Our upcoming lineup of books includes an on-the-ground account of Native activism in the Pacific Northwest; the story of how Mesoamerican food activists faced down Monsanto . . . and won; new books in our Indigenous Confluences series; the first book in the Critical Filipinx Studies series; new art books from our publishing partners Cascadia Art Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, and others; and much more.
Joe Feddersen, Elk at Spotted Lake, 2016. Relief monoprint with spray paint, 19 × 14.75 in. (48.3 × 37.5 cm). Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon; gift of Joe Feddersen. Photograph by Dean Davis.
The cover depicts Elk at Spotted Lake by Joe Feddersen (Arrow Lakes/Okanagan, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation), the artist featured in an upcoming solo exhibition and accompanying catalog from the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. Spanning printmaking, weaving, glass, and ceramics, Feddersen’s work both celebrates his culture and speaks to a Plateau-Native viewpoint of the contemporary world.
We invite you to browse the interactive catalog and explore all of our forthcoming books. Now is also a great time to subscribe to our newsletter or update your preferences so that you can receive email alerts when your favorite books are released.
The University of Washington Press was pleased to welcome Justine Sargent as an acquisitions fellow this past fall. Most recently, Justine interned at Getty Publications after receiving a BA in English and a Minor in Film, Television, and Digital Media from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include 19th–20th century British and Irish literature, Victorian studies, Gothic and horror studies, queer and feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, medical humanities, and film and media studies.
Below, we catch up with her to hear about her academic and professional paths, her work in the acquisitions department, and some of her favorite UW Press projects.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to academic publishing?
I grew up in California and attended UCLA, where I completed an undergraduate thesis on Victorian horror fiction and became exposed to academic publications in the process. During my senior year, I wanted to learn more about the editorial side of research, so I spent my final quarters as a developmental editor for UCLA’s undergraduate research journal for humanities, arts, and social sciences.
Immediately after graduation, I interned at Getty Publications as part of the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program. During this time, I had informational interviews with acquisitions editors and assistants, and began to pursue work in academic publishing. One of my mentors at Getty, senior editor Ruth Lane, sent me the acquisitions fellow job posting last fall, and I’ve been at the press since November!
What does a typical day look like for you as an acquisitions fellow?
As a fellow, I handle a lot of the day-to-day work as an assistant in the acquisitions department, which includes preparing book proposal records, facilitating with peer review processes, drafting meeting memos, and making sure that projects are transmitted to our design and production teams on time. The fellowship is great in that it provides a very thorough introduction to acquisitions editorial and allows me to understand the processes and field of academic publishing more largely.
Has working at the press changed the way you think about publishing?
It really has. I’ve garnered a larger appreciation for the work that researchers do to produce manuscripts, and I’m perpetually in awe of how the staff at UW Press and in academic publishing generally can juggle so many projects and tasks at once. After working in museum publishing, I’m also struck by how differently book publishing can look across different fields, subjects, and forms. One of the things that surprised me the most was how far ahead editors must plan for their projects—they sometimes contract authors for projects years in advance.
What projects at UW Press are you most excited about?
Any advice for recent graduates who are also interested in pursuing a career in publishing?
For recent graduates, I would suggest leveraging your publishing network as much as possible. During my Getty internship, I had many informational interviews with editors and assistants across publishing, including museum, trade, and academic publishing. It was only by talking to professionals that I really learned about the material work of publishing, job opportunities, and how to present myself as effectively as possible as an entry-level candidate. I also had my mentors and professors review my application materials for feedback, which was very useful.
Finally, what are you reading and enjoying these days?
Most recently, for nonfiction, I’ve read Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism and Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which are both great reads. For fiction, I’m halfway through Rachel Cusk’s novel The Country Life, which is a satire that draws from Jane Eyre.
I also watched Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer on HBO recently, and I recommend it to those who are looking for a quick, but great, watch.
In Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II, Holly Miowak Guise draws on a wealth of oral histories and interviews with Indigenous elders to explore the multidimensional relationship between Alaska Natives and the US military during the Pacific War. The forced relocation and internment of Unangax̂ in 1942 proved a harbinger of Indigenous loss and suffering in World War II Alaska. Violence against Native women, assimilation and Jim Crow segregation, and discrimination against Native servicemen followed the colonial blueprint. Yet Alaska Native peoples took steps to restore equilibrium to their lives by resisting violence and disrupting attempts at US control.
In the Q&A below, Guise shares more about her process of researching and writing the book as well as how Alaska Native peoples altered the colonial structures imposed upon them by maintaining Indigenous spaces and asserting sovereignty over their homelands.
As part of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference, taking place in Bodø, Norway from June 6 to 8, we are pleased to offer NAISA members a 30% discount. Find Alaska Native Resilience and other new and notable books through our virtual booth and take advantage of the conference discount with promo code WNAISA24 at checkout through June 30, 2024.
First, can you touch on your background and what led you to this study?
I am enrolled Iñupiaq born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. My family is from the village of Unalakleet. When I was growing up, I heard several stories from my grandparents about 1940s Alaska and assimilationist schools that punished my grandparents for speaking Iñupiat. I remember my grandpa Lowell Anagick talking about his time serving in the guerilla platoon known as the Alaska Territorial Guard with Muktuk Marston. I wanted to link these family histories to better understand the broader experiences of Alaska Natives during the war.
Can you share a bit about your process for conducting and compiling the oral histories of Alaska Native elders and veterans that are included throughout the book?
When I was an undergraduate majoring in Native American Studies at Stanford University, I began interviewing Alaska Native elders about racial segregation in the Alaska territory for my senior honors thesis. When I returned to oral histories as a graduate student at Yale University, I broadened the study. I wanted to better understand what was happening during the passage of the 1945 Alaska Equal Rights Act, which addressed racial segregation in Alaskan towns at businesses and public venues. This era included the Pacific War/World War II, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, and settler colonial projects that developed alongside imperial US projects.
Over the years, I have worked with several tribal organizations, including the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, the First Alaskans Institute, the Sealaska Heritage Institute, and the Fairbanks Native Association Elder Program, as well as several other senior centers and community-based organizations, including the Alaska Veteran’s Museum, for conducting oral histories. I found tremendous help from Alaskan community leaders, libraries, museums, and through word of mouth in the Alaska Native community. I try to name every person and organization in a timeline of my oral history research travels in the appendix. Some of my favorite interviews are ones that I conducted with elders and their descendants. Oral history is indeed family history and academic.
As colonialism seeks to unravel Indigenous peoples and nations including through land removal, relocation, and boarding school separations, the act of Indigenous peoples restoring equilibrium goes directly against a colonial structure.
Holly Miowak Guise
What are some instances of separation, exclusion, and segregation in Alaska that readers might be surprised to learn?
In listening to elders, including my own grandparents, it seemed unfathomable that Western government, missionaries, and powers tried to assimilate Native children, an incredibly vulnerable population, all while social exclusion existed in Alaskan towns where white residents sought to establish settlements in the post Gold Rush era. How could Native children be forced to abandon their Native languages and assimilate to Westernization when Western society excluded and separated Native people?
Readers might also find it interesting to learn that in certain regions of Alaska, for example in the southeast, WWII–era military ordinances sought to separate Native women from servicemen to prevent interracial dating, sex, and marriage. Unsurprisingly, Tlingit activists mobilized through the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Alaska Native Sisterhood, writing letters to government officials and military leaders to end stigmatization directed at Native women as venereal. As oral histories show, in some cases Native women defied the ordinances by simply dating and marrying servicemen anyway.
Visiting the former gunnery at Point Davidson with Conrad Ryan Sr. and Karen Thompson, 2017. Karen points to where Metlakatlans fished and gathered herring eggs. Photo by the author.Totem pole honoring veterans in Metlakatla, October 2017. Photo by the author.
You write about what you call “equilibrium restoration.” Can you elaborate on this concept and share an example from the book?
It is probably common for writers to be unable to sleep, or to think deeply in the middle of the night. One such night, I thought about Alice Petrivelli’s story about her uncle banishing the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) doctor, H.O.K. Bauer, who brought physical harm, death by neglecting a patient, and sexual violence to the Atkan wartime relocation camp in southeast Alaska. I thought about the action of her uncle banishing the doctor, essentially expelling federal “aid,” and I realized he was trying to restore equilibrium for their people.
Conceptually, I found “equilibrium restoration” in a variety of settings where Alaska Native people resisted, expelled, and sometimes even appropriated or adopted colonial structures to maintain indigenization. As colonialism seeks to unravel Indigenous peoples and nations including through land removal, relocation, and boarding school separations, the act of Indigenous peoples restoring equilibrium goes directly against a colonial structure. Throughout the book, I try to show different ways that Alaska Natives restored equilibrium, sometimes through tribal mutual aid from Tlingit to relocated Unangax̂ during the war, which counteracted US colonial structures.
For Alice’s uncle, equilibrium restoration could be suddenly achieved in banishing the BIA physician. For others, like elder Nick Alokli from Kodiak, equilibrium restoration took his lifetime. The Western school teachers punished Nick as a child by slapping him with the straps from hip boots for speaking Sugpiaq, and yet, as an elder he returned to Sugpiaq by teaching it to the future generation of youth. He participated in the project of restoring his Indigenous language that colonialism sought to annihilate.
How has this colonial history manifested in Alaska Native communities today?
This is both an easy and hard question to answer. For those impacted by colonialism— through language theft, removal, family separations, sexual violence, and more—these dark histories impact individuals, families, communities, tribal nations, and the intricacies of daily life. These darker colonial histories can be felt, carried, and—I am going to be a bit more hopeful here and say—expelled over one’s lifetime or generations. Native people continue to try to unravel the harm of colonialism while reinstating their Indigenized nations, spaces, and livelihoods.
Gifts from elders in Juneau and Metlakatla, 2014. Signed book from Carol Brady (Tlingit), Southeast Traditional Values magnet from Marilyn Doyle (Tlingit), tea from Rosa Miller (Tlingit), copper earrings from Donald Gregory (Tlingit), kippered salmon from Dorothy Owen (Tlingit/Filipina), and doll fashioned by Roxee Booth (Tsimshian). Photo by the author.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
My main goal for this book is to center the voices, stories, and reflections of Alaska Native elders who witnessed settler colonialism alongside militarization during World War II. Elders shared an array of experiences depending on their tribal geography, gender, and their age at the time of war. I find it profound that so many elders (more than 90 from this study) challenged settler colonialism and discrimination and navigated the war all while clinging to their Indigenous identities and sovereignty. I tried to highlight background information about each elder quoted in the book so readers can better understand Indigenous perspectives. I wish readers will see how much care goes into oral history in building relationships with elders over time and connecting elders through resources by academic institutions as well as tribal and community-based organizations.
Photo by Haiden Renae (Navajo/Diné) directed by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi)
Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) is assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She is the creator of World War II Alaska, a digital humanities project that centers the voices of Alaska Native elders and veterans by bridging institutional, federal and university archives, tribal archives, and oral histories.
On March 25, I went for my first hike of spring 2024 at the Fernald Preserve, a Department of Energy (DOE)–owned park located about eighteen miles northwest of Cincinnati, Ohio. I have been visiting this place for nearly a decade in the process of researching and writing my new book Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory: Grassroots Activism and Nuclear Waste in the Midwest—so I was not expecting any surprises. After getting out of my car and approaching the Weapons-to-Wetlands Trail near the visitor center, however, I paused when I realized that I smelled something burning.
As I continued down the trail, I realized the landscape around me was scorched from what must have been a considerable fire. Forty years ago a fire at Fernald would have sent the community into a panic, and rightfully so, because at the time the site was operating as the Feed Materials Production Center, a uranium processing plant that served as a key facility in the sprawling Cold War nuclear weapons production complex. After a highly publicized uranium leak in 1984, the plant’s neighbors were perpetually on edge as they anticipated the next potential accident amid near daily newspaper coverage and government investigations that gradually revealed that Fernald was a dangerous place to work and the third most polluted nuclear wasteland in the country.
The aftermath of a prescribed burn at the Fernald Preserve, March 25, 2024. Photo by author.
With this history in mind, my surroundings looked a little apocalyptic, but I also knew better. Rather than a nuclear disaster, the scorched earth I experienced was the aftermath of a prescribed burn, which will strengthen and diversify the preserve’s prairies in the years ahead and continue the DOE’s commitment to protecting human and environmental health at Fernald. Over a ten-year period, a $4.4 billion DOE remediation project transformed the site from a nuclear wasteland into a public park in the wake of the Cold War. This surprising change in mission from producing uranium metal products, or “feed materials,” for plutonium reactors to environmental stewardship was what first inspired me to tell Fernald’s story. Grab a pair of binoculars and go for a walk there this summer. You will see what I mean.
As I argue in Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory, however, the greening of the DOE’s institutional culture was not a natural result of the Cold War’s end. During the 1980s, the department was better known as a secretive and notorious polluter. Through the protections of the Atomic Energy Act, it self-regulated its radioactive materials and fought tooth and nail to remain insulated from the nation’s environmental laws and denied any responsibility for harming human or environmental health. Only through a grueling, multi-decade campaign by grassroots activists Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH), unionized nuclear workers in the Fernald Atomic Trades and Labor Council, and their political allies in Ohio and Congress did the bombmakers budge and begin to adopt the tenets of environmentalism.
The 1980s was a difficult time to launch an environmental movement, especially one battling the federal government. The Reagan administration had worked to dismantle regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency at the same time it waged the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. This process ramped up production in Fernald’s outdated factories during a period of renewed Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this challenging political environment, FRESH was determined to hold the DOE accountable for its negligent radioactive waste disposal. Led by Lisa Crawford, a self-described housewife who became an activist after discovering her family’s well water was contaminated with Fernald’s uranium, FRESH centered its movement around the interests of working people and never wavered from the community’s commitment to jobs and a clean environment. Through this inclusive approach, FRESH cultivated progressive and moderate allies and learned to fight the DOE locally and nationally.
Fernald’s environmental movement was ultimately successful, and they secured many notable achievements along the way: the firing of Fernald’s unpopular operating contractor National Lead of Ohio; securing a class-action settlement and medical monitoring program for community residents; passage of the Federal Facilities Compliance Act of 1992 that forced the DOE’s compliance with hazardous waste laws; and, of course, Fernald’s cleanup, which ensured that former production workers were retrained for remediation jobs. But FRESH also understood that in the politically partisan decades of the 1980s and 1990s, the results of their efforts were going to be mixed. The Fernald Citizens Task Force—a citizen advisory board formed as part of a national DOE public participation program to guide local cleanup efforts—ultimately accepted the onsite encapsulation of nearly three million cubic yards of low-level radioactive contaminated soil and building debris. This consensus, though difficult to achieve, was reached through two creative approaches to environmental compromise: a board game called FUTURESITE, which simulated the high costs, technological limitations, and political restraints of radioactive waste disposal, and dialogue between nuclear-contaminated communities that helped educate each other on the principles of environmental justice. If Fernald’s waste was not kept onsite, it was going to be dumped in somebody else’s backyard.
At the Fernald Preserve ponds fill the former foundations of uranium plants. The earthen mound in the background is the On-Site Disposal Facility, March 25, 2024. Photo by author.
Along the Weapons-to-Wetlands Trail, a platform looks out onto Fernald’s former production area. It is the perfect spot to reflect on the important transformations that have happened here and the challenges environmentalists face going forward. Waterfowl now congregate on ponds where uranium production plants once stood, which represents the downsizing of the nuclear weapons production complex and the DOE’s improved focus on environmental health and safety in the wake of Fernald’s movement. Looming on the site’s eastern boundary, however, is the massive on-site disposal facility, where the remnants from building demolition and contaminated soil from the production area are entombed. It is a stark reminder that this site must be continuously monitored for public health and environmental health, and despite the massive mobilization of resources and energy by federal and state governments, corporate contractors, organized labor, and grassroots activists, the Fernald Preserve cannot be made clean, only safer. The bomb’s environmental legacy is Fernald’s to keep indefinitely.
In a 1999 oral history interview with the Fernald Living History Project, Lisa Crawford reflected on Fernald’s complicated legacy. As a site of public history, Fernald’s contaminated landscape lives on as an indispensable warning so “something like this never happens again.” But its powerful environmental movement also offers hope. “One hundred years from now I really hope people will come back and say . . . ‘gosh, look what happened here, but they fixed it.’ Maybe not 100 percent but they did what they could at that point in time, and that will be our legacy.” For partisan times like ours, these are important lessons on how creativity, compromise, and environmental justice can help solve large-scale environmental problems, even if imperfectly. I invite you to read Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory and consider how these stories can help us build a safe and sustainable future.
Casey A. Huegel is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Cincinnati and a public historian with the National Park Service.
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