Category Archives: History

From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California: Q&A with Kaitlin Reed, author of Settler Cannabis

In anticipation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) 2023 conference, taking place in Toronto from May 11 to 13, we caught up with Kaitlin Reed, author of Settler Cannabis, over email.

The newest book in our Indigenous Confluences series, Settler Cannabis offers a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental consequences of cannabis cultivation in California that foregrounds Indigenous voices, experiences, and histories. Below, Reed shares about the ongoing effects of resource rushing in the state and how this history can inform the path toward an alternative future, one that starts with the return of land to Indigenous stewardship and rejects the commodification and control of nature for profit.

As part of the Summer Reading Sale, enjoy 40% off and free domestic shipping on all books when you order on our website. Use promo code WARM23 at checkout. The sale ends June 16, 2023.

Can you tell us about your background and how your research for Settler Cannabis took shape?

It was never my plan to write a book about cannabis. Thinking back, my scholarly entanglements with cannabis began within the first few days of my freshmen year of college. Gathered in the hallway of our dorm building, my cohort and I exchanged introductions and pleasantries. I shared that I was a member of the Yurok Tribe in northwestern California—as soon as the word “Humboldt” left my lips, eyes lit up. I pondered: How had this commodified plant relative made its way over three thousand miles from Yurok ancestral territory to the Eastern Seaboard? And who was really paying the price? These questions would take a backseat for the next few years.

In 2014, I was an inexperienced intern working for the Yurok Tribe Environmental Program (now referred to as the Yurok Tribe Environmental Department). One July morning, I was drinking coffee at my desk. I opened my inbox to see a Los Angeles Times article that had been forwarded to all Yurok tribal employees. The headline read: “Massive Raid to Help Yurok Tribe Combat Illegal Pot Grows.” This has come to be known as Operation Yurok. While I sat safely in my office, other tribal members and employees, accompanied by dozens of law enforcement officers clad in camouflage and carrying assault rifles, made their way upriver. Their goal that morning was to eradicate cannabis cultivation and document the resulting environmental damages, both within and beyond the boundary of the Yurok Indian Reservation.

The health of ecosystems is directly connected to the vitality of Indigenous peoples.

Kaitlin Reed

That summer, and several summers to follow, the Yurok Tribe was under siege from illicit trespass cultivation. Illegal and unregulated water diversions were running our streams dry. Chemical pollution and human waste dramatically degraded our water quality. Our wildlife were intentionally and accidentally poisoned. Our traditional gatherers and basketweavers faced threats, physical violence, and intimidation from cannabis cultivators. And yet, all the while, the experiences of California Indian people were largely left out from mainstream cannabis discourse. For me, it became very important to document the ecological and cultural impacts of cannabis cultivation for Indigenous peoples not as a new phenomenon but as a continuation of settler-colonial resource extraction.

Can you share a brief overview of resource rushing in California and describe how this history connects to cannabis cultivation in the state today?

The book aims to connect the historical and ecological dots from the gold rush to the green rush. I argue that resource rushing, or the “rush” mentality, is a violent settler-colonial pattern of resource extraction that must be repeatedly played out—first gold, then timber, then fish, and now cannabis. While it may have started with gold, resource rushing did not end with gold. Resource rushing in California has always been less about the specific resource/relative in question and more about access and control over lands and the ability to assert ecological managerial authority. The real gold is not gold, after all, but the land itself. In Northern California a pattern of resource rushing has left a toxic legacy that shapes the historic context of emerging industries in the state. From the widespread use of mercury during the gold rush and its disproportionate impact on Indigenous fishing communities to the aerial spraying of atrazine over Yurok forests as late as 2013, the use of toxics within settler resource rushing has negatively impacted tribal peoples since invasion. California Indians have watched this pattern play out over and over again.

How does settler-colonial violence against the landscape correlate to violence on Indigenous bodies and cultures?

We are a part of the land, and the land is us. We mean that quite literally. When a group of people live in the same place for thousands of years, our ancestors become the soil, they become the Earth. The gifts we receive from Creator—Salmon, Elk, and Acorns—nourish us and become part of our bodies. In caring for the land, gathering the plants, dancing for the Salmon, we engage in an ancient relationship with our land bases, rooted in a connection and reciprocity that has developed over millennia. Additionally, the health of ecosystems is directly connected to the vitality of Indigenous peoples. For example, Yurok elders have said that as long as our River is sick, our people will never be healthy. This includes the Salmon people swimming upriver to spawn, the Tree people dependent on the marine nutrients their Salmon relatives will deliver to the forest, and, of course, the neediest of the bunch, the human people. Our health and vitality are tied to the health and vitality of our landscapes. If the River is sick, everything that depends upon the River will not flourish.

Is sustainable cannabis production possible? What might that look like?

While working on this book project, I received several invitations to speak at academic gatherings. This question comes up a lot. I tell these folks what I tell my students: here in California, our land was stolen only 170 years ago. Before that, our ecosystems thrived. The Salmon runs were so huge, our elders say you could walk across the River on their backs. To us, 170 years is not very long ago. For a people who have been here for tens of thousands of years—and, by the way, some argue over 100,000 years—170 years is a blink, a flash. So, my sustainable vision of cannabis production, then, is not focused on preserving folks’ ability to continue to cultivate for-profit cannabis.

As a result of the legacy of the settler state’s toxic relationship with lands and waters, coupled with the impacts of climate change, our River systems are reaching their breaking points. Our Rivers are choked and contaminated, yet more is demanded from them every day. Our River systems need time to heal, to recover. Demanding water allocations for yet another industry is like asking your relative, still in the intensive care unit recovering from a heart attack, to help you move your furniture. This is not to say that the cannabis industry, specifically, is the cause of this problem. Rather, it is a worldview that considers our water systems as resources to be plundered for export-based agriculture and other industries. My sustainable vision is land return. Decolonization. Ecologically speaking, I argue this is the only path forward. We need to operate within a framework of radical relationality that rejects the commodification and control of nature for wealth accumulation.

Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is assistant professor of Native American studies at Humboldt State University.

Discover More Books in the Indigenous Confluences Series

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UW Press at ASEH 2023

We are looking forward to connecting with everyone at the American Society for Environmental History Annual Conference, taking place in Boston, March 22-26. We are pleased to offer ASEH members a 30% discount on all orders. Stop by our booth at Exhibit Space 12 to meet our editors, browse our latest releases, and learn about forthcoming titles. Visit our virtual exhibit for more details.

For those not attending, or when placing an order through our website, you can take advantage of the conference discount through April 30, 2023 with code WASEH23 at checkout.

Book Signing with James Morton Turner, author of Charged

Thursday, March 23, 3:00-3:30 PM

Visit our exhibit space for a signing with James Morton Turner, author of Charged, “an eminently readable, elegantly precise treatise on the topic of batteries” (Science).

Turner unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving “the battery problem” is critical to a clean energy transition. As climate activists focus on what a clean energy future will create—sustainability, resiliency, and climate justice—the history of batteries offers a sharp reminder of what building that future will consume: lithium, graphite, nickel, and other specialized materials. With new insight on the consequences for people and communities on the frontlines, Turner draws on the past for crucial lessons that will help us build a just and clean energy future, from the ground up.

Discover New and Notable Books

Visit our virtual exhibit to learn more about new and forthcoming books in environmental history.

Learn About Our Relevant Series

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast new light on the ways that natural systems affect human communities, the ways that people affect the environments of which they are a part, and the ways that different cultural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around us.

The Outdoors: Recreation, Environment, and Culture critically examines the dynamic social and political questions connected to outdoor experiences. While outdoor recreation provides a means to interact with nature and experience solitude or adventure, it also raises issues such as the dispossession of Indigenous lands, the exclusivity of recreational cultures, and the environmental impact of outdoor practices. This series aims to explore these tensions and the landscapes that have come to embody them.

Civil Rights under the Northern Lights: Excerpt from Black Lives in Alaska

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest maps the trials and challenges African Americans have encountered in the forty-ninth state. The earliest arrivals, many of whom worked as whalers, prospectors, and service members, did not always stay long. Others put down roots and lived full lives in Alaska. These Black individuals fought for greater inclusion and helped establish Alaska’s modern civic institutions, contributing to the political and social life of the state even as they endured racism and fought injustice.

The excerpt below touches on Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights. This history reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—self-activity, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places. Even as it reveals the specific context of the state’s complex history, Alaska’s Black history encompasses the themes of the larger nationwide freedom struggle and enriches the history of people of African descent in North America. —Ian C. Hartman

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

In the summer of 1962, African Americans and other area activists joined together to picket Carrs, Alaska’s largest grocery store chain. Clarence Coleman, branch president of the Anchorage NAACP, wrote to Roy Wilkins at the national office in New York City: “The first picket line in the history of the Anchorage NAACP began its task of protesting the hiring policies of Carrs Food Center here in Anchorage today 31 July 10 am Alaska Standard Time.”1 Coleman’s statement was not quite true. Five years earlier, Joseph M. Jackson and James E. Owens organized area workers and set up a picket outside of the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union Hall. They and others sought an inclusive union for African American and Alaska Native workers and called for greater transparency in promotion guidelines. Owens stated that direct action “was the only way we’re going to get equality.”2

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska. Many in the Black community took issue with the grocery store’s apparent refusal to hire African Americans to work in any capacity beyond sanitation and other so-called menial, low-level jobs. In one correspondence Bernard J. Carr Sr., an owner of the grocery store chain, conceded he had “two Negro employees,” a garbage collector and a janitor. But he continued, “The time is not right to hire a Negro checker.” Activist Pat Berkley recollected, “They [Carrs] didn’t want to hire any Blacks. And of course, Pop Carr…wasn’t to hire any Blacks because he had hired one [who] became very friendly with a white girl that worked there, so that was the end of that.”3 Still, the NAACP suggested the grocer benefited from a base of African American patrons and, as such, should hire and promote a few as employees. At its Fairview store, over 30 percent of the clientele was Black, yet not a single African American worked in management or any position that interfaced with the public.4

In response, men and women took to the picket line outside of Carrs to raise awareness. Though she was seven months pregnant, Anchorage resident and activist Pat Berkley helped organize the picket and led the women to march on the line during the day; the men walked in the evening. Cars and pedestrians “booed and laughed at [us],” Berkley remembered.5 Despite some negative reaction, the picket seemingly worked; owners agreed to hire a more diverse workforce. Organizer Joseph Kline summarized the terms of the agreement: Carrs grocery would “hire one person immediately. The second within thirty days and the third sixty days after the first.” These positions were supposed to include a clerk, cashier, or grocery checkers, all of which afforded a greater possibility for advancement than the menial positions that the picketers accused Carrs of reserving for Black workers.6

Unfortunately, Carrs failed to hire three African Americans within the agreed-upon sixty days, but the NAACP kept up its pressure, and the grocery store eventually complied. Richard Watts was the first man Carrs hired as a result of the picket. He became the first African American bagger at the store and stayed with the grocer for over forty-five years. In accordance with what the activists envisioned, Watts did not remain a bagger for long. He ascended the chain of management; by the end of a long and distinguished career, Watts had become a district manager and participated in the local business community as a member of the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce.7

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska.

The Carrs boycott anticipated more extensive changes in Fairview that had come about by the middle of the 1960s. During this decade the neighborhood emerged as a center of activism and civic engagement in Anchorage. Its reputation as one of Anchorage’s most diverse communities only grew, as did the fear that city leadership might continue to neglect the needs of its residents. After the redevelopment and so-called urban renewal of Eastchester Flats, roughly the southern tier of Fairview, men and women on the community council grew more determined to ensure the existing neighborhood would not be left out as Anchorage leadership plotted new recreational outlets for residents. Olivia Holland, Ben Humphries, and John Parks, all active on the neighborhood council, led an effort to set aside land for a park and later spearheaded an effort to deliver public transportation throughout Anchorage. These efforts took considerable effort but would yield tangible results for the residents of Fairview in the decades to follow.8

Beyond the Carrs boycott in Fairview, activists protested and organized against mistreatment and discrimination elsewhere during the early and mid-1960s. In Anchorage and Fairbanks, residents established employment workshops to organize letter writing campaigns and rallies and to reach out to area businesses to connect minority job candidates with desirable employment. The workshops in Anchorage organized pickets at Caribou-Wards and Woolworths; one woman in Anchorage, Lillian Morris, took a lead role in the Woolworths pickets and led the area employment workshop. Fairbanks activists also organized a picket of Woolworths in their hometown. The efforts paid off, at least to some extent. Sears, Roebuck and Company agreed to interview and hire qualified African American, Native, Filipinx, and Mexican applicants. The Spenard Caribou-Wards hired two Black salesclerks and agreed to file and retain applications for a longer period, a concession to the employment workshop. The Anchorage Woolworths hired a Black employee for the first time. These efforts did not approach the level of equity that the Employment Workshop ultimately desired, but they represented a small measure of progress.9

Ian C. Hartman is associate professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

David Reamer is a public historian and journalist who writes for the Anchorage Daily News.

Notes

1 Clarence V. Coleman to Roy Wilkins via Western Union Telegram, August 1, 1962, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, ed. John H. Bracey Jr., Sharon Harley, and August Meier. Available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

2 For reference to the picket on the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union, see Papers of the NAACP, Supplement to Part 13, the NAACP and Labor, 1956–1965, edited by John H. Bracey Jr. and August Meier (folder 14), available on microfilm at the University of Alaska Anchorage. For additional reference, see Meier Randall Keenan, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), 284.

3 Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983, Bruce Melzer oral history interviews, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

4 NAACP News Letter, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

5 Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983.

6 Joseph H. Kline Jr. to Roy Wilkins, March 3, 1963. Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

7 For a brief report on Richard Watts’s career at Carrs, see Christine Kim, “Carrs’ First Black Worker Recalls His Rise through the Ranks,” February 19, 2010 on KTUU. For the announcement of Watts on the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, see “Anchorage Chamber’s 2013–14 Board of Directors Announced,” Alaska Dispatch News, September 12, 2013.

8 “City officials tour Fairview neighborhood park,” Anchorage Times, August 2, 1967, 1.

9 Dianne Anderson, “Protest Group Gets Results, With and Without Picketing,” Anchorage Daily Times, August 13, 1968, 3.

Black History Month Book List

In celebration of Black History Month, we invite you to check out recent books as well as select titles from our backlist in Pacific Northwest, African American, and Black Diaspora historical studies that speak to the profound legacy of Black Americans and this year’s theme of Black resistance.

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest

Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, this book chronicles how Alaska’s Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—determination, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places.

The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era

University of Washington Emeritus Professor of American History Quintard Taylor’s meticulously researched account is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest. The second edition features a new foreword and afterword.

Revolution to Evolution: The Story of the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity at the University of Washington

Born from a national movement in the late 1960s seeking to address structural and cultural racism, the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMA&D) started as a core group of Black Student Union leaders at the UW who demanded changes in how the school served students of color. In a new book releasing February 21, legendary founding member Emile Pitre shares deep insight into the making of the institution through candid interviews, letters, and reflections of those who participated across decades.

Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

In this rich narrative, Daudi Abe draws on interviews with artists and journalists to trace how hip hop flourished in the Seattle scene. He shows how Seattle hip-hop culture goes beyond art and music, influencing politics, the relationships between communities of color and law enforcement, the changing media scene, and youth outreach and educational programs.

The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City

Combining histories of the city and its African American community with interviews with former Portland Panthers and other key players, this long-overdue account adds complexity to our understanding of the protracted civil rights movement throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime

Beginning with the 1971 appearance of the first Black female superheroine in a comic book—the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly”—artist, curator, and writer Deborah Elizabeth Waley examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world.

Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora.

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

Through interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue and laid the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, this volume explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure.

Barbara Earl Thomas: The Geography of Innocence

Artist Barbara Earl Thomas’s body of work collected here offers a reexamination of Black portraiture and the preconceived dichotomies of innocence and guilt and sin and redemption, and the ways in which these notions are assigned and distorted along cultural and racial lines.

New and Forthcoming Books

From the frontier of health and homelessness in Seattle to nineteenth-century maritime Southeast Asia, our new and upcoming books span the globe to illuminate histories and provide new studies and perspectives on pressing issues. Learn more about these recently released and forthcoming books below.

Don’t forget that our Holiday Sale is ongoing through January 31. Get 40% off all books and free domestic shipping when you order through our website with code WINTER22 at checkout.

Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico

In the first comprehensive study of queer lives in twentieth-century New Mexico, Jordan Biro Walters explores how land communes, art circles, and university classrooms helped create communities that supported queer cultural expression and launched gay civil rights activism in the American Southwest. Wide-Open Desert also frames the significance of and relationship between queer mobility and queer creative production as paths to political, cultural, and sexual freedom for LGBTQ+ people across the nation. In doing so, the book reassesses the power of urbanism on the social construction of contemporary notions of queer identities and politics.

Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

Newly released in paperback, this Washington State Book Award Finalist explores the tensions between caregiving and oppression, as well as charity and solidarity, that polarize perspectives on homelessness throughout the country. Author and University of Washington professor of nursing Josephine Ensign uses extensive historical research to piece together the lives and deaths of those not included in official histories of Seattle, a city with one of the highest numbers of unhoused people in the United States. Drawing on interviews, she also shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health and social care and public policy debates.

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia

What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? Historian Faizah Zakaria explores these questions and the history of ecological change in the region by centering the roles of religion and colonialism in shaping the Anthropocene. Using a wide array of sources such as family histories, prayer manuscripts, and folktales in tandem with colonial and ethnographic archives, Zakaria brings everyday religion and its far-flung implications into our understanding of the environmental history of the modern world.

Material Contradictions in Mao’s China

This first volume devoted to the material history of the Mao period explores the paradox of material culture under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia within reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough. Editors Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho bring together scholars of Chinese art, cinema, culture, performance, and more to share groundbreaking research on the objects and practices of everyday life in Mao’s China, from bamboo and bricks to dance and film.

Chinese Autobiographical Writing: An Anthology of Personal Accounts

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. Edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, and Ping Yao, the volume includes an array of engaging and readable works that draw us into the past and provide vivid details of life as it was lived from the pre-imperial period to the nineteenth century.

An open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

University Press Week | #NextUP: Q&A with Editors of the Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral Series

Continuing our celebration of University Press Week, today we’re highlighting our new series, Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral. We are thrilled to be publishing this timely series that reflects the activist orientation of abolition and highlights abolitionist creative practices that explore radical worlds beyond policing and prisons. Read our Q&A with the series editors, Michael Roy Hames García and Micol Seigel, to learn more.

What is your vision for the series?

In the wake of the movement for Black lives, and especially since 2020, academic and popular interest in abolition has flourished. As the first university press series on the subject, Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral will respond to and, we hope, shape that interest. This series will highlight academic texts across the humanities and social sciences, bringing them together so as to make more visible the larger conversation of which they are a part. Rather than understanding abolitionism as a recipe to be followed dogmatically, we see abolition as a set of open-ended questions to be asked generously in response to the conditions of a radically unjust and unfree world.

Abolitionist visions advocate for decarceration, defunding of police and prisons, and removal of the criminal legal system from people’s lives. Abolitionism is also a creative practice that entails discovering, developing, and promoting alternatives to policing and prisons such as mutual aid associations, restorative justice processes, and nonviolent approaches to personal and community safety. What might a more free and more just world look like? How might it develop? What stands in the way of its emergence? What possible relationships might this future have to present-day criminal justice reform? Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral will offer a forum to scholars and activists continuing to pose these generative questions and more.

Who is the series for?

This series will offer a platform for the groundswell of recent work that has explored abolition in its myriad implications, centered in interdisciplinary fields such as American studies, geography, and critical ethnic studies. Perhaps books under its auspices might take up some of the keywords in this emerging field: abolition, abolition democracy, carcerality, care, collateral consequences, communal luxury, emancipation, freedom, justice, racial capitalism, social harm, and the human.

Books will speak to audiences of scholars, students, general readers, and activists with accessible prose and urgent topics, including but not limited to local policing, campus policing, family policing (child welfare systems), e-carceration and electronic monitoring, sur- and sousveillance, crimmigration and border enforcement, race and racialization, antiblackness, settler colonialism, anticarceral feminisms, involuntary medical confinement, and organizing for abolitionist reforms.

In what ways does the series engage with past and present traditions of abolitionism?

The words abolition, abolitionism, and abolitionist are most widely associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements in Europe and the Americas to end the systems of racialized enslavement—specifically, although not exclusively, of people of African descent—that evolved in tandem with the European conquest and colonization of Africa and the Americas. Contemporary uses of abolition either translate the term from slavery to a superficially unrelated context (as in the abolition of nuclear weapons) or argue that a context is structurally related to, or even an extension of, slavery (as in prison abolition). This series emerges from the latter tradition, extending the intellectual and political vision of abolitionism in order to continue the unfinished work of emancipation in the twenty-first century.

Abolition: Emancipation from the Carceral thus understands this strain of contemporary abolitionism to be constitutively both antiracist and antiprison. Its intellectual genealogy includes the groundbreaking 1971 anthology If They Come in the Morning, edited by Angela Y. Davis with the collaboration of Bettina Aptheker (reissued by Verso Books in 2016) as well as more recent volumes on prisons by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Joy James, Dylan Rodriguez, and the Critical Resistance Publications Collective. Such authors follow skeins of antiblackness through sequential, overlapping systems of racialized labor from African chattel slavery to black codes, convict leasing, chain gangs, Jim Crow and mass incarceration, now acquiring digital forms.

The centrality of antiracism to this tradition distinguishes it from other critiques of the prison such as Michel Foucault’s 1975 book Discipline and Punish, although such critiques have been profoundly important for many abolitionists. Observing the failures of postwar civil rights movements to advance anti-racism through state policy, abolitionist thought is skeptical of the state, even in its welfare mode, understanding the ways belonging and citizenship are made available to some at the expense of others. It therefore embraces a relational analysis, an understanding of how vectors of disadvantage intersect, and the confidence that global currents and transnational networks shape all local phenomena. Abolitionist scholarship is necessarily interdisciplinary because its object of study literally refuses to remain disciplined. It is thus among the swiftest-moving, most daring and sophisticated fields of study in the academy today.

Carceral studies stretch the abolitionist project beyond the prison to consider all forms of carceral space. How might future books in the series approach carcerality in this context?

Carcerality helps point to confinement and surveillance as mechanisms for the production and maintenance of racialized inequality in U.S. society. The United States maintains the largest prison population in the world, both as a percentage of its population and in terms of absolute numbers. The social impact of prisons, however, is augmented by law enforcement, courts, and reentry policies; supplemented by video surveillance and other forms of electronic monitoring; and supported overall by ideological investments, systems of knowledge, and institutions far outside of prison walls.

As of 2019, 6.3 million adults in the United States were on probation, on parole, in state or federal prison, or in a local jail—approximately the population of Los Angeles and Chicago, combined. This number does not include children, people in federal immigration detention centers, those confined by electronic monitors to the prisons of their homes, or those in any number of other conditions that remove personal liberty at the direction of the state.

Well beyond the prison itself, recent scholarship in critical prison studies has identified roots and branches of the carceral in a range of repressive state apparatuses. Courts, hospitals, immigration systems, the military, police agencies, private police, schools and universities, and social welfare agencies devoted to matters such as child protection, public health, housing, and unemployment are all mutually reinforcing with—if not mutually constitutive of—prisons and jails. From an abolitionist perspective, the future of such systems and structures must be put into question to the extent that they support a profoundly unequal society by depriving oppressed and exploited people of their freedom.

What should authors do if they are interested in submitting to the series?

We welcome proposals for books across disciplines, from scholarly monographs, edited collections, and compelling nonfiction works written for a more general readership. Authors may be grounded in fields such as American studies, geography, history, and critical ethnic studies. Interested authors can contact either one of us or send questions/queries to UW Press acquisitions editor, Mike Baccam, at mbaccam@uw.edu.

About the Series Editors

Michael Roy Hames-García is a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice. He previously taught at the University of Oregon and served on the City of Eugene’s Civilian Review Board, overseeing investigations into allegations of misconduct and uses of force by the Eugene Police Department.

Micol Seigel is a professor of American studies and history at Indiana University and author of Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. In addition to research and teaching, Micol is involved in the Critical Prison Studies caucus of the American Studies Association and the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas.

This post is part of the 2022 University Press Week blog tour hosted by the Association of University Presses. This year’s theme is #NextUP, reflecting the spirit of constant learning, adaptation, and evolution within scholarly publishing. Read more about UP Week and all of the featured books and blog posts here.

The Hauntings of Local History: Peter Boag on “Pioneering Death”

Admittedly, I see the world in terms of darkness rather than light, and in history as in life, I am drawn more to stories of human pathos than to tales of human triumph. I am bemused by “rosy retrospection”—the penchant of many to reflect on the positives of the past rather than on the negatives and to also, therefore, see the past as somehow better than the present.

Darkness, pathos, and the folly of rosy retrospection comprise the foundation of Pioneering Death. It tells the story of Loyd Montgomery, an impoverished eighteen-year-old who shot and killed his parents and a visiting neighbor on his family’s farm near the western Oregon town of Brownsville late on the fair autumn day of November 19, 1895. Little more than two months later, on a cool morning and just as the rising sun gilded the eastern sky above the Cascade Range, Loyd met his own end on gallows erected adjacent to the Linn County jail in the county seat of Albany.

I first became aware of the Montgomery murders when, back in the early 1980s, I began researching my own family’s history as connected to Brownsville, a community whose origins are rooted in the arrival there in the 1840s of its first white American settlers who came by way of wagons on the overland trails. When I began my work, local historians, the librarian, and museum docents who befriended me mentioned the murders. Given that the Montgomerys were among the most esteemed early American settlers of the area, when these local authorities spoke of that past tragedy, they did so more in hushed tones and as an aside to the official, celebratory “pioneer” history of that community. Clearly, Loyd’s grim tale haunted Brownsville long after it had happened. It took me close to four decades of intermittent research and unremitting reflection to figure out why.

My own digging, so-called, into the Montgomery murders began by accident on January 10, 1987. It was a dreary and rainy Saturday morning when I appeared at the Linn County Historical Museum in Brownsville to conduct research in its collections for my doctoral dissertation. That project later became my first book, and it focused on the environmental history of the southern Willamette Valley. (The reader will detect a clear pattern by now: my preoccupation with history—my need to make sense of its shadows—has taken me back time and again to Brownsville.) The gloominess of that January day and the relative darkness of the room in which I labored provided an atmosphere fitting for what I chanced upon—a photocopy of the special edition of the Brownsville Times for November 20, 1895. Its sole article is entitled “A TRIPPLE MURDER.” It was the first account of that crime to appear anywhere. It was also the one written closest to the event and by someone whose very eyes beheld the aftermath of the tragedy within hours of its commission. Sadly, only random issues from the 1890s of that newspaper are preserved. No issue among those, other than this fragment, comes from the period when the Montgomery murders otherwise lit up the headlines of papers in communities up and down the West Coast.

Albert Cavender, its writer, was the editor of the Brownsville paper. It took some time for word of the violent killings to make its way to his offices. By then, night had already fallen. But the resourceful newsman reached out to local boys—similar in age to the murderer—who, on horseback and with lanterns they must have grasped as tightly as anxiety gripped them, illuminated the way for the journalist as he headed up the country lane into this local heart of darkness. Cavender’s description of the landscape of death that he found there beguiled me—the bodies and the blood; desiccated hop vines in surrounding fields yet clinging to their poles long since the late summer harvest had ended; the Montgomery family’s forlorn and weathered house sitting beneath the sprawling limbs of an immense maple tree; and the canine companion of the neighbor-victim that took up vigil at his slaughtered master’s side, refusing to be lured from it. Those forbidding images and so many others in that two-page document bespoke the poverty, tragedy, darkness, and pathos not just of the victims and the boy murderer but of their community, the larger region, and even the nation.

Cavender’s story had nothing to do with my dissertation’s subject. But it so haunted me that I took a copy of it, promising myself that one day I would do something with it. For the next three decades and more, Loyd Montgomery became an unwelcome companion to me as I struggled to piece together who he was, what he did, how he and his violent actions fit into history, and how to craft a coherent story from it all. As it turned out, I needed those years—time spent at four universities, countless hours in the classroom, and intervals for producing three other books on quite different topics—to collect the research and, more, come to comprehend why Loyd haunted me as much as he did the community that he was more a part of than he was apart from.

Apart from rather than a part of community history is how local memory preferred it. The vast literature that exists on matricide and patricide, moreover, fortifies that construction. That is, psychology, criminology, and other social sciences that dominate parricide studies are by nature disciplines that, with rare exception, are disinterested in the larger, historical forces that I have come to understand contribute mightily to why children have more than occasionally killed their parents. Local tradition and the traditional approaches to explaining parricide had worked together—intentionally, defensively, or both—to bury the truth so deeply about Loyd that I simply needed the time and the education that time affords to unearth it.

As I excavated Loyd’s life, slowly peeling back the accumulated layers of historical and disciplinary sediments and sentiments, a much darker tale revealed itself than simply that of an isolated, though horribly gruesome anecdote. His story is really the underbelly of so many a local Oregon history (and local histories elsewhere in North America) that celebrate the “pioneer” foundations of community, state, and nation. Constructing these histories involved willfully burying the truth about the brutal, murderous, and even genocidal nature of them. But more, the violent expressions within Oregon “pioneer” families were in reality and are in the very wanton act of trying to forget them, an integral part of the story of American-settler violence against Indigenous people. The messy, unresolved, and troubling tension between the darkness of reality and the human need for rosy reflection in all this is just one of the many stories that Pioneering Death exhumes from our haunting past.

Peter Boag is professor and Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. He is author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, and Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oregon. His latest book, Pioneering Death: The Violence of Boyhood in Turn-of-the-Century Oregon is available now.

A Gift of Peace and Quiet: Judy Bentley on the West Seattle Greenbelt and “Hiking Washington’s History”

Armed with more than two hundred white plastic bags, neon-clad neighbors gather at the West Seattle Greenbelt trailhead on a cold, sunny morning in late February 2021. Their mission is to make a trail visible from more than five hundred feet above. At precisely 8:45 a.m., a helicopter will circle the greenbelt with Jean Sherrard’s camera peering out, photographing the bright white squares revealing the trail through the overhanging branches. Sherrard and Clay Eals are preparing a Now & Then column for the Seattle Times.

Photo by Christine Clark.

The bags are the brainchild of Paul West, a member of the West Duwamish Greenbelt Trails group, who brings an ample supply from Puget Ridge Cohousing. (With only a few splotches of mud, the bags will be carefully collected and folded for reuse.) The volunteers start down the trail in small groups to drop their “bread crumbs” ten feet apart. As the temperature climbs above the mid-thirties, the white helicopter circles three times against a clear blue sky, above the waving Hansels and Gretels.

Looking south over part of the West Duwamish Greenbelt. Photo by Jean Sherrard.

In the resulting aerials, the people are mostly invisible and the bag trail is faint, but the views of the ridge on the highlands between the Duwamish Waterway and Puget Sound are stunning. The green fields of South Seattle College and the Riverview playfields frame the greenbelt. Industrial companies hug the river, colorful containers park at port terminals, the First Avenue South Bridge spans the river, and a belt of late-winter brown separates commerce from neighborhoods.

Looking west to the West Duwamish Greenbelt. Photo by Jean Sherrard.

Glacier action that left rocks resistant to erosion created the greenbelt ridge more than sixty thousand years ago. A conifer forest of Douglas fir, western red cedar, and Sitka spruce grew on its slopes.

The Duwamish people lived below the greenbelt along the Duwamish River and its tributaries for centuries; the earliest archaeological record places a village on the river as early as AD 500. As settlers and land developers moved in, the Duwamish were dispossessed, but the spirits (and bodies) of their ancestors live on in the soil and the trees.

A 1920 aerial photo shows the same ridge but with fewer trees. Puget Mill Company extracted what they wanted from the ridge before donating twenty acres to the City of Seattle in 1912 for a park at the north end. The same photo shows Boeing Plant 1 sitting at the foot of Highland Park Way. The newly straightened and dredged river is visible below the tip of an airplane wing. A streetcar line, which ran from the tip of the Duwamish Peninsula south to new communities, shows faintly on the ridge. The green line indicates trails in the 2021 greenbelt.

An aerial photo taken in 1920. Courtesy the Boeing Company.

In the decades after 1920, a brickyard dumped kiln dust on the hillside, neighbors dumped trash, a gravel company mined sand and gravel, and the Seattle Department of Engineering acquired property to build Soundway, a proposed freeway from the First Avenue South Bridge to suburban areas of Burien and southwest Seattle. The state located one of three Seattle community colleges at the top of the ridge in the late 1960s.

“There is no place in the city of Seattle where a buffer between industry and residences is more badly needed,” wrote the unnamed author of a 1970s report advocating the ridge’s preservation under the city’s Urban Greenbelt plan. “It should be left to the following generations as a gift of peace and quiet in our busy, noisy, polluted city.”

Through gradual property acquisitions and the activism of citizens, the greenbelt became that gift—at five hundred acres, it is the largest contiguous forest in the city. The Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and countless volunteers have replanted and restored the forest and created a few good trails and more than a few social trails pounded by hiking boots and running shoes.

Trailhead at Fourteenth Avenue SW and SW Holly Street. Photo by Judy Bentley.

One of those trails is featured in the expanded second edition of Hiking Washington’s History by Judy Bentley and Craig Romano. Although this trail was not in use as an indigenous trail for thousands of years, it crosses an ancient landscape in the industrial heart of the state’s largest city. That makes it historic.

Judy Bentley taught Pacific Northwest history at South Seattle College for more than twenty years and is an avid hiker and author of fifteen young adult books. Her latest book, co-authored with Craig Romano, is Hiking Washington’s History, Second Edition.

The Most Noble Estuary: David Williams on the Making of “Homewaters”

Homewaters began with a simple idea: Write a book about the human and natural history of Puget Sound. I didn’t know exactly what this would encompass but knew that I wanted to focus on the landscape where I have lived for most of my life. I had a few vague ideas: the three forts (Casey, Flagler, and Worden) at the Sound’s northern entrance; something about Albert Bierstadt’s ferocious painting of Puget Sound at the Seattle Art Museum; the ferry system and the mosquito fleet; and, of course, geoducks.

I knew that more stories were out there, so I began to reach out to friends and colleagues. Over the next six months I interviewed scientists, tribal members, and historians. My standard opening was that I was working on a book about the cultural and ecological history in Puget Sound, and I wanted to know what stories they thought were important.

What stood out for me in these interviews was the passion everyone expressed for this lovely body of water: It is a “beautifully complex ecosystem.” The Sound is a “unique waterbody whose beauty is hardly rivaled.” It is a “microcosm of ecological issues everywhere.” The abundance of the Sound made “us some of the most complex and wealthy people; we didn’t need to migrate.” I also learned that six-gill sharks will eat anything on the bottom, that as herring go so goes Puget Sound, that salmon are narcissistic, and that no one has a handle on kelp slime.

Based on these interviews and my interests, I put together a proposal to address people, plants, and animals and how history could help modern residents understand the present and think about how to pursue a future Puget Sound that is healthier for its human and more-than-human inhabitants. My interviews also impressed upon me the idea that I should focus on overlooked species, such as herring and kelp, which are critical to the ecosystem.

The press accepted my proposal, though they were less than enthusiastic about my title “The Most Noble Estuary.” Two and a half years later, in June 2019, I turned in my manuscript. It totaled 76,184 words with 14,054 words in endnotes. And it had a new title, “Breaking the Surface,” which once again was met with a less than enthusiastic response. Not until another round of editing did we come up with Homewaters.

The main highlight of working on Homewaters was the field time I spent with researchers, which resulted in me filling seven five-by-eight-inch notebooks, by far the most for any book I have written. During my writing journey, I was treated to five types of fresh oysters, some harvested just hours earlier, and given a geoduck pulled up from water sixty feet deep in Agate Passage. (The other geoducks harvested that day traveled more extensively, being overnighted to China.) I crisscrossed Admiralty Inlet, luckily on a calm-water day, in a fourteen-foot Zodiac searching for herring; tagged along as researchers pulled up invertebrates from the Sound’s deepest location (930 feet off of Point Jefferson); and rode all of the Sound’s ferry routes, including several I hadn’t known existed. I also dropped a notebook in the water, was brutally pinched by a mean old Dungeness crab, was confronted by machine-gun-toting nuclear-submarine-protecting Coast Guardsmen, and got stuck on a sandbar with three biologists for several hours when we failed to notice how rapidly the tide was ebbing. I enjoyed every moment.

The other exciting aspect of the book was my dive into history. The Sound has a relatively short written story; not until 1792 did Europeans reach the waterway. But the x̌ʷəlč, as it is known in Lushootseed (pronounced as whulge in English), has a very deep record of human habitation, which stretches back at least 12,500 years, only a couple thousand years after a great ice sheet had rewritten the landscape and then retreated to the north. One of my goals was to weave together these story lines and to explore how the different people who called this place home have responded to the landscape and the more-than-human inhabitants, as well as to each other. 

Of all the books I have written, I am most proud of Homewaters, in part because of its themes of connection and caring. My primary goal is always to write in ways that allow people to develop better connections and relationships to the place they call home. In Homewaters I added a call to act by writing in a manner that I hope encourages people to think more carefully about their actions and their impacts on the health of Puget Sound. I wouldn’t call the book an activist manifesto, but it sends a message that it is up to the residents of the Sound to continue working to improve the waterway for everyone. And based on the people I met and the stories I learned, I truly believe that we are ready to work toward this goal.

David B. Williams is a naturalist, author, and educator. His many books include the award-winning Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography and Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City. Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound is available now.

What counts as a wetland? It’s complicated: Emily O’Gorman on “Wetlands in a Dry Land”

The reeds were tall, almost reaching the top of our heads. We were on a cattle property that adjoined part of the Macquarie Marshes, a Ramsar-listed wetland in north-central New South Wales, Australia. A small group of cattle wandered along the edge of the reedbed and occasionally disappeared into it and then reappeared farther along. Some had ventured away from the herd, toward a small farm dam. Two brolgas—wetland birds renowned for their spectacular dances on the surface of shallow water—glided past. Here, our group, which was made up of mostly Australian and South African environmental scientists, prepared to go into the reedbeds, into the wetland. But as we stood on this threshold, it was difficult to say exactly where this wetland began and ended. Although we might be tempted see the wetland as natural and the farm as cultural, the farm cattle and wetland brolgas moved easily along and across this threshold. These reedbeds have in fact been deeply shaped by Wailwan Aboriginal people over tens of thousands of years through burning and harvesting the reeds for weaving. The farm dam may have been intended to water cattle, but for the brolgas it presented some additional watery habitat. Within these far-reaching and deeply historical sets of socio-ecological relationships, the category of wetlands sits somewhat uneasily. Indeed, while we might at first think of this category itself as natural, it, too, has a history.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, Especially as Waterfowl Habitat. While I am more used to writing about archives grounded in particular watery places, researching this agreement for a chapter in my book Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (out in July) made me more fully appreciate that some of the critical sites in a history of wetlands are boardrooms and government buildings. In many ways my research helped me pay greater attention to the category of wetlands itself and in turn revealed that the decisions and disagreements of bureaucrats and scientists in Australia and elsewhere, about what has counted as a wetland and why, have had long-lasting and mixed consequences. I will focus on just some of these.

The Ramsar Convention—initially signed by representatives of eighteen countries in 1971—aimed to coordinate international efforts in wetlands conservation. It reflected and reinforced the goal of many governments and scientists in this period around the world to reframe these as precious places that needed to be set aside for conservation and to shed the negative associations of terms like swamp (long associated with disease). Indeed, it was in this period that wetlands became an international category and an object of conservation shaped by two key factors: multiscalar politics and bird-centrism. Each of these have had particular stakes, creating lasting tensions within wetlands conservation and management.

The new international category of wetlands touched down in and was reshaped by local places. National and global environment movements, Pacific diplomacy, and scientists’ mounting concerns over species and habitat loss converged to shape the Australian government’s involvement in the Ramsar Convention and simultaneously a Japan-Australia Migratory Bird Agreement in the early 1970s. For some Australian government scientists, however, these two international agreements highlighted a paucity of knowledge about what now might be classified as wetlands on a national scale. Individual studies showed that there had been a loss of important waterbird habitat in specific places, such as a 1970 study that indicated 60 percent of wetlands along coastal NSW had been destroyed or degraded largely due to drainage for flood mitigation. Yet any effort to quantify losses more widely was difficult, perhaps amplified by the fact that the wetlands category was relatively new in scientific studies. So in 1972 members of the Australian Committee on Waterbirds—made up of state and federal government researchers and managers—proposed a national wetlands survey focused on waterbird habitat in order to support Australia’s obligations to both the Ramsar Convention and the Japan agreement.

The proposal, “A Survey of Wetland Habitats of Australian Waterbirds,” was approved by the Australian government, but then the Council of Nature Conservation Ministers significantly widened the brief to “go beyond an examination of waterbird habitat” and “encompass all wetland areas so as to be beneficial to a wider section of government agencies.” Ultimately three research divisions—wildlife, land use, and fisheries and oceanography—of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) conducted separate investigations as to whether such a survey was feasible. Notably, the Australian government researchers did not use the Ramsar definition of wetlands—which encompassed a very wide range of watery places including coral reefs—as they sought to reflect Australian ecologies and concerns within the international frameworks. The three divisions ultimately, but uneasily, decided on a definition that also suited their expertise and the goals of the survey: “wetlands include swamps, marshes, wet meadows, billabongs, lakes, estuaries and coastal lagoons, mangrove flats. These may be temporary or permanent. The mainstreams or main channels of rivers are excluded except for the survey of fishes.”

Each feasibility study soon ran into problems. The Division of Wildlife Research aimed to test methodologies for classifying wetlands according to the needs and populations of waterbirds. Focusing on just six sites in New South Wales, this study  threw into question the practicality of undertaking a continent-wide survey. The diversity of bird species and their different and changing habitat needs made implementing a single methodology too difficult, and constraints of budget and people power meant that comprehensive data simply could not be gathered. The division’s report concluded that a continent-wide survey “might not be the most important step to take next in waterbirds conservation.” What was needed was rather “detailed ecological research.”

The chief of the division admitted that while ephemeral wetlands in Australia were important for their opportunistic use by waterbirds, “no one has yet been able to properly assess them. . . . At present we have no idea how we will overcome that problem when the survey begins.” Dynamic wetlands in a dry continent proved a challenge for any simple process of quantification. The other divisions ran into similar problems. Further, the wetlands survey was being pulled in different directions by the CSIRO divisions and toward three different models: wetlands for birds, wetlands as hydrological entities, and wetlands as fisheries and estuaries.

The three divisions, each seeing major issues with conducting a national wetlands survey, requested more funds and time for pilot studies, which would inform a wetlands survey proper with an estimated cost of AUD$3.3 million over eight years. No additional funding was granted, and the wetlands survey was labeled not essential by the now conservative Liberal government.

In 1979 the acting minister of environment and science stated: “The . . . [wetlands survey was] not implemented because of cost, lack of agreement on a national approach and differences of opinion on the extent to which a national survey should concentrate on the aquatic fauna or the total wetlands ecosystem.” The survey had ultimately become unworkable.

That the survey did not, or could not, go ahead has had a range of implications. Perhaps most significantly, wetlands ecologists have limited ability to give robust estimates of losses, hindering the development of policies for their protection. Instead, a case-by-case and typology approach to wetlands conservation has unfolded, focusing on important or iconic sites that have reasonable historical research behind them. Treated as indictors of the general condition of wetlands, birds have remained central to wetlands conservation, management, and sciences. Yet this view of wetlands is one of birds and not those of other biota. The role of birds in wetlands conservation in Australia presents somewhat of a paradox as they will likely continue to be important, partly for historical reasons, as there has simply been so much research on them in the past that comparisons across time are better founded than for most other animals and plants.

 Wetlands entered history in this period as an international category of conservation, and its history has had significant, and mixed, consequences for the way wetlands are understood and managed within conservation science and governments today. This is a category that we need to keep revisiting and refining, asking what counts as a wetland for whom and with what consequences?

Emily O’Gorman is senior lecturer at Macquarie University. Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin is forthcoming in July 2021.