Local artist restores Spokane House murals

For North Idaho artist Shaun Deller, work over the past two summers restoring the murals on the exterior of the Spokane House Interpretive Center in Riverside State Park has been the perfect combination of his two passions: art and history.

Originally founded as a fur-trading post in 1810, the Spokane House site was a busy locale for the Spokane Tribe and other area tribes who would gather there to fish, trade and recreate.

The project has been a labor of love for Deller, one that came to him at a fortuitous time, he said.

“Honestly, if it had come to me … with gas prices where they are now, I’m not sure I could’ve said yes,” he said.

Because it’s not just the 400 hours researching and painting the murals that he’s devoted. There’s also drive time. Deller lives with his wife and children more than an hour from the Spokane House, in Priest River, where he teaches woodworking part-time at a local high school. It’s clear this project has been a major undertaking .

It represents a joining of his two passions, art and history, Deller said. He started school as an illustration major and later pursued a fine arts major, dabbling in everything from fiber arts to sculpture along the way. And while his artistic path ended up taking a lot of turns, his childhood love of Native American culture, particularly that of the fur-trade era up to today, has never wavered.

In 2014, Deller left Oregon for the Inland Northwest, and soon connected with the Spokane House where he would go on to take part in various living history programs. The Spokane House plans to hold a mural dedication the second weekend in June 2023 during their annual Fur Trade History Encampment.

“Every June, they would do a camp where the public could come through on a Saturday or Sunday and we would talk about the fur trappers and traders that were in the area during the early 1800s and what their lives would have been like … and show a lot of their skills … how the guns worked, why beavers were trapped and so on,” he said.

Around 2018, a park ranger brought up the idea of repainting the building’s exterior murals. You could barely read the text on one of the walls, and the images had already started fading, he said. Eager to put his skills to use, Deller put his name forward.

“I said, ‘well, you know, I’m actually an artist – I haven’t done anything at that scale, but I’d be willing to volunteer my time,’” Deller said. At one point he anticipated bringing in other artists to help, but in the end, between mixing paints and balancing his home and work schedule, he was happier finishing it on his own.

In July 2020, Deller met with members of the Spokane Tribe and the Friends of Spokane House to review the original murals. They discussed technical considerations and potential updates that might come with repainting.

From the beginning, Deller aimed to recreate the murals in the most well-researched and inclusive way he could. He worked with members of the Friends of Spokane House and consulted several Spokane Tribe members including Shawn Brigman of Salishan Sturgeon Nose Canoes, Jennifer Lebret, Joshua Flett and Warren Seyler on the site’s cultural significance and use of tribal imagery.

Deller soon learned that certain elements of the original murals were anachronistic, and in some cases taboo. One of the murals, for example, depicted a group of women processing salmon, discarding unwanted parts on the water’s edge.

“Most of the public would walk through there, see that mural and they wouldn’t ever think twice,” he said. But according to tradition, this never would’ve been done. Throwing salmon remains into the river, Seyler explained to him, is totally transgressive.

“If you’re processing salmon and the blood and the organs get into the water, the salmon will be offended by that and they won’t come back up that stream for a long time,” Deller said, mentioning another account he’d read from explorer David Thompson’s journal that confirmed this back in the 1800s.

“Somewhere up in the headwaters of the Columbia – one of Thompson’s men threw some animal bones into the river … and, ‘indeed the salmon didn’t come back for many days,’ ” Deller said.

In addition to more accurate depictions of local flora and fauna, Deller wanted to place greater emphasis on the human element of each mural. This meant bringing them into the foreground.

“I wanted to bring the people to the foreground … this wasn’t a place where there were just a few Native people,” he said. “It was a whole village … a huge fishing site for the Spokane people.”

In the next phase, Deller hopes to find funding that will allow him and the Friends of Spokane House to commission informational plaques for each of the murals.

“My hope is that even if the interpretive center isn’t open, even if there’s no ranger there to tell them about it,” he said, “people will leave knowing about the history of the site.”