Benjamin Quanah Parker PhD ’21 became the first Indigenous student to earn a doctorate in mathematical sciences at Portland State. During the early days of the pandemic, Parker (Squaxin, Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, Cree, ShoshoneBannock) started a list of Indigenous master ’s and Ph.D. students to motivate himself for the final push of graduate school and drew inspiration from from the site indigenousmathematicians.org started by Kamuela Yong. After defending his dissertation in November 2021, he accepted a job as a software research and development engineer at Intel. Rudy Soto ’11 was appointed Idaho State Director for Rural Development with the Department of Agriculture by President Joe Biden. In this role, he’s responsible for programs authorized by the congressional Farm Bill and designed to help rural communities. Soto, an Army National Guard veteran, lost a 2020 bid to represent Idaho’s 1st congressional district. He worked most recently with Western Leaders Network, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization of local and tribal elected officials across the Interior West focused on protecting public lands, water and air. He is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation. Carolyn Wood MSW ’79 MS ’80 published a new memoir, Class Notes: A Young Teacher ’s Lessons from Classroom to Kennedy Compound. After Wood took a day off to campaign for Robert F. Kennedy in the 1968 Oregon presidential primary, the two bonded over sports and he asked her to be his 11 children’s governess. Three months later—immediately after his assassination—she arrived at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port to begin an extraordinary year. Wood, now a retired English teacher, won an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award in 2017 and the 2019 Buck Dawson Authors Award for her first memoir, Tough Girl, about her experience as one of the youngest athletes to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming. HIGHLIGHTS “A lot of his initiatives were implemented,” Kenck-Crispin says. “They just didn’t last.” WHILE MOOSE was Portland’s top cop, he and Jolin published a paper evaluating the bureau’s response to domestic violence-related calls. It noted a key issue. Despite general enthusiasm for community policing, the community “neither fully understood nor fully accepted” the process of problem-solving and evaluation the approach required. Plus, buy-in from law enforcement officials and other powerful people in the city was tenuous. “Giving up policing power was something most people in positions of power were unwilling or unable to do,” Jolin says. “Trust me, that was a very unusual step.” Still, Moose was committed to getting community input. He held monthly meetings with community stakeholders, featuring wide-ranging and free-flowing conversations. “He wasn’t doing lip service, that’s for sure, and he was very approachable,” Chiquita Rollins says. During her 16 years as Multnomah County’s domestic violence coordinator, Moose was the only chief to attend the county’s Family Violence Coordinating Council meetings. “He really took seriously that if the community said ‘No,’ he would do it another way. I don’t think that ever happened again to that extent.” THE MOOSES made national headlines shortly after Charles was sworn in as chief in 1993 when they bought a house in Northeast Portland’s King neighborhood. Part of the historically Black Albina District, at the time it had one of the city’s highest crime rates.The move represented Moose’s personal commitment to the concept of community policing. If connections were key to effective policing, he for one, would live where he worked. “At the local level, I think it was viewed as revolutionary.That’s good and that’s bad,” Kenck-Crispin says. “There were a lot of people that were saying he’s walking his talk. But I think that there were a lot of people who felt that this was a publicity stunt.” Moose established a loan-financing incentive to encourage other officers to live in high crime neighborhoods across Portland, though few took advantage of it. Rather, the move may have helped ease white Portland citizens’ concerns about moving into the neighborhood, KenckCrispin says, adding to the growing gentrification of the area. Looking back, Sandy Moose recalls an interaction with a young boy overcome J. ROBINSON PHOTOGRAPHY ROBERT GRAVES BENJAMIN QUANAH PARKER “He was a big believer in the complexity of decision-making in policing and that it was easy to make mistakes.” When the Mooses purchased a home in a high-crime area of Portland in 1993, The New York Times called Charles a “24-hour role model.” The next year, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and Mayor Vera Katz toured his neighborhood. “He was a big believer in the complexity of decision-making in policing and that it was easy to make mistakes.” THE SKANNER SPRING 2022 // 35
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