passionate about re-centering people and place

above: swimming the lower salmon with my friend Silas

I’m Clark- guide, educator, student.

I was born and bred in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and spent my early adult life working in education and community engagement in marginalized Boston communities. Over the last six years, I’ve worked as a whitewater rafting guide in the basalt canyons of Northeastern Oregon and Western Idaho- Nez Perce and Cayuse territory. Nowadays, I combine my passions for guiding, youth work, and social justice to co-direct the Pandion Institute, an majority Indigenous-led organization that facilitates Land-based cultural, ecological, and outdoor skills-training education for youth- our future elders.

My philosophy is simple:

the way we engage with the world around us has a primary effect on our ontology- our value systems and worldview.

< 2021 Saqáanma School. Photo credit Tiyana Blackeagle

Pretty basic proposition, right? I’d argue that (at least in our dominant settler paradigm) this goes almost completely overlooked.

People are not separable from place, and place is not separable from people. Our current dissonance is an inevitable symptom of a culture isolated from the world around it. Land-based engagement guided by traditional, land-based cultural value systems doesn’t hold all the answers, but it’s the foundation our solutions to the world’s wicked problems need to rest on.

feel similarly? let’s chat!