Jeremy Spoon is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Portland State University and a Senior Fellow at The Mountain Institute. For more than 20 years he has facilitated partnerships between Indigenous communities and protected areas in western North America, South Asia, and East Africa. These collaborations focus on creating communication pathways for integrating diverse cultures and different ways of knowing into design, governance, and resource stewardship. Jeremy also recently initiated a new project on disaster recovery in rural Nepal following the catastrophic 2015 earthquakes.

For a decade Jeremy has co-facilitated the inter-agency and inter-tribal partnership between seven Nuwuvi or Nuwu (Southern Paiute) tribes and several federal agencies in southern Nevada. This partnership uses a consensus approach and includes collaborative research and design of multiple visitors centers and interpretive landscapes, a bi-annual consultation framework, an annual intergenerational resource stewardship event, and more.

Locally, Jeremy has collaborated with Fort Vancouver National Historic Site and multiple Native American tribes and a Native Hawaiian organization to integrate contemporary Indigenous perspectives into their newly renovated visitors center. He is also co-facilitating the re-indigenization of the landscape through a series of planning meetings and multi-vocal research.

Jeremy will share lessons learned from 20 years of experience of blending culture and collaboration into design, governance, and stewardship of federal lands in the western United States and beyond. His presentation will focus on how to integrate Indigenous relationships with place into design, including equitable frameworks for collaboration that consider power and history.