For over 100 years, the University of Washington Press has producedgroundbreaking books for a global community of scholars as well as essential books that tell the stories of our city and region. Over the past three years, we’ve released 150 new books, organized hundreds of public talks and other author events, and collaborated with numerous campus and community partners to carry out this vital work.
With this report, I’d like to highlight some of our recent activities—not just our fantastic new books but the many ways in which we engage the world and support the public good. From combatting misinformation with robustly peer-reviewed publications to diversifying the publishing industry to co-creating materials for Indigenous revitalization, our work touches many lives on campus, in our local communities, and around the world. We invite you to learn more about us in the following pages.
February 12 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1974 Boldt Decision, a watershed ruling that affirmed the fishing rights and tribal sovereignty of Native nations in Washington State and transformed Indigenous law and resource management across the United States and beyond. In recognition of this significant ruling, the University of Washington Press is honored to announce the publication of Treaty Justice: The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights by eminent legal historian and longtime tribal advocate Charles Wilkinson.
Expert and compelling, Treaty Justice weaves personalities and local detail into the definitive account of one of the twentieth century’s most important civil rights cases. Wilkinson tells the dramatic story of the Boldt Decision against the backdrop of salmon’s central place in the cultures and economies of the Pacific Northwest.
In the mid-twentieth century, when Native people reasserted their fishing rights as delineated in nineteenth-century treaties, state officials worked with non-Indian commercial and sport fishing interests to forcefully—and often violently—oppose Native actions. What became known as the “fish wars” of the 1960s spurred twenty tribes and the US government to file suit in federal court. Moved by the testimony of tribal leaders and other experts, Judge George Boldt pointedly waited until Lincoln’s birthday to hand down a decision recognizing the tribes’ right to half of the state’s fish. The case’s long aftermath led from the Supreme Court’s affirmation of Boldt’s opinion to collaborative management of the harvest of salmon and other marine resources.
For Wilkinson, the Boldt Decision sits alongside Brown v. Board of Education and a select few other court cases in terms of bringing justice to dispossessed peoples and resulting in far-reaching societal changes. He writes, “Like those opinions, the Boldt Decision’s ramifications are many and still felt today . . . [it] vividly displays the brilliance and worth of the American system of justice and the moral and tangible benefits it can achieve at its heights.”
As a young civil rights attorney in 1971, Wilkinson joined the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), where he worked alongside John Echohawk (Pawnee) and the late David Getches to fight for the rights of tribal nations, earning significant victories across the United States. After four years at NARF, he became a law professor, teaching first at the University of Oregon in Eugene and then at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Over the next half-century, he built a legacy as one of the foremost scholars of Indian law.
In a tribute for High Country News, Daniel Cordalis and Kristen Carpenter write that “Charles was more than a brilliant lawyer, dedicated professor and gifted author; he was a true friend to Indian Country. To him, the field of federal Indian law was not just an interesting intellectual or professional pursuit; rather, it was a testament to the perseverance of a people. He saw that Indigenous people achieved the revival of tribal nations through their own vision, determination and action, not because of the federal government or anyone else.”
Charles Wilkinson has done it again. With unmatched familiarity and command, he adds another essential volume to the amazing history of Indigenous activism and legal advocacy that has made the Northwest such a vibrant region for Native rights and power. While much more remains to be done to affirm the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty in American legal institutions, Wilkinson’s insights, vision, and legacy offer both guidance and inspiration.
Ned Blackhawk, author of the National Book Award-Winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Treaty Justice was supported by a generous grant from the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and made possible in part thanks to the support of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. The book was also supported by the Tulalip Tribes Charitable Fund, which provides the opportunity for a sustainable and healthy community for all. Additional funding was provided by a grant from the Hugh and Jane Ferguson Foundation.
UW Press also thanks Michael Burnap and Irene Tanabe, Vasiliki Dwyer, Ellen Ferguson, Kelby Fletcher and Janet Boguch, Mary Hotchkiss and Mary Whisner, Barbara Johns in memory of David Getches, Sandeep Kaushik and Elizabeth Goodwin, Suzanne Kotz and Stephen Tarnoff, Michael Repass, and Cynthia Sears for their generous gifts in support of the book.
Read an excerpt from Treaty Justice in the Seattle Times Pacific NW Magazine.
Upcoming Events
UW Press is proud to join the Northwest Treaty Tribes, the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NWIFC), and the Washington State Historical Society in commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Boldt Decision.
US v WA: 50th Anniversary. February 6 and 7 at the Muckleshoot Events Center in Auburn. The Northwest Treaty Tribes and the NWIFC present two full days of events and programming, including a presentation of Treaty Justice by Charles Wilkinson’s family; a screening of Fish War, a documentary produced by NWIFC and North Forty Productions; and a series of panels reflecting on the impact of the Boldt Decision.
Usual and Accustomed Grounds. Exhibition on view February 10–September 1 at the Washington State History Museumin Tacoma. This exhibition focuses on the story of the Native fishing rights movement in Washington State and marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision. Through artifacts, photos, and footage, learn about how tribal people and nations resisted termination policies and fought for treaty-protected fishing access, cultural survival, and sovereignty—with impacts still felt today.
Boldt at 50: Reflecting on Treaty Justice and Tribal Sovereignty. February 12, 7:30 pm at Town Hall in Seattle. Centered around Wilkinson’s Treaty Justice, a panel will discuss the significance of the Boldt Decision and its enduring impact on the tribal sovereignty movement in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Featuring Jeremiah “Jay” Julius, a fisherman and member of the Lummi Nation; Lynda V. Mapes, author and Seattle Times journalist specializing in the environment and Native American issues; Nancy Shippentower, a Puyallup elder and activist; and Coll Thrush, noted historian and author of Native Seattle. The event is set to open with Native drummers and will also feature remarks from Darrell Hillaire, executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions (CSSP), and a film clip from CSSP. Books will be available from Third Place Books.
Symposium: The Boldt Decision at 50. March 30, 10:00 am–5:00 pm at the Washington State History Museumin Tacoma. This daylong symposium will explore the history of the ruling that served as an affirmation of Tribal fishing rights and sovereignty, featuring a lecture from state historian John Hughes; a panel conversation with representatives from the Nisqually Tribe, the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, and the Squaxin Island Tribe; and an opportunity for program participants to connect with panelists and purchase copies of relevant historical scholarship. Guests will also have the rare opportunity to view the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek.
My new book, The Unknown Great: Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History, cowritten with Jonathan van Harmelen, is a collection of short pieces on remarkable people and things in Japanese American history. Beyond being interesting in themselves, when put together, the stories constitute a counter-history of ethnic Japanese in North America, refuting received ideas about the group.
When it came time to think about potential covers for the book, I was not sure what to propose. As the partner of a graphic designer, I long ago learned that producing an acceptable book cover is one of the most difficult aspects of book publishing. The designer must be able to come up with something that will please the author, the press’s marketing department and—one hopes—themself. The design must immediately express the idea of the work and attract the potential reader into choosing it (the old saw notwithstanding, many many people do in fact judge books by their covers!). The author can be as much a hindrance as a help. If an author proposes images for which the rights cannot be obtained or which are not sufficiently clear or high-resolution, it just makes life difficult for the designer.
Especially tricky is producing a cover for a book like The Unknown Great that revolves around a variety of themes. Whether such a cover is typographical or illustrative in nature, the same problem remains: How can the cover designer choose just one aspect of the book to express? How can the contrasting themes be dramatized in a way that leads to a unified presentation? To be sure, my previous collection with University of Washington Press, The Unsung Great, had a cover featuring a mosaic of portraits, and I found it most satisfying. Still, I did not want a cover that looked too similar to that one. On the other hand, none of the photos that I had found to illustrate the individual articles was powerful enough to carry the weight of the entire book’s meaning by itself.
It was then that I hit on the idea of proposing for the cover a striking image that I had just come across. In 2021, my collaborator Jonathan van Harmelen and I wrote a two-partarticle on the great photographer Toge Fujihira, and in the process of research we interviewed Fujihira’s two children. Toge’s daughter Kay Bromberg graciously invited us to visit the extensive archive that she maintained of her father’s work.
Sometime later, I accepted Kay’s invitation and visited the archive. I was bowled over by the variety and depth of Fujihira’s photography. While reviewing his work from the wartime period, which he had spent in New York City, I discovered a set of snapshots he took in the mid-1940s, at a beach on what looked like Long Island. In the snaps were a number of Nisei men and women in bathing suits; he photographed them alone and in teams—even one with them all together, piled on each other in a pyramid. While the majority of the images were of women, my eye was caught by one that featured a pair of smiling Japanese American men in bathing suits, happily embracing. Their affection for each other and the obvious ease they felt in holding their (shirtless) bodies against each other shined through.
Fujihira’s photo . . . expressed so many of the “marginal” stories and themes I had discovered in Japanese American history: Nisei outside the West Coast; the postwar lives that Japanese Americans built following their wartime incarceration; the presence of creative artists, including photographers, in their communities; and yes, Japanese American sexuality.
Greg Robinson
The photographs did not list any of the names of the people involved, and neither Kay nor I was able to identify the men in the picture. It was unclear whether they were friends, colleagues, or brothers, or whether they were romantic partners (though homosexuality would have generally been considered taboo in the United States at that time, and an openly gay couple shocking). The very mystery of their identities and connection to each other heightened the both the power and ambiguity of the image: Was it homoerotic, homosocial, or fraternal? Whichever the case, it was clear that in an era when Nisei, like other American men, were conditioned to restrain their emotions, at least in public, an image showing such open warmth between them was exceptional.
Kay generously gifted me a duplicate print of the image and agreed to let me publish it. At first, I wasn’t sure in what context I should present it. While it was unlikely that the men in the photo were still alive, some seventy-five years later, I worried whether they might have descendants who would criticize me for misrepresenting them. When I had the opportunity to propose a cover image for The Unknown Great, I realized that the image of the men from Fujihira’s photo would be perfect. It expressed so many of the “marginal” stories and themes I had discovered in Japanese American history: Nisei outside the West Coast; the postwar lives that Japanese Americans built following their wartime incarceration; the presence of creative artists, including photographers, in their communities; and yes, Japanese American sexuality. Yet it evoked these themes in symbolic, not representative, fashion.
In the end, it worked out superbly. Heng Wee Tan, the cover designer, agreed to incorporate the Fujihira photo into his design. Meanwhile, he had the happy idea of putting the type on a slant, which makes it appear that the image is in motion, passing from the margin toward the center. The color is an unusual shade of orange, marking the unorthodox nature of the contents. All these elements work together to highlight the book’s examination of the margins of Japanese American history.
Author’s Note: After writing this post, I received a message from the writer Susan Kiyo Ito, who identified the two men in the photo used on my book cover. They are, respectively, Kiyoshi and Asao Inouye, two native New Yorkers who were the older and younger brothers of Susan’s mother, Kikuko Inouye Ito. Toge Fujihira was a friend and basketball teammate of both Inouyes. Susan also identified the location of the photo as Lake George, New York. Susan believes that her father, Masaji Ito, who was a photographer, may have taken the photo in question. I found the image amid a series of photos in Fujihira’s archive, but I am unable to state definitively that it was his work. If it was not, I regret any unintentional misattribution.
Greg Robinson is professor of history at l’Université du Québec à Montréal and author of several books, including The Unsung Great: Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans and After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life.
Photographs of receding glaciers are one of the most well recognized visualizations of human-caused climate change. These images, captured through repeat photography, have become effective with an unambiguous message: global warming is happening, and it is happening now. But this wasn’t always the case. The meaning and evidentiary value of repeat glacier photography has varied over time, reflecting not only evolving scientific norms but also social, cultural, and political influences.
In Capturing Glaciers, Dani Inkpen historicizes the use of repeat glacier photographs, examining what they show, what they obscure, and how they influence public understanding of nature and climate change. Though convincing as a form of evidence, these images offer a limited and sometimes misleading representation of glaciers themselves. Furthermore, their use threatens to replicate problematic ideas baked into their history.
Excerpt from Capturing Glaciers
I visited an old friend recently. It had been years since seeing the Bow Glacier. Both of us had changed. I was last in her neighborhood on a winter day so bright and cold it transformed my breath into crystals that shivered and sparkled in the air. She was indisposed, hibernating beneath her billowy robes of winter snow. I had to content myself with a view of her front garden, soft and rounded, blue and white. In summer she presides over one of the most breathtaking scenes on the (for now) aptly named Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies. Perfectly framed by peaks, the glacier perches above the indigo waters of Bow Lake, to which she is connected by thundering Bow Falls and a creek that winds its way through rainbow-pebbled flats. The whole scene can be taken in from the front porch of red-roofed Bow Lake Lodge, set on the lake’s shore by packer and guide Jimmy Simpson. In 1898 he deemed this a good spot to “build a shack.”
I met the Bow Glacier the summer I left home, one of those free-spirited summers that Hollywood films coat thickly with nostalgia. Freshly released from the corridors of teenagedom, I chose a seasonal job that could not possibly advance the career I was preparing for in college but that would give me plenty of time in the mountains: housekeeping at a historic alpine lodge. In my time off I often scrambled up chossy peaks where I met wobbling marmots and grizzlies lounging in full-blooming meadows. I drank from swift, icy streams and camped wherever suited me (because, like many seasonal workers, I believed that national park rules didn’t apply to me). The Bow Glacier looked on with dignified indifference. I stood on her surface, secure in mountaineering harness and crampons (though a couple foolish times not) and marveled at the white westing plains of the Wapta Icefield from which the Bow drains, dreaming of even grander vistas beyond. I knew in those moments I was one of thousands to behold that sight yet felt like the world had just taken form. My happiness was untouchable, not yet complicated by the conundrums of adulthood. I was immortal; death did not exist and time would never run out.
Old friends: The Bow Glacier and the author, 2003.
But time does run. And glaciers, compressions of time in frozen water, are excellent gauges of its passage. Mountain glaciers like the Bow are disappearing at rapid—and accelerating—rates. When Jimmy Simpson pondered building his shack, the Bow cascaded down to a forest abutting the lake in three undulating lobes, with the topmost flaring like outstretched eagle wings. I studied its shape from a black-and-white photograph hanging in the lobby of the lodge. Crevasse-torn icefalls separated the lobes, giving the glacier an intimidating look. It was big. It was beautiful. But the Bow Glacier has since receded. When I arrived one hundred years later, only the topmost lobe remained; dark cliff bands, wetted by Bow Falls, stood where crevasses once churned. The eagle wings were gone, and the glacier’s surface was noticeably lowered. Yet you could still see its toe from the lodge. Today it has retracted even further. Like a wounded spider, it now huddles on the lip of the cliff over which it draped in 2003, barely visible from Bow Lake Lodge.
Photographs of glaciers are about more than just glaciers. They’re also about nature, land, how we can know about such things, and the value we ascribe to them. Grasping this allows us to better appreciate repeat glacier photographs for what they can tell us about global warming, but also how they are conditioned by history and where they fall short.
Dani Inkpen
For many people who are not climate scientists, drastic recession of mountain glaciers like the Bow is clear and persuasive evidence of global warming. Since most folks have never been to a glacier, photographs are often how they learn of disappearing ice. This is achieved through what are called repeat photographs: juxtapositions of old photographs and recent re-creations taken from the same perspective at the same time of year (because glaciers fluctuate with the seasons). Curiosity about the historical photographs in repeat series, like the one hanging in Bow Lake Lodge’s lobby, eventually pulled my carefree summer in the Rockies into the trajectory of a professional life.
My book, Capturing Glaciers, is the result: it is about the people who photographed glaciers repeatedly and systematically to produce knowledge about glaciers and a variety of other subjects such as ice ages, wilderness, the physics of ice, and global warming. Throughout the twentieth century those studying glaciers used photography to capture changes in glacier extent and distribution, but they did so for different reasons and with different consequences. I trace the evolving motivations behind the use of cameras to capture images of ice and concomitantly changing ideas about what is (or is not) being captured.
The book title is thus a double entendre, referring to both the enduring allure of glaciers as repeat photographic subjects that “capture” beholders and the variety of ways people sought to capture glaciers with their cameras. I pay especial attention to the perceived value of repeat photographs as a form of evidence. Doing so illuminates some of the ways repeat photography has encapsulated and conveyed changing ideas about what glaciers are and why they matter. Photographs of glaciers are about more than just glaciers. They’re also about nature, land, how we can know about such things, and the value we ascribe to them. Grasping this allows us to better appreciate repeat glacier photographs for what they can tell us about global warming, but also how they are conditioned by history and where they fall short. It helps us see them not as static representations of the present situation, but as still-evolving elements in a process much bigger and more complex than any photograph could possibly capture.
I take a photograph-centered approach, following the photographs to archival information about the practices behind their creation. The history of how repeat photography was used to study glaciers in North America is checkered and discontinuous. Its value as a form of evidence ebbed and flowed based on ideas about what glaciers were and what knowledge-makers wanted to know. This was more than just a scientific matter. While many of the actors who populate the pages of the book were scientists, producing knowledge of glaciers required an extensive host of characters and institutions. And the meanings of repeat glacier photographs broke the bonds of scientific intention and interpretation, drawing from and circling back to potent cultural associations. We will see, then, that the value of a form of evidence is conditioned by nonscientific elements, including political and practical considerations. Evidence, like objectivity, has a history. And history continues to make itself felt in the present.
Dani Inkpen is assistant professor of history at Mount Allison University.
More from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series
Campy and competitive, gay rodeo offers a community of refuge that straddles the urban and rural, providing space to both embrace and challenge the idealized masculinity associated with the iconic cowboy of the US West.
Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo brings together over a decade of research by Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield, historians of gender and sexuality in the American West. The book explores the complex history of gay rodeo from the late 1960s through the 2010s as a case study for western cultural performance, LGBTQ+ community building, queer philanthropy, and the creation of a racialized and gendered image of the queer cowboy.
As part of the American Historical Association annual meeting, taking place in San Francisco from January 4 to 7, we are pleased to offer AHA members a 30% discount. Find Slapping Leather and other new and notable books through our virtual booth and take advantage of the conference discount with promo code WAHA24 at checkout through February 15, 2024.
To start, can you share about your scholarly backgrounds and what led you to gay rodeo?
Ford: My senior year in college, I decided to explore my interest in museums and completed an internship at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Texas. The very limited racial diversity of the museum in the early 2000s made me ask questions about women, race, and rodeo in the US, and those are themes I studied in both my MA and PhD. I came across gay rodeo at that time, but it didn’t fit into the scope of my work until my first book, Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo (University Press of Kansas, 2020), when I included a chapter on that rodeo circuit.
Scofield: While completing a master’s degree in Regional Studies: East Asia, I was in Tokyo looking at the acrylic nail industry when I saw a store called Rodeo Clowns, which was selling cowgirl boots to Japanese teenagers. It completely changed my academic trajectory, and I began researching the rise of western wear and looking at how the “cowboy” became a straight white man when so many people outside that limited definition were participating in country western culture. As a part of this, my first book, Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West (University of Washington Press, 2019), included a chapter on gay rodeo.
There was so much more to examine in gay rodeo than we were able to tackle in just our single chapters. Rather than pursuing separate book projects, we decided to work together so we could combine our decade worth of research and bring our overlapping—but also different—areas of interest within gay rodeo into a single volume.
Many queer cowfolx narrate finding the rodeo as a moment of finding community. They had been convinced they were the only gay person who loved country music, riding horses, or line dancing. The ability to do the sport they loved in a safe space was revolutionary.
Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield
In writing the book, you drew on multiple archives and over seventy oral interviews. Can you share more about your process and how the book took shape?
Co-authorship is not particularly common in the field of history, and neither of us had approached a project in this way before. And we had never met. In fact, we never met in person until the book was finished! However, the changes to digital communication during COVID really worked to our advantage, with Zoom and Google Docs allowing us to collaborate, communicate, and share materials. We already had conducted much of the necessary research and interviews during our first book projects, and we both knew the material so well that we quickly identified the chapters we wanted to include. We also were lucky that our specific interests within gay rodeo combined in such a way that we each developed several chapters individually and then worked collaboratively on others.
The archival materials and oral interviews were such an integral part of this project. We revisited the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles to complete a comprehensive examination of their International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) collection, and we continued to conduct interviews with participants as part of the Gay Rodeo Oral History Project. Both added new dimensions to our chapters and helped us tell a more complete story about the complexity of gay rodeo’s origins and evolution.
International Gay Rodeo Association Finals rodeo program. Courtesy of the Autry Museum of the American West.
You write that “as rodeo professionalized, it also narrowed the boundaries of the cowboy.” Can you elaborate on this and the effect it had on gay rodeo in its nascency?
Phil Ragsdale, and later the IGRA, initially created gay rodeo as a fundraising event and as a place for queer cowfolx to compete in rodeo. Yet it also was rooted in a hegemonic masculinity so that gay cowboys in particular could adopt, demonstrate, and exert the traditional white masculinity of the American cowboy of western mythology. This vision for gay rodeo clashed with the presence of lesbians, drag queens, and camp events, and while some participants fought for those elements, others pursued a rodeo modeled on the professional rodeo circuit. As gay rodeo struggled in the 1990s for legitimacy in the straight rodeo world, it became increasingly difficult to find space for the elements of gay rodeo that failed to fit into the dominant rodeo narrative.
Gender, politics, and geography all play into the history of gay rodeo, which you call a “case study for belonging.” Can you share more about community-building within the sport and a few examples of the tensions LGBTQ+ people faced both within and outside of the gay rodeo arena?
Many queer cowfolx narrate finding the rodeo as a moment of finding community. They had been convinced they were the only gay person who loved country music, riding horses, or line dancing. The ability to do the sport they loved in a safe space was revolutionary. However, it also came with a lot of negotiation as all the assumptions of what it meant to be a cowboy still played out in gay rodeo, often with drag queens and lesbians being made to feel less welcome at times.
Additionally, gay rodeo emerged at a time when the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement was gaining steam but came of age in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. So the organization always had to balance the desire to be visible with an increasingly hostile public who could use AIDS as a reason for hate. Gay rodeos have been protested by religious groups, animal-rights groups, and many others. This brought gay rodeoers together to support their own efforts and also saw them combine forces with other LGBTQ+ organizations for AIDS fundraising and Pride events, and other rodeo groups, to counter animal-rights protests.
Between chapters, stories from gay rodeo participants are included as oral history vignettes. Why did you choose this type of framing?
It was important to us to share how real people expressed their gratitude and love for this space and illustrate that while we are taking an academic approach, this is a living, thriving community that allowed us access to their stories.
What does the future of gay rodeo look like?
That is the $100 question! And, it is the question that keeps many in gay rodeo awake at night. Gay rodeo is at a crossroads today as it attempts to overcome the serious impact of COVID, a changing and more welcoming society for queer people, and the lack of a single unifying force, such as AIDS or extreme homophobia. As we discuss in our final chapter, IGRA today is grappling with these questions and looking for ways to reach new groups of participants and new audiences.
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
This is a group of people who never easily fit into society’s assumptions about politics, geography, or culture. We hope this helps people rethink with more nuance who belongs where.
Elyssa Ford is associate professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University and author of Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion: Gender, Race, and Identity in the American Rodeo. Rebecca Scofield is associate professor of American history at the University of Idaho and author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West.
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