUS GUEST

NIGHT The Coeur d’Alene chorus is accepting new members and invites community members to rehearse with them for one night only. March 6, 5:30-9 pm. Free. Community United Methodist Church, 1470 W. Hanley Ave. facebook. com/CDAchorus (208-717-1332)

IRISH MUSIC WITH ARVID LUNDIN & DEEP ROOTS A high-energy mix of instrumental music and songs drawn from traditional and contemporary sources. This event also takes place at other SCLD branches, see website for details. March 7, 7-8 pm. Free. North Spokane Library, 44 E. Hawthorne Rd. scld.org/events

NORTH IDAHO COLLEGE CHORAL

KALEIDOSCOPE This concert features music performed by the NIC Cardinal Chorale and Cardinal Chamber Orchestra with Conductors Max Mendez and Bryan Hannaford. March 7, 7:30-9:30 pm. Free. North Idaho College, 1000 W. Garden Ave. nic.edu (208-769-3276)

SPIRIT OF SPOKANE CHORUS REHEARSAL Sit in on the rehearsals of the Spirit of Spokane chorus. Tuesdays from 6:30-9 pm. Free. Opportunity Presbyterian Church, 202 N. Pines Rd. spiritofspokanechorus.org (509-866-6354)

EWU STRING ORCHESTRA: MUSIC

FROM FILM The orchestra performs music from films including Psycho and Howls Moving Castle. March 8, 7:30-9 pm. $5-$10. EWU Music Building Recital Hall, Music Building 119. ewu.edu/music

SPORTS & OUTDOORS

INTERNATIONAL FLY FISHING FILM

FESTIVAL This festival consists of films produced by professional filmmakers from all corners of the globe and showcases the passion, lifestyle and culture of fly fishing. All proceeds benefit the Spokane Riverkeeper and efforts to protect the Spokane River fishery. March 2, 7-9 pm. $18-$20. Garland Theater, 924 W. Garland Ave. spokaneriverkeeper.org

MT. SPOKANE NIGHT SKI Ski in the dark on Mt. Spokane’s 16-lighted runs. Wed-Sat from 3-9 pm through March 11. $36. Mt. Spokane Ski & Snowboard Park, 29500 N. Mt. Spokane Park Dr. mtspokane.com (509-238-2220)

STATE B BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

Division B scholastic basketball teams compete for the championship title in this four-day tournament. March 2-4, 9 am-9 pm. $13.50-$50.50. Spokane Arena, 720 W. Mallon Ave. wiaa.com (279-7000)

CROSS COUNTRY MOONLIGHT TOUR

& DINNER Take a guided cross-country skiing trip through the woods at Mt. Spokane and enjoy a made-from-scratch meal of lasagna, salad, breadsticks and more afterward. Fee includes skis, boots, poles and dinner. March 4, 6-9 pm. $51. Selkirk Lodge, N. Mt. Spokane Park Dr. spokanerec.org (509-755-2489)

MEGADEMO DAY Try out new gear all day long. Twenty brands are on the mountain with over 400 pairs of skis and boards for snow enthusiasts to try out. All proceeds go to the Panhandle Alliance for Education. March 4, 7:30 am-2:30 pm. $60-$135. Schweitzer, 10,000 Schweitzer Mountain Rd. schweitzer.com

SKI BUM PROM This event features night skiing, dancing, live music by Jamshack in Moguls and drink specials from Grand Teton Brewing. March 4, 3-9 pm. $64$71. Silver Mountain Resort, 610 Bunker Ave. silvermt.com (208-783-1111)

SNOWSHOE MOONLIGHT TOUR & DINNER Take a guided snowshoeing trip through the woods at Mt. Spokane and enjoy a scratch meal of lasagna, salad, breadsticks and more afterward. Fee includes snowshoes, headlamps, poles and dinner. March 4, 6-9 pm. $51. Selkirk Lodge, N. Mt. Spokane Park Dr. spokanerec.org (509-755-2489)

SORTA NATURAL BANKED SLALOM

This ninth annual binding-free slalom is hosted by Boyd Hill Snowskates in the Rolling Thunder Natural Terrain Park. The course layout is a natural banked slalom. Runs are timed on a technical banked course, challenging riders to carry speed from top to bottom. March 4, 10 am. Lookout Pass Ski & Recreation Area, I-90 Exit 0. skilookout.com (208-744-1301)

SNOWSHOE & BREWS MOUNT SPO -

KANE TOUR A 2-3 mile snowshoe tour through the woods of Mount Spokane State Park. Afterward, head to Big Barn Brewery to learn about their locally crafted beer and enjoy beverages to end the day. Fee includes: snowshoes, poles, trail fees, instruction, guides and transportation. (Beverages not included) March 5, 9 am-2:30 pm. $47. spokanerec.org

STATE LAND FREE DAYS The Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission invites visitors to enjoy a state park for free on select days each year. Visitors are not required to display the Discover Pass for day-use visits to a Washington state park or on lands managed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) or Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) on these dates: March 9, March 19, April 22, June 10, June 11, June 19, Sep. 23, Oct. 10, Nov. 11 and Nov. 24. parks.wa.gov

LADIES DAY CLINIC The day begins with coffee and stretching followed by ski instruction, lunch and a social hour. March 10, 8:30 am-2:30 pm. $129. Mt. Spokane Ski & Snowboard Park, 29500 N. Mt. Spokane Park Dr. mtspokane.com/ladiesday

SPOKANE CHIEFS VS. PORTLAND

WINTERHAWKS Promos include Coeur

d’Alene Casino 30th Anniversary Celebration. March 10, 7:05 pm. $12-$30. Spokane Arena, 720 W. Mallon Ave. spokanechiefs.com (279-7000)

SNOWSHOE TOUR 49 DEGREES NORTH

Tour the trails of 49 Degrees North with a guide who gives tips leading to better

control and more fun on your snowshoes. Fee includes: snowshoes, poles, trail pass, instruction, guides and lunch! Meet at 49 Degrees North Nordic Area Yurt 3311 Flowery Trail Rd. March 11, 10 am-2 pm. $45. 49 Degrees North, 3311 Flowery Trail Rd. spokanerec.org

SPOKANE CHIEFS VS. KELOWNA

ROCKETS Promos include the Numerica Piggy Bank Giveaway. March 11, 7:05 pm. $12-$30. Spokane Arena, 720 W. Mallon Ave. spokanechiefs.com (279-7000)

GET THE GIRLS OUT A national campaign to unite women and girls as they support, challenge, mentor and inspire each other in the outdoor sports world. Connect with other female athletes on the mountain all day long. March 12, 9 am-3 pm. Free. Mt. Spokane Ski & Snowboard Park, 29500 N. Mt. Spokane Park Dr. shejumps.org/get-the-girls-out

SUNSET SNOWSHOE TOUR MOUNT

SPOKANE Hike up to Bald Knob campground during sunset. Fee includes: snowshoes, poles, instruction, guides, and transportation! Meet at Yoke’s Fresh Market in Mead. March 12, 4:30-8:30 pm. $33. spokanerec.org (509-755-2489)

BIG HORN OUTDOOR ADVENTURE

SHOW This annual show boasts more than 300 outdoor-oriented vendors, guides and nonprofit exhibitors, along with seminars, demos and the most current information for outdoor enthusiasts of every kind. March 16-19; Thu-Fri from 12-8 pm, Sat from 10 am-8 pm and Sun from 10 am-4 pm. Spokane County Fair & Expo Center, 404 N. Havana St. inwc.org/ big-horn-show (509-477-1766)

THEATER

THE IMAGINARY INVALID This version of the classic Molière comedy maintains an over-the-top farcical tone while retelling the original play with updated language in a 1960s setting. The play is centered on a hypochondriac obsessed with managing his imagined ailments. March 3-12; Fri-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm. $8-$20. Hartung Theater, 625 Stadium Dr. uidaho. edu/theatre (208-885-6111)

RED VS. THE WOLF This comedic play tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of the wolf. March 3-5, Fri-Sat at 7 pm and Sat-Sun at 3 pm. $10-$14. Pend Oreille Playhouse, 236 S. Union Ave., Newport. pendoreilleplayers. com (509-447-9900)

RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA This musical is based on the fairy tale of Cinderella with music by Richard Rodgers and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. Fri-Sat at 7 pm, Sat-Sun at 3 pm through March 5. Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague Ave. cytspokane.org

TWELFTH NIGHT A musical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s classic story of love and mistaken identity. March 3-11; Thu at 5 pm, Fri-Sat at 7:30 pm and Sun at 2 pm. Eastern Washington University, 526 Fifth St., Cheney. ewu.edu/cahss/ fine-performing-arts/theatre

WILLY WONKA Enigmatic candy manufacturer Willy Wonka stages a contest by hiding golden tickets in five of his scrumptious candy bars. Fri-Sat at 7 pm, Sat-Sun at 3 pm through March 5. $15$20. Kroc Center, 1765 W. Golf Course Rd. cytnorthidaho.org (208-660-9870)

TEEN IMPROV WORKSHOP Learn the building blocks of improvisational theatre in this workshop. Students work together as a group to create and tell stories through scene work. New students may join any time. First Sat of each

month from 10:30 am-12:30 pm. $25. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland Ave. bluedoortheatre.com (509-747-7045)

VISUAL ARTS

FLUID A watercolor show curated by Jen Erickson featuring music by August to August. Featured artists include Kate Lund, Katie Creyts, Tobe Harvey and more. Tue-Sat from 9 am-6 pm through March 3. Free. Emerge, 119 N. Second St. emergecda.com (208-930-1876)

PLATEAU PICTORIAL BEADWORK: FRED L. MITCHELL COLLECTION During a lifetime collecting Plateau floral, geometric, and pictorial beadwork, Walla Walla resident Fred L. Mitchell has amassed the premier collection of this material. The collection includes beaded bags, cuffs, gauntlets, vests, cradleboards and horse regalia. Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through May 14. $7-$12. Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org

UBUHLE WOMEN: BEADWORK & THE ART OF INDEPENDENCE This exhibition showcases a new form of bead art, the ndwango, developed by a community of women living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through April 30. $10-$15. The MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org (509-456-3931)

PIPER SWANEY: A WAY Swaney explores imperfection and discourse between people through her work. March 1-April 1, Wed-Sat from 11 am-5 pm. Free. New Moon Art Gallery, 1326 E. Sprague Ave. manicmoonandmore.com

TOM FROESE: ART BY THE RULES An exhibit of recent mixed media work featuring motifs of arches and lizards. March 3-31; viewings by appointment. Artist is in the gallery Tue-Sat from 12-6 pm throughout the month. Free. Kolva-Sullivan Gallery, 115 S. Adams St. facebook. com/kolva-sullivan-gallery

ART MEETS COMEDY Local comedians interpret portraiture artwork by artists including Daniel Lopez, Tom Quinn, John Thamm and Travis Chapman. Hosted by Audreana Camm, with comedians Rocki Martin, Beth Corrigan, Blade Frank, Anthony Singleton and Jordan Black. March 3, 7-9 pm. $10. Shotgun Studios, 1625 W. Water Ave. shotgunstudiosspokane.com

CHRIS KELSEY: CERAMICS & SCULPTURE This exhibition features ceramic work fired in wood and soda kiln environments by Chris Kelsey. His works are inspired by his musical background. March 4-31, Wed-Fri from 11 am-5 pm. Opening reception March 3 from 5-8 pm. Free. Trackside Studio, 115 S. Adams St. TracksideStudio.net (509-863-9904)

CUSTER’S SPRING ARTS & CRAFTS SHOW This show features professional artists and crafters from across the Inland Northwest displaying and selling their art, handmade crafts and specialty foods. March 3, 10 am-7 pm, March 4, 10 am-6 pm and March 5, 10 am-4 pm. $8-$10. Spokane County Fair & Expo Center, 404 N. Havana St. custershows.com

FIRST FRIDAY Art galleries and businesses across downtown Spokane and beyond host receptions to showcase new art. March 3, 5-8 pm. Details at firstfridayspokane.org

LANDSCAPES REIMAGINED This exhibit features art by Roxanne Everett and Josh Hobson that explores the beauty of nature from a new perspective. March 3-31,

Mon-Fri from 8 am-5 pm. Free. Chase Gallery, 808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. spokanearts.org (509-321-9416)

JESSE RE: INNER VISION Jesse Ré is a Spokane artist using acrylic pouring as a base to create mixed media art incorporating epoxy, collaboration, collage, woodworking and more. March 3-26, daily from 11 am-7 pm. Free. Liberty Building, 203 N. Washington St. spokanelibertybuilding.com (509-327-6920)

DAN MCCANN & DUSTIN M. REGUL This exhibition showcases works by McCann in the theme of ‘Seen and Unseen’ and works by Regul exploring the in-between of physical space and nostalgia. March 3-April 1, Fri-Sat from 12-8 pm. Free. Saranac Art Projects, 25 W. Main Ave. sapgallery.com (509-350-3574)

STAN MILLER: PORTRAITS & LANDSCAPES Miller shows an array of portraits and landscapes. Also on display is his iteration of “Salvator Mundi” by Leonardo da Vinci. March 3-April 30; Tue-Fri from 10 am-6 pm, Sun from 10 am-4 pm. Free. William Grant Gallery & Framing, 1188 W. Summit Pkwy. williamgrantgf. com (509-484-3535)

WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH SHOW:

THE FEMINIST EXPERIENCE This show, highlighting the feminist experience, coincides with the grand opening of the Spokane Art School’s expanded University District location. All work is by local female artists. Opening reception includes a food truck, a coffee truck and live music. Reception: March 3 from 5-9 pm. Regular hours: March 3-31, Mon-Fri from 10 am-5 pm. Free. Spokane Art School, 503 E. Second Ave. spokaneartschool.net

WORDS

LAND OF OPEN GRAVES The Foley Institute hosts Jason De Leon of the University of California Los Angeles, who discusses the politics of migrant death in Arizona. March 2, 12-1 pm. Free. Foley Speakers Room, Bryan Hall Room 308., WSU Pullman. foley.wsu.edu

3 MINUTE MIC A poetry open mic where readers may share up to thee minutes’ worth of content. Open to all ages. First Friday of every month, 7-8 pm. Free. Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main Ave. auntiesbooks.com (509-838-0206)

EWU VISITING WRITER SERIES: ME-

GAN CUMMINS Cummins discusses her book If the Body Allows It, and answers questions pertaining to writing. March 3, 7:30-9 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org

TY BROWN: BYRON RIBLET Brown discusses his book about a local richesto-rags tale of a man who accomplished impressive engineering feats in Spokane. March 4, 7 pm. Free. The Hive, 2904 E. Sprague Ave. auntiesbooks.com

CAMINO ADVENTURES Rev. Stephen Towles presents highlights of his treks along the Camino de Santiago in 2019, 2021 and 2022, based on his recent book Heaven is Walking the Camino de Santiago. March 4, 11 am-noon. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. cdalibrary.org (208-769-2315)

MEET LOCAL AUTHOR KIM CHAFFIN

Meet local author of Simply Blessed: Finding Joy in the Little Things, a 31-day devotional focused on the foundation of a woman’s faith, tackling issues she faces on a daily basis and providing joyful and practical lessons for a woman’s heart. March 4, 12-2 pm. Free. Farm Salvation, 106 S. Lefevre St. fb.me/e/TZIDQ5NG

The Scoop on Cannabis

Drug tests, teenagers and cardiovascular disease

BY WILL MAUPIN

Aflurry of studies and some developments in the Washington Legislature have kept cannabis in the headlines in recent days. State lawmakers are considering employment discrimination protections for cannabis users, while academics have been unearthing both positive and negative information associated with cannabis use.

EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION ADVANCES

The Washington state Senate last week passed a bill that would establish employment protection for cannabis users. Senate Bill 5123, which passed 28-21, would make it unlawful for employers to discriminate based on past cannabis use. Currently, state law allows for employers to use cannabis drug screening as a reason to deny or terminate employment. The problem is that many of these drug screenings test only for cannabis metabolites, not active intoxication. Someone who consumes cannabis after work on a Friday, for instance, could subsequently fail a screening upon returning to work on Monday. If this bill becomes law, most employers would no longer be allowed to deny or terminate employment in such scenarios.

The legislation now moves to the state House.

TEEN USE ON THE DECLINE

A study conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that cannabis use among

high school students nationwide is on the decline. Before the legalization wave began, the CDC found that 23 percent of high school students reported cannabis use in 2011. In 2021, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

The study — the Youth Risk Behavior Survey — is conducted every two years. Its findings show that cannabis use among high school students has been steady or on the decline in five of the six surveys conducted since 2011. The 16 percent number from the 2021 survey is the lowest on record.

CANNABIS AND CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE

It’s not all good news. A study presented last weekend at the American College of Cardiology found that daily cannabis users are at higher risk of cardiovascular disease than people who used cannabis infrequently.

The study used data from the National Institutes of Health and found that daily users were 34 percent more likely to be diagnosed with coronary artery disease than non-daily users, according to reporting from CNN. Those who consumed cannabis once a month or less were found to be at no elevated risk. n

NOTE TO READERS

Be aware of the differences in the law between Idaho and Washington. It is illegal to possess, sell or transport cannabis in the State of Idaho. Possessing up to an ounce is a misdemeanor and can get you a year in jail and up to a $1,000 fine; more than three ounces is a felony that can carry a five-year sentence and fine of up to $10,000. Transporting marijuana across state lines, like from Washington into Idaho, is a felony under federal law.

Marijuana use increases the risk of lower grades and dropping out of school.

GREEN ZONE

BE AWARE: Marijuana is legal for adults 21 and older under Washington State law (e.g., RCW 69.50, RCW 69.51A, HB0001 Initiative 502 and Senate Bill 5052). State law does not preempt federal law; possessing, using, distributing and selling marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In Washington state, consuming marijuana in public, driving while under the influence of marijuana and transporting marijuana across state lines are all illegal. Marijuana has intoxicating effects; there may be health risks associated with its consumption, and it may be habit-forming. It can also impair concentration, coordination and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. Keep out of reach of children. For more information, consult the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board at www.liq.wa.gov.

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