Home and Homelands

This virtual 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. 

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.

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.

Below, 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 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.

Scroll down through the exhibit for an immersive experience. You can also jump to each theme using the navigation above, or you can use the map to explore these stories by location.

What does it mean to lose a home or homeland? What are the consequences?

Women played a prominent role in building, making, and sustaining the dreams of home held by their communities. The story of the Pacific West is in many ways the story of competing visions of home. When these visions clashed, many women and their families experienced tremendous loss – of their homes, their homelands, and often the cultural practices integral to their identities. The stories in this thread touch upon many of the darker moments in American history, including colonialism, forced removal, incarceration, war, and death. They showcase how women faced the violence of losing a home or homeland. Sometimes they bravely fought back at the cost of their own lives. Sometimes they had no choice but to endure by sustaining or building lives in the most challenging circumstances. Most of the stories below are told through photographs that can only capture a fleeting moment in time. Nonetheless, these images provide clues to how women felt and bore the loss of home over time.

What does it take to build a home? What would you be willing to sacrifice to make a home?

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans idealized isolated western homesteads. For the many women making and maintaining homes in the Pacific west, however, domestic life was not as picturesque as advertisements and novels made it out to be. They lived and breathed hard work. Many of the women that you will meet in this thread lived in a constant state of motion, moving to new places to build their homes and communities in difficult circumstances – whether environmental, political, or personal. Several of these women were settlers who benefitted from stolen Indigenous lands in order to make their own homes. Some of the stories below capture moments of exchange across cultures and time, of women sharing their knowledge of the land or recovering past traditions. What all the women’s stories share in common is pride in their work. One way or another, they all put their hands in the soil to claim resources and build homes. Whether wielding a kapa beater to create the cloth that would adorn the living and dead or planting a tree that would grow to sustain a family over several generations, these women sought to create a meaningful future for their families and larger communities.   

What counts as a home? Who has the right to call a place home? Who gets to decide?

Building a home is personal, but it has also always been political. This thread contains stories of belonging and exclusion. At the heart of each story is a woman or a group of women working, organizing, or fighting for their homes and homelands. Most of the women highlighted here fought for full inclusion in American society and to be able to make their homes despite systemic challenges and racial injustices. Some of the women fought for an autonomous homeland for their communities. The written word dominates in these stories – an interrogation interview, a war memorandum, an act to restore a homeland – all pleas for justice. The political, it turns out, demands women of incredible achievement and leadership.

How have the expectations of others shaped your life?

In the American context, ideas about home connect intimately to ideas about gender. In practice, 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 expanded beyond restrictive ideas about home and gender, as each of the stories in this thread capture. Some women have sought to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous or traditional ideas of home, adapting them to modern circumstances. Other women have sought to push the boundaries of home outward to expand the possibilities of what home encompasses. These stories are paired with the most eclectic objects of the exhibit – a knife, a paint can, a song in nimipuutímt, the diary of a girl obsessed with trains. These women and their stories of resistance conclude the exhibit precisely because they are stories about expanding what counts as a home and women’s relationship to it.