“I couldn’t write his name, couldn’t carve his name into the piece… We couldn’t include the [Freeman] name in the title, either,” Tarver says. “It absolutely sanitized the work and intention.” Tarver says that’s why she decided to title the until-then nameless piece “Author Redacted, or The Seattle Star (1919).”

Snowden originally wrote, “You find it easy to forget how cruel you were just one grandmother ago, how you uprooted some of your people, drove them into camps, and sold what they had from under them.” That line later became: “But you’ve turned on the people who helped you build before,” among other changes. “I had to be more circumspect about it,” Snowden says.

A third participant, artist Erin Shigaki, says sentences referencing Miller Freeman and his grandson, Bellevue real estate magnate Kemper Freeman Jr., were taken out of the wall text she wrote to accompany her Bellwether sculpture, also on view at City Hall.

Shigaki was in the news recently, after an incident at Bellevue College (first reported by The Seattle Times) in which someone at the school whited out a sentence in a mural she had created that referenced anti-Japanese agitation by Eastside businessmen, including Miller Freeman. (The college’s president and one of its vice presidents have since left.) But Bellwether happened six months earlier, and in that instance Shigaki says not one, but three sentences referring to the Freeman family were removed before the descriptive plaque was printed.