NEWS

UW’s New Regent, Leonard Forsman, ’87, Looks Ahead

By Chris Talbott

LEONARD FORSMAN

Forsman is chairman of the Suquamish Tribe and president of the Affiliated Tribes of the Northwest Indians. As a student, he majored in anothropology and worked as an intern at the Suquamish Tribal Archives in a partnership with the Burke Museum. As the first Native American member of the UW Board of Regents, Leonard Forsman comes with a long to-do list to make life on campus more welcoming to American Indian students and those from underrepresented communities.

“Indian students come in and have to be introduced to the campus as kind of outsiders,” Forsman says. “We want to make it so that the University is learning from the Indian students and faculty as well, so that we cannot only get an education, but provide an education to the to the institution,” Forsman says. “I can’t do that by myself. But there’s great students and people on faculty who are ready and willing and trying to bring that forward.” The chairman of the Suquamish Tribe and president of The Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians sat down recently with Viewpoint to discuss the priorities he’ll tackle during the early stages of his sixyear term:

When your appointment was announced, you said recruitment and retention of Native faculty and students was a priority. How do you accomplish that?

There are different ways. One starts with the faculty, the programs and investing in the curriculum—essentially the classes that are important to them to have on campus because American Indians will seek out those programs. Even though they may be in another major, they’ll seek out those experiences with fellow students. That’s one of the reasons why we push so hard for the Intellectual House to have a place to nurture that, and that’s why phase two [of — Intellectual House] is super important.

My experience when I got there was the Educational Opportunity Program was solid and they had a different ethnic cultural counseling center. So there was counseling available for all different types of groups— American Indians, Asian Americans, economically disadvantaged Americans—and that went away. It got consolidated essentially, so we lost some of our identity there, and that was kind of a blow to us.

You’ve said you’d like to see Native American faculty and students develop curriculum and research in certain areas of interest. What do you envision there?

I think that we’re talking about research into salmon recovery, climate change, better health outcomes, development of curriculum for public schools and training school teachers on history and culture of tribes. These aren’t being ignored, but they need to be emphasized and amplified in a way that makes it more relevant and accessible to tribes.

Many of the topics you mentioned aren’t tribal or local issues, they’re global.

Oh, yeah, they are, and I think that one of the places that it comes into play for us is salmon recovery and ocean acidification. On salmon recovery, we’ve got challenges with habitat, restoration and preservation. So not only restoring, but also preserving what we do have has created a dynamic of diverging priorities with ag, timber, urban development and the fish and habitat. All these things are coming together, so we need to have more engagement with University help identifying potential solutions to these challenges.

GABRIELA CHAVARRIA

New Leader at the Burke

Last month, Gabriela Chavarria became executive director of the Burke Museum. She brings more than 20 years of experience in science, management, influencing policy, developing new scientific collections and leading research efforts both nationally and internationally.

“What excites me the most about joining the Burke Museum is that I’m coming to an institution that has created a totally new way to showcase collections,” says Chiavarra. “There’s no other museum in the world that wants to show the public the work behind the scenes to the extent that the Burke does.”

Looking ahead, Chavarria is prioritizing expanding the museum’s approach of giving visitors up-close views of science at work as well with outreach to the community. “In a world where we’re trying to be more inclusive and diverse, more equitable, the Burke has much room to grow, incorporating new ideas and thoughts,” Chavarria says.

New Name, New Vision

The Graduate Opportunities & Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP) has served graduate and professional students from underrepresented communities for decades. Now it has changed its name and expanded its mission to meet the times. Last fall the program was renamed and recast as the Office of Graduate Student Equity & Excellence (GSEE).

“We are living through another historical moment of racial reckoning. Racialized injustice, violence, and stunted opportunities remain too ubiquitous in American society,” write Graduate School Dean Joy Williamson Lott and GSEE Director Carolyn Jackson. The term “minority” is outdated and does not signify the change-making the Graduate School is committed to in the current historical moment. Expanding its work, the GSEE will focus on improving departmental climate and equity for students in their academic homes.

Toward a More Diverse Faculty

By Jackson Holz

Last fall Angélica Amezcua, the first in her family to earn a Ph.D., arrived at a tenuretrack job at the UW. Her journey started in Jalisco, Mexico, and continued through California, where her family moved when she was 11, and Arizona, where she completed her doctorate.

Now assistant professor of Spanish and director of the UW’s Heritage Language Program, Amezcua says coming to the University directly from her graduate program was daunting, especially since she is breaking ground in a new field. But she feels at home thanks, in part, to a campus-wide effort to support underrepresented groups

and first-generation faculty. “I just felt so reassured that I made the right decision,” she says. “Not only did I feel validated, but I felt like I was going to be receiving support.”

That support is part of an effort to recruit and retain faculty in line with the Race and Equity Initiative that the University launched in 2015. The new program is run out of the provosts office and led by UW sociology professor Alexes Harris. It serves about 28 new faculty from the Seattle and Tacoma campuses. They are paired with mentors with tenure in their academic units. They also have workshops and discussions to designed so they can build community, network and find professional development.

“We cannot be an excellent university without a racially and ethnically diverse faculty,” says Harris, ’97. “We need to fully support our colleagues of color and ensure our community is a space where everyone can flourish.” At a town hall meeting this February, Provost Mark Richards described UW’s hiring trends: Nearly 27% of new tenure-track hires in 2021 are from underrepresented populations, the most diverse new faculty cohort in recent UW history. What’s more, the number of underrepresented faculty in tenure/tenure-track positions has increased 22% since 2017, and the number of women faculty in tenure/tenure track positions has increased 6.4% Hannelore Sudermann contributed to this story.

Unequal Air

Despite cleaner air, pollution disparities for people of color remain across the US By UW News

Despite dramatic improvements in air quality over the past 50 years, people of color at every income level in the U.S. are exposed to higher-than-average levels of air pollution. While this disparity has been widely studied, the links between today’s air pollution disparities and historic patterns of racially segregated planning are still being uncovered.

Now a study from researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Washington has found that housing discrimination practices dating from the 1930s still drive air pollution disparities in hundreds of cities today. In this study—the first national-level analysis of modern urban air pollution and historical redlining—the team examined more than 200 cities and found a strong correlation between present-day air pollution levels and historical patterns of redlining. The researchers recently published their findings in Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

“Racism from the 1930s, and racist actions by people who are no longer alive, are still influencing inequality in air pollution exposure,” says co-author Julian Marshall, professor of civil and environmental engineering. “The problems underlying environmental inequality by race are larger than any one city or political administration. We need solutions that match the scale of the problem.”

The term “redlining” describes a widespread federally backed discriminatory mortgage appraisal practice in the 1930s. This process color-coded city areas red if they included high concentrations of Black, Asian, immigrant or working-class residents, deeming these areas hazardous and excessively risky for investment. Redlining blocked access to favorable lending and other services. Historically redlined areas have been cumulatively affected by a low prevalence of home ownership, uneven economic development, displacement of residents, community disintegration and lack of access to education and economic opportunities.

The researchers compared year-2010 levels of two regulated air pollutants—nitrogen dioxide (a short-lived gas emitted by traffic, industry and other sources) and fine particulate matter (longer-lived, tiny particles found in dust, soot, smoke and other emissions or formed in the atmosphere)— to redlining maps in 202 U.S. cities.

A new study from a team of researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Washington has found that housing discrimination practices dating from the 1930s still drive air pollution disparities in hundreds of American cities today. “I just felt so reassured that I made the right decision [to come to the UW]. Not only did I feel validated, but I felt like I was going to be receiving support.”