About

If you want to reach out please email yehawliuw@gmail.com

Yehawli began in 2005, three years after Pacific Islander Partnerships In Education (PIPE) was founded. Like PIPE, Yehawli is a mentorship program centered around studying together.

Core Values

• Collective work

• Partnership - people mentor each other

  • Mentorship relationships not based on hierarchies

• Culture is central rather than peripheral

We are looking to archive stories about Yehawli and what it means to the Indigenous community at UW. If you have a story to share please email yehawliuw@gmail.com

The significance of the logo we decided on was for the fact that it was a common design in Coast Salish art, so we felt it was appropriate given whose territory we're in and the fact that it's a fairly common design that may or may (hopefully) not be owned or claimed by a particular group/tribe was another reason. It symbolizes ferns growing together, the larger ones covering/protecting the smaller ones still growing underneath. The fact that the ferns are connected at the bottom represents their shared "roots," speaking to our shared/common experiences as Native peoples, despite our other differences (urban/rez, local/displaced, etc). The bigger ferns watch over the smaller ferns, symbolizing the mentor/mentee aspect of Yehawli. They grow together and share some of the same roots showing the peer to peer learning aspect. You could even go farther and describe the ferns being connected to each other as different years of classes as they grow together and share the same lateral experiences as they progress farther and farther towards graduating from UW.

-Peji Hota Wakhan / Christian Nault (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota & Tlingit)

Christian Nault and I brainstormed some ideas as to what image fit our mission as an organization. The fern design fit this mission. The fern follows a fern basket design from the Coast Salish region. The fern represents the spreading of knowledge. We chose to add roots as a means for planting our roots in the community and sharing our knowledge to others. Together, this piece represents the sharing of knowledge within our community.

-Theron Wahkinney (Comanche & Kiowa)

Rick Bonus is primarily an associate professor of American Ethnic Studies, but he also has strong interests in the conjunctions among ethnic studies, American studies, Pacific Islander Studies, and Southeast Asian studies, particularly as they deal with the historical and contemporary phenomena of migration, transnationalism, interdisciplinary work, and multicultural pedagogy. His first book, Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Temple 2000), is a study of transnational Filipino experiences in the U.S. within the contexts of U.S. imperial histories, labor recruitment, and ethnic community formations. He co-edited the anthology, Intersections and Divergences: Contemporary Asian American Communities (Temple 2002), a collection of essays that grapple with the heterogeneities, complexities, and contradictions of racialized group formations. He has written essays on the cultural politics of difference, media representations, and multicultural education.

Rick teaches courses pertaining to U.S. multiracial society, Filipino American History and Culture, ethnographies of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian America, and education in relationship to race. His forthcoming book is based on an ethnography of underrepresented students whose college experiences become generative sites for critiquing and transforming university schooling. He has been involved in the creation and sustenance of several UW mentorship programs that specifically target the retention and eventual graduation of students who identify as, or are allies with, Pacific Islanders, Chicanos/Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans, and African diasporic people. He also works on advocacy for underrepresented faculty, curriculum transformation, and nurturing community linkages with many groups. He was formerly the president of the Association for Asian American Studies.

Born and raised in Washington State, Dr. Joshua L Reid (registered member of the Snohomish Indian Nation) is an associate professor of American Indian Studies and the John Calhoun Smith Memorial Endowed Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington. He holds degrees from Yale University and the University of California, Davis, and is a three-time Ford Foundation Fellow. Yale University Press published his first book, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (2015) in the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. It has received awards and acknowledgements from the Organization for American Historians, American Society for Ethnohistory, the Western History Association, and the North American Society for Oceanic History. Reid currently directs the university’s Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest and edits the Emil and Kathleen Sick Series on Western History and Biography with UW Press and the Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. He serves on the editorial advisory board of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, is a Distinguished Speaker for the Western History Association, and member of the board of the National Council for History Education. He is also the chair of program committees for the American Historical Association’s 2020 conference and the Western History Association’s 2019 conference. Reid currently researches Indigenous explorers in the Pacific, from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, and is completing an edited volume on Indigenous communities and violence.

Professor Reid's research interests include American Indians, identity formation, cultural meanings of space and place, the American and Canadian Wests, the environment, and the indigenous Pacific. He teaches courses on American Indian History, the American West, U.S. History, and Environmental History.