American Origami: From Columbine to Parkland, Reading the Relice of Grief

Blacksburg, VA

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Archived newspaper clippings from the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Columbine, CO. Denver Public Library, Denver, CO

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Angel: Item from the April 16, 2007, Condolence Archives, Virginia Tech Special Collections Library. Blacksburg, VA

Chest x-ray, Ryan Auginash

Quilt: Gift to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Not yet archived

Japanese legend has it that anyone who makes 1,000 paper cranes will be granted any wish, a piece of lore rooted in the cultural reverence for this regal bird, which was once thought to live to a thousand years. This story of wish-making was embraced by a twelve-year-old Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki, who had been struggling with leukemia as a result of the US bombing of Hiroshima. The year she died, Sadako was able to make more than 1,400 paper cranes with the help of her classmates. Decades later, a children's book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, told her story to an American audience, which helped to popularize the ritual of making origami cranes in response to tragedy.

Whenever a mass school shooting happens, the grieving community is inundated with gifts and letters. (In Parkland, Florida, alone, 227 boxes of mementos were collected at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School within a month of the shooting there.) For more than five years now, I've been visiting these communities, studying the massive accumulation of materials sent in response to this particular kind of tragedy. I have sifted through hundreds of boxes of artifacts, mostly stored in basements and vaults beneath state archives, university libraries, and local museums. I've found lengthy handwritten letters, confessional letters, letters that express a deep empathy for what these communities may be going through. Most seem prescribed by past tragedies, using sentimental language embedded in our collective memory. Many young children write without seeming to fully grasp the meaning of their condolences.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in December 2012, the communities of Sandy Hook and Newtown, Connecticut, received more than 65,000 teddy bears and half a million letters, as well as paintings, quilts, poetry, and religious memorabilia sent from around the world. Newtown City Hall attempted to preserve all these gifts to the grieving but quickly ran out of room. The items were eventually moved to an airplane hangar outside of town in nine tractor trailers, but soon that, too, overfilled. Except for a selection taken to the Connecticut State Library, the town decided to incinerate the tonnage of gifts and memorabilia. A Newtown resident and amateur photographer named Yolie Moreno heard of this plan and decided to photograph each item on its way to the incinerator. She told me she felt every artifact needed to be touched, opened, seen, and read at least once. The incineration produced a few small boxes of ash, which the city has designated "sacred soil." The boxes are now stored behind locked doors underneath city hall. Yolie took a small vial for herself. When I asked her if she had actually documented everything, she said yes, except for anything hateful, which went straight into the fire.

Ten people died on March 21, 2005, on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, Minnesota, during the Red Lake High School shooting. The Tribal Archives in Red Lake did not have any mementos in their possession when I visited last year, and few had been saved by the community. Kathryn "Jody" Beaulieu, the director of the Tribal Archives and Library at the time of the shooting, told me that for the Ojibwe, burning the belongings of the departed is common after one passes on, as a way of freeing their spirit. The idea of artifact—and collecting...