WARM SPRINGS, Ore. – Imagine you’re camping, and you see a bear. Now, imagine that kids, some as young as 6, also see the bear and they tell you they want to pet the bear.
Arlene Boileau was faced with this serious situation years ago at Culture Camp, an Oregon State University Extension Service camp held each summer for 4-H members of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs.
The bear ripped open a tipi and grabbed bags of pretzels. Even though the bear turned around and walked away, it wasn’t safe to be there. But the kids didn’t want to cancel camp.
“I had to put my thinking cap on,” Boileau recalled. “If we were at camp, I let the kids make the decisions. So, I had to find another place.”
Boileau directed an evacuation of the camp. About 100 kids, ranging in age from 6 to 12, packed up, loaded a two-ton truck and hauled out of there to set up camp an hour and a half away.
“I wasn’t afraid. I should have been, but I wasn’t,” Boileau said.
She paused for a moment.
“I have lots of stories with bears,” she said, with a laugh.
Boileau, who became the first 4-H faculty member at Warm Springs in 1986, shared this experience and others recently at an Extension-hosted luncheon and dedication of a garden to honor her and her late husband, Mickey. Family, friends and former 4-H’ers attended the event to show their appreciation of Boileau and her decades of mentorship.
“I’m ecstatic,” Boileau said after the garden dedication, which in addition to the lunch included Warm Springs community member Jefferson Greene sharing a hand drum song, and Greene and Rosie Johnson singing and playing the Warm Springs 4-H Big Drum.
“When they said they were going to name a garden after me, I thought they were going to make a plaque and put it up,” Boileau said. “I didn’t think that they were going to do all of this. It’s wonderful.”
The Skuliłama Garden recognizes Arlene and Mickey Boileau’s dedication to supporting youth to become lifelong learners. Skuliłama means “students” in Ichiskin, a language spoken in Warm Springs.
Boileau started the garden behind the old boys’ dorm building when she realized that the 4-H youth “thought food came from Safeway.”
“It dawned on me that they didn’t know that the food comes from the Earth,” she said.
A blessing
Boileau, 88, officially retired in 2015 and was inducted into the Oregon 4-H Hall of Fame in 2016.
The lunch was held in the old boys’ dorm building that now houses Extension and Tribal offices. Clint Jacks, a longtime Extension agent and administrator in Warm Springs who worked with Boileau for many years before his retirement in 2005, said that after Boileau was hired she let him, and others, know that the building was a source of pain for elders in the community.
“We had a number of folks, elders now who have gone, who would not come into this building because of how they were treated in boarding school,” Jacks said. “They survived in a way that allowed their families and grandkids to be a part of the community and not fear this building. But the building needed to be blessed.”
And that’s what Boileau did.
“We brought in the shakers, and we went through the whole building and just sang,” she said. “I had to take the leadership from what the spirits were telling me, where to start and where to end. So, that’s what I did.”
When Boileau started with Extension she had so many ideas that it was “like holding on to a whirlwind,” Jacks said.
“We challenged Extension’s liability insurance because of the search and rescue 4-H club,” he said. “Youth Tribal members were skilled enough that they did search-and-rescue training in Wheeler and Wasco counties. That was just one example. We also had a 4-H club in which boys learned traditional songs. Some of those boys are still using that skill in the longhouses.”
“In many respects the 4-H club here in Warm Springs was a trendsetter,” he said. “It allowed another way of thinking. We didn’t have a lot of money. We made it work because of Arlene’s ability to talk to people. Camp only existed because Arlene was able to get the resources for it.”
A well-stocked van
Danita Macy, who coordinates Extension’s Urban Native Indigenous Program in Portland, began her Extension career in Warm Springs. She looked to Boileau as one of her community elders to “learn how to do things, and how not to do things.”
“Arlene thought it was rude if you sent an e-mail to say, ‘thank you,’” Macy said. “Arlene would always make us send cards. If you got a card, it was because of Arlene.”
Macy marveled at Boileau’s ability to teach youths how to cook. “By the time they left the fifth grade so many of these kids had better knife skills than professional chefs,” she said.
Most impressive, Macy said, was the way Boileau stocked her 4-H van. She seemed to have any item on hand.
“If you needed scissors, she had them. If you needed an extra dress, she had that, too. ‘You have this?’ I got that, it’s in the back.”
Macy continued, “Arlene loves her community. She loves her people, and she loves kids. If you’ve got a woman that’s willing to do just about anything to make your children feel grounded and loved, like Arlene has, then we’ve really been fortunate.”
