Announcing the recipients of 2025 Washington Stories Fund Grants

Northwest Museum of Art and Culture, Spokane

Humanities Washington is excited to announce that we have awarded 20 grants totaling more than $100,000 to cultural organizations across Washington State via our Washington Stories Fund initiative. The purpose of the Washington Stories Fund is to record and share with the broader community the little-known stories of people or groups whose contributions add to the cultural richness of Washington State.

“As Humanities Washington celebrates 50 years of serving the state, we wanted to amplify the great work that is happening in communities large and small across Washington. Further, we felt it was important to have local cultural leaders direct these resources to the most deserving projects,” said Julie Ziegler, Humanities Washington’s CEO and Executive Director. “Five regional committees helped to spread the word about this opportunity and chose the projects. The process was very competitive, and the projects that were chosen are the best of the best.”

“This has been a challenging year for Humanities Washington with the sudden and illegal cancellation of our grants from the NEH by DOGE. We are grateful to the Hale Family, who provided seed funding for the Washington Stories Fund in 2013, for supporting of these grants so we can meaningfully celebrate 50 years of serving the state. These projects give us hope for the next 50 years of the public humanities in Washington.”

Organizations and Projects by Region:

Central Washington

Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center, Wenatchee
Interpreting WVMCC’s Indigenous Basket Collection
The Wenatchee Valley Museum and Cultural Center (WVMCC) will collaborate with tribal cultural experts from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation to deepen our understanding and interpretation of their tribal basket collection. Through this collaboration, WVMCC will identify the historical context, craftsmanship, cultural narratives, and the individuals behind these culturally significant items. The project seeks to preserve and share authentic tribal knowledge with the broader community and ensure accurate, respectful, and engaging representation of tribal heritage.

Mending Wings, Wapato
Slam Trips
Through Slam Trips, Mending Wings invites groups of junior high, high school, college/university students and families, and shares with them stories and legends through cultural immersion projects such as a reservation tour, basket making, bead working, tule mat gathering/making, etc. The stories are shared with groups as they are taken around the reservation and ceded lands of the Yakama Nation explaining how geographical formations came to be, historical sights and interactions with United States army and the Church, fishing sights and root digging sights where our relationship with the sacred foods (salmon, deer, elk, roots, berries and water) are explained through story.

Methow Valley Interpretive Center, Twisp
Keep the Fires Burning – Winter Storytelling on the Methow Tribal Homeland
Keep the Fires Burning is an annual winter storytelling event rooted in the rich oral traditions of Native cultures, including the Methow Tribe. Hosted by the Methow Valley Interpretive Center at the Twisp Valley Grange in February 2026, this community gathering features Indigenous humanities scholars and storytellers such as Arnold Cleveland who descends from the p’squosa (Wenatchi), Entiat, Chelan, Methow, Okanogan, Kittitas, Wanapum, Nez Perce, Spokane, Snoqualmie, and Muckleshoot bands, and is the 4th Great-grandson of Chief Owhi. The evening will include a flute prayer and traditional storytelling through mixed media (oral and film), offering attendees a chance to connect with Native perspectives, cultural wisdom, and seasonal traditions.

Wenatchee Valley College, Omak
tmix^w “In this place we are all related” 2025 Indian Education Summer Teaching Institute
Wenatchee Valley College Omak, in partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, local school districts, and education organizations, hosted the 2025 Washington State Indian Education Summer Teaching Institute, tmix^w, or “In this place, we are all related,” on June 24, 25, and 26 in Omak. Held every year since 2016, the Institute’s goal has been to help Washington State teachers integrate tribal knowledge into their curriculum.This year’s tmix^w was grounded in Indigenous theory, where educators shared and learned best cultural-responsive practices and policies alongside Washington State tribes, Indigenous scholars, elders, and First Peoples.

Central Puget Sound

Fort Nisqually Foundation, Tacoma
Indigenous Voices Podcast: Season 3
Indigenous Voices is an award-winning podcast produced by the Fort Nisqually Living History Museum (FNLHM) that shares the history of the Puget Sounds region from the perspective of Tribal historians. It is a partnership between FNLHM, HistoryLink.org, and participating Tribes. FNLHM produces the podcasts, HistoryLink’s Executive Director Jennifer Ott is the panel host, and Tribal historians determine the topics and lead the discussion.

WSF will support the production of the third season of the Indigenous Voices podcast on the subject of the enduring impacts of the Medicine Creek Treaty with anticipated topics to include the lasting effects of the boarding schools, the Fish Wars, and the modern canoe journey. Season one focused on the Puget Sound Treaty War (1855-1856), and season two focused on its aftermath (e.g. Fox Island Council, Boarding Schools, Tribal governance, land allotments).

Center for Global Muslim Life, Seattle
The Pacific Northwest Prayer Rug Project: Weaving Belonging Across Lands and Lineages
For many Muslim families, refugees, immigrants, and Black Muslims the prayer rug is one of the few personal sacred objects that travels with them through war, displacement, and resettlement. Yet these rugs rarely reflect the places we now call home. The Pacific Northwest Prayer Rug Project: Weaving Belonging Across Lands and Lineages will create three regionally inspired prayer rug prototypes, each accompanied by a connected blanket that honors the sacred traditions of both Muslim and Indigenous communities in Washington State. These prayer rug / blanket sets will be co-designed by Muslim and Native artists to reflect stories of migration, spiritual rootedness, and shared connection to land. This project includes community design workshops, oral history collection, and a statewide traveling exhibit that will visit mosques, tribal centers, libraries, and public institutions from Seattle to Spokane, Yakima to Bellingham.

Kent Historical Museum, Kent
Resilient Roots: Sharing Native Histories and Living Traditions
Resilient Roots is a year-long monthly series at the Kent Historical Museum, celebrating the artistic and cultural traditions of the Coast Salish people. Through storytelling, musical performances, artisan demonstrations, and hands-on workshops, this program provides a platform for Indigenous voices while fostering intergenerational learning and cultural exchange. The project draws inspiration from the Snohomish concept of “Hub trees.” Hub trees grow strong from the spirit of ancestors within the land: nourishing and nurturing younger trees through their shared roots. Much in the same way, this program ensures that elders pass down ancestral knowledge to younger generations so they too may grow strong.

Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPOPS), Seattle
Moving History: The Queercrow Archive
Moving History: The Queercrow Archive represents a collaborative initiative between Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS) and Scarecrow Video (SV Archive) to digitize, preserve, and provide public access to rare LGBTQIA+ audiovisual materials held within the SV Archive VHS collection. These efforts will directly support the ongoing development and presentation of The Queercrow Archive, an annual archival screening installment, in partnership with Northwest Film Forum (NWFF).

Eastern Washington

Washington State University Culture Studies and Social Thought in Education program, Pullman
The Reclamation and Recognition of our Niimíipuu stories in Washington State
The Reclamation and Recognition of our Niimíipuu stories in Washington State project enriches Washington State’s John McCoy (lulilaš) Since Time Immemorial (STI) tribal sovereignty curriculum by integrating the voices, stories, and cultural heritage of the Niimíipuu (Nez Perce), whose ancestral lands include much of Eastern Washington. While the current STI curriculum emphasizes tribes from Western Washington, Niimíipuu narratives are often missing or misunderstood. In collaboration with the Nez Perce Tribe’s Education Department and Washington State University’s Culture Studies and Social Thought in Education (CSSTE) program, this initiative will create culturally grounded educational materials—including a bilingual (Nimipuutímt and English) story video animation, a story and language PowerPoint with artwork, and artwork—that highlight Niimíipuu history, place-based stories, and star knowledge.

FāVS News, Pullman
Uniting Through Faith: Untold Stories of Bridge-Builders in the Inland Northwest
“Uniting Through Faith” is a six-part journalism series by FāVS News that explores unity in a region often characterized by its divisions. The series will showcase leaders in Eastern Washington who are building bridges across political, cultural, and geographic divides through initiatives like interfaith housing coalitions, rural-urban food partnerships and environmental collaborations. The project will include in-depth articles, audio and photographs; a virtual public humanities panel event bringing together some of the profiled faith leaders; plus social media content.

Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane
Our Stories: A Program, an Event, and a Method for Sharing Community and Family Stories from Spokane
The Inland Northwest includes a diverse range of people and communities, and each has an important story to share. To capture and tell these relevant stories, the MAC launched an interactive program called “Our Stories” that reaches out to community members asking them to share their family stories with us in a variety of ways including festive events, such as Our Stories: African Americans in Spokane; materials for educator resources such as MAC Packs that bring the museum to classrooms; and the MAC website’s Digital MAC Packs that invite learners to examine stories using archival documents, images, and objects to learn about the people and events that shaped the Inland Northwest.

Power House Theatre Walla Walla, Walla Walla
Development of storytelling program featuring Native culture bearers
“The Aunties” is a storytelling project that honors three local culture bearers from the traditional territories of southeastern Washington who shape, support, and uphold their Indigenous communities. This community-based project highlights the role of Aunties as cultural custodians and keepers of knowledge systems. Their stories will be featured at live storytelling events, documentary screenings, and in-person interactive talkback events.

Northwest Washington

Key City Players, Inc., Port Townsend
WA Women’s History Tour: The Next Story and In-School Lecture Series
“WA Women’s History Tour: The Next Story and In-School Lecture Series” is an expansion of the program’s Suffrage Lecture Series. Equal parts academic discourse and biographical dramatization, this project will both develop the next powerful story as well as reach into under-served middle school classrooms across the state of Washington. This series, which provides a dramatic chronology of the suffrage movement across Washington State with a special focus on underrepresented voices, brings little-known stories of BIPOC women of Washington to life using historical materials, first-person accounts, and dramatic biographical re-enactments. Featured stories illuminate the personal histories of women and their unique challenges within each of their socio-cultural contexts as well as their collective experiences in the American suffrage movement.

Dungeness River Nature Center, Sequim
Ancestral S’Klallam Stories
The Dungeness River Nature Center will work on the restoration of audio devices that have provided visitors with the experience of hearing Tribal Elder and storyteller Elaine Grinnell tell six ancestral stories of the S’Klallam people, including “Grandma Crab”, “Wishy Coyote”, and “How Salmon Got His Hooknose”. These Indigenous Coast Salish stories tell of the importance of family, acting with integrity, embracing who you are, and cooperation with others. These audio exhibits, along with the Jamestown S’Klallam cultural information and artifacts on display, have been engaging visitors since the opening of the Center’s new Exhibit Hall in 2022.

Lopez Island Historical Society, Lopez Island
Creating an LGBTQ+ Archive of Lopez Island
Lopez Island Historical Society will gather oral histories from the LGBTQ+ community to create an archive, host an LGBTQ+ oral history speaker, culminating in a future exhibit to celebrate these under-told stories. Lopez Island has a long, under-documented, history of LGBTQ+ community members, dating back as early as the 1940s. These few recorded stories show a history of lesbian and gay couples integrated into this small rural, island community. Since then, LGBTQ+ farmers and artists have moved to the island, following their forebears to this isolated community. Now they are elders, in a broader historical context where LGBTQ+ elders are a rarity. This aging LGBTQ+ community creates an added element of urgency to gather these stories before we lose them.

Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, Port Angeles
Stories of our Elders in Klallam Language
This project will produce a printed collection of narratives previously recorded on audio by four of the last first-language speakers of Klallam. This collection will, for the basis of a Klallam literature in furtherance of the goal of the Klallam Language Program, not only to preserve the Klallam Language but also to ensure that it will continue to be a living language.

Southwest Washington

Indigenous Performance Productions, Olympia
The Aunties: Women of The Salish Sea
“The Aunties: Women of The Salish Sea” is a live storytelling and documentary film project using footage from an event held in Olympia where three local aunties chosen by their community shared stories centered on Indigenous models of care and kinship. The film will be screened at a free community event at the Washington Center with Native vendors and nonprofits and a post-show auntie circle talkback. The creative team and aunties will also visit local high schools through outreach.

Grays Harbor Museum Association, Aberdeen
Passport to Grays Harbor History
The new Passport to Grays Harbor Museums project will be part of the 2026 America 250 Kick Off and will feature stamps to record the exploration of each of the 14 museums in our expansive county. The project hopes to encourage visitors to enjoy the breadth and variety of the community’s history.

The Transgender Health and Wellness Center of Washington (Trans-Wa), Olympia
Genderations: Uplifting Intergenerational Narratives of Trans Community, Joy, and Liberation
“Genderations” is a zine that will exemplify transgender, non-binary, Two-Spirit, and Gender-Expansive (TGE) communities’ strong legacies of resistance and celebration. It aims to honor the queer roots of zines and its prevalence in resistance movements throughout history, creates bridges across generations, empowers trans folks of all ages and geographies, and challenges the notion that our community’s history is only one of suffering. Contributions will be sought from TGE people across Washington state and will prioritize the stories of TGE who identify as BIPOC (QTBIPOC) and/or disabled.