Human Rights Law

Genius at Work: Maya Lin and the Confluence Project

By melvin

I wonder why there isn't more buzz about Maya Lin's current project. Maybe because it treads so lightly on the earth, even though it is her most monumental to date, its seven component sites scattered across 465 miles of river and two states.

So many things to love, like the perfectly functional fish cleaning table and sink at the completed Cape Disappointment site. These amenities are found at most parks along the river and these days are usually made of stainless steel. Lin's was carved from a basalt column she found near Spokane and inscribed with a Chinook origin myth. It already looks as though it has been there forever. One gets the feeling it may very well sit there and serve its purpose for another two hundred years, or another ten thousand.

Or the fact that wherever possible, she has incorporated her theme of restoration into the work at each site, restoring wetlands at Cape Disappointment, eradicating invasive weeds at the Sandy River Delta in an attempt to restore the area to the condition in which Lewis and Clark found it.

Most of all, the exquisite sensitivity to the immediate environment and to the impact of the project itself. For instance, her choice of Black locust for the Sandy Delta site is notable for two reasons: it is extremely rot resistant, and the trees consumed in the project are invasive noxious weeds in the northwest. Their consumption as lumber does the local native species a favor. It is perhaps this sensitivity that won her the enthusiastic support of every Native American group on both the Snake and Columbia Rivers. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Nation suggested Lin in the first place. The Nez Perce held a blessing ceremony at the Chief Timothy Park site - which sits on what the tribe calls its "ceded lands" - before even preliminary surveys began.

More on the Confluence Project below.
Another characteristic of this project that stands out is the involvement of as many people and institutions as possible, like the National Guardsmen and all the Sandy River volunteers. There aren't that many projects in these parts the get the unqualified blessing of the Corps of Engineers, State governments, and the tribes.

In what will surely be the centerpiece of this entire work, its heart, Celilo Falls will finally get the memorial it deserves in her cantilevered walkway over the submerged site. Talk about minimalism. All of the power of this site will derive from all that was there for ten thousand years and disappeared on March 10, 1957: the roaring of the falls, the frenzied churning of the water, the salmon, the fishermen, the celebrations, the vibrant culture of the interior Northwest peoples. The viewer will look down in silence on the stillness of what the Corps - and no one else - calls Lake Celilo.

It will just be an odd little roadside viewpoint for most people rushing  by. But I predict it will be a place of pilgrimage.

Video: Maya Lin talks about the project.

Lin is also working on what she insists will be her last memorial. Its working title seems to be variously Missing or What Is Missing. Scheduled for unveiling on Earth Day 2009, it will feature a list of names like her most famous memorial. This time the names will be those of plants and animals driven to extinction in our lifetimes.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on September 24, 2008 (boomark / email).