I Climb Up the Ladder

UW senior Auston Jimmicum photographed in the Intellectual House. Jimmicum is a law, societies and justice major and an American Indian studies minor. Media credit: Bryan Nakata

Growing up on the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay, Auston Jimmicum vividly remembers meeting University of Washington students for the first time. 

He was in second grade, and they were teaching in his school as part of the University of Washington Pipeline Project’s Alternative Spring Break program — a week-long program through which UW students lead art, literacy and science projects in rural and tribal elementary schools across the state. Over the course of the week, they wrote and illustrated their own poems...