When artist Timothy White Eagle talks about the Green-Duwamish River, he doesn’t describe it as a landscape, a resource, or even a subject for artistic study. He describes it as something more akin to a relationship.
“It’s really a witnessing, not just a listening,” he says. “The river is never the same from day to day, season to season, year to year. It asks for time. Patience. Repetition. It asks for relationship.”
White Eagle’s connection with the environment sits at the heart of his work. A Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist of mixed Mohave and European descent, he has spent more than two decades creating immersive performances, installations, photographs, and stories that explore ritual, transformation, memory, and “humanity’s relationship to the animate world.” For the last year, he has served as the inaugural Green-Duwamish Artist-in-Residence, a pilot initiative supported by the Urban Waters Federal Partnership that uses art to deepen connections between people, place, and the watershed itself. Those themes found new expression through his regular encounters with the Green-Duwamish River, one of Puget Sound’s most significant waterways.
For White Eagle, however, his story and relationship with water began much earlier, and in almost tragic fashion. He was five years old when during a family picnic near Phoenix, Arizona, he almost drowned in a river.
“I slipped into the water and was almost swept away,” he recalls. “My father jumped in and saved me.”
It’s an experience that left a lasting impression on him and helped shape his life as an artist. From that day on, he associated water not only with beauty, but also power.
“Since then, I’ve carried a deep respect for the natural world,” he says. “I move through nature with an awareness of its power: the possibility of getting lost, encountering wild animals, or being overtaken by water. There is a thread of fear in me, but also reverence.”
Rivers carry memories
Born in Tucson, Arizona, White Eagle was adopted into a working-class white family and later moved to Montesano, Washington. Although he is not registered as a Tribal member, his mixed heritage and Indigenous roots have had a profound impact on how he understands humanity’s place within the natural world.
“Within many Indigenous worldviews, we are not separate from nature, nor are we positioned above it in a hierarchy,” he explains. “We are part of a living web of relationships that include rivers, animals, plants, weather, land, and spirit.”
That perspective influences the environmental themes that are often the focus of his work. White Eagle prefers to treat nature not as a backdrop, but something to care for and be responsible for.
“I’m less interested in presenting nature as a resource,” he says, “and more interested in asking how we can return to a relational way of being with the world.”
During his Green-Duwamish residency, White Eagle spent months observing and researching the watershed. It was there that he learned about the disappearance of the Black River, a tributary of the Duwamish River that once drained Lake Washington and was a significant fishery for the Duwamish people. The opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in the early twentieth century lowered the lake below the river’s outfall, causing the river to dry up and displacing the Native communities that had long lived alongside it.
Learning about this story stunned White Eagle and reinforced something he had come to understand through both art and observation: rivers carry memories. They are never just water moving through a channel; they are wild and tell stories of ecological change, human decisions, loss, resilience, and renewal.
This understanding helped inspire his recent Once Wild River exhibition at Georgetown’s Mini Mart City Park. The show brought together artists, Adrain Chesser, Laura Wright, Epiphany Couch, Crystal Cortez, and Sarah Kavage, each responding to the Green Duwamish River through their own medium. Supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Puget Sound Partnership, the exhibition reflected White Eagle’s year-long exploration of the watershed and its stories.
Ritual, transformation, and healing
Halfway through his residency, the Once Wild River project took an unexpected turn when White Eagle was diagnosed with cancer. But even then, he saw an opportunity to evolve the project into a collaborative effort with fellow artists and community members, which he says expanded his perspective and understanding.
“What I thought was going to be a very solo experience became a collaborative and more expansive community project,” he says. “I’m so grateful for my team and my collaborators for stepping in to expand the project into something larger than originally planned.”
The experience echoed the themes that have appeared throughout his work, such as transformation, healing, and the importance of connection.
Ritual also plays an important part in everything he does and creates.
“I hold a deep belief that ritual can manifest change,” he says. “I’m always searching for transformation, for healing, for an opening into the animate world and a deeper relationship with it.”
Whether through performance, photography, installation, or storytelling, White Eagle’s goal is to create art that is more than just something for people to look at. He believes experiences have the power to shift perspectives and remind us that we belong to something larger than ourselves.
“As an artist, I’m always considering the audience’s experience and imagining the mindset they bring when interacting with a performance or an object I’ve made,” he says. “My goal is never simply to present something to be viewed, it’s to create an experience.”
Humanity’s place in the world
After spending a year focused on the Green-Duwamish watershed, White Eagle says he is now more aware than ever of the pressures facing urban waterways, such as development, industrial activity, and pollution that have left visible marks on the river and the communities closest to it.
However, White Eagle is optimistic and hopes visitors came away from the Once Wild River exhibition with a new appreciation for the river and considering their relationship with it.
“At a minimum,” he says, “I hope they see one beautiful thing, one truthful thing, one reminder of privilege, and one moment that reminds them of their place in humanity.”
It’s a message that resonates beyond his work and offers another way of appreciating and studying the environment, by not just monitoring and measuring, but witnessing.
Learn more about Timothy White Eagle at https://www.whiteeagle.me/.
The Art of Watershed Recovery
In 2024, the Green-Duwamish watershed was one of six locations selected for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Artist-in-Residence Pilot Initiative through the Urban Waters Federal Partnership. The program is designed to explore how artists can help deepen connections between communities and their local watersheds through creative engagement.
Through a community-led selection process, Timothy White Eagle was chosen as the Green-Duwamish Urban Waters inaugural artist-in-residence. Over the course of the year, White Eagle worked alongside community members and partners along the watershed, developing a body of work inspired by observation, story, and relationship to place. His residency culminated in Once Wild River, an exhibition and series of artist talks at Mini Mart City Park.
