On a spring morning, the Vancouver Land Bridge appears to be
a bridge alive, lush with native plants fluttering in the wind as joggers
follow its wavy path. Its long arc — about half a kilometer — weaves and soars
over Highway 14, reconnecting the Columbia River with the ancient Klickitat
Trail, said to have been used by Northwest tribes for millenniums.
اضافة اعلان
Ten miles north of downtown Portland, Oregon, the
earth-covered pedestrian bridge, completed in 2008, was a collaboration between
architect Johnpaul Jones, best known for his work on the
National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, and artist and architect Maya Lin, who designed
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Jones and his architectural firm created the maquette of the
land bridge that is the centerpiece of “Along the Columbia River: Maya Lin and
the Confluence Project,” which will be on view through December 15 at Whitman
College’s
Maxey Museum in Walla Walla, Washington, and online.
Using architectural models, blueprints, correspondence,
interviews, geological surveys and other archival materials, “Along the
Columbia River” is the first retrospective to outline the scope and impact of
the Confluence Project, a Washington-Oregon nonprofit that seeks to educate the
public about the river system’s significance through the voices of Northwest
tribes and to counter the myth that Lewis and Clark “discovered” this land.
At the land bridge, “We grabbed the prairie and pulled it
over the highway,” Jones has said.
It is among six public “art landscapes” the Confluence
Project commissioned Lin to design along 704km of the Columbia River system,
from the basalt fish-cleaning table engraved with the Chinook creation story at
Cape Disappointment State Park on the Washington coast to the story circles at
Sacagawea Historical State Park and the Listening Circle amphitheater at Chief
Timothy Park on an island in the Snake River near Clarkston, Washington.
Each site was chosen by Columbia River tribes to mark a
significant confluence, or spot where bodies of water or cultures converge.
Five of the six are complete.
“The Confluence Project built that bridge,” said Antone
Minthorn, chair of the Confluence Project board and a member of the
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. “You begin to wonder,
well, what is our legacy?”
Minthorn said the project works to unite a small group of
people — Native Americans — with their fellow citizens in learning how to
“become American” and how best to steward the land together. The goal, he said,
is to create visual markers, not monuments per se, that are in harmony with the
landscape and serve as reminders that “just because you don’t see us does not
mean we are not here.”
“The education of non-Native people about the Indigenous
history of this place helps them to become more from this place, and of this
place,” Minthorn said.
For two decades, the nonprofit — founded by Minthorn and
tribal leaders, community arts advocates and historians — has sought to reclaim
the narrative of discovery and Manifest Destiny.
The exhibition also highlights how these projects offer
alternative ways of honoring histories and living cultures in a period marked
by the toppling of statues and the rejection of celebrated individuals frozen
in time and stone.
“We’re responding to a growing hunger to know more about
what it means to be from here and to have a better relationship to our
environment,” said Colin Fogarty, executive director of the Confluence Project.
In April, Whitman and Confluence hosted “An Evolutionary
Moment for Monuments,” a panel discussion for the exhibition.
“We are not monument builders,” explained Bobbie Conner,
director of the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, a Confluence educator and also
a member of the tribes of the Umatilla reservation. “We do not construct edifices
or sculptures or obelisks to pay heed to the past. We keep track of the past in
our oral histories, in our hearts and in our minds.”
The event’s moderator was Matthew Reynolds, an art professor
at Whitman who is writing a book on the Confluence Project. He said that when
he took his students or his (“mostly white”) friends to the Confluence sites,
they were often confounded by their simplicity.
“They’re expecting this great artwork that rises out of the
earth or calls attention to itself and screams: ‘I am a great work of art. Look
just at me and don’t look at anything else around me,’” he said. “What I find
most poignant about the Confluence Project is that it resists that kind of
looking. It asks viewers to work harder, and it also calls attention to the
landscape around it, and it asks you to move around and experience those sites
as whole environments.”
The Confluence Project and Lin do not ignore the roles of
Lewis and Clark and other non-Native Americans; rather they use the explorers’
copious documentation as supplementary material, secondary to the primary
source of Native voices and oral traditions.
The explorers, Fogarty said, “didn’t discover this place,
but they took really great notes.”
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