Friday, October 10
Historic Black Sites in Tacoma’s Hilltop Neighborhood - Monette Hearn
Explore the rich history of Tacoma’s Black community through sites surveyed as part of the Black Historic Sites of Washington Project that highlight key stories of resilience, activism, and culture. This tour features nine sites in the Hilltop neighborhood and share how diverse histories can be shared and honored, even when structures have been altered or even no longer exist. The tour will include a presentation and discussion at the Caballeros Club, the site being nominated to the National Register of Historic Places as a result of the survey, reflecting on the survey project’s impact and how preserving and sharing Black history is building community in Tacoma.
Japanese American Mukai Farm and Garden on Vashon Island - Jade Agua
Saturday, October 11
Evergreen State College Tacoma - 1210 6th Ave, Tacoma, WA 98405
What’s in a Name? Archie Phinney Hall and the Politics of Remembrance - Shelley Dael Walker-Harmon
This paper explores the power of place naming as a form of symbolic capital and symbolic resistance, focusing on the renaming of a University of Idaho building from Brigadier General Edward Chrisman Hall to Archie Phinney Hall in 1987. Through the story of its current namesake—Archie Phinney, a Nez Perce anthropologist, linguist, and Indigenous advocate—the paper examines how the built environment both reflects and shapes public memory. By analyzing the symbolic implications of this name change, the paper highlights how commemorative naming can serve as a tool for reclaiming space and honoring marginalized histories, advocating for a more inclusive and intentional approach to naming practices in institutional settings.
The Intellectual House as Quasi-Object Architecture: Diasporic Cultural Architecture and its Materiality for Cultural Reparation - Babita Joy
Based on the French philosopher Michel Serres’ theory of quasi-objects, this research primarily engages two distinct yet connected ideas -- first, it examines and identifies contemporary cultural spaces of diasporas as a new sub-typology of cultural buildings called Quasi-Object Architecture. According to Serres, “quasi-objects” are entities that occupy a middle ground between subjects and objects and function as mediators and connections between them. Next, it analyzes the materiality of such diasporic built works in becoming culturally reparative to the community. In so doing, the research studies the Intellectual House on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus as a Quasi-Object Architecture. While scholarship on the materiality of architecture has often focused on an aesthetic or a tectonic agenda, this research argues that architectural materiality is agential in cultural reparation.
Implementing design ideas and building materials that originate from the PNW Indigenous culture, the Intellectual House’s architectural vocabulary exercises a resistance to dominant forces surrounding them, physically and symbolically, while supporting a sense of belonging on a competitive and global university campus. This research argues that while historiography of Indigeneity often suggests the ephemeral, i.e., stories, songs, folklore, etc., the Intellectual House spotlights traditionally marginalized Native worlds. Using visual, material, and spatial analyses; interviews; and archival research, this interdisciplinary research reveals restorative spatial narratives of the oft-forgotten Native diaspora of the Pacific Northwest. The Intellectual House becomes the locator and indicator of contemporary Native diasporic cultural histories, underscoring the dynamics between cultural reparation, political and social powers around, and the role that built environments play in mediating these conditions.
Queer, Native, and South Asian histories and how we can use traditional and non traditional tools to expand the historic record - Manish Chalana, Ernestina Fuenmayor, Jessica Bonner, Susan Ferentinos, Kristen Minor, Dylan M. Stevenson
This panel brings together three speakers whose work challenges the conventional boundaries of historic preservation by centering the often-overlooked social histories of South Asian, Native American, and queer communities in the Pacific Northwest. Moving beyond material heritage, the session explores how inclusive narratives can reshape preservation practices and foreground the lived experiences, cultural memory, and resistance of marginalized groups.
The Counter-Archive: Stories from Outside the Architectural Record - Michael Uttley
City building is often understood as an additive process; a series of successive constructions made without regard for what came before. This paper emphasizes what has been removed and explores the stories embodied in the remains of demolished buildings. In many cities, debris and demolition waste is hidden in plain sight, used as fill for land reclamation projects in industrial port areas. This paper considers two such cases in Toronto, Ontario and Vancouver, British Columbia, exploring the heritage value of these landfill sites and contextualizing their resident artefacts within broader social, political, and material histories.
In Toronto, the remains of many demolished buildings can be traced to the Leslie Spit, a human-made peninsula and lakefront wilderness preserve where debris have been dumped since 1959. Through a series of archaeological explorations, including field research, the cataloging of artefacts, and analysis of archival documents, chronological relationships between specific events of demolition and dumping are established. A sample of discarded bricks recovered from the portion of Leslie Spit filled in June 1965 are traced to the demolition of a block opposite Toronto’s City Hall. These artefacts represent the culmination of a transformational civic project but also index the cultural and material displacement of a multi-ethnic, working-class community (The Ward) from the city centre. In Vancouver, similar methods are applied to human-made landscapes such as False Creek, a formerly industrial area that was filled in several phases, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing through the 1970s.
Artefacts recovered from these sites and other architectural graveyards are the forensic evidence of displacement and community erasure. They demonstrate that our cities are not neutral entities – they have counter-histories, and there were winners and losers in their making. These discarded fragments offer a reminder that the concept of “progress” is subjective, and it never arrives without consequences.
Note: Research on sites in Vancouver is preliminary/ongoing.
The Tacoma Tideflats: Distance and Environmental Psychology - Andrew Weymouth
This project investigates the overlapping spatial, economic, and ethical histories of Tacoma, Washington’s Tideflats—an industrial area shaped by more than a century of development, displacement, and exploitation. Originally developed to connect the city’s shipping trade to the Northern Pacific Railroad, the Tideflats have been the site of both the Carstens Packing Company, once the largest wholesale meat distributor on the West Coast, and the present-day Northwest Detention Center, a privately operated immigration detention facility. Although separated by time and industry, both enterprises were strategically located to benefit from proximity to transportation routes, unorganized labor, and civic infrastructure—while remaining physically and psychologically removed from the daily lives of Tacoma’s residents.
By uncovering archival blueprints, oral histories, and federal environmental assessments, this research traces how the geography of the Tideflats has enabled the sustained marginalization of immigrant and working-class communities. The comparison reveals a shared logic of profit through invisibility, where ethically and environmentally harmful practices are obscured from public scrutiny. Through this lens, the Tideflats become not just a site of industrial development but a case study in how urban peripheries are weaponized to separate consumption from consequence. The project asks: How far away can you be from a city’s residents so you are almost never considered, while still close enough to impact them environmentally or psychologically on a daily basis?
The Place to Tell the Story of the Puyallup People - Brandon Reynon and Amber Taylor, Puyallup Tribe Historic Preservation Department
In 2023, the Puyallup Tribe Historic Preservation Department opened a “mini museum” and exhibit titled Puyallup Tribe: The Story of Our People at their administrative offices. This project created a space for everyone to learn about the Puyallup people's rich history while encouraging all communities to learn from their past and converse about their future. This “mini museum” was a pilot project for the construction of a larger, permanent Tribal museum which is currently being designed. Brandon Reynon and Amber Taylor from the Puyallup Tribe Historic Preservation Department will present about the development of their new Tribal museum and how it is a step in the continual process of reclaiming Tribal history and returning artifacts to tribal lands.
Sunday, October 12
Washington State History Museum - 1911 Pacific Ave, Tacoma, WA 98402 (board room)
Reframing the Narrative: Language and Interpretation in Preservation - Morgan Quirk
SAH MDR/PNW chapter meeting