2026 Advocacy Award

Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland (NPWH)  

Local Advocacy Award 2026

Along Oregon Route 82, where river-carved canyons open into the community of Wallowa, Storie Street leads to a landscape where the past and present meet. Here, the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland (NPWH) is restoring not only land, but living tradition—reclaiming a vernacular landscape defined as much by cultural practice as by physical form. NPWH are the 2026 VAF Advocacy Award winners, and it was not even close.  The NPWH is a place-based nonprofit led by tribal and non-tribal people with a common commitment to upholding, perpetuating, and celebrating the people and practices native to wal’áwa (Wallowa), a shared home.

At the heart of their work is their 320-acre Homeland Site, returned to Indigenous stewardship in the 1990s. What was once an empty expanse has been transformed through ecological restoration—reestablishing native plants like camas and tule reeds, reviving wetlands, and supporting the return of salmon, steelhead, and lamprey. Yet the site’s most profound renewal lies in its cultural life. Each year, the Tamkaliks Celebration gathers descendants, neighbors, and visitors for days of song, dance, and shared memory, reconnecting people to wal’áwa through lived experience.

The built environment, though contemporary, deepens this connection. A circular dance arbor, longhouse, and sweat lodge anchor cultural practices, while the restored Wallowa River Pedestrian Bridges—two sister repurposed 1910 pony trusses—vitally links town and Homeland Site both physically and symbolically. Crossing it, made possible by a collaboration with the Oregon DOT seeking a new home for old bridges, became an meaningful act of continuity, stewardship, and belonging.

Through youth programs, public education, and a virtual exhibit expanding access beyond place, NPWH sustains knowledge across generations. Their work embodies vernacular architecture at its most essential: a dynamic, place-based response to environment, culture, and community. For restoring not just structures but relationships—to land, history, and one another—the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland stands as a powerful model of advocacy and enduring preservation.