Equity and Inclusion

This webpage is a living document managed by our Equity Action Team and members of our board. This document is meant to provide background on OLWC’s journey to becoming a more equitable organization and will be regularly updated to reflect what we’ve been learning. A variety of voices within our watershed council community contributed to this document. Personal statements will be linked throughout.

Equity Statement:

Oswego Lake Watershed Council strives to be a welcoming, equitable, just, and inclusive organization. We are working to actively include cultures, world-views, and other ways of knowing that have been historically excluded from the Western scientific worldview, which has informed much of our existing land stewardship practices. We acknowledge that the natural world has suffered because of this lack of representation and understanding. Our own awareness of the present conditions of these lands—and the fuller picture of the earth’s struggle for health—depends on how we listen to many voices, past and present, as we engage our vision and goals.  We strive to work forward with that principle as part of our perspective in the way we work with the land and form partnerships. 

The Council is committed to advancing environmental justice and doing our part to enrich the lives of all people who interact with the Oswego Lake Watershed and play integral roles in its ecological functions.

First Stewards of Oswego Lake Watershed

We acknowledge that our land is saturated with injustices and exclusions of many different communities. We strive to welcome ALL who share the Oswego Lake Watershed. Because we are a land-based organization, many of our goals and practices are oriented around the indigenous perspective of land stewardship. 

Indigenous peoples successfully cared for this land for millennia prior to European colonization and continue to do so today. The land that we now call Lake Oswego, Oregon, is the traditional land of the Tualatin band of the Kalapuyan Tribe, the Atfalati peoples, the Chinook band of the Clackamas tribe, and other native groups who relied on and cultivated their natural environment. Their tribal members today are represented by the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and other indigenous groups. This relational knowledge of local ecosystems is embedded in indigenous culture, food, craftsmanship, and storytelling, and is recognized today through Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). You can read more about existing research on the indigenous history of land cultivation of the Oswego Lake Watershed on our Watershed History page and our Land Resilience page. 

Land Ethic

How do we see ourselves within this world?

How do we learn from each other and from the Earth? 

Every human being who interacts with the Oswego Lake Watershed is an integral part of the watershed. As a Watershed Council, we embrace the worldview that human beings are a part of the natural world and our management practices impact us as part of the land. Over the millennia that human beings co-evolved alongside nature, the landscape imprinted on us and, in turn, we’ve imprinted our will on the landscape through deliberate management. We are in a position of collective decision-making to ensure protection and enhancement of our natural resources and this position is strongest when it adopts multiple perspectives and land management frameworks that incorporate agency, gratitude, empathy, reciprocity, and interdependence.

TEK is a holistic and dynamic body of knowledge handed down by generations of people with collective ancestral ties to land and is one worldview that embraces biocultural restoration as a way of healing damaged relationships between people and place. The modern idea of a “land ethic” was articulated by Aldo Leopold in his book A Sand County Almanac as a set of beliefs and principles shared by a community to guide land management decisions. The OLWC staff and board have explored different expansions on this idea through indigenous perspectives such as Dr. Christina Eisenberg’s in her recent lecture, “Beyond the Land Ethic: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Forest Management and Conservation, A Native American Perspective” and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s environmental philosophy centered on building reciprocal relationships with the land. These foundational perspectives demonstrate and explore how individual and collective environmental values grow directly from their experience.