To visit the Confluence Project at Sacajawea State Park is to be immersed within the landscape of the Columbia River’s industrialization. From Walla Walla, the route passes one of the largest slaughterhouses in North America, and the Boise Cascade paper mill. From Richland or Spokane, the highway takes you past the Hanford Reach, home to the nuclear reactor that refined the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki and where now a toxic plume of radioactive waste has seeped out of its underground containers, slowly creeping towards the Great River. Closer to the State Park, this landscape also features vast agricultural fields, small housing developments and trailer parks, sludge ponds, and a Pasco Port facility with row after row of out-of-use farm equipment. 

The Sacajawea State Park site was dedicated in 2010 and is named for the 16-year-old Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacajewea, who served as guide and interpreter during Lewis and Clark’s expedition. The Corps of Discovery briefly camped at the site long known to Indigenous peoples as a space for gathering, fishing, and trade. Maya Lin represents this history through the construction of seven discreet “Story Circles.” Clustered along the southwestern point of a man-made jetty where the Snake and Columbia Rivers meet, each circle has a theme: salmon, the footprint of a longhouse, dams, the legend of Coyote, native animal species, trade, and the Seasonal Round. 

The maquettes and documents on display in this section demonstrate the evolution of the site’s design over years of planning. Plans for a refurbished dock in a nearby bay were abandoned. The seven Story Circles, originally designed to cluster and overlap one another at the southernmost tip of the park’s peninsula, were instead dispersed around a wider area of the southwest edge of the park, close to an interpretive center and a marker commemorating the Daughters of the Pioneers.