From above, the new centralized Eastern Shoshone Cultural Hub might look like a Shoshone rose, to symbolize a place of healing for the community.
On the inside, the details are still very much on the table.
At an open house event at the Fort Washakie School in late November, architect Omar Hakeem chatted with community members as they looked at a semi-circle of poster boards. There were interactive stations set up around the school gym, and the night was all about getting input about the still-in-process plan. The overarching goal of the hub project is to create a centralized space to celebrate and preserve Shoshone culture.
“These are really minimalist, very simple, lightweight. These are much bulkier, massive,” he said to the onlookers. “You like this one?”
Hakeem is with To Be Done Studio, which has been collaborating with the Eastern Shoshone Tribe on this project for the last few years. The displays showed pictures of different interior spaces: lighter or darker, with exposed wood panels or steel beams.
“We're talking about the kinds of spaces, like what does a classroom in a building like this look like, feel like?” he said. “What types of furniture or materials and textures should it have?”
The hub isn’t built yet, but its location is now set in stone. The new building will go on eight acres of land across from the gas station in town, right off Highway 287.
It’ll house a museum and also bring four separate tribal departments under one roof: archives, cultural arts and education, tribal historic preservation and enrollment. The idea is also to increase tourism and pass information down to younger generations.
Community members have carried the vision of this kind of space forward for decades, but the Eastern Shoshone tribe got a big boost when it was selected as part of the cohort with the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design in 2023. The national program worked with community members to provide technical assistance and hands-on training in rural design, but was ended by the Trump administration this year.
During its two-year partnership with CIRD, the tribe hosted community input sessions alongside architects to develop some of the initial models that were on display at the Fort Washakie gym.
Now, the next step is to take all of those ideas and start getting into the nitty-gritty of fundraising and planning for construction.
At Hakeem’s station, kids, adults and elders use colored stickers to show what design elements resonate most with them and check out chunks of stone and tile on the table. He said the building needs to be functional and reflective of the community.
“ We have to make sure a building is technically appropriate as a repository and archive and holding place for such sensitive histories, and is culturally appropriate,” he said. “Both of those have to work together.”
That means a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled space to digitize archives, share pieces of history and prevent artifacts from degrading. The current facility doesn’t totally cut it, and sometimes the tribe has to turn away items that belong to the people.
“Right now, the tribe cannot hold them. They cannot carry them,” said Hakeem. “They do not have the facilities and the resources at this time to do that.”
At another station, a few young students get a tour of an intricate 3-D architectural model with a removable roof, to take a look at the rooms inside. Other design elements nod to the shapes of mountains and rivers, and the building is intentionally oriented in alignment with the four cardinal directions.
The kids are especially interested in making sure there’s a room to make art, which fits under the current plan for a cultural activities classroom. There’s also tentative plans for a multi-purpose room that could host storytelling events or dance performances, along with gallery space, the museum and even a recording studio.
Next to the 3D model, folks put felt flowers, circles and tags on a big 8-by-10-foot map of the space to show what they’d like the outside of the building to look like.
“ One of the ideas I wrote down is an observatory for lunar solar equinoxes, and celestial alignments,” said Cass Burson, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe.
There’s also a mini pow-wow space and gardens sketched onto the map, along with other written suggestions from people at the event.
“ I just think that a lot of community has already started to fill out the tags and include their ideas and their thoughts,” said Burson. “I think that's great.”
Rachel Ynostrosa is the interim director at the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center and said she really liked seeing a 3D model of the building.
“ I think it's going to be a reality. We're going to have this, but it's not going to be, like, tomorrow,” she said. “It'll be in a few years.”
The cultural center and its connected museum are currently located in the Fort Washakie School, which is a bit of a detour off Highway 287. The center and museum would eventually be relocated to the new hub building.
Ynostrosa said one point of concern she’d been hearing that night was: Why is the model roof so flat?
“ I know roofs have to have a little slope because we get tons of snow,” she said. “We're trying to figure out what kind of roof we need because of our weather.”
Ynostrosa’s also spent a lot of time in the food world and is extra excited about the idea of a cafe.
“ Do we want buffalo meat? Do we want trout? How do we want it? Do we want fast food, do we want to go boxes? Or do we want to dine in?” she said.
Robyn Rofkar’s hanging out at the last station, where people, mostly kids, draw what they want to see at the museum.
“I really like this one, I like your flower!” she said to one young artist. “We want to keep them, so put them here.”
Rofkar has worked at the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center for five years. But now she’s the new director for the development of the hub project.
“ I'm really excited just to have a place where our people, especially our elders, can go and hang out talk to each other, have a cup of coffee,” she said. “Just talking to them in my day-to-day life, I learn so much, just being around them.”
Finding the funding to make the project a reality is the biggest hurdle. The team’s raised almost a million dollars in grants so far since 2022, but Rofkar said it’s time to start branching out.
“ Our [tribal] oil and gas revenues are up and down, but I think we have a good team that can do fundraising,” said Rofkar. “We've got all kinds of grants, but now we need to turn to the private sector for private grants, philanthropists and other donors.”
Liz Kinne is the founder of Grant Pro Group and has been working on fundraising with the Eastern Shoshone Tribe for the last few years. She said the rising price of lumber and recent tariffs have made it more difficult to estimate construction costs.
“ Right now, we're looking somewhere around the ballpark of $20 million, but that could change depending on market fluctuations,” she said. “But that's just the brick and mortar expenses, that doesn't include the ongoing operating expense. Those are projected out to be anywhere from $750,000 to a million dollars on an annual basis. So we have our work cut out for us.”
The group is in the early stages of exploring a funding opportunity through the U.S. Economic Business Administration. But Kinne said the federal funding landscape has changed significantly in the last year.
“ Last fall we developed several proposals to federal agencies that would've been a great catalyst for this project. But thanks to DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency], those funding opportunities were eliminated,” she said.
Despite the financial uncertainty, the project is starting to look for volunteers for committees on topics like fundraising and culture. Rofkar said the community has momentum.
“ There's been many pushes towards that in the past that haven't come to fruition,” she said. “I don't want it to fail on my watch at all.”
