(Photo courtesy of Tananáwit)
Opened in September of 2022, Tananáwit is a Native-owned and operated nonprofit art shop and gallery with a mission to promote, preserve and advance traditional artforms that are common among Native artists in the Warm Springs Reservation. Their gallery and art shop is filled 100 percent with Native art, with around 95 percent coming from artists within the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, which includes the Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute tribes. The remaining five percent of the art comes from the groups’ sister tribes, like the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla.
In the 2010s, a group of community members and artists in Warm Springs came together and decided they wanted to create an artists’ co-op to help promote Native artists. They began working with the Warm Springs Community Action Team, also called WSCAT. “Once WSCAT got involved, they began to pull in other organizations that might be able to help out, including the Oregon Native American Business and Entrepreneurs Network (ONABEN),” said Tananáwit’s Executive Director Debbie Stacona.
Debbie runs Tananáwit with a small but dedicated team: Natalie Kirk is the shop manager and artist coordinator, and Jason Smartlowit leads sales and accounting.
Debbie spent over 20 years working at the Museum at Warm Springs and recalls absolutely loving her work. Her passion for supporting Native art, history and culture drives her to spend each day trying to make a difference for artists and community members who can sometimes be overlooked in the broader Central Oregon art scene. Throughout her career, supporting the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs has always been a top priority. “We exist solely to help our community,” Debbie said. “Tananáwit wouldn’t be here without the trust and support from so many people, from artists and community members to the visitors who see us along the highway and choose to come in.”
The word Tananáwit, from the Indigenous Ichishkin language, is not directly translated to English. The language has the same roots as languages spoken by the Yakama and Nez Perce, and in 2014, there were only an estimated 50 fluent speakers of the language. Debbie did not recognize the word when she was first hired, but she gained some insight after speaking to a tribal elder who was also a linguist of the language. “She told me that tananáwit was the first everything,” Debbie said. “Tananáwit was the first huckleberry plucked, the first salmon caught, the first ceremony, the first root pulled… It’s the first of everything, and it also implies growth, or continuation.”
The name is fitting for the nonprofit. Tananáwit is the first of its kind in Warm Springs, and it has already expanded to create a larger gallery and shop. Not only that, but the mission of the nonprofit also reflects this idea. For many Native artists and their careers, this is their tananáwit; the beginning of their career as a professional artist who is growing in their own skills while also teaching others. “We started out with 30 artists, and even that took some time, just to gain their trust and show them that we value them and their art, not profits,” Debbie said. “Now we have art from 61 artists, all of whom are Native.”
One of the ways in which Tananáwit supports Native art is by having workshops for artists and community members to come learn a variety of skills. They have held entrepreneurial classes for artists, to help them manage the business side of their career in art. For kids and adults in the community, there are classes run by artists who are master weavers, jewelry makers, painters, sculptures, and much more (an upcoming workshop will teach adults how to make moccasins).
A major reason why Tananáwit was founded and why they have remained successful, is the massive amount of community support they have received. They wanted to expand the gallery by occupying an adjacent space that was already inhabited by another business, and the other business simply agreed to move to allow the gallery to expand. Some of the art came from the Museum at Warm Springs, and only took one phone call (and a walk across the highway) to retrieve.
Aside from one-off stories of other organizations going out of their way to support Tananáwit, community support can be seen by the eagerness of artists to get in the gallery, and the popularity of their workshops.
Debbie and her team are very grateful to be the recipients of a $200,000, two-year grant from the First Nations Development Institute. The grant funds will be used to support the operations of the nonprofit while allowing the artists featured in the gallery and art shop to greatly benefit from their sold work.
Now having spent two years at Tananáwit, Debbie has big plans for the future. From more physical expansion of the gallery to house more art and artists to increasing the frequency and size of workshops, there is plenty to be done. “It’s really all about the community,” Debbie said. “As long as they keep supporting our growth, we’ll keep growing.”