The river is still moving.

That is the idea behind Once Wild River, Timothy White Eagle’s new exhibition. The artist has spent the past year thinking about the Duwamish River as a living force with a long memory and its own direction. Over time, the river has been straightened, dredged, filled, polluted, studied, cleaned, and managed. It’s still moving.

White Eagle, the first Green-Duwamish Urban Waters Artist-in-Residence, works across performance, installation, photography, storytelling, and design. His projects often ask people to enter the work rather than stand outside it. In The Indigo Room, which played New York’s Under the Radar Festival in 2023, audience members moved through ritual and story. His 2024 On the Boards performance Indian School took on adoption, family history, cultural displacement, and the lasting harm of Native boarding schools through performance and audio-visual design.

Once Wild River brings that immersive approach to the Duwamish River and its watershed. The show gathers work by collaborators Adrain Chesser, Laura C. Wright, Epiphany Couch, Crystal Cortez, and Sarah Kavage. Together, the artists look at the uneasy relationship between the river’s power and the industrial systems built around it.

Timothy White Eagle

Photo by Adrain Chesser

Halfway through the project, White Eagle received a cancer diagnosis, and the work expanded into a wider collaboration. Each artist adds another way into the river, and the exhibition builds from those layers, holding the river’s presence alongside the people and histories connected to it.

The show’s attention to place and consequence brings to mind Utah Phillips, a folk singer and historian from Northern California, who pushed back on the idea that people should stop bringing up the past. You could pick up a rock older than the oldest song you know, he said, drop it on your foot, and there it is: “The past didn’t go anywhere.” Telling people to move on can be its own kind of control. Maybe someone is afraid of what will be remembered.

That concept feels embedded in a collaborative show about a river that has carried so much and kept moving anyway. Once Wild River holds the river’s presence with what a place remembers, what people try to bury, and what keeps rising back to the surface.

The exhibition includes Path of Water, an audio work by Crystal Cortez that draws from the soundscape of the Duwamish and stories created with guest storytellers, including Duwamish Councilman Ken Workman. It’s one more way into the moving water, and another reminder that a place will speak long after people decide they are done listening.

Once Wild River runs at Mini Mart City Park through June 21.

Hometown

Montesano, Washington.

Discipline

Multidisciplinary artist.

Favorite spot in Seattle

El Gallito Mexican Restaurant in Central District.

Describe your work in three words.

Experiential. Transformative. Immersive.

Gratitude, Adrain Chesser and Timothy White Eagle, detail from Once Wild River.

Photo by Mark Woods

Once Wild River

Photo by Mark Woods

Where do you find inspiration?

I look for discord in my own personal world, and through the process of investigation I learn about what needs to be healed and how. By doing this it calls out to others who might also need this. We all need healing in some form.

What are you working on now?

Once Wild River. I’m wrapping up this exhibition, which was a year and half effort as the Urban Waters Green-Duwamish Artist in Residence sponsored by Puget Sound Partnership, the EPA, and numerous other agencies.

Service Industry, Sarah Kavage, Once Wild River.

Photo by Mark Woods

Can you tell us about Once Wild River and how this body of work came together?

Once Wild River began as a solo project rooted in my research of the Green-Duwamish watershed, approached through my lens as a storyteller and performer. In 2025, I was selected from a pool of applicants to become the inaugural Green-Duwamish Urban Waters Artist-in-Residence, a program supported by the EPA and partner agencies, with a focus on the river’s restoration and reconveyance.

Midway through the project, I received a cancer diagnosis, which profoundly shifted both my process and perspective. What started as an individual inquiry opened into a collaborative practice. I invited artists Adrain Chesser, Sarah Kavage, Laura C. Wright, Epiphany Couch, and Crystal Cortez to join the work.

This unexpected turn expanded the project in meaningful ways, bringing in multiple visions, disciplines, and lines of research. The result is a body of work that is more layered and expansive than I originally imagined, shaped not only by the river itself, but by the collective energy and insight of the collaborators involved.

Sacrifice, Adrain Chesser, Timothy White Eagle, and Crystal Cortez, Once Wild River.

Photo by Mark Woods

Who do you admire and why?

Taylor Mac for his willingness to be big and take up space and generosity of spirit.

James Turrell for his use of light.

Cannupa Hanska Luger, a Navajo visual artist who makes stunning work.

Define success on your terms.

Getting to keep on doing what I do: make art, celebrate life and community.

Timothy White Eagle and Adrain Chesser, Once Wild River.

Photo by Mark Woods

Share one piece of advice you wish you knew when you were first starting out.

Stay connected to the spirit of the work you are doing regardless of where you are in space and time, and regardless of what jobs you have to take to survive. Don’t disconnect or compartmentalize. Find ways to connect your living to your work.

What do you still hope to accomplish?

Up next is an autobiographical campfire series inviting the community to listen to my life story as a performance offering.