Category Archives: Native American and Indigenous Studies

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

See All Indigenous Confluences Books

Living Wisdom from Coast Salish Elders: Excerpts from Jesintel by Children of the Setting Sun Productions

Jesintel gathers the cultural teachings of nineteen Coast Salish elders for new generations. Collaboration is at the heart of this work by Native-owned and -operated Children of the Setting Sun Productions, who came together with their community to honor the boundless relations of Coast Salish people and their territories.

Jesintel—”to learn and grow together”—characterizes the spirit of the book, which includes photographs and interviews that share powerful experiences and stories. In the excerpts below, elders reflect on identity, education, and the importance of storytelling. Throughout the book, they offer their perspectives on language revitalization, Coast Salish family values and naming practices, salmon, sovereignty, and canoe racing. They also reveal traumatic memories, including of their boarding school experiences and the epidemics that ravished their communities.

Those featured here as well as other participating elders will be honored at the book launch on April 17, 4:30–6:30 pm, at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House. Find more information about upcoming events below.

Elaine Grinell (Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe) on the Importance of Storytelling

I learned storytelling at a young age, but I didn’t utilize it. I thought that was just for me. I thought that was just mine. And I didn’t learn until, oh, I was probably twenty-four or twenty-five when I realized that this was for me to give to someone else too—my whole family, you know. These things seep out. They just seep. Actually, I don’t know whether you realize how much you really do know until pretty late in life, and that it’s important, that I better stick with that, I’m good at that, I’d better continue.

Elaine shares stories at her home in S’Klallam [Photo by Beau Garreau]

I started in the Port Angeles school district, and now I have carried our stories and songs to Africa, Prague, Bangkok, Japan, and Alaska, way out on Saint Lawrence Island. Africa was fun. I got along really well with the people. They were really interested in Indians. They just really liked the Native Americans. They had thought we were extinct and they were quite surprised when one of us turned up at their hut.

Grandpa Prince would build a fire in the cast-iron woodstove, and those stoves have leaks in them. They’re just little openings and cracks, and the firelight would flicker through. So the three of us—Grandma, Grandpa, and me—would sit there, and he would peel apples, and that flame would hit his face, and it would just flicker, and Grandma would flicker. And I’d watch them, and he would tell stories. I was just, ah . . . mesmerized, totally taken in, and I thought, I have to remember.

Nolan Charles (Musqueam Indian Band) on Salish Identity

Language—it gives you your identity. It’s one. And it’s the resources. Like, we look at the Salish Sea. “Is that our soup bowl? The sea urchins, the octopus, the salmon, the halibut—all those things that we draw from the Salish Sea that sustain us?”

Those nourish us, but it’s also the things like the cedar tree that we use to build our canoes, to build our longhouses. We fashion mats and hats and clothing from cedar and from bulrushes from the mouths of the rivers. Those also provide us with clothing and mats and things like that. It’s all part and parcel. But language is probably the key that gives you your identity, connecting all of these. It will help our little ones prepare themselves for the next battle.

Nolan Charles [Photo by Beau Garreau]

Virginia Cross (Muckleshoot Tribe) on Education

I went to the University of Puget Sound and then got a master’s degree in education at the University of Washington in curriculum and instruction. I started the Virginia Cross Program when I was with the Auburn School District in the 1980s, and it has grown. It’s now known as the Virginia Cross Native American Education Center. When I started the program, we had a lot of kids who had dropped out of school, and we designed the program to serve the cultural, social, and academic needs of teenagers who weren’t in school. The program now supports students from over seventy tribes across a range of areas that are all connected. It’s important for our tribal students and future leaders to learn and share their culture as part of their education. It’s important to share this with non-tribal students and neighboring community members.

Virginia is most proud that the Muckleshoot people have come “from nothing” and overcome “struggle and uncertainty.” [Photo by Beau Garreau]

I have a lot of hope for the new legislation requiring Washington State public schools to offer a Native Education curriculum. We helped. Our lobbyists worked really hard on that. When it was signed, we went to the signing ceremony. If the public schools follow through and teach what they’re supposed to be teaching—the history of how tribal sovereignty came to be, treaty rights, Native science, opportunities to learn our traditional languages, opportunities to participate in traditional practices—then I think that our kids will have an easier time than we did at school. I worked for the Auburn School District for over twenty years, so I know very well the kinds of history books they approve and are distributed into our school system. Nothing has to do with tribal history or the plants you might gather. They don’t mention anything about Muckleshoot tribe or hardly any Indian tribe. They don’t recognize that we have our own constitution and bylaws—they only study the US Constitution. They also celebrated holidays that we don’t honor—Columbus Day, now Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I don’t think they have treated our kids well for their special needs.

I’m thinking back to when I was in school. I graduated in 1957, and at that time I was the only Muckleshoot graduate. My sister two years before me was the only Muckleshoot graduate. We would start in kindergarten with ten or fifteen tribal people, and by the time we were out of the eighth or ninth grade, they would all be gone. It just didn’t serve our kids or our people well.

I think there was just so much prejudice. There were very few of us who were in high school at that time, probably not more than ten of us in the whole school of thousands of kids. Our dad wanted us to be in school, that’s why we were there.

I think it’s the education department that has really progressed, mostly because that’s where our primary interest has been. We now have a tribal school and a Lushootseed language program with a program director, where we teach and qualify five full-time language teachers every year, who then go out to teach. And now we have hired another five more. Hopefully we’ll end up with everybody speaking Lushootseed language. And hopefully this work will continue.

Upcoming Events

April 17, 4:30–6:30 pm, Book Launch at wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House (UW Seattle): The program will feature selected readings from Jesintel and an evocative drumming ceremony honoring elders in attendance whose narratives are presented in the book: Steve and Gwen Point, Gene Harry, Nolan Charles, Elaine Grinell, Virginia Cross, Nancy Shippentower, and Jewell James. Books will be available for purchase from the University Book Store.

April 28, 7:00–8:00 pm, Village Books (Bellingham): Join Darrell Hillaire, executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions, and editors of the book for a reading and book signing in the Village Books Readings Gallery. This event is part of the Nature of Writing series, a partnership between Village Books and the North Cascades Institute.

Gifts from Their Grandmothers: Megan Smetzer on “Painful Beauty”

A common thread running through the contemporary artworks included in my book, Painful Beauty, is the deep respect for the tangible and intangible gifts received by the artists from their mothers and grandmothers through the beadwork they created. Two ephemeral fragments—a family snapshot of a mother and daughter beading moccasins and a paper beadwork pattern stored in a fruitcake tin—inspired the poignant and powerful artworks by Larry McNeil and Tanis S’eiltin that are critical to my own consideration of the histories of Tlingit beadwork.

Tlingit mothers and grandmothers in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere have known the power of beadwork to feed their families and also affirm thousands of years of connections to the land and its bountiful resources. Yet throughout the twentieth century, their beading has been dismissed by many scholars and collectors as derivative and inauthentic. Tlingit communities, however, have long recognized the strength and resilience of these women through the overt racism and discrimination brought to bear by the institutions of settler colonialism. Through the generosity of the descendants of these beaders, who are telling their stories through contemporary artistic production, the historical significance and impact of these powerful Indigenous women is being shared more widely with the public.

I was first drawn to Larry McNeil’s photographic collage, Once Upon a Time in America, because of the 1943 snapshot at its center depicting his mother Anita McNeil (kaajee seidee) and grandmother Mary Brown Betts (kah saa nák) holding and sewing beaded moccasins. Here was a beautiful illustration of the intangible intergenerational knowledge that fueled so much beading in the mid-twentieth century. I knew, from archival research, that around five hundred women had beaded moccasins and other work for sale through the Alaska Native Arts and Crafts Cooperative from the 1930s to the 1970s. Many contemporary artists I have spoken with shared memories of watching or helping their grandmothers with beaded work. In this print and in his writing, McNeil foregrounds the power of these women through a seemingly mundane activity, which, in fact, was central to their fight for equal education as well as perpetuating intangible Tlingit ways of knowing in a difficult and discriminatory era. I am deeply grateful to Larry McNeil and his sisters, Helen and Patty, for sharing stories of their mother and grandmother with me.

Larry McNeil, Once Upon a Time in America from Fly by Night Mythology series, 2002. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Over the years Tanis S’eiltin and I have discussed octopus bags—distinctive pouches with four pairs of “tentacles” made from wool and beaded with seaweed and floral designs—and how they express historical trade relationships with interior peoples as well as the ways in which Tlingit women transformed them aesthetically to better represent local knowledge. When I first saw photographs of S’eiltin’s untitled armor-like floor-length coat featuring an oversized beadwork pattern depicting an octopus, I was thrilled to see how she had transformed the idea of an octopus bag into a life-size work celebrating Tlingit women.

During my visit to see her coat, Tanis mentioned that she had a fruitcake tin filled with beadwork patterns that dated to her great-grandmother’s era. I was nearly brought to tears when she brought it out. I had been told of these tins filled with patterns, but this was the first time one was shared with me. We pulled out hundreds of delicate pieces of paper, cut from old envelopes and cookbooks, and Tanis shared stories of the women, including her great-grandmother Mary Barries and her mother Maria Ackerman Miller (Ldaneit), who filled the tin over the years. These patterns and others like them adorned hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of moccasins made for sale throughout the twentieth century. The oversize octopus pattern on the coat foregrounds those powerful Tlingit women and their centrality to trade in all its forms, including the relationships that brought octopus bags and other treasures to Southeast Alaska. S’eiltin has drawn inspiration from this battered “box of treasures” to create work for her own children and grandchildren to teach them about their matrilineal legacies. I am so grateful for the opportunity Tanis has given me to write about her work.

Tanis S’eiltin, Untitled, 2017. Photo courtesy of the author.

Tanis S’eiltin’s fruitcake tin holding three generations of beading patterns. Photo courtesy of the author.

Tanis S’eiltin, Untitled, 2017. Photo courtesy of the author.

I extend my gratitude to all Tlingit people, past and present, who have always expressed longstanding cultural practices through the incorporation of new ideas and materials in innovative and creative ways. The histories and stories shared in Painful Beauty are a testament to the power of their art and the strength of their resilience.

Megan A. Smetzer is lecturer of art history at Capilano University.

Tips for the Home Gardener: An Interview with Linda Chalker-Scott, Co-Author of “Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest, Third Edition”

During the COVID-19 sheltering-at-home period, have you noticed an increased interest in home gardening?

Oh, wow, yes! Our Garden Professors Facebook group has been swamped with questions from new gardeners, and I’m glad I’ve got that group there to help provide science-based advice.

Is this interest mostly in growing edibles or ornamental plants?

It’s both, though I bet that vegetable gardens have the upper hand. But lots of people have been tackling long-term projects that they didn’t have time to do before, like removing lawns and putting in landscapes.

For beginning gardeners, what would be good projects to start with this summer?

I would really recommend building a raised bed system for growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers. We put one in last year and it was fantastic. We put up a fence to keep out the four-legged critters and used our native soil to fill the beds. It takes some time to do this correctly but once it’s done, it requires little upkeep other than laying down a protective mulch over the winter to keep weeds out.

20190714_160515

Courtesy of Linda Chalker-Scott

What mistakes should beginning gardeners try to avoid?

Don’t try to do it all the first year! Choose something you really want to focus on—a vegetable garden, a pollinator garden, or some other relatively small project. It is going to take time and patience to do this right. Don’t expect instant gratification. Plants are living organisms, not design elements—and they will require proper planting and care to thrive.

Now that nurseries are beginning to reopen, should people expect most of the usual plant inventory to be available?

From my personal experience, it varies! As I expected from our local nurseries, the inventory got pretty slim after the spring rush. However, I’ve found that some garden centers at hardware or big box stores still have excellent selections and the quality can be surprisingly good. And again, work with the nursery or garden center if you are looking for something they don’t have.

Which plants are good to order by mail? Do you recommend particular nurseries?

Only seeds and bare root plants are consistently reliable for ordering by mail. You can look online for other options, but be aware that mailing live plants is difficult on the plants and you may not like what you receive. It’s best to work with a local nursery to order plants.

How can people living in apartments grow edibles and ornamentals? Which plants grow well in pots on apartment balconies? What are successful indoor plants? What kinds of pots are best?

Tropical ornamentals are great choices for house plants, as are cacti and succulents; temperate perennials and woody plants are not good choices, as most of them do best with low winter temperatures. Whatever you choose, you’ll just need to make sure you have the right exposure for your desired choices. If you have a balcony that gets at least six hours of sunlight a day, you can grow some vegetables though yields can be low with reduced pot size. I think herb gardens are the easiest to create. You can also grow many smaller trees and shrubs. You will need to protect the pots from cold weather, not only so ceramic pots don’t crack but so that roots don’t freeze.

You really can use any type of pot you want, inside or out. You need to ensure that there are drain holes and protect surfaces, either with saucers or cachepots on top of some sort of impermeable material. I like to buy single-glazed floor tiles and then glue cork on the bottom.

Which are the best plants for edible landscaping?

First, you’ll want to know that you can safely eat plants in your landscape, and the best way to find out is to do a soil test to be sure you don’t have lead or some other heavy metal in your soil. Assuming you don’t have a problem, then choose perennials and woody plants you like to eat that are also ornamental. Consider perennial herbs, rhubarb (there are several cultivars with attractive leaves), berry bushes (we have lots of natives in this group), and dwarf cultivars of tree fruits that can be espaliered or otherwise formally trained. There are even ornamental groundcovers with edible fruit.

Which drought-resistant native plants do you recommend for home gardeners in the Pacific Northwest?

A lot of this is personal aesthetics, but you can tell which plants are going to be drought-tolerant by looking at their leaves. Plants with small, thick leaves, with a waxy covering that appears to be gray-green or gray-blue, use much less water than those with broad, thin leaves. But do understand that even drought-tolerant plants need to be watered through their first year of planting to get roots established.

For people who want to stroll (socially distanced) through a park or garden to see the mature sizes and shapes of plants they’re considering planting at home, can you recommend a few places in the Pacific Northwest?

Here are places I’ve visited where you can see many native (and nonnative) trees and shrubs in their full glory. Of course, state and national parks will also have many of our more ornamental natives, but the environmental conditions in large tracts of land may not reflect those in a small urban landscape. More managed gardens are probably the best bet. For more information, just look at their websites online.

Seattle area:

  • Bellevue Botanical Garden
  • Bloedel Reserve
  • Heronswood
  • Kruckeberg Botanical Gardens
  • Washington Park Arboretum/UW Botanical Gardens

Tacoma area:

  • Lakewold Gardens
  • Point Defiance Park
  • Rhododendron Species Garden
  • Wright Park

Spokane:

  • Manito Park

Portland:

  • Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden

Vancouver/Victoria BC areas:

  • Butchart Gardens
  • The Gardens at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific
  • UBC Botanical Garden
  • Van Dusen Botanical Gardens

For people who want to support their local bee and bird populations, what are good landscape plants that provide pollen and seeds?

There are so many choices! There are great pollinator plant lists at websites such as Xerces. Don’t worry about having to use native plants (but do avoid any known invasive species). Wildlife is highly adaptable to their habitat and they learn to use new food sources. For the most part, the types of plants you choose because of their flower color and fragrance will be good choices for pollinators. And birds will eat just about any type of fruit. If you want to provide seeds without getting weed problems, you can cook seeds in the oven at 300°F for thirty minutes. This prevents germination but does not affect the nutrient content.

Linda Chalker-Scott is associate professor of horticulture and extension specialist at Washington State University. She cohosts the Garden Professors blog, and her books include Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest, The Informed Gardener, The Informed Gardener Blooms Again, and How Plants Work.

 

 

Jill La Pointe on the Art—and Preservation—of Lushootseed Storytelling

Adapted from Jill La Pointe’s foreword to Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound by Vi Hilbert, Jill La Pointe, Thom Hess

When Haboo was first published 35 years ago, the dramatic art of traditional storytelling in many of our Native American communities was fading as younger generations became more adapted to mainstream culture and values. Recognizing the impact of cultural change taking place in their communities, my grandmother—like so many other elders—sought to gather and preserve as much traditional information and wisdom as possible. Every elder who contributed to this magnificent collection of cultural stories did so in hopes that someday future generations will once again appreciate the ancient art of storytelling. 

Although much has changed over the years, there remains one unfortunate constant. Despite all the technological advancements since the first publication of Haboo, our communities continue to lose many of their beloved elders. As each year passes, we are left with fewer and fewer among us who can still recite the ancient stories and even fewer who can retell the stories in our traditional Lushootseed language.

Confronting this reality remains as critical to the survival of Coast Salish culture and language today as it was 35 years ago. The wisdom and teachings found in Haboo continue to offer a pedagogical resource that highlights a way of being in the world that we have strayed from, and they remain as relevant today as they have been for generations. 

Growing up, my brother Jay and I heard our grandmother Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert tell many of the stories included here over and over again. Staying true to who she was, she never explained the meaning or revealed the overall lessons hidden in the stories, but rather she instructed us to think about each story and ask ourselves, “What is the story trying to tell me?”

It wasn’t until years later that I gained a deep appreciation for the traditional art of storytelling, as I heard Grandma repeat to audiences everywhere, young and old, that “Lushootseed never insults the intelligence of a listener by explaining the story,” allowing them the same dignity her elders allowed her, to find their own interpretation and understanding.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT Literary Hub.

Jill tsisqʷux̌ʷał La Pointe is director of Lushootseed Research and granddaughter of Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert.

Giving Historical Context to Elizabeth Warren’s Plan for Native Americans

On August 16, Senator Elizabeth Warren announced the policy she will pursue for American Indians if she wins the presidency in 2020. While the New York Times called it a plan to “help” Native Americans, the Huffington Post emphasized Warren’s intent to “empower tribal nations,” noting specifically her desire “to reverse” a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that tribal governments have no power to prosecute non-Indian lawbreakers.

Warren promised to seek congressional affirmation that tribes have “inherent jurisdiction over their sovereign territory,” including jurisdiction to arrest, try, and jail non-Indians who commit crimes there. Voters may think that is a radical and unrealistic proposal, but Warren’s choice of words – her call for legislation to “restore” tribes’ jurisdiction over non-Indians – suggests that radical change came with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of existing law. Indeed, a year before the court ruled, the American Indian Policy Commission – a body created by and composed of US lawmakers – adopted virtually the same position on tribal jurisdiction as Warren has. A commission investigation revealed that several dozen tribes were applying their laws to non-Indians as well as Indians, with encouragement from key federal officials.

This historical information is not from Warren’s manifesto; it appears in Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed, my book recounting modern tribes’ efforts to regulate all people and activities within reservation boundaries. Reservations – even those established for Indians’ “exclusive use” – were never entirely closed to non-Indians, but thousands of non-Indians now live on reservations because Congress allowed them to acquire land there in the late 1800s. For five subsequent decades, the undeniably dominant United States tried to dismantle tribal nations and discourage Indian self-governance but did not abolish reservations or deny tribes’ inherent sovereignty. Meanwhile, through several turns of US policy, lawmakers and judges made a jumble of the rules for governing what remained of Indian country.

With stories from Indian perspectives, which the Supreme Court did not consider, Reclaiming the Reservation shows why and how tribes brought the issue of their power over non-Indians to national attention in the 1970s. Several factors had combined to convince them that taking responsibility for reservation conditions was essential for their communities’ survival and was their right under US law. Although tribes featured in the book did want to deter criminal activity, that was a secondary aim – a corollary of their desire to preserve and manage the land and resources on which their future as tribes depended.

Nevertheless, the action that eventually provoked a Supreme Court case about tribes’ jurisdiction over non-Indians was not a land use regulation; it was an arrest and prosecution for assault. A climactic chapter of the book examines the court’s denial of tribal power in Oliphant v. Suquamish Tribe along with the criticism that opinion earned for its blinkered, disingenuous account of relevant history and its evident racial bias. The book does not end there, however, because – as Elizabeth Warren’s familiarity with the issue indicates – tribes’ determination to ensure safe conditions on reservations did not end there. The Supreme Court’s veto of criminal law enforcement has not deterred them from invoking civil power to regulate non-Indians.

As the number of non-Indians who travel, live, or work on Indian reservations has grown in recent years, so have the stakes in the jurisdiction debate. Yet most non-Indian voters today are as uninformed about reservation community histories as the justices were in 1978. Thus, while Senator Warren’s support for tribal power may win her Indian votes, it could alienate more numerous non-Indians, many of them fearful that tribal police and courts will be unfair. Rather than address that fear directly, Warren identified tribal jurisdiction as a sensible response to another, proven threat: criminals are escaping justice through gaps in reservation law enforcement. She cited Native women’s shocking rate of violent victimization, often by non-Natives who never face prosecution – a scandal that motivated Congress in 2013 to approve limited tribal court jurisdiction over Indians’ abusive, non-Indian intimate partners.

That amendment to the Violence Against Women Act was politically feasible because tribal governments are increasingly sophisticated, effective, and accepted as permanent components of an American federation that has three kinds of sovereign polities. Senator Warren’s position on tribal jurisdiction is also a consequence of that historic tribal resurgence – a sign that tribes have persuasively communicated their need for empowerment and their ability to wield power judiciously. Their accomplishment illustrates a central theme of Reclaiming the Reservation: long after Europeans invaded America, Indians continue negotiating with their conquerors for terms of relations that will enable sovereign tribal communities to endure.

Alexandra Harmon is professor of American Indian studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History and editor of The Power of Promises: Perspectives on Pacific Northwest Indian Treaties. Her book Reclaiming the Reservation is part of the Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography.

To hear more about Reclaiming the Reservation, please join us for Professor Harmon’s Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture on November 6th at 3:30 p.m. in UW Allen Library’s Peterson Room.

How a Culture of Impunity is Fanning the Flames in Amazonia

As a cultural anthropologist who has worked in Amazonia for the past twenty years, I am saddened—but not at all shocked—by the swathe of fires currently burning across northern Brazil. The smoke from these fires has famously blackened the daytime sky of Brazil’s largest city, shaking the world to notice the existential threats facing the peoples and ecosystems of Earth’s largest remaining tropical rainforest. And while reports have correctly laid the blame on the Brazilian government for its feckless response to the conflagrations, it is the Brazilian President’s public statements and policy proposals—which so clearly signal a racist contempt for Indigenous rights—that are the true fuel that drives these fires. President Jair Bolsonaro’s “develop-at-all-costs” posture regarding the Amazon encourages the type of land-grabbing, forest destruction, and violence against native peoples that I write about in Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon. Though based on research conducted through 2014, my book describes colonial land dynamics that have only intensified since Bolsonaro’s ascendancy, placing numerous societies and an entire ecosystem closer to the brink of destruction.

The explosion of fires is not natural, and this year’s record-breaking conflagration is not new. Indigenous peoples have managed fire in an ecologically sustainable fashion for millennia. But since Brazil began to encourage agricultural colonization in the region during the 1970s, the Amazon’s dry season has been eagerly awaited as the “burning season”: time for ranchers and soy-planters to clear large extensions of forest, let them dry, and strike the match. In this way, over 20 percent of the original forest’s extent has been converted to pasture and field over the last few decades. The vast majority of this agricultural expansion has proceeded through illegal land-grabs, in which elites deforest land, evict peasant and Indigenous groups at gunpoint, and manipulate the judicial system to launder their ill-gotten lands into deeded properties. Some of Brazil’s (and indeed the world’s) largest companies are involved in this cycle, in which traditional communities and their forests and rivers fall prey to an unsustainably expanding agricultural system. Though technically illegal, the machinations of this system are taken for granted among rural colonists, who have come to resent any form of legal enforcement as a brake on their right to “improve” the land by burning down the forest.

It is a system in which fire and political maneuvers are the weapons that colonists use to invade and rob Indigenous territories. And though in operation for half a century (a history documented in Conjuring Property), it is a system whose backers and beneficiaries have finally arrived at the very pinnacle of power in Brazil. Since taking office in January 2019, President Bolsonaro and the “ruralist” parliamentary block have sought to open Indigenous lands up to mining and logging operations; have slashed the budgets and oversight potential of environmental agencies; have backed an “economic liberty” suite of policies for agribusiness; have vowed that the government will not demarcate “one more centimeter” of Indigenous land in Brazil, and have taken steps to try to decertify (rob) existing Indigenous reserves. These maneuvers are especially heartbreaking because over the previous two decades Brazil had been making concerted efforts to reverse deforestation and protect culturally- and ecologically-significant territories. Bolsonaro learned from his time in congress how to enflame rural populist resentment for regulations, sentiment that has its deepest root in a skepticism among Amazonian colonists regarding whether the elites that benefit most from Brazil’s political-economic system really have their best interests in mind. The ruralists in Brasilia understand how politically useful anxiety in the provinces can be for expanding their grip on power.

The parliamentary assault on Indigenous peoples and on Amazonian ecosystems is vast, coordinated, and has been decades in the making. Though there have been signs of hope—last month Brazil’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected Bolsonaro’s attempt to assign oversight of Indigenous territories to the Ministry of Agriculture—the ruralists have a litany of schemes in the queue. The idea is to act for “Brazil above all.” This slogan was no doubt on the minds of ranchers and farmers in the Amazonian towns of Novo Progresso and Altamira, where on August 10 thousands of acres of felled forest were set ablaze. A week after this coordinated “Day of Fire” (which had been announced in a local newspaper on August 5), with the flames still raging (and smoke settling on São Paulo), local farmers chirped on social media that the fires were meant to signal support for the president’s policies, since Bolsonaro “supports those of us who produce.” The implication was clear: colonists see themselves as “producers” in contrast to Indigenous Amazonians, whom they view with scorn and contempt. The irony is that the very forest itself, with its unmatched biodiversity and ability to store carbon, is in large part the result of thousands of years of purposeful habitation and cultivation by Amazonia’s native peoples; the original producers, as it were.

It seems that all is burning in Brazil. Just a few days from now marks the one-year anniversary of the fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, in which ethnographic and archaeological treasures, precious pieces of art and manuscripts—all irreplaceable testaments to the staggering cultural diversity of Brazil—were reduced to ashes. As an anthropologist who has the privilege of working with the Indigenous peoples of Amazonia, I also have the obligation to condemn the racist rhetoric and genocidal policies pursued by the current Brazilian government. Those who would pose the future of Amazonia as a question of “production” vs. idle, unutilized land are committing grievous errors: the human rights of Indigenous peoples, and the priceless value to the global ecosystem that the forest produces, must not be sacrificed as “costs of doing business.” Though I applaud the efforts of political leaders and companies that are demanding that Mr. Bolsonaro change course, I am deeply skeptical whether he would—or even could, given the power of the ruralists in congress. Certainly, international pressure must continue, and global citizens must prioritize consumer- and investment-choices that preserve the forest. But ultimately the Brazilian people will decide the fate of the leaders who have placed so much in peril for so long. Citizens near and far should continue to watch the Amazon even after the rains cool the fires this year. Because burning season comes again next year, and the year after, and so on until no trees remain lest we all remain attentive, vigilant, and supportive of the Indigenous peoples of Amazonia.

Dr. Jeremy M. Campbell is an associate professor of anthropology at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. His 2015 book, Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon, received the James M. Blaut Award for the outstanding book in political ecology from the Association of American Geographers and an Honorable Mention Book Award from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

This piece was adapted from an open letter written on behalf of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America.

Bringing Indigenous Artists to the Forefront

A student recently came by my office to talk about Atalie Unkalunt, a Cherokee vocal performer, lecturer, actor, and writer of the early twentieth century. Reading too quickly through an introductory email, I thought that the student perhaps meant Mary Ataloa McClenden, the legendary Chickasaw singer and teacher. While I’d never heard of Atalie, I’d run across Ataloa while researching American Indian concert vocalists for my 2004 book, Indians in Unexpected Places. There were a lot of these singers—Tsianina Redfeather, Princess Watawaso, Irene Eastman, Oskenonton, Yolachie, Falling Water, Sausa Carey, Kiutus Tecumseh, Carlisle Kawbawgam, to name just a few. Somehow, though, I’d missed Atalie Unkalunt, who was (despite sharing four out of six letters in her stage name) not Ataloa.

The moment reminded me of two issues central to my new book, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. First, no matter how well we think we understand our pasts, there are always individuals hidden to us, human footnotes in the flow of our narratives who are so deeply buried as to be invisible. I thought I knew the world of early twentieth-century Native vocal performers. But Atalie Unkalunt reminds me just how fragmentary my knowledge—our knowledge—really is. I have no doubt that more and more such performers will emerge, claiming space in the stories we tell.

Mary Sully—the professional name used by my great aunt Susan Deloria—may well offer the definitive example of such an invisible footnote of a person. Between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, she made ravishingly beautiful, highly intelligent art that was shown to the world on perhaps four or five occasions. Her medium was colored pencil—the tools of an artist struggling with poverty—and her work followed a form that she called the “personality print,” a three-panel triptych that developed themes and iconographies across distinct styles—modernist abstraction, geometrical design patterns, and Native-influenced imagery and design. The personality print was quite literally meant to capture the essence of an individual, and Mary Sully focused her attention on an archive of popular culture celebrities—Babe Ruth, Helen Keller, Betty Boop, Bing Crosby, and 131 others. Like Atalie Unkalunt and Mary Sully herself, many of these people have now faded into deep-footnote obscurity. Who remembers Alice Fazende, the last Confederate widow, or Jesse Crawford, the “poet of the organ”?

The second issue Atalie Unkalunt pressed on me was that when we move people from the footnotes to the main text, there’s a good chance we change the very nature of the story. Here, too, I’ve found that Mary Sully matters. Indeed, in Becoming Mary Sully, I suggest the ways in which she’s a game-changing artist.

The story of early-mid-twentieth century Native American art has had a story not unlike the one I once told about Native musicians performing operatic arias and Indigenous melodies while garbed as Indian princesses and chiefs. In that story, in the first half of the twentieth century, Native crossover artists, supported by patrons, teachers, art markets, and schools, created new forms of art in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. Their work was brilliantly creative and technically excellent—but it was also circumscribed by the desire of non-Native supporters for a brand of primitivism that emphasized Indigenous pasts, “traditional” subject matter, flat perspectives, and featureless, timeless backgrounds.

Put Mary Sully’s work into this story and watch the narrative change. Her work reversed anti-modern primitivism (indeed, one might call it instead “anti-primitivist modernism!). In that sense, Sully asks us to rethink not simply a story about Native American art, but about the far more intimidating category “American Art” itself. For all its anonymity, Sully’s work sought out dialogue with artists we more easily place in the “American” canon: Aaron Douglas, Diego Rivera, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley. And when Mary Sully is read as something other than a footnote, we find ourselves contemplating a significant cohort of Indian women who made similar efforts to engage the wider world of American art: Edmonia Lewis, Angel De Cora, Wa Wa Cha, Tonita Pena, and many others.

These arguments might ring a familiar echo for those fortunate to have seen the recent Hilma auf Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City: a previously obscure artist, lifted from the footnotes and, on the strength of the work, elevated into the main narrative of the invention of modernism, utterly transforming that story in the process. I’m not an art historian—but it seems to me that the world of art scholarship and appreciation is caught up in an amazing moment of footnote rescues and returns of the repressed. It’s a moment when Atalie Unkalunts and Mary Sullys have a chance to leap out of the past and take a second shot at the main texts and the master narratives that evaded them in life.

Philip J. Deloria (Dakota descent) is professor of history at Harvard University and the author of Indians in Unexpected Places and Playing Indian. His most recent book, coauthored with Alexander I. Olson, is American Studies: A User’s Guide. He is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he chairs the Repatriation Committee; a former president of the American Studies Association; and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

What Tahlequah Said

Even writing that headline, I feel the lilt and wash of the ocean in the language of the Salish, who consider the orca, qal̕qaləx̌ič in Lushootseed, their kin.

We show our own smallness, place a frame around an individual creature, when we name an orca in human terms. But somewhere along the line, people felt that this particular orca needed a name we could relate to. Tahlequah supposedly means “mother of waters.” J 35 suggests a science experiment, not just a study of existing conditions, and we have been conditioned to expect experiments to fail.

Of all the noise we were subjected to in 2018, the most important message we received was from Tahlequah. She brought her baby to full term only to have it die within a few minutes of birth. Those of us who have experienced pregnancy know that your body prepares you during the whole gestation for the miracle of being twinned somehow, divided so that you will have two bodies to care for until the little one is fully grown. I can imagine the surging hormones experienced by this mother orca as her calf was born and failed to thrive. What could she have done? Nothing. But she understands that the conditions humans have created in the Sound make it impossible for the near-shore orcas who depend on Chinook salmon for their food to survive. She carried that dead baby with her for seventeen days, until it fell apart, so that we would see her and it, and get the message.

While it is in many ways a series of humorous books, Douglas Adams got it right when he named one of his books “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” as the farewell message from the dolphins while departing from a future earth, no longer considered tenable by its oceanic inhabitants. As the dolphins desperately try to tell us that we are doomed, that we need to leave, we ooh and ah and applaud their apparent hijinks. We are incapable of understanding that we are not the only creatures on earth with an understanding of time, life, and mortality.

While there is ample evidence around us of global warming and impending disaster, we are aggravating this scenario with our willful inaction. A couple of months ago the governor of the state of Washington, Jay Inslee, rolled out some points to enhance his standing as a protector of the environment. This included some language about saving the orcas, but not an obvious one: take down the dams that are keeping Chinook salmon from reproducing. The Snake River was once their breeding ground, but fewer and fewer salmon make it past all the obstacles we have placed in their way. The Chinook are not reproducing, and the whales are starving to death. It doesn’t take summersaults, it doesn’t take naming orcas, to figure that out.

In spite of our reluctance to face the obvious, nature has been very forgiving. The dams on the Elwha River were removed a couple of years ago, and the natural life of the river is surging back at a miraculous pace. Its native salmon have been waiting almost a hundred years to return to their spawning beds. Just imagine! They had to return from the open ocean to the mouth of the river each year, only to be turned back by dams. Again. And again and again. But now they made it.

Can we save the Chinook? In my opinion, there is only one way to find out. Take down the dams. Ease up on the hatchery fish, which probably just compete with the wild salmon for scarce resources.

Almost unremarked, another orca died on January 28, 2019, after a short illness. Kayla was thirty years old, what should have been the half-way point in her life, when she suddenly sickened and died. She lived at Sea World in Orlando, Florida, which has been the site of many questionable practices concerning orcas.

“We shared our salmon,” wrote Jack Flander of the Yakima Nation in The Seattle Times (1/29/19), speaking for the orcas, “but you took more than your share,” leaving us little to survive on. “Our waters became polluted. Our infant mortality rate increased … Imagine what a brotherhood and sisterhood we could have shared. Now imagine that I am an Indian.”

With the paperback issue of my book, The Deepest Roots, I wish I had a more cheerful introduction to offer. But the same warning bells are going off as when I started this book. What’s more, the current administration has made the work that we do to conserve the environment even more difficult, and even more important.

Every person I interviewed for The Deepest Roots has a different story to tell, a different relationship with the land and the sea. Some of them are gone now, having passed their legacies on to younger farmers and fisher people. They are remembered with fondness, their penchant for barbeque, or having created fertile soil through sheer willpower.

Others have begun to engage with the land and the people in a more entrepreneurial fashion, looking to the eastern horizon and the inevitable population growth that will take place on the island. We wonder if our children will return, and what it will be like for them in ten, twenty, one hundred years from now. Will the salmon continue to wait for us?

This book has raised as many questions as answers, but people continue to approach me thoughtfully, usually with their own stories to share. I hope The Deepest Roots encourages you to see the place where you live with new eyes, and to see yourself as an active partner in its salvation and recovery. As storyteller Vi Hilbert would say, “Haboo!”

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of a collection of essays, The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing; three novels, including Treasures in Heaven; and a collection of short stories. She lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

To learn more about The Deepest Roots, buy your copy of the book today!

March 2018 News, Reviews, and Events

News

The University of Washington Press has an outstanding opening for an Editorial Assistant (job number 153892). Please help us get the word out to excellent candidates who are interested in getting into acquisitions!

We were thrilled to announce that starting March 1, 2018, the University of Washington Press joins the UW Libraries and reports to the vice provost of digital initiatives and dean of University Libraries, Lizabeth (Betsy) Wilson. The Press and the Libraries currently collaborate on a number of joint initiatives, and the Press has also published a number of books in association with the Libraries. Read the full press release on the UW Press Blog and more at Shelf Awareness Pro.

Monthly Giveaways

Reviews and Interviews

The Spokesman-Review publishes an opinion piece by The Spokane River editor Paul Lindholdt.

The Indian Express features an article by High-Tech Housewives author Amy Bhatt about how US immigration policy is impacting Indian families.

The Seattle Times mentions Seattle Walks by David B. Williams in a Lit Life column about the Seattle Public Library’s Peak Picks program.

Light reviews Nasty Women Poets edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane (dist. Lost Horse Press): “This anthology is the burn, the salve on the burn, and the funny story you make up years later to explain the scar.”—Barbara Egel

Kotaku Australia includes Black Women in Sequence by Deborah Elizabeth Whaley in a round-up of comics-related Black History Month reads (2/15/18). The author also gets a mention in a New York Times opinion piece (no book mention; 2/16/18), which is syndicated and translated at Gazeta do Povo.

UW Today / UW News highlights news that UW professor emeritus and UW Press author Quintard Taylor has been awarded the lifetime achievement award from the Washington State Historical Society. The Forging of a Black Community gets a mention.

Redmond Reporter features Looking for Betty MacDonald by Paula Becker.

The Forbes Science / #WhoaScience stream features the second edition of The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 by Brian F. Atwater, Satoko Musumi-Rokkaku, Kenji Satake, Yoshinobu Tsuji, Kazue Ueda, and David K. Yamaguchi (published with US Geological Survey, Department of the Interior): “A rather beautifully illustrated account.”—Robin Andrews

Above & Beyond publishes an article about ptarmigans by Michael Engelhard. Ice Bear gets a byline mention.

University of Montana News features Douglas H. MacDonald and Before Yellowstone.

The Fil-Am Magazine and Inquirer.net US review A Time to Rise edited by Rene Ciria Cruz, Cindy Domingo, and Bruce Occena: “For anyone looking to engage in the issues they believe in or find inspiration amid today’s discouraging headlines, the lessons shared by former KDP members in A Time to Rise are deeply impactful. . . . Detailed and informative, the memoirs in A Time to Rise hash out the struggles that made the difficult road to justice possible. . . . More than a list of achievements, A Time to Rise is personal.”—Renee Macalino Rutledge

Association of King County Historical Organization (AKCHO) Heritage Advisor / News features Frederick L. Brown and his 2017 AKCHO Virginia Marie Folkins Award-winning book The City Is More Than Human.

The Art Newspaper reviews No Idols by Thomas Crow (dist. for Power Publications):”The greatest value of No Idols is in its widest implication: that even if we try, we cannot rid ourselves of the past. Art, stripped of its religious foundations, lives on in a secular world, but ghostly remnants will always remain.”—Pac Pobric

International Examiner mentions Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Yoshiko Uchida’s Desert Exile in a review of Jeanette Arakawa’s The Little Exile.

Live Science mentions Ancient Ink edited by Lars Krutak and Aaron Deter-Wolf in an article about newly published research on prehistoric tattooing. The article interviews lead researcher and book contributor Renée Friedman, and her team’s original article is published in the March 2018 issue of Journal of Archaeological Science.

Ethnic Seattle features Monica Sone and Nisei Daughter in a Women’s History Month round-up of women of color writers from Seattle.

Diplomacy’s Public Dimension reviews Mediating Islam by Janet Steele: “Steele brings the strengths of an accomplished journalism and media scholar and twenty years of field research in Southeast Asia to a book that explores important questions. . . . Not least among many contributions in this important study is the way the author, a self-described Western, secular, female scholar, has engaged in sustained, productive cross-cultural dialogue with journalists in majority Muslim countries, many of whom are not liberal or secular.”—Bruce Gregory

Panorama Television (PCTV) “Now Where Were We?” interviews Lorraine McConaghy about Free Boy. Stream the segment on YouTube.

Food Politics blogger Marion Nestle features The Organic Profit by Andrew N. Case.

The New York Times Lens section’s latest Race Stories piece by Maurice Berger features Al Smith’s life, work, and Seattle on the Spot (dist. for Museum of History and Industry).

Cool Green Science (the conservation science blog of The Nature Conservancy) reviews Razor Clams by David Berger: “An entertaining account, and guide, to the real fun of digging your own food in the beach. . . . Berger’s book is an excellent testimony that gathering is still an enriching, fun and tasty pursuit. Long may it be so.”—Matthew L. Miller

Science interviews Ted Pietsch, coauthor of the forthcoming Fishes of the Salish Sea, about first-ever footage of living anglerfish. More via UW News.

Santa Fe Council on International Relations interviews Janet Steele about Mediating Islam.

The Seattle Times Outdoors section features two (out of six) spring hikes from Seattle Walks by David B. Williams.

Humboldt State Now interviews Cutcha Risling Baldy and mentions We Are Dancing for You in a news release about the 32nd Annual California Indian Conference to be held at Humboldt State University on April 5 and April 6. She is chair of the conference organizing committee.

Science to the People rebroadcasts their interview with Dawn Day Biehler about Pests in the City.

New Books Network interviews Frederick L. Brown about The City Is More Than Human (posted on the NBn American Studies, American West, Environmental Studies, History, and Native American Studies channels).

The Booklist Reader features Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and recommends additional contemporary Filipino-American fiction: “Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart is a cornerstone of classic Asian-American literature.”—Terry Hong

New Books

A Family History of Illness: Memory as Medicine
By Brett L. Walker

While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, “Do you have a family history of illness?”—a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family’s medical past. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather’s sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family’s Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west.


Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore
By Breanne Fahs

Breanne Fahs brings together ten years of dialogue with four founders of the radical feminist movement and provides a timely and historically rich account of these audacious women and the lasting impact of their words and work.


Before Yellowstone: Native American Archaeology in the National Park
By Douglas H. MacDonald

Douglas MacDonald tells the long history of human presence in Yellowstone National Park as revealed by archaeological research into nearly 2,000 sites — many of which he helped survey and excavate. He describes and explains the significance of archaeological areas and helps readers understand the archaeological methods used and the limits of archaeological knowledge.


Olympic National Park: A Natural History, Fourth Edition
By Tim McNulty

In this updated classic guide to the park, Tim McNulty invites us into the natural and human history of thesenearly million acres and offers a detailed look at Elwha River restoration after the dam removal, inspiring descriptions of endangered species recovery, and practical advice on how to make the most of your visit.


The Spokane River
Edited by Paul Lindholdt

From Lake Coeur d’Alene to its confluence with the Columbia, the Spokane River travels 111 miles of varied and often spectacular terrain — rural, urban, in places wild. The twenty-eight contributors to this collection — including activists, storytellers, and scientists — profile this living river through personal reflection, history, science, and poetry.


Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going
By Ana Maria Spagna

These engaging, reflective essays muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, and wonder, and remind us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.


Cultivating Nature: The Conservation of a Valencian Working Landscape
By Sarah R. Hamilton
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Shifting between local struggles and global debates, this fascinating environmental history reveals how Franco’s dictatorship, Spain’s integration with Europe, and the crisis in European agriculture have shaped the Albufera Natural Park, its users, and its inhabitants.


Bringing Whales Ashore: Oceans and the Environment of Early Modern Japan
By Jakobina K. Arch
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

In this vivid and nuanced study of how the Japanese people brought whales ashore during the Tokugawa period, Arch makes important contributions to both environmental and Japanese history by connecting Japanese whaling to marine environmental history in the Pacific, including the devastating impact of American whaling in the nineteenth century.


Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic
By Hongmei Sun

In this far-ranging study Hongmei Sun discusses the thousand-year evolution of Sun Wukong (aka Monkey or the Monkey King) in imperial China and multimedia adaptations in Republican, Maoist, and post-socialist China and the United States.


Medicine and Memory in Tibet: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform
By Theresia Hofer

Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet’s medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang.


Making New Nepal: From Student Activism to Mainstream Politics
By Amanda Thérèse Snellinger

Based on extensive ethnographic research between 2003 and 2015, Making New Nepal provides a snapshot of an activist generation’s political coming-of-age during a decade of civil war and ongoing democratic street protests.


Mediating Islam: Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia
By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia.


Buddhism Illuminated: Manuscript Art from South-East Asia
By San San May and Jana Igunma
Published with British Library

Buddhism Illuminated includes over one hundred examples of Buddhist art from the British Library’s rich collection, relating each manuscript to Theravada tradition and beliefs, and introducing the historical, artistic, and religious contexts of their production. It is the first book in English to showcase the beauty and variety of Buddhist manuscript art and reproduces many works that have never before been photographed.


Captive Light: The Life and Photography of Ella E. McBride
By Margaret E. Bullock and David F. Martin
Distributed for Tacoma Art Museum
Exhibition on view through July 8, 2018

Internationally acclaimed fine-art photographer Ella McBride (1862–1965) played an important role in the Northwest’s photography community and was a key figure in the national and international pictorialist photography movements. Despite her many accomplishments, which include managing the photography studio of Edward S. Curtis for many years and being an early member of the Seattle Camera Club, McBride is little known today. Captive Light reconsiders her career and the larger pictorialist movement in the Northwest. Captive Light is part of the Tacoma Art Museum’s Northwest Perspective Series on significant Northwest artists.


Julie Speidel: The Center Holds
By Matthew Kangas
Foreword by Rock Hushka
Distributed for Speidel Studio LLC

In this richly-illustrated monograph, the art of Julie Speidel is seen as one of myth and materiality, encompassing the creation more than four decades of numerous objects that inhabit a variety of locales and fulfill a wide variety of purposes. She has created sculpture in many different media and a variety of scale, as well as an impressive body of prints.

Events

MARCH

March 30, A Time to Rise edited by Rene Ciria Cruz, Cindy Domingo, and Bruce Occena, Bayanihan Community Center with Arkipelago Books, San Francisco, CA

March 30 at noon, Janet Steele, Mediating Islam, New York Southeast Asia Network and NYU Wagner’s Office of International Programs, New York, NY

APRIL

April 2 at 7 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass Amherst), History of Art & Architecture, Amherst, MA

April 2 at 7 p.m., Ingrid Walker, High, King County Library System – Des Moines Library, Des Moines, WA

April 5 at 7 p.m., Ana Maria Spagna, Uplake, Whitman College, Reid Ballroom, Walla Walla, WA

April 6 at 6 p.m., Bruce Guenther, Michael C. Spafford (dist. for Lucia | Marquand), Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA

April 7 at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., Quin’Nita Cobbins, Paul de Barros, Howard Giske, Jacqueline E. A. Lawson, and Al “Butch” Smith, Jr., Seattle on the Spot (dist. for Museum of History and Industry), On the Spot Gallery Talk, Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), Seattle, WA

April 7 at 10 a.m., Stevan Harrell, Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China, Saturday University: Textiles of Southwest China, Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas, University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies and Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle Art Museum, Plestcheeff Auditorium, Seattle, WA

April 8 at 3 p.m., Ana Maria Spagna, Uplake, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA

April 9 at 4:30 p.m., Sylvanna Falcón, Power Interrupted, Wellesley College, 2018 Domna Stanton Lecture in Women’s and Gender Studies, Wellesley, MA

April 11 at 12:30 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Garfield Senior Center, Pomeroy, WA

April 11 at noon, Janet Steele, Mediating Islam, George Washington University, Sigur Center for Asian Studies, Washington, DC

April 11 at 7 p.m., Nasty Women Poets edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane (dist. Lost Horse Press), GA Nasty Women Poets, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA

April 13 at 7:30 p.m., Kathleen Alcalá, The Deepest Roots, with Donna Miscolta, Town Hall Seattle and Phinney Neighborhood Association, In Residence—History Is an Act of the Imagination, Taproot Theatre, Seattle, WA

April 14 at 10:30 a.m., Jennifer Ott, Waterway (dist. for HistoryLink), Redmond Historical Society, Old Redmond Schoolhouse, Redmond, WA ($5 suggested donation for Non-Members)

April 14, Eileen A. Bjorkman, The Propeller under the Bed, Oregon Aviation Historical Society, Cottage Grove, OR

April 17 at noon, Jakobina K. Arch, Bringing Whales Ashore, Whitman College, Whitman College Bookstore at Reid Campus Center, Young Ballroom, Walla Walla, WA

April 18 at 3 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Suffolk University, Boston, MA

April 19 at 3:30 p.m., Brett L. Walker, A Family History of Illness, University of Oregon, Department of History, Eugene, OR

April 21 at 3:30 p.m., Douglas H. MacDonald, Before Yellowstone, Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, Missoula, MT

April 23 at 5 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

April 26 at 3:30 p.m., Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones, University of Washington, Seattle Campus, The East Asia Center and China Studies Program at the Jackson School of International Studies with the Seattle Art Museum, Thomson Hall,  Seattle, WA

April 26 at 7:30 p.m., Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones, Asia Talks, Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas, Seattle Art Museum, Nordstrom Lecture Hall, Seattle, WA (Free with RSVP; Doors at 7 p.m., Talk begins at 7:30 p.m.)

April 27 at 11:15 a.m., Marisol Berríos-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, and Michelle Habell-Pallán, American Sabor, MoPOP, Pop Conference 2018, Roundtable: Making American Sabor, Seattle, WA

April 27 at 5 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Timberland Regional Library – Raymond Library, Raymond, WA

April 27 – September 2, Adman edited by Nicholas Chambers (dist. Art Gallery of New South Wales), Exhibition, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

April 27-28, Ana Maria Spagna, Uplake, Get Lit! Festival, Eastern Washington University, Spokane, WA (Tickets on sale March 27 at 10 a.m. PST)

April 28 at 10:30 a.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Timberland Regional Library – South Bend Library, South Bend, WA

April 28 at 2 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Timberland Regional Library – Naselle Library, Naselle, WA

Save

Save