(soft ethereal music) - I'm making the star people.

They're not really people.

They're kind of creatures and everything.

The stars brought these people to us to help us live better and be kind and thoughtful to each other.

And so that's my star people with their wonderful images and projections that only I know, you know?

(soft ethereal music) At a sculpture meeting, they were trying to figure out who to choose to do what.

I said, "You know, I had a dream about this big totem."

- She said, "Don, I had a vision last night, "this dream that we would find a log "that came out of the St. Helen's explosions "and had gone down the rivers "and ended up at the ocean and was kind of salt-cured."

And if we got this log, we could bring it in as a marker, almost as a totem at the center itself.

If we were able to take metal pieces and wrap them around this pole, that indicated the life of a salmon from the egg up to the final dance at the top of the pole.

And, in a way, she said it parallels the way a student, that they come in almost as an egg and they leave as something that will go on to other places and doing other things.

- One of the things that really inspires me to continue with my public artwork is to let people know that we're still here.

There's Indian women out there making artwork whose interest is to educate the public.

(soft ethereal music) I was born in Warm Springs, Oregon, the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in 1943.

I must have been about four or five watching my elders bead work.

And my mother did bead work and then she made moccasins.

So, I just, it was always there.

And my dad was very creative.

He had a beautiful voice and just could sing.

He was a tenor.

Then he had a baseball team too.

So the Indians and the white guys always fought, you know, they ended up fighting each other after every single game.

It was no fun.

I moved to Portland the day after high school graduation.

I just had enough of the prejudice in Madras.

- She actually came to town as a beautician, and, because she had such a bad back problem, she couldn't do that anymore.

So she turned to art.

- That's what changed my life, touching clay.

I just love touching it, feeling it, smelling it in all its stages, from moisture to dryness to fire.

It just seemed to tie me to Mother Earth.

This I don't want to ever let go of.

(soft ethereal music) And I thought, "Well, I found my way, "but I don't know what to do with it."

I said, "I got to go talk to my elders."

(soft ethereal music) I went to Warm Springs and I said, "Now, who am I?

"Who are my people?

"And where are we from?"

They told me that we came from the Columbia River Gorge, and we had lived there for thousands and thousands of years until the mid-1800s.

The government moved the Washington people to Yakima, and they moved the Oregon side to Warm Springs.

And I thought that's where we were always from.

I said, "I keep seeing this image."

She had these big eyes and she was huge.

And I said, "What does that mean?"

They said her name is Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches.

And there was a story that went along with it.

And I'm sitting there listening to all these beautiful words these elders were telling me.

I just felt like I've been found.

I found myself.

When I did finally get to see She Who Watches, it was a profound sense of identity and strength that no one can take away from me ever.

And that has carried me for 40 some years in this business.

- I got to know Lillian a number of years ago because one of the main goals of the Friends of Fort Vancouver is to help reintroduce Indigenous heritage to this historic site.

So we have progressed from there, and we have one of the largest collections of Lillian's work here at the site.

I would say there is no line between the stories and Lillian's work, and that's probably why Lillian is just as excited about her artwork, in a very non-egotistical way, as anyone else.

Because there's the story right there in this little otter's face that emerged out of clay.

It's as if it's the first time she's seen it, and so it's something that flows through Lillian.

It is creation in many ways.

(soft ethereal music) - You know, when I first moved to Portland in the mid-1980s, one of the things that surprised me is I knew there were Native people here, but you drive up down the streets, you don't see any Native art.

It's like we were erased.

And probably about three or four years ago, we started doing more affordable housing development right here in this area.

I wanted to make sure that these buildings looked and felt Native.

So I wanted to make sure that, when you drove down the street, it was going to be a Native building.

And the first person I thought of was Lillian.

If you look at what she's doing, she's using modern techniques but on very organic materials, basalt rocks, etchings, you know, engraving stones and images into these incredible pieces of just earth.

One of the great gifts we have from Lillian is these monumental works of art.

(soft ethereal music) It reminds people that Native people were here and we're still here.

(soft ethereal music) (soft ethereal music continues) - [Don] What Lillian does is she places herself in the current timeline but as guardian of the past.

But I also feel as a visionary for the future.

(soft ethereal music) - You have to be resilient, you have to be flexible, and you have to be forgiving.

From knowing all these wonderful people I've worked with in the past and who I'm working with now has just made me feel like I have a very blessed life.

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