Japanese immigrants began settling on Bainbridge Island, a hilly, forested patch of land two miles west of Seattle, in the 1880s. Early arrivals found work in the Port Blakely mill, but within a generation, many Japanese residents had established their own businesses, including plant nurseries and produce farms. By the time Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, the Japanese American population on Bainbridge was approaching 300, or about 1 in 10 island residents.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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In the wake of the attack, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which called for the relocation of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast to internment camps. Those on Bainbridge—the first of the 120,000 Japanese Americans eventually incarcerated—were initially sent to a hastily built camp in Manzanar, in the high desert of California’s Owens Valley; most were subsequently relocated to a camp in Idaho. The detainees were given less than a week to pack their bags.
The path that exiled residents followed on March 30, 1942, to board the ferry Keholoken is now part of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, which was dedicated in 2002. The memorial’s serpentine wall—designed by the Indigenous architect Johnpaul Jones, who lives on Bainbridge—is made of old-growth redwood atop a granite base and is 276 feet long: one foot for each person of Japanese descent removed from the island during World War II. Among other features, the memorial is decorated with terra-cotta friezes by the artist Steve Gardner that suggest both the extent to which Japanese immigrants and their descendants, collectively known as Nikkei, had become part of the fabric of the community on Bainbridge and how their removal tore at that fabric.
The density of information that is crowded onto the wall struck me, when I visited on a warm, cloudless afternoon in May, as fitting. It suggests a kind of historical compression, reflecting the way that Japanese Americans’ collective time on Bainbridge, more than six decades, was squeezed by the evacuation order into a six-day rush of preparations and goodbyes, and then the way that the trip from their homes to the ferry dock became a grim march, watched over by armed soldiers, along this final stretch of walkway to the boat itself.
In a broader sense, as many memorials do, this one collapses the events it commemorates and the time taken to arrive at the decision to build it into a single viewing experience. The historical gap between 1942, when Nikkei on Bainbridge were rounded up, and 2002, the year of the dedication, is as much the subject of the memorial as the banishment and internment themselves.
Across the American West, a new generation of memorials and monuments, some more artistically accomplished than others, explores that compression from a variety of perspectives. In late spring, I traveled to several of them, with a focus on sites completed since 2000. I wanted to avoid older, prominent memorials that were often erected by elites to sell the public on an incomplete or self-serving version of history. Newer monuments would offer a glimpse into the ways in which the West is grappling with more recent tragedies, including a growing number of mass shootings, and at the same time reflect shifting notions of which more distant historical events, such as the Japanese incarceration, need to be pulled back into public view and reckoned with more directly.
RESTORED CONNECTIONS
From Bainbridge, I headed south, through the Olympic Peninsula, to the memorably named Cape Disappointment State Park, where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific. My destination was the westernmost of the six sites that make up the Confluence project, an initiative organized by the state of Washington and numerous tribes, including the Chinook, the Umatilla, and the Nez Perce, to coincide with the 200th anniversary, in 2005, of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Tribal leaders engaged the architect and artist Maya Lin, best known for her 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., to craft a series of art and landscape designs along the Columbia River basin. In 2006, Lin completed installations on two sides of Cape Disappointment, in a project called Cape D.
The first installation includes a fish-cleaning table made of a single block of basalt (inscribed with a Chinook origin legend) and a simple, curved viewing platform overlooking Baker Bay. The second features a pair of walking paths. One is lined with boardwalk planks bearing snippets from Lewis’s and Clark’s journal entries. The other, leading to an arrangement of cedar driftwood columns around a cedar tree trunk, is made of crushed oyster shells. This path is inset with bands of concrete etched with sections of a Chinook song of praise:
We call upon all those who have lived on this earth
Our ancestors and our friends
Who dreamed the best for future generations
And upon whose lives our lives are built
And with thanksgiving, we call upon them to
Teach us and show us the way.
Lin’s Confluence designs, in her own steadfast way, hold up a number of manifest destiny tropes for scrutiny, setting side by side the heroic, high rationalist language of western expansion and Chinook narratives that strike a more mythic, communitarian, or fantastical tone. It’s telling that the boardwalk featuring the Lewis and Clark journal entries leads to the Pacific, the end point of their exploration, while the path quoting the Chinook song of praise bends away from the edge of the continent and back into the woods. Throughout, as is typical of Lin’s best recent work, the design is subtle to the point of invisibility. As the artist explains on the website of her firm, Maya Lin Studio, “My goal at times was to disappear, not to add an artwork [but] to erase prior damage and to restore a connection back to the environment.”
COMMUNITY COLLABORATION
Lin was a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate when she won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. She therefore brought to her work on the Confluence project an approach to memorial design that she has shaped over four full decades. And along the Columbia, she was grappling with events two centuries old. The development of the memorial at the site I visited next—a vast, sunbaked parking lot just east of the casino and hotel towers lining the Las Vegas Strip—could hardly have unfolded more differently. It was here that the Route 91 Harvest country music festival, on October 1, 2017, became the backdrop for the deadliest shooting at the hands of a solo gunman in American history. A 64-year-old retiree and avid gambler named Stephen Paddock, looking down on the festival from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, opened fire on concertgoers with more than 1,000 rounds. He killed 58 people, and hundreds more were injured by bullets and in the chaos that occurred at ground level.
In the fall of 2019, Nevada governor Stephen Sisolak and the Clark County Board of Commissioners announced the formation of the seven-member 1 October Memorial Committee, which would ultimately oversee a budget of more than $25 million. Nearly four years later—in July 2023, after a three-stage process—the committee announced it had chosen a design by JCJ Architecture, a firm with offices in Las Vegas and six other cities.
The committee and JCJ showed great deference to the wishes of survivors and the families of victims, closely engaging with them throughout the design process. This collaborative approach, as part of broader public outreach, is increasingly central to memorial design in America. It can often pay clear dividends, anchoring design concepts in community aspiration and building support to fund and maintain the final product. This was certainly the case with the Confluence sites I saw. I’d argue it has also been true in the development of the forthcoming memorial by Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and Judy Chui-Hua Chung for the victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles, a project that I helped launch while working in the L.A. Mayor’s Office from 2018 to 2022 (see “Knowing and Grieving Two Massacres”).
In other instances, especially where the design being considered has diffuse goals from the start, or where the larger political or cultural meanings of a violent event remain contested, this method can chip away at coherence and aesthetic rigor. Among the most important skills a memorial designer can bring to the task is, in fact, a willingness to step out of time and consider a longer or even a strategically detached view.
Signs of this dynamic aren’t hard to spot in the plans for the Las Vegas memorial, which include a nearly endless menu of design gestures, from the abstract to the saccharine. The heart of the memorial, called Forever One, is a series of walking paths that, as seen from above, resemble the infinity sign. The site, according to descriptive text by JCJ, will be crowned by a conical “tower of light” 58 feet high—one foot for each victim, and meant to be “highly visible from anywhere along the southern Las Vegas Strip.” Elsewhere, the text echoes the language of marketing, with references to design elements that “set the tone” for the “guest experience.”
What’s lost in this compulsion to label and explain nearly every element of the memorial—in what we might think of as its hyperlegibility—is any reference to the culture of gun ownership and gun violence that has furthered our epidemic of mass shootings, to say nothing of any exploration of links between that culture and myths of self-reliant individualism that are so often connected in the popular imagination with landscapes of westward expansion. (As the historian Brian DeLay wrote in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, American gun manufacturers for more than a century have found new buyers by “hitching their domestic marketing to the brutal romance of the American West.”) Paddock brought 24 firearms into his connected pair of Mandalay Bay suites, including more than a dozen .223-caliber AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, eight .308-caliber AR-10-style rifles, and the Smith & Wesson revolver he used to shoot himself in the head as police closed in. An investigation after the shooting found that he had purchased each of the weapons legally.
TRAGEDIES AND TRAGEDY
Less mute on the subject of gun violence, and far more effective as a work of design, is the landscape designer Walter Hood’s Curtain of Courage memorial in San Bernardino. It opened in June 2022 to commemorate the lives of the 14 people killed in the 2015 shooting at the Inland Regional Center, carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple the FBI described as “homegrown violent extremists.” The memorial is located not at that site but at a larger county building nearby. Completed for a relatively modest $1.5 million, it stretches along a pedestrian walkway and features 14 curved alcoves lined with a curtain of laser-cut steel, which blazes gold each evening when illuminated by the setting sun.
The hexagonal pattern on the curtain, according to Hood’s firm, “evokes the construction of bullet-proof vests.” The alcoves, meanwhile, suggest not just a way to remember but—in a society where mass shootings have invaded churches, synagogues, movie theaters, schools, nightclubs, music festivals, and in this case the banal interior of a county-government office building—a fortified place to hide.
The collective tragedy of a mass shooting has become all too familiar to Americans; what about honoring the life of a victim who suffered alone? Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of Wyoming when, on October 6, 1998, after attending a planning meeting for Gay Awareness Week at the university, he walked into the Fireside Lounge in downtown Laramie and met two men around his age, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Later that night, McKinney and Henderson, who had worked together on roofing jobs, lured Shepard to McKinney’s pickup truck. They drove him to a remote spot in the foothills just northeast of town and, after taking his wallet, tied him to a split rail fence and beat him with the butt of a pistol before leaving him in the cold to die. “Almost 18 hours later,” notes the Matthew Shepard Foundation, “he was found by a bicyclist who initially mistook him for a scarecrow.” Shepard died of his injuries six days later at a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Shepard’s parents, who live in Casper, Wyoming, worked with University of Wyoming officials to install a bench with a small rectangular plaque in front of the pale-brick Arts and Science Building on campus. The plaque reads, “Matthew Wayne Shepard / December 1, 1976–October 12, 1998 / Beloved son, brother, and friend / He continues to make a difference / Peace be with him and all who sit here.” The simplicity of the message disappointed some friends of Shepard’s who had hoped for a more prominent statement acknowledging his homosexuality, the nature of his death, or both. Visitors, however, regularly add stickers, signs, and other materials with LGBTQ themes to the bench, or to the area around it, lending the site as a whole a poignant, and ever-shifting, collective energy. On the day I visited, the surface of the bench was almost entirely covered by these items, many of them bleached from their time in the sun.
ONGOING REMEMBRANCES
After leaving Laramie, I drove north toward the final stop on my tour: South Dakota’s Crazy Horse Memorial, in the Black Hills National Forest, a tribute to Indigenous people, blasted from a tall rock face of pegmatite granite. It is not a new project by any means—it was begun in the late 1940s—but it’s still very much an ongoing one, a mammoth work in progress. Initiated by the sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski on the invitation of Chief Henry Standing Bear, the monument shows Crazy Horse on horseback, with one Brobdingnagian outstretched arm pointing southeast, toward Lakota lands. After Ziolkowski died in 1982, work on the monument was carried on by his wife and later their children and grandchildren, as well as by members of the Lakota tribe.
The design is at once a rebuke of and—in some unfortunate ways, including how it strip-mines the landscape—a sibling to Mount Rushmore, which is just up the road, and on which Ziolkowski also worked, as an assistant to sculptor Gutzon Borglum. (Workers at both sites began by dynamiting the hillside to dislodge large pieces of rock, as a precursor to finer sculpting with handheld tools.) When finished—and it remains less than a third complete—the memorial will measure 563 feet tall by 641 feet across: “higher than the Washington Monument,” as South Dakota Magazine put it, “larger than the pyramid of Gizeh, and so massive all four of the heads at Rushmore could fit inside the head of Crazy Horse when it is completed.”
The main impression the unfinished memorial made on me, in its scale and mad ambition, was an unmistakably quixotic quality, tilting at the notoriety of Mount Rushmore and the ghosts of American history. The memorial’s board of directors, the tribe, and the sculptor’s family have carried on Ziolkowski’s policy of refusing public funding of any kind, which is one reason for its glacial progress. Reactions from some of the Lakota themselves to the project, at its inception and more recently, have been mixed.
Mass shootings, the subjugation of tribal communities, antigay violence, wartime hysteria: to the extent that there are links among the events that give rise to the new memorials of the American West, it is in their shared roots in the region where our nation’s valorization of conquest and celebration of individualism have played out in the most extreme ways. These are landscapes that were brought to heel—Americanized—by power and bloodshed, state-sanctioned or otherwise. It would be naïve to think that the echoes of that violence will subside anytime soon.
Taken together, the commemorative sites I visited suggest that the region is, yes, reckoning with past injustice more fully than ever before—but also continuing to produce, at a volume I fear we are becoming dumbly accustomed to, new victims whose lives, and deaths, deserve to be marked in public space. The overriding impression I got from a week on the road, from Puget Sound to the southwestern desert to the Black Hills, is that the memorial makers are struggling to keep up.•
Christopher Hawthorne is a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a former longtime architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2018 to 2022, he served as chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, where he helped organize the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group and edited its 2021 report and recommendations, Past Due.
