The name is heavy, but so is the ground it sits on. Long before the asphalt and the strip mall’s beige stucco walls, in September of 1858, this stretch of land it now sits on in modern-day Airway Heights was the site of the Battle of Spokane Plains, a violent clash between the U.S. Army and a coalition of Palus, Schitsu’umsh (Coeur d’Alene), Spokan, and Yakama warriors defending their homeland. But step off the busy street and into Battlegrounds Native Art Market, and you enter a different kind of battleground, one shaped by creativity and connection instead of conflict. It is a space of quiet, powerful resilience, transforming land once marked by violence into a thriving sanctuary of cultural presence.
The Soup That Started It All: The Origins of Elk Soup
To understand the heartbeat of the market, you have to understand Elk Soup, the parent nonprofit founded six years ago by Spokane Tribe member Jeff Ferguson and his wife, Margo Lee Hill-Ferguson. Like every good origin story, it starts with a name.
“There is a story from the Spokane Tribe that Chief Sam Boyd told in 1935 about a winter when the tribe was on the verge of starvation,” Ferguson explains.
As the story goes, ten families were camped along the freezing Spokane River, entirely out of food as spring approached. The snow was knee-deep and too soft for travel; even snowshoes sank a foot deep. One hunter, a Lakes Indian man with a Spokane wife, was near death but resolved to go out, telling his wife he would rather die trying to find game than waste away lying down. She insisted on going with him. Together they braved the bitter cold elements, with the darkness creeping in quickly on their first day of travel, forcing them to camp beneath a large tree after having traveled less than a mile.
Pushing onward the next day, the woman told her husband to watch out for a big animal that would be lying across their path. Around noon, her foretelling came true when they reached a hill and found a freshly fallen elk. Because hunger left them too weak to digest solid meat, she heated stones in a yamawa basket to boil a broth first. They drank only small, calculated amounts of the lukewarm soup until they regained the physical strength to harvest the animal, return to the river, and slowly revive the rest of their starving village one spoonful of elk soup at a time.
“It’s a story about how we survive by helping each other,” Ferguson says. “Elk Soup is how we get our people back to finding their strength.”
That ethos shapes Elk Soup’s day-to-day work.
“Our mission is to empower Native American families both on and off the reservation,” Ferguson says. “But organically, it’s grown to be about a lot more than that – it’s really about serving urban Natives who don’t have services available to them because they aren’t enrolled with a local tribe. Some moved here for work, some married in, some just ended up in Spokane. Either way, they didn’t have anywhere to turn.”
The numbers behind that isolation speak for themselves. With only around 3,000 enrolled tribal members locally, Spokane is nonetheless home to close to 20,000 Native people within a 50-mile radius, representing well over 300 tribal nations — a population largely outside the reach of tribal-specific services.
Elk Soup stepped into that void, organizing its grassroots work around four foundational pillars: arts and culture, health and wellness, education, and entrepreneurship. Today, the nonprofit provides a wide array of programs designed to give Native families the tools to thrive while staying rooted in heritage. In practice, that looks like hosting traditional cultural workshops, such as root-digging outings, ribbon skirt-making sessions, and beading classes, alongside modern initiatives like accessible, free weekly yoga classes to help community members navigate trauma and stress.
To foster economic independence and sovereignty, they also facilitate Native Networking events, creating a collaborative incubator where Indigenous professionals, students, makers, and allies can share resources and build businesses together.
Battlegrounds Native Arts Market: A Permanent Home for Indigenous Art Built on Ancestral Grounds
When Ferguson talks about urban Natives needing a place to turn, he isn’t just speaking as the founder of the nonprofit or an advocate, but as an artist who spent 15 years searching for the very thing he’s now building for others.
As a photographer, he had documented everything from joyous Native celebrations across the Inland Northwest to the historic 2016 Standing Rock protests. His work had taken him across 30 states and 17 countries. Yet when he searched for a permanent place to display his own work, he ran into the same impenetrable walls that so many others had faced.
“I had tried to get my work into a handful of different places over the years,” shares Ferguson, “and I could never get my foot in the door.”
So, Elk Soup worked to find other ways to get Indigenous art out there, organizing pop-up art shows and one-off auctions around the region, giving artists a temporary stage when a permanent one wasn’t available. Then a retail space in Airway Heights came on the market, and everything changed when Battlegrounds Native Art Market was born.
It felt fitting to open on that particular stretch of ground. “We opened Battlegrounds where they fought the U.S. Cavalry,” Ferguson says. “That’s where the name comes from.”
Its new home on West Sunset Highway happens to sit along the same corridor that runs directly between the Northern Quest Resort & Casino and the Spokane Tribe Resort & Casino, placing it squarely within reach of Native communities traveling between the two. From the outside, the beige strip mall gives no hint of the vibrant world within, but step through the doors and the space is anything but plain. Acrylic portraits of tribal elders by Jacob Johns glow through the front windows. Dreamcatchers sway lightly. Beadwork, regalia, wood carvings, prints, and photographs line the walls and fill the glass cases.
A $10,000 Strategic Art Grant (SAGA) from Spokane Arts made opening day possible. Curating the market’s roster of artists was part outreach, part open call. Currently, the market represents 28 distinct Indigenous artists from across the Pacific Northwest with plenty of room to grow.
“We’ve got Quinault, Lakota, Salish Kootenai, Upper Skagit, Kalispel — artists from all over,” Ferguson says.
Crucially, the storefront gives a dedicated platform to authentic, interior Salish Columbia Plateau artists. “There is plenty of representation out there for Plains, Southwest, or coastal artists,” Ferguson notes. “But what’s really huge is representing interior Salish and Columbia Plateau artists of this exact area. It’s very rare and incredibly important.”
The business model is meticulously designed with an artist-first ethos: Battlegrounds adds a 30% commission on top of the artist’s asking price rather than taking it from their cut, plus a small flat rental fee. Any excess funds go directly back into funding Elk Soup’s community programs.
Looking Forward to What Comes Next: Coffee, Culture and Community Housing
For all it’s already built, Battlegrounds isn’t the finish line for Ferguson or Elk Soup — it’s a foundation for what comes next.
For the market, that means literally expanding what’s on the menu. Immediately on the horizon, the market is actively working to incorporate a dedicated coffee counter into the retail space. The addition will transform the market into a fully realized community hub, bringing together Native artists, neighborhood voices, and local coffee to create a warm, inviting environment where culture, creativity, and oral storytelling can naturally thrive.
Looking further into the future, the overarching five-year goal for Elk Soup is to establish a transitional housing program specifically for Native American men re-entering society from the prison system. The project is currently in the heavy research, planning, and grant-writing phase.
In alignment with their commitment to true tribal sovereignty and self-determination, Ferguson and his team are highly intentional about how this program will be funded. They are actively choosing not to rely on federal or state government funding, focusing instead on raising capital privately and through their own independent fundraising initiatives. By steering clear of bureaucratic strings, they ensure their community work remains completely self-directed, resilient, and unbothered by the changing tides of modern politics.
Ultimately, every piece of art sold, every networking door opened, and every future cup of coffee poured at the market serves as a vehicle for collective healing.
Nearly 170 years ago, this stretch of earth was consumed by the smoke, noise, and tragedy of the Battle of Spokane Plains. Today, Battlegrounds Native Art Market stands as a profound monument to how a community can transform a site of historic trauma into a place of collective healing and economic empowerment. By providing a permanent, brick-and-mortar anchor for Native artisans to showcase their craft, the market handles the weight of the land’s legacy with the utmost dignity. It serves as a beautiful, buoyant reminder that while the battles of the past altered the landscape, the living culture of the people remains unbroken.
How to Help:
Battlegrounds Native Arts Market and Elk Soup rely on community momentum to expand their reach. Locals can support the mission through financial donations, volunteering, or simply stopping by the Airway Heights storefront to boost foot traffic. To stay updated on upcoming First Friday art gatherings, Sunday morning yoga, or cultural workshops, follow Elk Soup and Battlegrounds on social media.
Elk Soup
509.218.1929
Follow on Facebook or Instagram
Battlegrounds Native Arts Market
12924 W Sunset Highway Suite 1, Airway Heights
Follow on Facebook or Instagram
