Reflections on the Confluence Project: Assimilation, Sustainability, and the Perils of a Shared Heritage

The recent bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s “Corps of Discovery” created increased interest in commemorations of this event along the entire course of the expedition’s travels. In advance of the bicentennial, a number of states established Lewis and Clark commemorative commissions, museums at both national and local levels planned exhibits on the Corps of Discovery, and leaders of local communities along the trail deliberated on the best ways to use the bicentennial to attract tourist dollars to their communities. A group of Lewis and Clark reenactors—including some descendants of William Clark—even set out to retrace the entire course of the journey during the bicentennial years.¹

The desire to commemorate the bicentennial was certainly felt along the Columbia River, along which the Corps of Discovery traveled in 1805 and 1806. A centerpiece of Columbia River commemorations of Lewis and Clark—and the one that might have the most long-lasting presence—is the Confluence Project, a series of seven permanent and public art installations located at specific spots on the banks of the river. The Confluence Project art installations were principally designed by artist Maya Lin and further developed and constructed with the assistance of a number of architects and partners.² The Confluence Project was initiated in 2000 as a collaborative effort between various civic groups from Oregon and Washington, a number of Pacific Northwest Native American tribes, artists, and landscape designers. The stated goal of the Confluence Project is to “reclaim, transform, and reimagine,” through the creation of public artworks, seven places along a roughly three-hundred-mile stretch from the mouth of the Columbia River to near the border of Washington and Idaho.³ All seven of the chosen sites were stopping points for the Corps of Discovery. Ultimately, the Confluence Project was “designed to rethink what a commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Northwest Expedition could be,” especially by providing greater space for Native American voices and framing the history of the Corps of Discovery as part of a larger shared heritage.⁴

Explicit in the Confluence Project, and promoted as part of a shared heritage, is a message of environmentalism and sustainability. The seven sites that were chosen for the Confluence Project were chosen in part because they were points of intersection between environment, culture, and history, places of “encounter between the natural world and the built environment, the past and the present, for people of all backgrounds.”⁵ The art installations located at each site were designed by Maya Lin to interpret the area’s ecology and history and to

integrate environmental concerns and history with an awareness of and sensitivity to the tremendous changes the journey of Lewis and Clark effected on Native Americans and their homelands. The Confluence Project has a strong, positive emphasis on a future where we begin to preserve and sustain our natural and cultural resources.⁶

Messages of shared heritage, especially when placed in the context of long-term environmental sustainability, seem reasonable and, in fact, even relatively mainstream. My argument in this article, however, is that these messages, while on the surface seemingly agreeable, are not entirely benign. I suggest that the messages of shared heritage and sustainability found in the Confluence Project, rather than transforming and reimagining the story of Lewis and Clark, serve to further assimilate the Native American story as one more component of the American master narrative, create a false equation of Indigenous and settler experiences on the landscape, distance and erase the tragedies of colonialism, and perpetuate stereotypes of pristine nonanthropogenic landscapes. In effect, the Confluence Project hides what is a very real and specific history of colonial violence and dispossession and turns it instead into an ahistorical story of shared environmental concerns.

My arguments in this article are drawn from multiple visits to two of the Confluence Project artworks; the Vancouver Land Bridge in Vancouver, Washington, which connects the Columbia River with historic Fort Vancouver, and the bird blind at the Sandy River Delta east of Portland, Oregon, where the Sandy River flows into...