Part of a series of articles titled Home and Homelands Exhibition: Loss.
Article • Home and Homelands Exhibition: Loss
Home and Homelands Exhibition: Introduction
Courtesy of Hanford History Project/Phil Mudd
Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD
This exhibition uses objects and places to tell stories of extraordinary women.
Each entry is from a different national park in the Pacific West, an area stretching from western Idaho to the Mariana Islands that has been fundamental in forging American identity. Each story is a portal connecting us to our past and showing us one of the many ways that women made homes in the diverse places of the Pacific West. Taken together, their stories reveal women’s agency as they sustained life, preserved cultural identities, broke boundaries, and resisted challenges. Home is where you stand.
Many-Layered Jelly Kettle
This unassuming jelly kettle comes from the Hanford site of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Washington State. It was used by the women of the Haynes family to make jelly in the early 1900s. On its surface, this kettle evokes a dominant story of the American West: a story that celebrates the self-reliance and determination of the white pioneer family with hard working women at the center – building family farm homes in the unforgiving West. The Haynes family did in fact harness the power of the Columbia River to irrigate the dry shrub-steppe into a fruit belt, which included garden berries that the Haynes women used to make their jellies. In the process, these foremothers helped develop Hanford into a bustling agricultural community.
But this is only one layer of the story. The jelly kettle, representing the Haynes family's attachment to Hanford as a home, also offers a glimpse into a history of displacement, first of the Native Americans that lived there before the Haynes arrived and later of the rural community that the Haynes women helped to create.
Hanford lay within the homelands of the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Wanapum, and Yakama Tribes. Each spring and summer they harvested the abundant berries in the surrounding mountains. Indigenous women of the Columbia Plateau wove the baskets that gathered, stored, and cooked these berries, as well as salmon from the Columbia River. They had a different relationship to the land than the Haynes women, an important reminder that there are multiple ways of knowing and making homes on western lands. In the face of displacement at the hands of settler communities like Hanford, Native women were and continue to be at the forefront of preserving knowledge about their homes and lifeways.
If we unpack another layer and ask what happened after women stopped using jelly kettles, we find yet another story, one about federal power. In 1943, the U.S. government commandeered the towns of Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland under the War Powers Act, displacing over a thousand residents and further dispossessing Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands. They bulldozed settler homes to make room for plutonium production facilities for the Manhattan Project. The rural community that had been home to the Haynes family was replaced by a federal construction camp populated by over 40,000 workers that was segregated by race and gender.
Construction of the Hanford Engineer Works included the transformation of Richland into a government-built town complete with prefabricated “alphabet houses” with standardized floor plans and numerous amenities. Richland was reserved for professional permanent employees, nearly all of whom were white. As temporary workers, African Americans were prohibited from living there. This planned “egalitarian” community foreshadowed the racially restrictive mass suburban housing that became synonymous with the post World War II American Dream. In this new industrial setting, and in the face of race, gender, and class inequities, women continued to create homes in familiar ways. Now, mass-produced jelly in jars imported from elsewhere replaced the jelly kettle and the woven baskets of before.
These three layers – Indigenous, pioneer, and federal – are significant to the history of homemaking in the Pacific West. When we zoom in on any single layer of the jelly kettle’s story, we can see how women’s everyday work supported their homes and homelands. Their sacrifice and determination are paramount. If we zoom out and place these layers in succession, we can see how one group’s vision of home has often meant the destruction of another’s.
Construction of the Hanford Engineer Works included the transformation of Richland into a government-built town complete with prefabricated “alphabet houses” with standardized floor plans and numerous amenities. Richland was reserved for professional permanent employees, nearly all of whom were white. As temporary workers, African Americans were prohibited from living there. This planned “egalitarian” community foreshadowed the racially restrictive mass suburban housing that became synonymous with the post World War II American Dream. In this new industrial setting, and in the face of race, gender, and class inequities, women continued to create homes in familiar ways. Now, mass-produced jelly in jars imported from elsewhere replaced the jelly kettle and the woven baskets of before.
These three layers – Indigenous, pioneer, and federal – are significant to the history of homemaking in the Pacific West. When we zoom in on any single layer of the jelly kettle’s story, we can see how women’s everyday work supported their homes and homelands. Their sacrifice and determination are paramount. If we zoom out and place these layers in succession, we can see how one group’s vision of home has often meant the destruction of another’s.
Home and Homelands Exhibition
You will find these women’s stories organized by four major themes: loss, work, politics, and resistance. Within these themes, we find striking similarities in the stories across both time and place. None of them can escape the dispossession of Indigenous homelands or the power dynamics between groups of people as they claimed, made, and fought for their homes.The goal of the exhibition is to hold those truths together – connection and segregation, beauty and violence, the personal and political – in order to better see the whole of a most basic human endeavor: to make a home.
The women in this exhibition are like many of the women in your community. Most of them were doing what they needed to survive in challenging situations. They stood up for their families and communities, for justice, and for a better future for the next generation. Most of them had no idea how exceptional their efforts were. By gathering their stories together, we shine a light on the Pacific West and the remarkable women who have called it home.
Exhibition Threads
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- Type: Series
- Sites: Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail, American Memorial Park, Big Hole National Battlefield, Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area, more »
What does it mean to lose a home or homeland? What are the consequences? The story of the Pacific West is of competing visions of home, and the women who built and sustained the dreams held by their communities. The stories in this thread touch upon many of the darker moments in American history, including colonialism, forced removal, incarceration, war, and death. They show women bravely fought back at the cost of their own lives. Some had no choice but to endure.
- Type: Series
- Sites: City Of Rocks National Reserve, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Haleakalā National Park, Klondike Gold Rush - Seattle Unit National Historical Park, Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, more »
What does it take to build a home? These women lived and breathed hard work, building their homes in difficult circumstances. Several were settlers who benefitted from stolen Indigenous lands. Some shared their knowledge of the land. They all had pride in their work. They all put their hands in the soil to claim resources and build homes. Whether wielding a kapa beater to create cloth or planting a tree to sustain a family for generations, these women created futures for their communities.
- Type: Series
- Sites: César E. Chávez National Monument, Death Valley National Park, Honouliuli National Historic Site, Minidoka National Historic Site, Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial, more »
Who has the right to call a place home? Who gets to decide? Building a home is personal, but it also political. This thread contains stories of belonging and exclusion. At the heart of each story is a woman or group working, organizing, or fighting for their homes and homelands. Most of them fought for full inclusion in American society despite systemic challenges and racial injustices. Some fought for an autonomous homeland. The written word dominates – all pleas for justice.
- Type: Series
- Sites: Channel Islands National Park, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, John Muir National Historic Site, Kalaupapa National Historical Park, Lake Mead National Recreation Area, more »
How have the expectations of others shaped your life? Ideas about home and gender are intimately connected. This has often meant confining women to a particular space – the home – and solely to domestic roles – a wife, a mother, a homemaker. But women have long pushed against this. Some sought to reclaim their Indigenous ideas of home. These stories of resistance conclude the exhibit precisely because they expand what counts as a home and women’s relationship to it.
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Last updated: June 6, 2024