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We acknowledge that Whitman College occupies a place named Walawála, the original place name for the valley "which is bisected by numerous streams," and a village named Pásx̣apa, "the place of the balsamroot sunflower," the traditional lands of the Walúulapam (Walla Walla), Weyíiletpuu (Cayuse) and Imatalamláma (Umatilla) peoples who were forcibly removed by the treaty of 1855. Through practices of settler colonialism, some lands promised by the treaty were later stolen, yet the treaty and subsequent legal victories upheld enduring tribal sovereignty in these lands. We pay our respect to tribal elders both past and present and extend our respect to all Indigenous people today. We honor their stewardship of the land and ecosystem and commit to continuing that important work. As curators occupying stolen land, we recognize our limitations in determining the decolonizing potential of Confluence. We cannot act as the final arbitrator for a problem we are actively perpetuating.
The Maxey Museum, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA.
In keeping with Whitman’s COVID protocols, the exhibition will not be open to visitors from outside the Whitman community during the fall semester.
Opening hours for Whitman community members only:
September 8-December 11, 2021: Wednesday-Saturday, noon-4pm
Please contact Libby Miller (millerem@whitman.edu) with any questions.
Confluence, n.
A flowing together; the junction and union of two or more streams or moving fluids.
Extraction, n.
The action or process of drawing (something) out of a receptacle; the pulling or taking out (of anything) by mechanical means; withdrawal or removal (of a person).
Over twenty years ago, renowned sculptor and architect Maya Lin was commissioned by a group of arts patrons and Indigenous tribal leaders of the Columbia River Plateau and the Pacific Northwest to create a major work of public art in remembrance of Lewis and Clark’s 1804-1806 journey to the Pacific Ocean. From its inception, Lin sought to present a counter-narrative of the Corps of Discovery expedition. Instead of statues and monuments to heroic explorers, Lin envisioned a series of six earthworks installed at important historical locations along the Columbia in Oregon and Washington. Each site is designed to integrate environmental concerns with an awareness of the tremendous ecological changes in the two centuries that followed. The artworks are located on state park lands and were all selected for their proximity to connecting river systems, hence the name “Confluence.” The term also represents the various cultures, nodes of travel and trade, species, habitats, and geological formations characteristic of the sites.
In 2018, Whitman College acquired Confluence Project archival materials, including maquettes, site surveys and records, blueprints and other architectural plans, documents related to educational outreach and programming, interviews with tribal members of the region, photos, newsletters, and much more. The objects and documents currently on display in the Maxey Museum represent a fraction of this material, now permanently housed in Penrose Library’s Northwest Archives and available to the public for future research.
Our exhibition at the Maxey Museum is part of EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. This multimedia, multi-venue art intervention seeks to promote broader social change around the environmental consequences of industrialized natural resource extraction. The Columbia River’s history is a paradox of sustainability and exploitation. The salmon populations that provided centuries of nourishment and community for the region’s Indigenous peoples are now threatened with extinction due to the many dams that clog one of the world’s most important tributaries. Those same dams also provide energy and reliable water supplies for agriculture, nuclear power, and the server farms of The Cloud. Along the Columbia N'či-Wana: Maya Lin and the Confluence Project situates this multifaceted artwork within EXTRACTION’s urgent call for creative responses to the ongoing climate crisis.
For the past two years, students in Art/Environment (ARTH 352) have researched Confluence archival materials in preparation for this exhibition. They spent time on the bottom floor of Penrose Library, working closely and collaborating with staff, reading and discussing related research in seminars, working individually and in groups, workshopping ideas and drafting proposals for this exhibition. What you see here are the fruits of those labors. And while there is much about the Confluence Project that is worthy of praise and celebration, as ambitious and complex an undertaking as this can never be free of controversy either. Along the Columbia N'či-Wana aims to demonstrate the vitality of the Confluence Project and its engagement with issues specific to this region, but also to address the conflicted and evolving responses to this complex artwork. In so doing, we hope to provide context for the myriad ways in which settler colonialism, the displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the consequences of resource extraction and environmental devastation are intertwined.
The exhibition is affiliated with Whitman College's first-ever Academic Theme: Race/Violence/Health. A link to this year's theme-related events and programming can be found here.