A child and her grandmother admire Baker Bay from the viewing platform at Cape Disappointment.
In 2000 a group in Washington State called the Confluence Project wanted to commemorate the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s expedition. The expedition party had spent eighteen days in Washington in 1805 on their journey to reach the Pacific Ocean. The group from the Confluence Project called Maya and asked her to design a memorial.
“Absolutely not,” she said once again.
Washington’s governor, Gary Locke, was a friend of Maya’s. He, too, was of Chinese descent and a graduate of Yale. He called Maya and said, “Would you just meet with the Confluence people?”
“I’m not in the monument business,” she replied.
Then to her surprise, tribal elders of the Nez Perce, Umatilla, and Chinook, who were part of the Confluence Project, came to her studio in New York City. They said, “Lewis and Clark did not come into an uninhabited land. They didn’t discover this country [the Pacific Northwest]. We were here. We think you could share and understand and delve deeper.” They told Maya about the ecological changes over the years. While gathering information about plants and animals, Lewis and Clark had brought illness and destruction. As the elders talked about the river and the salmon, she grew interested.
But Maya had just launched her project What Is Missing? about the extinction of species. She told the elders that if she accepted their project, she wouldn’t be able to get to it for another five years.
They agreed to wait.
It took Maya three years to figure out how she would approach the project. In the meantime, she was working on many other things: designing furniture, making Timetable for Stanford University, and constructing the Riggio-Lynch Chapel. And, of course, she was raising her children.
Finally, Maya began to really focus on Confluence. Her goal was not celebration as much as understanding. She wanted to encourage people to look at the land as it is today and as it was in the past, from different points of view. She planned six locations along the Columbia River for the project. “Each one tells you what went on at that place,” she explained. “We started with Cape Disappointment, where Lewis and Clark ended . . . where the river meets the sea.” For Maya this was like “holding up a mirror to reflect back upon Lewis and Clark’s journey.”
Cape Disappointment State Park is located at the mouth of the Columbia River. Working with park planners and landscape designers, Maya replaced parking lots with natural dunes and native grasses. Her objective was to remind people of what had been lost and what could be saved. She said,
“A lot of my work is not very glorious. If I succeed, you may never know I was here.”
Maya installed a new fish-cleaning table near the boat launch. She selected a block of local basalt rock for the table. It has a sink carved into it on one end and is engraved with a Chinook creation myth about how the Chinook tribe came to be.
The fish-cleaning table at Cape Disappointment.
The story tells of an old man who met a giantess. The man caught a little whale and the giantess told him to split it down the back. But the man cut the whale the wrong way. The whale changed into a thunderbird that flew to the top of a mountain near the Columbia River and laid a nest of eggs. And from the eggs came the first members of mankind.
Maya said of the story, “It’s also a reminder that Chinook fishermen were catching salmon here thousands of years before white men came.” The words of the myth etched in the rock were intended to grip the fish when they’re being cleaned. Chinook chief Cliff Snider says the salmon slip off the polished table, but nonetheless he is appreciative of Maya’s respectful treatment of his people’s history.
Maya had first thought that the Native Americans and Lewis and Clark had followed the same path to the ocean. But she realized there were two different walkways. Lewis and Clark had made a “beeline to the ocean.” So she designed a boardwalk leading to a viewing platform at the beach that is inscribed with excerpts from Clark’s journal, using his original spelling.
Maya Lin and Horace Axtell, a Nez Perce tribal elder, celebrate the dedication at Chief Timothy Park, a Confluence Project site in the Nez Perce homeland in Washington State.
The entire Chinook blessing consists of eight sections that are engraved along the Blessing Trail.
“Saw several rattle snakes.”
“Saw several Canoes.”
“Ocian in view! O! the joy.”
Another trail follows the original water’s edge and leads to a totem circle made of cedar driftwood. This is the Chinook homeland. On November 18, 2005, the very date that Lewis and Clark had arrived at the spot two hundred years earlier, the Chinook blessed the site. The blessing opens, “We call upon the earth, our planet home, with its beautiful depths and soaring heights, its vitality and abundance of life, and together we ask that it Teach us and show us the way.”
Maya was so moved by the beauty of the dedication that she asked for permission to include it in the project. It is now engraved on the Blessing Trail.
