It’s a Knowledge Festival! Five years in, Salish Current and local sponsors are bringing thoughtful, experienced speakers on top topics of interest.
To celebrate our fifth anniversary, Salish Current will be joined by local businesses and organizations in presenting our “Voices of the Northwest” Knowledge Festival in September at the Bellingham Cruise Terminal. The free, five-part program features local experts speaking on media, the environment, social justice, artificial intelligence and the music business. If you haven’t already, sign up to reserve your seat for one, some or all of the presentations.
Four local musicians will share insights gained from experience in a panel discussion on “Navigating a Career in Music” at the Knowledge Festival on Sept. 18.
If you can make it in the City of Subdued Excitement, you can (maybe) make it anywhere
DIY is at the heart of the Northwest music scene, especially in Bellingham: House concerts. Random festivals. A sidewalk solo at the farmers market. Pop-up performances at dive bars and delis. High-volume practice sessions in garages and storage lockers. And maybe, the ultimate prize, a gig at the Wild Buffalo.
Every once in a while, breakout performers from the land of plaid shirts and endless winter rain make it really big. Back in the day, indie-rockers Death Cab for Cutie and electronica giants ODESZA both catapulted to fame from their perches as humble undergrads at Western Washington University. (For a great trip down memory lane, watch this archival clip from the 2012 “Live at the Mount Baker” documentary from the Warner Sound archive, on how Death Cab for Cutie made their way from a dump on Ellis Avenue to international superstardom.)
Such is the stuff musicians’ dreams are made of. And on Sept. 18, a panel of local performers will share their knowledge of how to survive — maybe even thrive — as musicians in the Pacific Northwest, as part of Salish Current’s Knowledge Festival. The panel on “Navigating a Music Career” will cover aspects of touring, booking, teaching and producing as a musical artist.
Panelists include professional artists from varied genres including funk, folk-punk, and jazz:
- Trumpeter/composer Kevin Woods, composer, arranger, performer and professor of music and director of jazz studies at Western Washington University. He leads the group Trio Linguai, which is known as one of the most melodic and emotive voices in improvised music in the Northwest.
- Mars Lindgren is a seasoned trombonist and Western alum, best known for his performances with MarchFourth, a Portland-based ensemble renowned for its eclectic fusion of rock, funk, jazz, and world music, combined with visually captivating performances featuring stilt-walkers and acrobats. Among the bands he performs with are Polyrhythmics, The Lucky Brown Band, Bilongo Quintet, and the Bellingham-based soul band Baby Cakes.
- Mandolist Nica has worked in every role needed to sustain life on the road as a performer, stage and gear tech, sound engineer, and front-of-house coordinator to bartender, tour manager, driver, performer, and merchandiser. Her hands-on approach and dedication to the DIY touring model have made her a reliable and resourceful presence in underground music circuits. Nica became booking agent and manager out of necessity for her Houston-based folk punk band Escape from the ZOO. The band, a side project of members from the folk-punk group Days N Daze, focuses on energetic, community-driven performances and a strong DIY ethic. Nica is now building a collective dedicated to helping emerging artists overcome the financial barriers that often prevent them from touring.
- Samantha Sinai, cellist and music therapist, brings music to people in accessible, meaningful ways. She is program coordinator for Bellingham Youth Chamber Players, holds a private cello studio, and plays in the Bellingham Symphony Orchestra. She also has worked to implement a music therapy program for a hospital in Wisconsin, bringing music to patients, kids with special needs, veterans who were previously homeless, and women who have experienced trauma.
This panel will appeal not just to musicians but to all music lovers who appreciate that it takes more than artistry to survive — and thrive — in the brutal business of entertainment, where the rewards are often as intangible as the music itself.
Artificial Intelligence: Separating the oracles from the bullshit machines
[Posted Aug. 28, 2025]
Like it or not, artificial intelligence is changing the way we work, learn and remember things, discover and share information, and easily solve difficult problems. It’s even changing the creative process itself. Yet for all the good AI might do, it is already beginning to saturate our information environment with machine-generated slop that threatens to drain human communications of meaning and pollute our public discourse with falsehoods, hallucinations and disinformation.
Most of the AI technology that’s top-of-mind these days — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Grok and Llama among others — are for-profit ventures spawned in Silicon Valley’s overheated and often reckless start-up culture.
Given that these AI models are all about making money for private companies, how, exactly, does an ordinary person differentiate the BS from the strengths and weaknesses of each tool? How will each one impact our public and private lives? How much will we gain as individuals and citizens — and how much do we stand to lose?
University of Washington evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom may have the answer. His 2021 book, “Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World,” co-written with UW colleague Jevin West, seeks to puncture the helium balloon of hype that surrounds AI and empower people to make informed decisions on how to use this path-breaking technology.
Bergstrom lays it all on the line Sept. 17 at the Salish Current Knowledge Festival in a talk titled “Artificial Intelligence: Modern Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?” He’ll discuss how AI is changing our world, from science and education to the democratic process itself.
Bergstrom will explain how large language models work, what they can do for us — and what they can’t. Most important, he’ll share insights on how each of us can live, learn and thrive in a world shaped by a flawed and ever-evolving set of technologies.
Trained in evolutionary biology, mathematical population genetics and epidemiology, Bergstrom is best known for crossing field boundaries and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences. The unifying theme that runs through all of his work is the concept of information.
He has studied how communication evolves, how animals deal with deception, and how the process of evolution by natural selection creates the information that is encoded in genomes. In the realm of philosophy and sociology of science, he has explored how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world.
Bergstrom and West are faculty members at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, a research organization focused on how to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society and strengthen democratic discourse. Far from being an ivory tower, the CIP has faced criticism for its work on elections and online misinformation, particularly from groups that have falsely accused them of suppressing conservative viewpoints.
Over the past decade, Bergstrom and West have developed a series of educational projects focused on quantitative reasoning and information literacy. Their educational website, Calling Bull.org, features course materials that have been used at over 100 colleges and universities.
You’ll get a generous sample of their research at Bergstrom’s upcoming lecture in Bellingham. Come equipped with your thinking cap firmly in place. And don’t forget your BS detector.
Naomi Ishisaka’s eloquent outrage: Seattle Times columnist targets inequity and injustice
[Posted Aug. 27, 2025]
Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.
There was a time, not very long ago, when these were considered democratic values to be integrated into our personal and professional lives. But President Trump and his enablers have sought to vilify these values, casting them as dangerous ideas that should be demonized, sanitized and removed from our classrooms, courtrooms, legislatures and C-suites.
Don’t try to sell that message to Naomi Ishisaka, assistant managing editor for equity and inclusion at the Seattle Times and columnist focusing on social justice issues. In her decades-long career as a journalist and a photographer, Ishisaka celebrates the beauty of humanity in its diversity and takes laser-like aim at inequity and injustice.
Consider this insight from a recent column on local folks looking for a meaningful way to respond to the unfolding horror in Gaza:
“I used to think that regardless of any political differences, there were some universal truths about humanity.
“I used to think that across all nationalities and beliefs, if a child was wandering into the street in front of an incoming car, it was a core human instinct of every human adult to grab the child and get them to safety.
“Now, I know better.
“Now, sadly, I know that instead of swooping the child into their arms there are people who would dither and argue that we don’t know enough about the circumstances to act. Some would say we shouldn’t trust our own eyes or rationalize that, “Well, it’s the parent’s fault the child was in the street in the first place,” so it’s not our responsibility.
“It’s one of the many casualties of Israel’s war in Gaza that we have lost that moral clarity.”
Among Ishisaka’s special gifts is the ability to write with eloquent outrage about the moral and political challenges we currently face. She spotlights ordinary people who manage to find meaningful ways to respond to the evil and chaos in the world. It’s an empowering mix.
In the case of her Gaza column, that involved talking to a Jewish man raising funds for the starving citizens of Gaza and a Seattle-based Palestinian activist pleading for moral awareness of the unfolding catastrophe..
“Holding Power to Account” is the theme of Ishisaka’s Sept. 15 talk at the Salish Current Knowledge Festival. Count on her to share her unflinching views on what is going wrong in our current moment, and what people of good will can do about it.
Coast Salish foodways: a foraging ethnobotanist offers lessons in sustainability
[Posted Aug. 26, 2025]
T. Abe Lloyd cultivates a fertile field of study at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College: His classroom is the great outdoors, where science intersects with natural history, ecology, indigenous wisdom and the human need and love of food.
An ethnobotanist and naturalist with interests in indigenous foods and Pacific Northwest biodiversity, Lloyd leads students into the wilderness where they learn to forage for edible plants and develop an appreciation for the nuts, berries, shoots, fruits and roots of the Pacific Northwest that are able to sustain human life.
Lloyd grew up in Bellingham with a love of nature and a deep affinity for the wilderness, especially the edible plants emerging from the forest floor. Early research projects took him to Nepal, where he served as an ethnobotanist for the Peace Corps at Langtang National Park. Later, he earned a master’s degree in ethnoecology at the University of Victoria, focusing on how the aboriginal people of the Salish Sea managed their food systems.
In graduate school, he began a decade-long apprenticeship with the late Kwakwaka’wakw elder Kwaxsistalla, also known as Clan Chief Adam Dick. (The Kwakwaka’wakw people, who dwell on northeastern Vancouver Island and nearby portions of the mainland, were formerly known as Kwakiutl.) This clan chief was a remarkable figure who over the years guided Lloyd and researchers like him in the study of traditional stewardship practices.
“I have come to understand wild foods as a means of reconciling our industrialized relationship with the earth,” Lloyd recently wrote on his blog, Wild Harvests. “Harvesting the products of native ecosystems not only increases our sense of place but simultaneously decreases our reliance on fossil fuels and monotypic landscapes of exotic species, which are both threatening the health of the planet.”
Much of Lloyd’s ethnobotanical writing is published in the Journal of the Washington Native Plant Society. He is also the co-author of “Wild Berries of Washington and Oregon.” He volunteers extensively with the Native Plant Society, the Shuksan Conservancy, and the Lake Whatcom Advisory Board. He spends his free time foraging for wild edibles and documenting the regional flora, fauna, and fungi.
Lloyd teaches the kind of college course that has great appeal for Western students, but it’s also of great interest to non-students as well. As part of Salish Current’s Knowledge Festival, nature lovers of all kinds can benefit from his knowledge of foraging in the wilderness.
His Sept. 11 presentation will contrast the merits of indigenous food system with the debilitating impact of industrial agriculture on the environment and on human health. Also on the menu is his curation of the best indigenous foods that can be foraged from our forests and wetlands.
Don’t come to this talk hungry.
Reporting on the Salish Sea: Looking back, looking forward
[Posted Aug. 25, 2025]
Lynda V. Mapes’ humane and nature-centric reporting has made her one of the great journalistic storytellers of our time. Her work inspires us to understand that the trees and creatures of our forests and waterways are more than renewable resources: they are precious kin to be preserved and revered. Her talk on Sept. 9 will open the Knowledge Festival.
Her vivid and disciplined narratives have explained the workings and wonders of the natural world and exposed the existential threats human activity poses to our rivers, forests and seas. Her investigative reporting has raised awareness of the injustices tribal people of the Pacific Northwest have suffered and lifted up the wisdom of their ways.
For almost four decades, Mapes has been an eyewitness to natural and cultural history. Her reporting on the removal of the Elwha Dam revealed the destruction and ultimate stunning restoration of riverbeds and salmon runs on the Olympic Peninsula. In an incredible series of stories that unfolded over several years, Mapes documented the grief of a starving whale named Talequah, matriarch of the endangered southern resident orcas, who birthed then lost two calves in succession, then carried their bodies through the waters of the Salish Sea in poignant rituals of bereavement.
Here in Whatcom County, Mapes cultivated sources such as the late Bill Tsi’li’xw James, hereditary chief of the Lummi Tribe, who was a key figure in blocking a proposed coal port at Cherry Point. She also documented the tribe’s decades-long fight with the City of Blaine, over its egregious desecration of human remains at a Lummi burial site near an ancient tribal settlement at Semiahmoo, as the city pursued construction of an ill-fated sewage treatment plant.
Mapes’ environmental reporting combines a scientist’s discipline with a poetic sense of wonder and a prophetic urgency to curtail the human carelessness that is propelling the extinction of vulnerable ecosystems. Her work explores how ancient and carbon-rich, old-growth forests play an irreplaceable role in the environment.
She is the author of seven books, most recently, “The Trees are Speaking,” published in April by the University of Washington Press. It is essential reading for those with a deep interest in environmental stewardship, indigenous land rights, and the urgent challenges posed by climate change.
In her Sept. 9 talk at Salish Current’s Voices of the Northwest Knowledge Festival, Mapes will reflect on her career at the Seattle Times covering the human and natural history of the Salish Sea — and the challenges that lie ahead.
— Compiled by Salish Current Editorial Staff