Live Oak Consulting is proud to be a Native woman-owned business who works closely with many Native leaders, practiced co-facilitators, and dedicated creatives.
Live Oak Team
Deana Dartt, PhD
Director
Deana Dartt, PhD (Director) is Coastal Band, Chumash and Mestiza, descending from the indigenous people of the Californias. Her scholarly and professional work strives to address the incongruities between public understanding, representation and true acknowledgement of Native peoples, their cultures, histories and contemporary lives. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Oregon and has held curatorial positions at the Burke Museum of Natural and Cultural History and the Portland Art Museum as well as teaching appointments at the University of Oregon, University of Washington, and Northwest Indian College. Her book manuscript titled, “Subverting the Master Narrative: Museums, Power and Native Life in California” is currently in prep. Deana serves on the boards of the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History Advisory Council and the Native Coast Action Network, as well as the non-profit organization she recently established, the Live Oak Center for Applied Decolonization (LOCAD).
Rachael Carnes
Associate Director of Programs for Museums
Rachael Carnes (she/her), Live Oak Consulting’s Associate Director of Arts Organizations and Museums, manages reinterpretation, program evaluation, policy assessment and development projects, through an inclusive lens. An internationally-recognized playwright, Rachael ensures project collaboration is clear, friendly and professional, as she approaches the work-at-hand with compassion and creativity.
Training Co-Facilitators
Heron Brae
Heron Brae is a community builder, educator, and facilitator with over 25 years of experience in grassroots intersectional anti-oppression movements. She practices peer-to-peer listening within a liberation framework and has deeply engaged in personal emotional learning, facing systems of power, and healing ancestral trauma and shame in her Celtic and Germanic lineage. As a descendant of early settlers to the US, emotional empathy is crucial to her work of un-numbing. Heron also has extensive knowledge of botany, ecology, and herbalism, teaching people to harvest, use, and care for wild plants while understanding the colonial context. At Live Oak Consulting, she co-facilitates training, including affinity groups for non-Native people to build emotional resilience and skills for decolonial work. In her free time, Heron enjoys camping in remote locations, harvesting wild plants, cooking, loving her community, and marveling at life’s mysteries.
David G. Lewis
David G. Lewis is a member of the Grand Ronde tribe, a descendant of the Santiam, Chinook and Takelma peoples of western Oregon. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Oregon and is faculty in the Anthropology and Ethnic Studies departments at OSU. David is a past manager of the culture department at the Grand Ronde Tribe and helped design and open the Chachalu Museum at the reservation. He conducts dozens of presentations each year to numerous groups throughout western Oregon about tribal history and context and has curated numerous exhibits at local museums. He currently lives in Salem, Oregon with his family, and continually researches the colonial histories of the Oregon tribes, writing numerous essays for journals and for his blog The Quartux Journal at ndnhistoryresearch.com
Nancy Judd
Nancy Judd is an internationally recognized artist, environmental advocate and teaching artist. For over 20 years she has been creating art exhibitions made from trash that engage people in conversations about how we live on the earth. Nancy exhibits her work in public airports and museums and one of her pieces, the Obamanos Coat is in the Smithsonian Museum’s permanent collection. In her work as a teaching artist, Nancy provides arts integration to students in classrooms and adults in training settings. Nancy’s work is inspired by the indigenous people around the globe who have cared for the earth for thousands of years. She asserts that by following their lead and working with them, we can collectively mitigate the impacts of climate change. Nancy explores her own privilege, colonized mindset and white/settler fragility and brings her personal experiences to all her trainings. www.RecycleRunway.com.
Brenna Two Bears
Brenna Two Bears, BA, is Navajo, Ho-Chunk, and Standing Rock Lakota from Black River Falls, WI and Flagstaff, AZ. She studied Art History & Visual Culture at Whitman College in Washington state with a focus on Tribal Museums and the Politics of Display. Her work in museums ranges from assisting her tribe with their first ever Ho-Chunk Museum & Cultural Center to most recently, curatorial intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She strives to uplift youth through art education, as well as prioritize Native voices within cultural institutions that house indigenous works. In addition to her work with Live Oak Museum Consulting, she is an educator in Tempe, Arizona.
Meranda Roberts, PhD
Meranda Roberts is an enrolled member of the Yerington Paiute Tribe and Chicana. In 2018, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in Native American History. Over the past few years, she has been working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History, where she is developing content for the renovation of the museum’s seventy-year-old Native American exhibition hall. Meranda also recently co-curated the exhibition Apsáalooke Women and Warriors with tribal member and scholar Nina Sanders. Meranda’s passion lies in holding colonial institutions, like museums, accountable for the harmful narratives they have painted about Indigenous people. She is also dedicated to reconnecting Indigenous collection items with their descendants. Through the use of Indigenous methodologies and public history pedagogy, Meranda examines the harm colonialism continues to inflict on Indigenous communities and how public institutions can correct these wrongs.
Greg Archuleta
Greg Archuleta is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. He is descended from the Oregon City Tumwater and Clackamas Chinook, Santiam Kalapuya and Shasta. He is a former administrator and policy and planning manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Today he works closely with the Tribe’s cultural departments to provide assistance related to the culture and history of the Grand Ronde Tribes of western Oregon. He provides community-based cultural arts classes related to traditional carving, Native art design, and basketry. These “Lifeways” classes have been ongoing for over 12 years. As an artist, he focuses on the Columbia River style art form. Today, Archuleta is the Cultural Policy Analyst for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and works on enhancement, education, and outreach activities related to the Cultural resources of the Tribe.
Contractors
Tima Lotah Link
Art and Design Specialist
Tima Lotah Link is an art director specializing in designing community and culture-based exhibitions, public spaces, publications, and online experiences. Recent exhibits include LA’s Living in a Wildlife Corridor, which attracted over 50,000 visitors. She is currently collaborating on projects such as the new wing and community hub of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles, the Reimagining La Brea Tar Pits project, and the Lake Balboa Park project, which highlights habitat restoration and cultural heritage. Tima was awarded a 2017 Emmy for her work on the KCET series Tending the Wild, received the First People’s Fund 2017 Community Spirit Award for her years as a cultural educator, and is featured in the book California Indian Baskets: San Diego to Santa Barbara and Beyond to the San Joaquin Valley, Mountains and Deserts (Vol 2).
Exhibits Team
Alan Ransenberg
Alan Ransenberg has more than 35 years of experience planning, designing, and implementing exhibits of all types. He is a wonderful listener, and he has honed his considerable skills in “thinking like a visitor.” Alan is intimately familiar with a wide variety of exhibit communication treatments, materials, and production processes. His designs are both ‘real’ and ‘buildable’ from the first concept sketches.
Oregon Folklife Network
The Oregon Folklife Network (OFN) makes a meaningful difference in Oregon communities and Tribes by documenting, sustaining and celebrating diverse cultural traditions and empowering tradition-bearers. OFN conducts fieldwork and engages the public to increase cross-cultural understanding and appreciation for Oregon’s living cultural heritage.
Emily West Hartlerode
Emily West Hartlerode holds degrees in Psychology, Mythology, and Folklore, with certificates in Family Support and Gender Studies. She integrates these backgrounds to increase personal and public understanding of individual and collective trauma and healing. Since 2010, Hartlerode has managed Oregon Folklife Network’s program portfolio while supporting grant proposals earning over $900,000. Her First Peoples: First Priorities objective at OFN results in collaborations with Oregon Tribes across institutions (National Park Service’s Honoring Tribal Legacies, 2013) and within communities (Kalapuya Cultural Preservation Youth Camp, 2012-14). Her video documentation of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Sound Preservation Project supported awards from Oregon Heritage Commission (2014) and American Folklore Society (2015). Hartlerode was Research Assistant to Live Oak’s assessment of Native Cultures Fund grantmaking impact (2019). Of settler descendancy, she is grateful to live and work on Kalapuya Ilihi, raising a child, a garden, and a great many bees.