Design chosen for first monument saluting Native American veterans
WASHINGTON – The design for the first national monument to Native American veterans in Washington came to Harvey Pratt in a dream.
Pratt, a 77-year-old Marine Corps veteran and member of the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, woke up with a vision: a steel circle poised above a drum whose surface rippled with water, a flame burning in the circle’s center, the entire structure ringed by a low wall studded with four tall lances. He sat down in his living room in Guthrie, Okla., grabbed a yellow legal pad and started sketching.
After months of work and several revisions, a version of Pratt’s drawing was on Tuesday named the winner of the international contest to design the National Native American Veterans Memorial. An eight-member jury appointed by the National Museum of the American Indian – on whose grounds the memorial will be built – unanimously voted for Pratt’s design, titled “Warriors’ Circle of Honor,” over four other finalists.
“It’s a great honor for me and my family and our team of people that we’ve accumulated to make this happen,” Pratt said in an interview. “I’m so happy for our Native American veterans that they are finally going to be recognized on the Mall in Washington.”
Pratt, an internationally renowned forensic artist who worked with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation for over three decades, said he drew on his experience reconstructing suspects and victims’ faces from witness descriptions to help translate his dream of the monument from his mind to the page. He also relied on his artistic background – Pratt is an accomplished painter and sculptor and previously designed a memorial in Denver that commemorates the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado.
Groundbreaking for the memorial will take place Sept. 21, 2019, and the monument is slated to open in late 2020. Its construction – projected to cost $8 million – will end more than a decade of anticipation: Congress authorized the memorial in 1994, though it did not permit fundraising until 2013.
Museum staff and members of an advisory committee in 2015 began traveling around the country and meeting with tribal leaders and military veterans to solicit their input on the memorial. Two years and 16 states later, the committee developed several guiding principles: The design had to represent and honor all tribes and traditions, recognize the sacrifices of native families, include an element of spirituality, and offer visitors a peaceful place to heal. The contest officially launched in November 2017. By the time the submissions window closed two months later, the jury had received 120 entries.
The jury winnowed the field to five finalists in late January. For the next several months, Pratt worked 16-hour days alongside a team of four – his wife and business manager Gina, his son Nathan, and Hans and Torrey Butzer of Oklahoma-based architectural firm Butzer Architects and Urbanism – to tweak and finalize his design before submitting a revised proposal in May. Pratt said he woke up and went to bed thinking about the memorial.
The jurors wrote in a final report that Pratt’s design is “culturally resolute and spiritually engaging” and fulfills every one of the advisory committee’s directives.