Finding Our Way: Fostering a Sense of Place for Underrepresented Communities

FAIN: MD-284714-22

Corporation of Gonzaga University (Spokane, WA 99258-1774)
Katey Roden (Project Director: June 2021 to March 2024)

Development of a digital platform exploring histories of people who have lived along the Children of the Sun Trail in Spokane, Washington.

Finding Our Way: Fostering a Sense of Place for Underrepresented Communities responds to construction of a highway in Spokane, WA that bisects low-income neighborhoods, severing residential areas from schools and businesses. Construction includes the “Children of the Sun Trail” pedestrian trail that parallels the highway, for residents to navigate the highway fragmenting their neighborhoods. Ethnobotanical plantings will ground stories about the role native plants have had and continue to have in the Spokane Tribe, who have been displaced from the land the trail occupies. Finding Our Way brings together community stakeholders and the Spokane Tribe to design a website for several marginalized communities to tell stories about their community culture and identity through collaborative geography, community dialogue, and place making that renders otherwise invisible communities visible via interwoven digital narratives that center the interrelations between diverse geo-cultural narratives.