In 1999, Maya Lin was commissioned to create a series of earthworks to commemorate the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition from 2004 to 2006. The collective works are called the Confluence Project and were commissioned by a group of arts patrons working in collaboration with Indigenous Peoples of the Plateau, Columbia River Basin and Pacific Northwest. Lewis and Clark’s Corps of the Discovery expedition failed to achieve its mission to find a contiguous waterway across the continent but the explorers’ contact with the peoples, places and species of the West set in motion a brutal, blunt transformation of the Western landscape. It is this contact that Lin’s work seeks to “memorialize.” Lin is arguably most famous for her memorials, including the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC, the Civil Rights memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama and the Women’s Table on the campus of Yale University. Confluence Project planners sought Lin out based on this history and Lin took the commission, pledging that this would be her last memorial. In accepting the commission, she was explicit from the outset about not wanting to make monumental statues of two figures on a hill pointing westward like the ubiquitous image of Lewis and Clark seen throughout the region on historical placards and signs. When completed, the project will consist of six public art installations at various historical points and state parks along the Columbia. These include Cape Disappointment State Park, Washington; Fort Vancouver, Washington; Sandy River Delta, Oregon; Sacajawea State Park, Washington; and Chief Timothy Park, Washington. At the time of this writing, a final site at Celilo, Oregon is awaiting completion.

The Confluence Project, as originally conceived, was to include a seventh location. However, over the project’s nearly twenty-year lifespan to date, this location evolved from a physical site to a virtual one. Until around 2008, the final Confluence site was going to be an environmental research center in Ridgefield, Washington. Following the financial crisis, plans for this physical location were abandoned. Instead, Lin has proposed that a website and a online publication will be the seventh location. Lin’s interactive website WhatisMissing.net is a crowd-sourced website that documents species and habitat loss through interactive maps, videos, audio and links that incorporate scientific data with personal anecdotes to provide evidentiary claims of an environment in decline as a result of human activity. The website currently links to the Confluence Project’s website thereby incorporating regional information about species and habitat loss along the Columbia River with similar testimonials and scientific information about habitat decline across the globe.