Home and Homelands is a National Park Service exhibition about women making homes in the Pacific West — the parks from western Idaho out to the Mariana Islands. Each entry takes one object or place from one park and follows a woman's story through it. The stories are grouped under four themes: loss, work, politics and resistance.
The exhibition opens with an ordinary kitchen pot.
One jelly kettle, three histories
The kettle belonged to the Haynes family of Hanford, Washington, and the women of the family made jelly in it in the early 1900s. It comes from the Hanford site of Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Look at it from three distances and it tells three different stories.
| Layer | Who made home here | What the kettle shows |
|---|---|---|
| Pioneer | the Haynes family and their neighbours | Settlers irrigated the dry shrub-steppe from the Columbia River and turned it into a fruit belt. The berries the Haynes women boiled into jelly grew in those watered gardens, and farm households like theirs built Hanford into a busy farming town. |
| Indigenous | the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Wanapum and Yakama | Hanford was their homeland before it was a town. Every spring and summer they picked berries in the surrounding mountains, and Plateau women wove the baskets that gathered, stored and cooked them — and the salmon from the river. The settlement that made the kettle's jelly possible pushed them off that land. Native women have led the work of keeping that knowledge alive, then and now. |
| Federal | the U.S. government and its workers | In 1943 the government took over Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland under the War Powers Act to make plutonium for the Manhattan Project. More than a thousand residents were moved out, Native people lost further access to their homelands, and the farmhouses were bulldozed. |
What replaced the town
The farm town became a construction camp of more than 40,000 workers, separated by race and by sex.
Nearby Richland was rebuilt as a government town of prefabricated "alphabet houses" — a handful of standard floor plans, each known by a letter — with shops, schools and services laid on. It was meant for permanent professional staff, and nearly all of them were white. Black workers were hired as temporary labour and were not allowed to live there. A planned town that called itself egalitarian was an early version of the racially restricted suburbs that would define the postwar American Dream.
Women there still made homes, in the ways they knew, inside a system built on inequalities of race, sex and class. The jelly now came in jars from somewhere else.
Why start with a kettle
Taken one layer at a time, each story is about women whose daily work kept their families and communities going, often at real cost to themselves. Stacked in order, the layers show something harder: one group's idea of home has repeatedly been built on the ruin of another's.
The exhibition sets out to keep both views in sight — belonging and exclusion, beauty and violence, private life and public power — because that is what making a home in the West has meant. None of its stories stand outside the taking of Indigenous land, or outside the struggles between groups over who gets to claim a place.
The women in it are mostly not famous. They did what they had to in hard circumstances, stood up for their families and neighbours and for a fairer future, and rarely thought of what they did as remarkable. The first entry in the Loss thread is the Fort Spokane Indian Boarding School.
Sources
Written from "Home and Homelands Exhibition: Introduction" by Nicole Martin, PhD, published by the National Park Service for Manhattan Project National Historical Park and its women's history in the Pacific West project, which was funded in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.
收录于这些合集Manhattan Project National Historical ParkHome and Homelands Exhibition: Loss
许可协议： CC0 1.0（公有领域） · 改编自 www.nps.gov
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