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The mural for the Community Energy Project depicts the positive actions and services they provide to communities, reflecting both interior and exterior local house-environments involving many factors that make a house or a building sustainable.

The first panel represents the Vanport Flood of 1948. As a symbol, it represents the largest influx of minorities into Portland, changing its ethnic and social structure form primarily Caucasian to our current multiethnicity. This event corresponds to the segregation of African Americans after Portland’s worst flood, which inundated downtown and left 20,000 people homeless in North Portland. It is also the birthplace of Portland State University, which was inundated and relocated in Southwest Portland. This panel symbolizes how people come together in the event of a natural disaster, converging the Vanport Floods, to Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti.

Native American once harvested cedar bark and lumber planks using sheer hand strength in the Northwest. The Red Cedar is a wonderful provider of materials; its grain allows the wood to be easily wedged out in straight planks. Bark can be made into baskets and it even provided food. This tree consumption created giant scars but did not circumscribe around the trunk, allowing the tree to heal itself, continue living, and perpetually gifting wood.

Celilo Falls was dammed in 1957. The construction of dams on the Columbia River has consequently displaced many Native American communities and destroyed important natural habitats for minerals, flora and fauna. This is Oregon’s most controversial dam event, symbolizing the economic and political marginalization of Native Americans during our century. Celilo was a convention point where the eastern desert and the western forest met, where animals, plants, and people interchanged. Wyam (Celilo Falls) was the most important fishery and point of contact between Indians of all directions (Yakima, Umatilla, Nez Perce, Chinook and Warm Springs) from as far as Alaska, Idaho, California and all of Oregon.
On March 10, 1957, the community of Celilo and the Northwest looked on as a rising Lake Celilo rapidly silenced the waterfalls, submerged fishing platforms, rock formations and consumed their village, ending one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities on the North American continent (11,000 years old)