Status Update: Vote for Me

OMG! I’m Running
The race for Spokane City Council entered the 21st century recently. Briefly.

First, by way of Facebook status update, state Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown announced she was endorsing Amber Waldref for District 1. Seven people commented on this update, including Waldref, in all using 18 exclamation points. Waldref — who has sat on the Logan Neighborhood Council for the last three years and works for the Lands Council, an environmental group — is running for the seat being vacated by Al French.

Five days after Brown’s Facebook announcement (which went out to all of her 895 friends on the social networking site), local land use advocate Kitty Klitzke (who has 679 fewer friends than Brown) ramped up a campaign to draft the very active 25-year-old Mariah McKay (who, incidentally, has 1,385 Facebook friends) into the race.

“I was very committed to running,” says McKay, who works for Community Minded Enterprises, runs the Spovangelist blog and helped organize last year’s art extravaganza, Terrain. “[But] when I made that decision, I was not aware that Jon [Snyder] was interested in running. … It was certainly unfortunate that we didn’t see each other coming.” Despite such sophisticated ways of communicating.

Snyder — founder and editor of the outdoor magazine Out There Monthly — threw his hat in the ring by e-mail, though he could not be reached for comment. McKay, while expressing disappointment, says she’ll wholeheartedly support Snyder. “I can take it in context. I’m excited about Jon’s candidacy. I intend to volunteer for him.”

Candidates filed into Spokane County’s elections offices to drop off their paperwork Monday morning — in person, the old-fashioned way. Deadline for candidate filing is Friday. — NICHOLAS DESHAIS

Craig to Crapo
For 16 years, Mike Crapo was Idaho’s junior senator behind Larry Craig and came across largely as Craig’s more amiable sidekick.

This year, with Craig opting to end his career after he became entangled an embarrassing sex sting in an airport bathroom, Crapo has not only become the senior member of the Idaho delegation — he’s starting to act like it.

Speaking last Friday to the NW Energy Coalition — a greenish group that would have been like kryptonite to Craig — Crapo challenged all sides of the Snake River dams vs. salmon debate to sit down and find a way to save Idaho’s imperiled salmon runs.

“Does that mean dam breaching must be on the table? Yes,” Crapo said, becoming the first Northwest senator to say it aloud.
His remarks are … well, remarkable.

Craig, by contrast, once told The Inlander he would happily let former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt blow up one of the Snake River dams “as long as he is standing in front of it when he pushes the plunger.”

There is no more time for snark, Crapo told The Inlander in a telephone interview last week. He’d tried in 2003 to get parties to collaborate, but it was just as a major federal lawsuit was beginning in Portland, and neither the pro-dam nor the pro-salmon sides had much incentive to talk.

“Six years later, we are still litigating and we are not making progress for the fish. Every year, it gets more difficult, and I think we should start sitting at the table ASAP,” Crapo said. — KEVIN TAYLOR

Death, Language, Hope
The Inlander has received word that one of the few fluent speakers of Salish in the Spokane Tribe, Millie Nicodemus, has passed away. May she journey well.

In the grim timeline of preserving Salish, her death is a reminder that the number of people who learned to speak it as a first language is dwindling.

On the hopeful side of the timeline, Nkwusm (“N-koosem”), the Salish-language immersion school on the Flathead reservation in Montana, is graduating its first group of students on June 12.

The school — a regular pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade school, except that all classes are taught in Salish — has been open since 2002, says Tachini Pete, brother of Shonto Pete and one of Nkwusm’s founders. The graduating group of seven students is the first to have completed four years of immersion school and are versed enough to be able to teach high school Salish if they had to, Pete says.

Is the school making an impact? “I think we are,” Pete says. “The elders are 100 percent supporting us, whereas before, they were skeptical. Now you hear, when they talk about our school, a real sense of hope that we can save our language.”

Closer to home, the Center for Interior Salish provides teachers for Salish classes offered at Spokane Falls Community College, Eastern Washington University and at Spokane Public Schools’ Medicine Wheel Academy as a Running Start evening class at Havermale High (offered through EWU and open to all). — KEVIN TAYLOR