Tag Archives: Pacific Northwest

Q&A with Kimberly Jensen, author of “Oregon’s Others”

In the era of the First World War and its aftermath, the quest to identify, restrict, and punish internal enemy “others,” combined with eugenic thinking, severely curtailed civil liberties for many people in Oregon and the nation. In Oregon’s Others, Kimberly Jensen analyzes the processes that shaped the growing surveillance state of the era and the compelling personal stories that tell its history.

Oregon’s Others is the newest book in the Emil and Kathleen Sick Series in Western History and Biography on the peoples and issues that have defined and shaped the American West.

To start, can you share a bit about your background and what led you to this study?

As a professor of history and gender studies it is my privilege to work with students, colleagues, and members of our community who are restoring the voices and experiences of diverse people to our collective history. In my previous books, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women and the First World War and Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism, I analyzed the history of women and citizenship rights as woman suffrage and the quest for a more complete female citizenship via service in the First World War came together.

In Oregon’s Others I explore the collisions between civic gains like voting for some people and the losses, often very violent and consequential losses, for others in this period using the lens of civil liberties and surveillance. It’s also very important to me to emphasize the many forms of resistance people used to address these violent and destructive processes. That resistance gives us hope in our own day.

Your book focuses on historical events and processes during and after the First World War. Can you help set the scene? How do we get from an era of so-called progressive reform to the exclusionary and reactionary postwar aftermath?

The era of “progressive” civic, legislative, and workplace reform from the 1890s to the First World War contained deep currents of exclusion, white supremacy, eugenic thinking, and discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender identity and presentation, class, ability, and nationality that limited the scope and effects of those reforms. Wartime and postwar “crises” and severe curtailment of civil liberties in the name of national security provided opportunities for some people to claim a more complete citizenship through loyalty to the state’s aims and programs but also destroyed civil liberties and safety for others.

Can you share a few examples from the book that reflect the ways that the war and eugenic policies expanded surveillance in the early twentieth century?

Wartime and eugenic policies created mutually reinforcing categories of “fit” and “unfit” people, loyal supporters of state projects, and dangerous internal enemy others who did not conform or who did not contribute to the state’s aims. Policymakers promoted surveillance as a vital tool to identify and punish enemy others. They deputized and pressured community members to help conduct that surveillance and report the results to local, state, and federal authorities in the name of loyalty and productive citizenship.

Anna Mary Weston was a second-generation German American railroad car cleaner in Portland who was the first woman in Oregon to be tried under the Sedition Act of May 1918 for speaking against the war effort. Federal agents questioned Weston and her co-workers at her workplace at North Bank Station and then arrested her. Her story illustrates the power of overlapping surveillance projects that create collateral scrutiny.

A federal jury later found Weston not guilty by reason of “mental incapacity” and frequent references to her “mental condition” meant she was also vulnerable in her workplace in this era of eugenic scrutiny. Weston was acquitted of federal sedition charges but authorities did not commit her to the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane in the aftermath of her verdict and additional sanity hearings, even though other family members were committed. The reason is something I try to unravel in the book.

Volunteer Sarah Evans, far right, and Portland police captain Leo Harms, far left, work to register noncitizen “enemy” women at the Portland Police Station on the first day of female “enemy alien” registration, June 17, 1918. “German Alien Women Appear for Registry,” Oregon Journal, June 17, 1918, 1.

The registration of noncitizen “enemies” during the war included German citizen women residing here and also women born in the United States who lost their US citizenship when they married German citizen men due to US naturalization policy in force at the time. Local and federal leaders also used “alien enemy” registration to police gender presentation and identity. Police or other agents could require anyone to provide proof of identity and registration.

Margarita Ojeda Wilcox, 1919. Oregon State Hospital Female Patient Files, Oregon State Archives, Salem.

Margarita Ojeda Wilcox fled the Mexican Revolution with her US citizen husband and went to the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane in 1919 to recover from what we might readily identify today as post-traumatic stress. Federal and state policy combined to target Ojeda Wilcox as a Latina born in Mexico and immigration officials and hospital administrators worked to deport her as she was also considered for possible eugenic sterilization. Ojeda Wilcox’s female patient file became a record of surveillance against her. But the same law that required women married to German citizen men to register as noncitizen enemies protected Ojeda Wilcox who became a US citizen upon marriage to her US-born husband. She gained her release without deportation or sterilization.

How does focusing on Oregon amplify our understanding of the nationwide restrictions and challenges to civil liberties going on during this time? In what ways is Oregon’s history unique in this respect?

During this period Oregon gained a “star state” reputation for workplace reform and the “Oregon System” of tools to restructure state and local government such as the referendum to bring more power to voters. The war brought additional “Oregon Firsts” including local and state policies to control sexually transmitted infections and detain women suspected of being infected; licensing laws for businesses and hotels to combat “vice” that targeted gender non-conforming people, sex workers, and Japanese business owners, including Issei women who managed rooming houses; and first-in-the-nation status in various wartime and postwar bond drives to support the government. This created even more pressure to be “first.”

In 1920 Oregon deputized residents to identify “mental defectives” in a singular statewide survey, and one Oregon policymaker advocated the eugenic sterilization of all first-generation Japanese women as a solution to the “Japanese Problem” a year later.

Oregon First “achievements” created a blueprint used by policymakers in other states and at the federal level to identify, surveil, and punish people considered dangerous internal enemies. Studying Oregon helps us see that blueprint, to understand how and why people created it, and suggests the importance of Oregon’s story in informing similar studies in other states, regions, and the nation.

What was your process of gathering the many compelling personal stories you share throughout the book?

Many state and federal archival materials and records of private organizations like the Oregon Social Hygiene Society were created by people intent on surveilling internal enemy others and punishing them. These records include Bureau of Investigation files; World War I “alien enemy” registration forms; files on people who refused to support the wartime Food Pledge campaign to conserve food; case notes on parolees of The Cedars detention home for girls and women suspected of carrying sexually transmitted infections; and Black Portlander Ruth Brown’s habeas corpus court challenge to the double-standard of women’s incarceration there.

The records also include Oregon State Hospital files; the 1920 “Oregon State Survey of Mental Defect, Delinquency, and Dependency”; federal “Industrial Surveys” of Indigenous people living on reservations; and a state “census” of Japanese Oregonians set in the context of a narrative based on fear of first-generation Issei women and their US-born citizen children.

“New Women’s Detention Home, ‘The Cedars’ Is Completed.” Sunday Oregonian, August 11, 1918, Section 1, 12.

These materials are housed across many different archives and libraries. This phase of the work absolutely depends on the incredible support of archivists and librarians who know these collections.

I believe we need to read and understand these records and the stories they reveal both as the tangible tools of exclusion and othering but also as vital evidence of people’s resilience and resistance in the face of these surveillance projects. To use the sources in this way is to challenge the surveillance projects and the ideas and actions at their foundation as we tell the stories of people at the center.

Then it is important to develop as much additional information as we can about the people whose lives and stories we encounter in these archival sources. Historic newspapers offer incredible details on people who have been left out of the larger historical narrative and the digitization of these newspapers is an invaluable help in this gathering process. This is also true for vital records.

For example, I was able to analyze birth certificates in the state from 1917 to 1918 to demonstrate that seventy percent of Issei women in Portland chose Japanese Oregonian midwives to help them with the birth of their child and to register the important evidence of their children’s births with the state as one way to resist attacks against them. Sometimes these materials are among the very few we have about people who otherwise left little in the historical record about their lives. I encourage all of us to support digitization projects in our communities for access and preservation of these materials.

By using this comparative approach across communities and across institutions we can amplify our understanding of the collective impact of the hunt for internal enemy others and see the destructive power of interconnected systems of discrimination and exclusion at work.

How do the themes in Oregon’s Others relate to present-day issues of civil liberties and surveillance in the state and beyond?

By tracing the growth of the surveillance state and challenges to civil liberties one hundred years ago and by chronicling the persistence and resistance of people in the face of that onslaught, we can hold up a mirror to our own day and think about ways forward to help repair that past and empower all people in our present and future.

What do you hope readers take away from your book?

I hope readers will connect with people whose compelling voices and experiences are in the book and see themselves and their communities reflected in the stories the book brings to light. I also hope readers will find strong reasons to engage with the struggles of a century ago as we realize more than ever the constant need to maintain and fight for civil rights and civil liberties protections for all of us. The hunt for internal enemy others in our past can inform our present with the knowledge that unless everyone’s rights and liberties are protected, no one’s will be safe. I hope the study will bring home the destructive dangers of “us” versus “them” thinking and actions.

Kimberly Jensen is professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University and author of Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism and Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War.

Upcoming Events

September 14, 2024: Sisters Festival of Books with Paulina Springs Books, 11:00 a.m. PT
Sisters Movie House, Sisters, OR

October 10, 2024: Sick Lecture Series at UW with the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, 4:00 p.m. PT
Petersen Room, Allen Library, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

October 16, 2024: Oregon’s Others Scholarship Symposium, 4:30 p.m. PT
Columbia Room, Werner University Center, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR

October 19, 2024: PNW History Conference Gender & Sexuality panel, 10:30 a.m. PT
Hilton Portland Downtown, Portland, OR

October 25, 2024: Western History Association Conference panel, 8:15 a.m. CT
Sheraton Kansas City at Crown Center, Kansas City, MO

Emil and Kathleen Sick Series in Western History and Biography

The Sick Series is supported by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington.

Exhibitions on View: “Nordic Utopia,” “Mary Sully: Native Modern,” “Calder: In Motion,” and More

The University of Washington Press is proud to publish important books in art history and to distribute exhibition catalogs for museums in the Pacific Northwest, United States, and around the world. These books provide rich context to the exhibitions they accompany through high-quality reproductions and illuminating essays by curators, artists, and scholars. Whether or not you have the chance to see some of these exhibitions in person, we invite you to explore the generously illustrated publications below.

Our Summer Reading Sale is underway! Enjoy 40% off and free domestic shipping when you order on our website through July 31, 2024. Enter promo code WARM24 at checkout.

Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the Twentieth Century

During the twentieth century, Black Americans visited and lived in Nordic countries, performing, studying, working, and seeking adventure, love, freedom to explore sexuality, and distance from Jim Crow segregation. Drawing from film, photographs, paintings, music, textiles, and dance, Nordic Utopia captures these journeys and ultimately reflects on how some African Americans have called and continue to call Nordic countries home.

Gathering voices from hip-hop artist Jason Diakité to novelist and essayist James Baldwin, this book, edited by the National Nordic Museum Director of Collections Leslie Anne Anderson, tells how African Americans were transformed through their Nordic encounters. The authors examine how “hip-hop ethics” illuminate the dynamic meaning of material culture in contemporary Afro-Nordic lifeworlds. Documented experiences by migrant and visiting artists probe the peculiarity of being a Black person in a remote “white” place while also using these experiences to reflect on and critique American racism. The book considers what specific Nordic artifacts and materials reveal about the complexities of place-making for Black people in a region where notions of innocence, isolation, and distance from the issues of the wider world also abound.

The exhibition is on view at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle through July 21, 2024 and at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI, August 10–November 10, 2024.

Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract

The first solo exhibition of the Dakota Sioux artist, Mary Sully: Native Modern opens at The Met on July 18. Although she attempted to enter the patronized artworld during her lifetime, Mary Sully completed her stunning portfolio in near obscurity. Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, she was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art.

Sully’s position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times during her life. In Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria reclaims that work from obscurity, exploring Sully’s portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s. Working in a complex territory oscillating between representation, symbolism, and abstraction, Sully evoked multiple and simultaneous perspectives of time and space. With an intimate yet sweeping style, Deloria recovers in Sully’s work a move toward an anti-colonial aesthetic that claimed a critical role for Indigenous women in American Indian futures—within and distinct from American modernity and modernism.

The exhibition is on view at The Met in New York City from July 18, 2024 through January 12, 2025.

Calder: In Motion
The Shirley Family Collection

In spring 2023, the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) announced that patrons Jon and Kim Shirley had generously gifted the Shirley Family Collection to the museum. The collection—one of the most important private holdings of Alexander Calder’s art—is the result of thirty-five years of thoughtful acquisitions and features many significant examples from his production.

Calder: In Motion accompanies SAM’s inaugural exhibition of works from the collection, demonstrating Calder’s unique vision, which has had a profound influence on contemporary culture. It features a curatorial foreword by José Carlos Diaz; short essays by Jon Shirley tracing his evolution as a passionate and informed collector of Calder’s work and discussing the importance of scale in the artist’s sculpture, which ranges from the miniature to the monumental; and an essay by art historian Elizabeth Hutton Turner that expands on the artist’s life and his extraordinary impact on twentieth-century art. Short contributions by Alexander S. C. Rower, president of the Calder Foundation and grandson of the artist, focus on ten of the collection’s artworks, situating them within Calder’s oeuvre.

The exhibition is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through August 4, 2024.

Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West

Out of Site explores the invisible landscapes of the American West through the interwoven forces of art and technology over the past 170 years. This interdisciplinary project features an array of visual media, including historical, modern, and contemporary photography, that punctuate a series of essays by art scholars alongside first-person perspectives from artists working “in the field” today.

Beginning with the survey era, the publication mines the use of wet-plate photography to penetrate the visible surface of the land to visualize the geological processes, mineral resources, and human histories that formed the foundation of the American empire. With the turn of the century, the relationship between sight and site grew increasingly remote, revealing patterns of large-scale industrial transformation, including the rise of nuclear technology and the American military-industrial complex. And with the modern use of long-range drones, satellites, and other adapted photographic technologies in the postwar years, new matrices of power and surveillance are revealed alongside the human and environmental fallout they often leave behind.

The exhibition is on view at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles through January 5, 2025.

Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum

Published on the occasion of the expansive Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum initiative at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), this lavishly illustrated catalog centers Native artist voices and challenges collective understandings of Native peoples’ pivotal role in North American history.

The written and visual contributions address and refute the oppressive and pervasive hierarchies of colonialism upon which museums are based. The book features essays by heather ahtone (Chickasaw / Choctaw), Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), and John Lukavic; newly commissioned poetry by Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe); a comic conceived, written, and illustrated by Weyodi Old Bear (Comanche), Dale Deforest (Diné), and Lee Francis IV (Pueblo of Laguna); and transcripts of roundtable discussions with contemporary Native artists.

Fifty plates spanning a range of media from monographic and thematic exhibitions showcase both historically significant works from the BMA’s collection and the works of living artists—many of whom offer their perspectives in the catalog—to offer an important contribution to current global conversations around the decolonization of museums.

Associated exhibitions are on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through February 16, 2025.

Books on Past Exhibitions

Books on Upcoming Exhibitions

Introducing the UW Press Fall 2024 Catalog

We are excited to announce our Fall 2024 catalog!

Our upcoming lineup of books includes an on-the-ground account of Native activism in the Pacific Northwest; the story of how Mesoamerican food activists faced down Monsanto . . . and won; new books in our Indigenous Confluences series; the first book in the Critical Filipinx Studies series; new art books from our publishing partners Cascadia Art Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, and others; and much more.

Joe Feddersen, Elk at Spotted Lake, 2016. Relief monoprint with spray paint, 19 × 14.75 in. (48.3 × 37.5 cm). Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon; gift of Joe Feddersen. Photograph by Dean Davis.

The cover depicts Elk at Spotted Lake by Joe Feddersen (Arrow Lakes/Okanagan, Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation), the artist featured in an upcoming solo exhibition and accompanying catalog from the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. Spanning printmaking, weaving, glass, and ceramics, Feddersen’s work both celebrates his culture and speaks to a Plateau-Native viewpoint of the contemporary world.

We invite you to browse the interactive catalog and explore all of our forthcoming books. Now is also a great time to subscribe to our newsletter or update your preferences so that you can receive email alerts when your favorite books are released.

National Bike Month: Excerpt from “Biking Uphill in the Rain” by Tom Fucoloro

May is National Bike Month, a celebration and showcase of the benefits of bicycling promoted by the League of American Bicyclists since 1956. More than just a mode of transportation, the bicycle has been used by generations of Seattleites as a tool for social change. In Biking Uphill in the Rain, Seattle Bike Blog founder Tom Fucoloro tells the story of the rise of an improbable bike culture in this notoriously hilly and rainy city. The following is an excerpt from the book.

Use promo code WSPRING24 at checkout on our website for 40% off and free shipping during our Spring Sale, on now through May 31, 2024.

The Boeing bust gave Seattle a head start on the national recession of the 1970s, triggered by the 1973 oil crisis. As Seattle would see again in the 2008 recession, people seeking ways to save money in difficult economic times found that and much more in the humble bicycle. The seeds of Seattle’s 1970s bicycle movement had been planted in the previous decades. Bicycle sales grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s as lighter bikes with multiple gears and easy-to-use gear shifters and derailleurs became more widely available at the consumer level. By 1968, a new kind of bike-riding movement was forming, empowering advocates to push for bike-friendly changes to the city.

The moment that propelled bicycling into the civic spotlight was the brainchild of a woman who didn’t even ride a bike. It rained all day November 16, 1967, which is to say that it was a very typical Seattle evening when Mia Mann walked into the regular meeting of the Seattle Board of Park Commissioners with a simple idea that would change her city forever. Mann was active on city and nonprofit boards, especially in support of city beautification and arts efforts.

Mia decided to push an idea being tried out in her hometown of Minneapolis: a car-free streets event. She wrote a Seattle City Council resolution to create such an event, but her idea met resistance from those in charge. First, the Parks Department tried to ignore her, but she would have none of that. Then the Parks superintendent said they couldn’t do it because it would interfere with vehicle traffic and because the Parks Department didn’t have jurisdiction to close streets. Eventually, Mia got a powerful City Council member named Myrtle Edwards involved. Edwards was responsible for major parks efforts, including the city’s acquisition of a closing gas plant at the north end of Lake Union that would one day become Gas Works Park. Edwards ran with Mia’s open streets idea, gathering council support and convening multiple city departments to make it happen. Her support was more than enough to win approval from the Parks board that rainy evening. They agreed to hold one trial event in the spring just to see how it would go.

The plan was simple: put up signs closing a two-mile stretch of Lake Washington Boulevard to cars starting at Seward Park in South Seattle and heading north. They then invited people to bike freely on the boulevard and on the forested roads through Seward Park without fear of cars. The whole thing cost the city less than five hundred dollars, and Mia Mann, Harry Coe of the League of American Wheelmen (now known as the League of American Bicyclists), and coaches from Rainier Beach Cottage School volunteered to carry out much of the organizing and promotion. “People have to get hold of their lives and get out in the open,” Mia told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before the first Bicycle Sunday event. “The automobile just isn’t doing this for us. I haven’t ridden a bike in years, but I’ll be out there.”

The simple act of kicking cars off a street for a few hours demonstrated to people the benefits of public spaces without cars.

Tom Fucoloro

Nobody, it seems from news reports, expected the number of people who showed up April 28, 1968. An estimated five thousand people brought their bikes to Lake Washington during the seven hours the road was closed to cars. City leaders clamored to show their support for the popular event and call for more. Soon the city was hosting Bicycle Sundays several times a month in locations across the city. More than half a century later, the Parks Department still hosts Bicycle Sunday on the same stretch of Lake Washington Boulevard.

But Bicycle Sunday did more than just create a fun space for a few hours. The simple act of kicking cars off a street for a few hours demonstrated to people the benefits of public spaces without cars. Cars require an enormous amount of space, and by the late 1960s nearly all street space had long been the domain of car travel and storage. In the city’s deeply entrenched car culture, getting out on a bike on a car-free street could be a radical experience.

The start of Bicycle Sunday in 1968 was something of a coming-out party for Seattle’s growing bicycle revival. Politicians saw that many people were deeply interested in biking; people with bikes realized they should use their numbers to get organized and start asking for better conditions for biking; and people who didn’t bike saw the crowds and thought it looked like fun. Within weeks of the first event, Harry Coe was rallying political support for a citywide bike route network. Signed bike routes were a small step, but they could be done quickly and represented perhaps the first time since the turn of the twentieth century that the city’s Department of Engineering was tasked with thinking about how someone on a bike might get around town.

Coe was a runner for Team USA during the 1908 London Olympics and had biked all over Seattle as a child. “You could ride downtown without much competition from automobiles,” he told the Seattle Times in 1968. Coe also wrote a letter to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer around the same time saying that the first Bicycle Sunday reminded him of those early days. “It was a day which will be long remembered as one of Seattle’s finest for a lot of people who too seldom get together at one place to enjoy something which they all have in common, namely, love of bicycle riding,” he wrote. He was eighty-three in 1968 when the city started putting up his long-sought bike-route signs. The sheer number of bicyclists who participated in the first Bicycle Sunday gave the plan the popular push it needed to win approval. Signs started going up within months of the first event, and fifty miles of signed bike routes were installed across the city in the first year. Some of these green signs are still in place, bearing a pictogram of a bicycle and reading simply “Bike Route.”

Tom Fucoloro will discuss Biking Uphill in the Rain at the Edmonds Public Library on May 29 at 6:00 pm in partnership with North Sound Bicycle Advocates.

Tom Fucoloro is founder of Seattle Bike Blog and has served as its editor since 2010. He was named one of “15 People Who Should Really Run Seattle” by Seattle Met magazine. In 2023, he won the Doug Walker Award for his work to improve lives through bicycling from the Cascade Bicycle Club.

Related Books

Finding Montana: An Excerpt from ‘Norman Maclean’ by Rebecca McCarthy

The following is an excerpt from Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers. In the first biography of one of Montana‘s most celebrated writers, author Rebecca McCarthy draws on their long friendship as well as stories from friends, family, colleagues, and others to reveal the forces and events that shaped the author-educator and formed the bedrock of his beloved stories.

Use promo code WSPRING24 at checkout on our website for 40% off and free shipping through May 31, 2024.

When Norman and his father stepped off the train in Hanover, New Hampshire, they found themselves in a small New England village of clapboard buildings and white picket fences. A walk around town confirmed that Hanover was a fraction of the size of Missoula. Where Hanover ended, Dartmouth College began. Its buildings bordered a long, open expanse called “the Green” that had been part of the school for more than 150 years. It was a small, all-male college in an isolated town. The winters were sure to be long, cold, and dark.

A notation in his high school yearbook shows Norman had listed as his college choice Washington and Jefferson, a small liberal arts college south of Pittsburgh founded by Presbyterian missionaries in the late 1700s. But he changed his plans. Norman told me Harvard had accepted him and that he thought about going, but he eventually decided not to, a decision his father seconded. Norman chose Dartmouth, he told his interviewers, because it was “the only outdoor college in the country,” and he assumed the woodsy setting would remind him of Montana. All too soon, he learned he was wrong. In Missoula, which sits at the confluence of five valleys, he had been able to see mountains wherever he went. In Hanover, elms and maples hid the vista. The White Mountains were far away. Most of his father’s family was in Boston, more than an hour south on the train.

At Dartmouth in the 1920s, the majority of students were privileged, white, wealthy young New Englanders. Some of their fathers and grandfathers had attended Dartmouth. They knew little about the Rocky Mountains and less about Montana, other than childhood tales about George Armstrong Custer and history lessons on Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Norman felt they looked down on him because his family wasn’t rich. I later learned that the clubby atmosphere had choked Norman, who told his friend Gwin Kolb that he felt “like an uncouth kid from Montana.” While many of his classmates were learning to sail and play polo, Norman had been fighting forest fires and leading pack mules in the Bitterroot Mountains. And though he spoke and wrote well, he was constantly having to explain himself, his hometown, his lineage, and his reasons for coming to Dartmouth. Doing so had exasperated him.

Even in his later years, Norman failed to resolve his antagonistic attitude toward the affluent. “He had a hatred of big money in the abstract,” said his son-in-law, Joel Snyder. “He could be very difficult, but at the same time, he could be very gracious with wealthy people.” [His wife] Jessie’s attitudes were clearer. She had been a fan of the International Workers of the World, the radical Wobblies, and she later became and remained, like Norman, an unreconstructed Roosevelt Democrat.

The most memorable figure in college for Norman was former Dartmouth student Robert Frost, then in his late forties. The poet was an occasional teacher at the college and had a free hand in instructing his students. Norman said Frost “talked straight to you, and often poetry was there, or something close to it.” Classes met once a week, in the evening, in a “great big basement room with a wonderful fireplace.” The subject was creative writing, but Frost apparently never bothered to read his students’ papers. Instead, he would pace back and forth in front of the class, talking and talking. There were never any questions in Frost’s classes, Norman said, and “nobody ever stopped him.”

Joel Snyder took this photo of Norman in Jackson Park on a crisp fall day in 1975, after the University of Chicago Press had accepted A River Runs Through It and Other Stories for publication. Norman is standing on the Clarence Darrow Bridge. Photo courtesy of Joel Snyder.

Norman studied hard, later claiming he read a book a day, but he realized he would have to suppress his sardonic sense of humor in class. He became a C student—an accomplishment, given his meager high school education and his many extracurricular activities. He found ways to thrive outside the classroom. He joined Beta Theta Pi and promptly began relieving his fraternity brothers of their money around the poker table. A friend visiting from Montana was astounded that the college boys “didn’t know not to draw from an inside straight.” In a local gym, Norman boxed with fraternity members and men from the community and enjoyed knocking down opponents. He became a staff member of the Dartmouth Bema, a literary magazine, and the Aegis, the Dartmouth yearbook. He was selected for Sphinx, the oldest of Dartmouth’s many secret societies. He was on the board of governors for The Arts, “a clearing house for the ideas and opinions of those interested in the fields of literature, drama and music.” Among the writers coming to campus during his senior year were journalist and critic Rebecca West and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. How he felt about meeting and hearing these women, we don’t know, but I do know he liked Millay’s poetry.

Before Norman graduated, in June 1924, Dartmouth English professor David Lambuth asked if he wanted to return to campus and teach freshman composition. Lambuth had had Norman in a few of his classes and was impressed with his writing ability and his sensitivity to language. Norman accepted the offer, telling an interviewer the class “was full of some poker buddies of mine, and I figured it would be a good way to pay back some debts.”

Norman went home to Montana to work for the US Forest Service, gathering some of the experiences he would later turn into stories. He had spent most summers working for the Forest Service, except for part of 1921, when his father [Reverend Maclean], [brother] Paul, and he worked on a log cabin on the shore of Seeley Lake, on land leased to them by the federal government. Norman returned to the halls of Hanover in the autumn of 1924 as an instructor of introductory English, and his brother went with him to start on his Dartmouth degree. The Reverend couldn’t afford to pay for two sons to attend private school at the same time, so Paul had taken classes at Montana State (later renamed the University of Montana) in Missoula for a year before heading east.

In the early 1970s, forester John B. Roberts Jr. took this photo of Seeley Lake and the Swan Range from Double Arrow Lookout. Built in 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, Double Arrow was one of many lookouts scattered across western Montana. A seasonal employee would staff each lookout, radioing into the district office any suspicious smokes that could blossom into forest fires. Today the lookout is rented to those wanting to stay a night or two. Photo courtesy of the author.

Bravig Imbs, one of Norman’s contemporaries, offers a glimpse of some events in Norman’s life while he was an instructor, in The Professor’s Wife. The professor and the wife are based on Lambuth and his wife, Myrtle. Imbs worked as a butler for the Lambuths, which gave him a bird’s-eye view of their lives. Norman makes an appearance in the book as the character Douglas MacNeil, “an exceptional person” with a sensitive and crooked smile, who comes to write in the couple’s study. The David Lambuth character says Douglas’s poetry “had the streak of genius” and that a novel he was working on was the best poetic prose he had read.

In addition to his own writing, Norman was busy teaching undergraduates how to construct sentences. He told the story of an “observer” visiting his class one session, a redheaded Scotch atheist he admired, Professor James Dow McCallum, whose lectures on Victorian writers were very popular. Weeks passed with no feedback. Norman at last went to McCallum’s office. The professor was surprised to see him. Norman asked McCallum how to improve his teaching, and McCallum told him to wear a different suit every day of the week. When Norman said he couldn’t afford so many suits, McCallum suggested he wear a different necktie. He followed this advice through his long teaching career at Chicago.

For Norman, the occasional amusement provided by his struggling students—one wrote that the primeval forest was “where the hand of man had never set foot”—failed to compensate for Dartmouth’s caste system. Maybe he was struggling with his own writing or tiring of the décor in Mrs. Lambuth’s study. The problems Norman had faced as an undergraduate now only worsened. The stratified society of the English department, in which instructors were socially segregated from tenured professors, added to the sense of moneyed clubbiness and made a lonely Montanan long for the West. Norman’s brother, Paul, had already gone home to Montana, skipping the 1926 spring semester.

Norman squirmed in the dinner jacket he was required to wear to departmental functions. Even the everyday clothes worn by the students set Norman on edge: the pullover sweaters and black-and-white saddle shoes of Joe College.

In June 1926, after two years as an instructor, Norman rode the train out of Hanover to Missoula and back to a job in the woods. In the fall, as the time came to return to New Hampshire, his father helped him realize he wasn’t bettering himself by teaching at Dartmouth. Alone, Paul boarded the train, heading east. Norman wrote to Professor Lambuth, telling him that he wasn’t coming back and asking if someone else could take his classes. He didn’t return to Hanover for decades.

He never wore a tuxedo again.

About the Author

Freelance writer, editor, and poet Rebecca McCarthy spent twenty-one years as an award-winning reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has written for the New York Times, Fast Company, the Bitter Southerner, and the American Scholar, among other publications. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago, where she was a recipient of the Norman Maclean Scholarship for an Outstanding English Student. She worked for the US Forest Service in Region 1 as a forest fire fighter and a timber beast.

Upcoming Author Events

May 22, 2024 | Athens, GA | Athens-Clarke County Library in partnership with Avid Bookshop, 7:00 pm EST

May 23, 2024 | Spartanburg, SC | Hub City Bookshop with John Lane, 6:00 pm EST

May 30, 2024 | Chicago, IL | Seminary Co-op with Alan Thomas, 6:00 pm CST

June 3, 2024 | Seattle, WA | Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum with Jonathan Evison in partnership with Elliott Bay Book Company, 7:00 pm PST

June 5, 2024 | Missoula, MT | Missoula Public Library with O. Alan Weltzien in partnership with Fact & Fiction Bookstore, 6:00 pm MST

June 6, 2024 | Seeley Lake, MT | Alpine Artisans Open Book Club, 7:00 pm MST

From Haida Gwaii to the Chicago World’s Fair and Beyond: Excerpt from ‘Skidegate House Models’

Based on over twenty years of collaborative research with the Skidegate Haida community, Skidegate House Models by Robin K. Wright features vital cultural context on the Skidegate model village carved by Haida artists for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. While promoters of the Chicago World’s Fair used the village to celebrate the perceived “progress” of the dominant society, for Skidegate residents it provided a means to preserve their history and culture.

After the exposition, the models went to the Field Museum of Natural History and many were dispersed from there to other collections, but fourteen of the model houses have not yet been located. The book provides extensive archival information and photographs that contextualize the model village and might help locate the missing houses while offering valuable insights into Northwest Coast art history. The following is an excerpt.

From the Foreword by Jisgang, Nika Collison

My name is Jisgang, I belong to the Ḵaay’ahl Laanas clan. Gaahlaay is my chief. My mother is Gid Ḵuuyas, my father was Skilay. I grew up in HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay Skidegate Village. I am one of the last generations to receive the smallpox vaccine. I was five or six when I got it. My mom explained the shot would really hurt, and probably scar a lot, showing me hers. She explained why I needed it. That is how I learned my village should have been much bigger than it was.

In 1862 colonizers purposefully introduced smallpox to the Northwest Coast, killing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people and almost annihilating some Nations, including the Haida.1 Survivors in northern Haida Gwaii migrated to G̱aw Tlagée Old Massett in order to survive. Chief Skidegate welcomed southern survivors into the village of HlG̱aagilda. Haawa Kilslaay, sah uu dang G̱iida. Before the smallpox epidemic we had successfully kept colonists from our territories. In 1867 the colonial state of Canada was formed, with assigned authority over “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians.”2 In 1876, Canada legislated the Indian Act, which was so effective it informed parts of Apartheid. The year 1876 is also the year missionaries arrived on Haida Gwaii. They shamed and prohibited our ways, often forcing the destruction, sale, or handing-over of our belongings. Desecration of our Ancestors’ graves would soon follow “in the name of science.” Around 1883, Canada and the Church joined forces to create the horrific Indian Residential School System, which operated for more than one hundred years. In 1884, Canada legislated the Potlatch Ban, which criminalized the legal system of the Northwest Coast from 1885 to 1951. Offenders faced seizure of belongings and up to six months in jail. A final mass exodus of our Ancestors’ belongings and funerary remains would follow.

HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay, 1878. Photograph by George M. Dawson. Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History, neg. no. PA-37756.

In other words, we were thirty years into the genocide of the Northwest Coast when James Deans traveled to Skidegate to commission a model village for the Chicago World’s Fair. [Robin K.] Wright notes that when Deans arrived, there were only about eleven poles and three longhouses still standing in Skidegate (families were largely living in colonial-style homes). Fourteen years prior, almost eighty poles of varying purpose stood in Skidegate. Deans directed artists to use an early photo of Skidegate to create their replicas. The end result was a massive model village that, while commissioned during times of duress, was built on our peoples’ own terms. It was sent to the World’s Fair along with a large collection of our peoples’ belongings, including a real-life pole, house, and canoe. When the fair ended, the village and greater collection were split up and dispersed willy-nilly around the world, far away from Haida Gwaii.

Our Ancestors did everything they could to preserve our Haida-ness. Each subsequent generation has been dedicated to the same. For decades we have been piecing ourselves, our clans, and our villages back together the same way Dr. Wright pieced the Skidegate House models back together.

Jisgang, Nika Collison

About 120 years later, Dr. Robin Wright started to piece the village model back together. For more than twenty years she searched the globe tracking down the model houses and poles; scoured archives to sort out the work of early anthropologists, photographers, missionaries, government agents, and museums; and worked with our people to sort these findings out further, along with working on Haida language, genealogies, privileges, and histories. The findings were woven together into this precious book. In piecing back together as much of our model village as she could, Dr. Robin Wright has not only created a fascinating body of critical research, she has assisted our Nation in our greater plight: piecing ourselves back together.

Model of HlG̱aagilda Llnagaay, Skidegate village, installed in the Anthropology Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 93-1-10/100266.1.39.

Several years ago, I was listening to a radio program on strategies of war and the annihilation of a people. In addition to destroying lives, destroying heritage was a critical tactic. Shatter identity so that the survivors don’t know who they are, where they come from, or their place in the world. I was born in 1971. The population of Skidegate numbered fewer than three hundred people. Growing up, we were called “Indians” and our home, the “Queen Charlotte Islands.” I lived with my grandparents behind the only pole left standing in our village.3 Part of my family lived “off reserve” and part off island, disenfranchised from their community through colonial regimes. Haida was rarely spoken, if at all. The were no masks, dance blankets, songs, or dancing. I didn’t have a proper name. Many didn’t. It was all silenced—hidden away in minds, archives, museums, and behind closed doors.

That was for the first few years of my life. I also grew up during a time of great cultural and political revitalization. Despite massive population loss and colonial regimes, our Ancestors preserved as much Haida knowledge as possible by employing subversive tactics and by working with anthropologists and other foreigners to record our knowledge. We started coming back out through the art, through the poles. I was seven when I witnessed the first pole to be raised in Skidegate Village in almost one hundred years, the Skidegate Dogfish Pole. Carved by my chinaay grandfather Iljuwas Bill Reid, the pole was raised in 1978, in front of the first longhouse to be built in Skidegate since the late 1800s, with a great community potlatch.4 A similar event had happened nine years earlier in the village of Old Massett, when Robert Davidson gifted his community a pole to raise. These events awakened much more than I think either artist anticipated.

My children are Haida, not Indians. They live on an archipelago called Haida Gwaii. The population of Skidegate is nine hundred strong, and more than five thousand as a Nation. My children have proper names, given in potlatch. They have attended many pole raisings in their lifetime, wearing their regalia. They are learning and growing up in the art, the language, the culture, the land and water. They are learning their family ties and their clan and nation histories. They were Haida singing and dancing in the womb.

House Model No. 5, Sgyam Sgwaan Naas, “Sparrow Hawk House,” made by Adam Brown, 1892. Courtesy of the Field Museum, cat. no. 17816. Photograph by Gail Specht.
House Model No. “2” really No. 21, Naa
Gudgiikyagangs, “People call to each other
in it,” 1892, made by Niislant, John Cross,
110 cm × 11 cm × 13 cm. Courtesy of the
Field Museum, cat. no. 17802. Photograph
by Gail Specht.

Today there are sixteen poles of varying purpose standing throughout Skidegate.5 My clan is readied for a memorial pole-raising in September 2022, and by the end of 2023, four new carved house posts will be standing at Xaaynang.nga Naay, the Skidegate Health Centre. There are nineteen poles in G̱aw Tlagée Old Massett, the most recent being raised in August 2022, marked by a two-day potlatch hosted by Christian and Candace White (Yahgu Jaanas/Laanas clan) in Old Massett. And more recently, in October 2022, a memorial pole was raised for Tlajang nang kingaas, Benjamin Ray Davidson.

We might be a far cry from eighty poles standing in Skidegate alone, but we are also a far cry from one pole left standing. Our Ancestors did everything they could to preserve our Haida-ness. Each subsequent generation has been dedicated to the same. For decades we have been piecing ourselves, our clans, and our villages back together the same way Dr. Wright pieced the Skidegate House models back together.

Like Dr. Wright’s restoring of our model village, the restoration of our world is not fully complete. Not everyone and everything has been located or gathered. There could even be a correction down the road. But we are still here—we are Haida—and we know our place in this world. My friend’s book is an important contribution to this journey. So many years of working with our people to bring critical stories together under one roof. So many names, clans, genealogies, houses, and poles reunited. When I hold this book, I am holding a part of myself, my family, our community, our Nation. When I hold this book, I am holding a part of our past, present, and future, all at the same time.

Haawa to my friend Robin for your respect, passion, and scholarship. Haawa to Haida Gwaii, our home. Haawa to the Ancestors, without your determination we would not be here as Haida. Haawa to our knowledge holders and scholars who scour their minds and the earth to gather the knowledge our Ancestors preserved. Haawa to the Supernatural, who help guide us in this work.

Notes

  1. Not just smallpox but also TB, measles, and other diseases. ↩︎
  2. BC joined in 1871. ↩︎
  3. It was raised ca. 1884 by David Shakespeare for his wife, Jane, of the Saang.ahl Staastas; see Skidegate House Models chapter 3, Model Pole No. 17, for more on that pole. ↩︎
  4. The Shakespeare and Dogfish poles stood side by side for almost a decade before the Shakespeare Pole fell in 1989. The Dogfish Pole was taken down for conservation in 2014. Both now live in the Haida Gwaii Museum. The Longhouse served as the Skidegate Band Council Headquarters through the mid-1990s. In 1998 it became the HlG̱aagilda Xaayda Kil Naay Skidegate Haida Language House, home to the Skidegtae Haida Immersion Program (SHIP). ↩︎
  5. Haida Heritage Centre-6, Cheexial-1, Lydia Wilson-1, Gah Yah-1, Skidegate-1, Sk’aadGa Naay-1, Niis Wes-1, Cumshewa-1, WiiGanad-1, Unity-1, Gidansda-1. ↩︎

Robin K. Wright is professor emerita of art history at the University of Washington, Seattle, and curator emerita of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Her award-winning books include A Time of Gathering and Northern Haida Master Carvers. Recent books include In the Spirit of the Ancestors (coedited with Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse) and Charles Edenshaw (coedited with Diana Augaitis).

Jisgang Nika Collison belongs to the Ḵaay’ahl Laanas of the Haida Nation. She is Executive Director and Curator of the Haida Gwaii Museum at Ḵay Llnagaay and has worked in the field of Haida language arts and culture for over two decades. Deeply committed to reconciliation, she is a senior repatriation negotiator for her Nation, pursuing reparation and relationships with mainstream museums on a global scale.

Upcoming Events

Author Robin K. Wright will share more about Skidegate House Models and her community-engaged research in conversation with Nika Collison at the following events:

  • Saturday, May 11, 2024, 7:00 pm PST at the Haida Gwaii Museum in Skidegate, B.C. Details here.
  • Tuesday, May 14, 2024, 7:00 pm PST at the Burke Museum in Seattle, WA. Register here.

Related Books

In the Spirit of the Ancestors cover

Celebrate Earth Month: Books in Environmental Studies

For Earth Month 2024, we invite you to explore environmental awareness, advocacy, and resilience through curated reading lists. Browse books in environmental studies below and don’t miss our past selection of books on the natural world with a focus on the Pacific Northwest.

Capturing Glaciers: A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming
Photographs of receding glaciers are one of the most well recognized visualizations of human-caused climate change. Historian Dani Inkpen explores the use of repeat glacier photographs, examining what they show, what they obscure, and how they influence public understanding of nature and climate change.

The Toxic Ship: The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade
Environmental historian Simone M. Müller uses the infamous voyage of the Khian Sea as a lens to elucidate the global trade in hazardous waste from the 1970s to the present day, exploring the story’s international nodes and detailing the downside of environmental conscientiousness among industrial nations as waste is pushed outward. Shedding light on environmental racism and justice, The Toxic Ship is “a deft philosophical and literary examination about what we throw away, where our discards go, who is harmed, and why” (Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains).

Cherokee Earth Dwellers: Stories and Teachings of the Natural World
Ayetli gadogv—to “stand in the middle”—is at the heart of a Cherokee perspective of the natural world. Emerging from a deep and continuing collaboration between Christopher B. Teuton, Hastings Shade, Loretta Shade, and others, Cherokee Earth Dwellers offers a rich understanding of nature grounded in Cherokee creature names, oral traditional stories, and reflections of knowledge holders. From clouds to birds, oceans to quarks, this expansive Cherokee view of nature reveals a living, communicative world and humanity’s role within it.

Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California
Yurok scholar Kaitlin Reed situates the booming California cannabis industry—dubbed the “green rush”—within a broader legacy of settler colonial resource extraction and wealth accumulation in the state. Revealing the ongoing impacts on Indigenous cultures, lands, waters, and bodies, Reed shares this history to inform the path toward an alternative future. Combining archival research with testimonies and interviews with tribal members, tribal employees, and settler state employees, Settler Cannabis offers a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental consequences of cannabis cultivation that foregrounds Indigenous voices, experiences, and histories.

Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future
In this “eminently readable, elegantly precise treatise on the topic of batteries” (Science)—a finalist for the Cundill History Prize—James Morton Turner unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving “the battery problem” is critical to a clean energy future. With new insight on the consequences for people and communities on the front lines, Turner draws on the past for crucial lessons that will help us build a just and clean energy future, from the ground up.

After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens
Eric Wagner takes readers on a fascinating journey of Mount St. Helens through the perspective of forest scientist Jerry Franklin, who helicoptered into the blast area a couple of weeks after the eruption. From fireweed to elk, the plants and animals Franklin saw in the blast area and beyond would not just change how ecologists approached the eruption and its landscape, but also prompt them to think in new ways about how life responds in the face of seemingly total devastation—a “superb look at scientists and science at work” (Publishers Weekly).

Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape
In this study of disaster, modernization, and fishing communities, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi examines the complex relationship between commercial fishing families and the Joban Sea—once known for premium-quality fish and now notorious as the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe. In response to unrelenting setbacks, fishing communities have developed survival strategies shaped by the precarity they share with their marine ecosystem. The collaborative resilience that emerges against this backdrop of vulnerability and uncertainty challenges the progress-bound logic of futurism, bringing more hopeful possibilities for the future into sharper focus.

The River That Made Seattle: A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish
With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river has been its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Using previously unpublished accounts by Indigenous people and settlers, BJ Cummings’s compelling narrative restores the river to its central place in Seattle and Pacific Northwest history. Writing from the perspective of environmental justice—and herself a key figure in river restoration efforts—Cummings vividly portrays the people and conflicts that shaped the region’s culture and natural environment and offers a call for action in aligning decisions about the river and its future with values of collaboration, respect, and justice.

Anticipating Future Environments: Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin
Ecological restoration is often premised on the idea of returning a region to an earlier, healthier state. Yet the effects of climate change undercut that premise and challenge the ways scientists can work, destabilizing the idea of “normalcy” and revealing the politics that shape what scientists can do. Using the restoration efforts in the Columbia River Basin as a case study, UW research scientist Shana Lee Hirsch explores how climate change affects the daily work of scientists, and how a scientific field itself can adapt to climate change.

Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement
In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Gina G. Warren digs into the history and food politics of the backyard chicken movement, chronicling her own misadventures raising chickens and attempts at sustainable eating. The result is a fresh and charming story that also raises questions about sustainable farming, industrial agriculture, and our connections with the animals we love.

Celebrate Earth Month: Books on the Natural World

In recognition of Earth Month, we’re sharing books that will inspire you to go out and explore. With information on how to forage edible and medicinal plants, dig razor clams, create a garden of native plants, and more, these books offer a deeper understanding and appreciation of the natural world.

Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon and
Between the Tides in California
These essential guides to exploring beaches and tidepools of the Pacific Coast feature full-color photographs, site profiles, fascinating stories of animal and plant species, and an accessible introduction to how coastal ecosystems work—perfect for beachgoers who want to know why.

Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City
Bestselling author and popular science writer David B. Williams will give you a new appreciation for how Seattle has changed over time, how the past has influenced the present, and how nature is all around us—even in our urban landscape. Ranging along trails and sidewalks, these guided walks lead to panoramic views, intimate hideaways, and beautiful greenways.

Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: The Pacific Northwest and British Columbia
We’re hard-pressed to choose just one of horticulturalist and arboriculturist Collin Varner’s indispensable guides to the natural world of the Pacific Northwest, but this compact, full-color forager’s guide is a great place to start. The region is home to a multitude of edible and medicinal plant species, edible mushrooms, and marine plants, and this book offers clear photography, descriptions, safety tips, and warnings, as well as culinary and medicinal uses from Indigenous Peoples and settlers, for more than 150 wild-growing flora species.

Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest
Challenging to dig, delicious to eat, and providing a heady experience of abundance, razor clams are entwined with Washington state’s commerce, identity, and history. Author David Berger shares his love affair of the Pacific razor clam and gets into the nitty-gritty of how to dig, clean, and cook them in this lively history and celebration of the Siliqua patula.

Flora of the Pacific Northwest: An Illustrated Manual
A classic since it was first published in1973, this tome covering Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia is the most comprehensive reference on Pacific Northwest vascular plants for professional and amateur botanists, ecologists, rare plant biologists, plant taxonomy instructors, land managers, nursery professionals, and gardeners—“a must for your home garden library” (Washington Park Arboretum Bulletin).

Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest abounds with native plants that bring beauty to the home garden while offering food and shelter to birds, bees, butterflies, and other wildlife. Whether you’re a novice or expert gardener, renowned botanist Art Kruckeberg and horticulturist Linda Chalker-Scott show you how to imagine and realize your perfect sustainable landscape.

Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon
Michael Engelhard‘s thought-provoking and beautifully illustrated iconography of the polar bear brings this elusive and powerful animal into focus. Eight thousand years of artifacts attest to its charisma, and to the fraught relationships between our two species. Drawing on meticulous research, Engelhard traces and illuminates this intertwined history. Doing so, he delves into the stories we tell about Nature—and about ourselves—hoping for a future in which such tales still matter.

Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State
In this richly illustrated guide to the amazing array of fossils found in Washington state, renowned paleontologist Elizabeth A. Nesbitt teams up with David B. Williams to offer a fascinating, richly illustrated tour through more than a half billion years of natural history. The spectacular paleontology of the state is brought to life through details of the fossils’ discovery and extraction, their place in geological time, and the insights they provide into contemporary issues like climate change and species extinction.

Fishes of the Salish Sea: Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca
This comprehensive three-volume set, featuring striking illustrations of the Salish Sea’s 260 fish species by noted illustrator Joseph Tomelleri, details the ecology and life history of each species and recounts the region’s rich heritage of marine research and exploration. Beginning with jawless hagfishes and lampreys and ending with the distinctive Ocean Sunfish, leading scientists Theodore Wells Pietsch and James Orr present the taxa in phylogenetic order, based on classifications that reflect the most current scientific knowledge.

Birds of the Pacific Northwest: A Photographic Guide
Spanning a vast, distinctive region rich in protected wildlands and iconic national parks, this bestselling field guide is a superlative, complete resource for enjoying the many bird species found from British Columbia to southern Oregon. Renowned bird experts Tom Aversa, Richard Cannings, and Hal Opperman illuminate the key identification traits, vocalizations, seasonal statuses, habitat preferences, and feeding behaviors of bird species in the region. The compact, full-page accounts feature maps and more than 900 photographs by top bird photographers.

Read More on the Blog

Celebrate Earth Month: Books in Environmental Studies

Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon: Q&A with Ryan P. Kelly, Terrie Klinger and John J. Meyer

Photo Essay: Razor Clams

UW Press Publishes ‘Treaty Justice’ by Charles Wilkinson, Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Landmark Boldt Decision

February 12 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1974 Boldt Decision, a watershed ruling that affirmed the fishing rights and tribal sovereignty of Native nations in Washington State and transformed Indigenous law and resource management across the United States and beyond. In recognition of this significant ruling, the University of Washington Press is honored to announce the publication of Treaty Justice: The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights by eminent legal historian and longtime tribal advocate Charles Wilkinson.

Expert and compelling, Treaty Justice weaves personalities and local detail into the definitive account of one of the twentieth century’s most important civil rights cases. Wilkinson tells the dramatic story of the Boldt Decision against the backdrop of salmon’s central place in the cultures and economies of the Pacific Northwest.

In the mid-twentieth century, when Native people reasserted their fishing rights as delineated in nineteenth-century treaties, state officials worked with non-Indian commercial and sport fishing interests to forcefully—and often violently—oppose Native actions. What became known as the “fish wars” of the 1960s spurred twenty tribes and the US government to file suit in federal court. Moved by the testimony of tribal leaders and other experts, Judge George Boldt pointedly waited until Lincoln’s birthday to hand down a decision recognizing the tribes’ right to half of the state’s fish. The case’s long aftermath led from the Supreme Court’s affirmation of Boldt’s opinion to collaborative management of the harvest of salmon and other marine resources.

For Wilkinson, the Boldt Decision sits alongside Brown v. Board of Education and a select few other court cases in terms of bringing justice to dispossessed peoples and resulting in far-reaching societal changes. He writes, “Like those opinions, the Boldt Decision’s ramifications are many and still felt today . . . [it] vividly displays the brilliance and worth of the American system of justice and the moral and tangible benefits it can achieve at its heights.”

Wilkinson, who passed away in 2023, was the Moses Lasky Professor of Law at the University of Colorado and author of fourteen books, including Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations and Messages from Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way.

As a young civil rights attorney in 1971, Wilkinson joined the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), where he worked alongside John Echohawk (Pawnee) and the late David Getches to fight for the rights of tribal nations, earning significant victories across the United States. After four years at NARF, he became a law professor, teaching first at the University of Oregon in Eugene and then at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Over the next half-century, he built a legacy as one of the foremost scholars of Indian law.

In a tribute for High Country News, Daniel Cordalis and Kristen Carpenter write that “Charles was more than a brilliant lawyer, dedicated professor and gifted author; he was a true friend to Indian Country. To him, the field of federal Indian law was not just an interesting intellectual or professional pursuit; rather, it was a testament to the perseverance of a people. He saw that Indigenous people achieved the revival of tribal nations through their own vision, determination and action, not because of the federal government or anyone else.”

The author with environmental leader and advocate for treaty rights Billy Frank Jr. Photograph by Mary Randlett, PH Coll 723. Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Mary Randlett, photographer, UW 41874.
The Puyallup Tribe participates in a salmon ceremony in 1977. The News Tribune. © 1977 McClatchy. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Charles Wilkinson has done it again. With unmatched familiarity and command, he adds another essential volume to the amazing history of Indigenous activism and legal advocacy that has made the Northwest such a vibrant region for Native rights and power. While much more remains to be done to affirm the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty in American legal institutions, Wilkinson’s insights, vision, and legacy offer both guidance and inspiration.

Ned Blackhawk, author of the National Book Award-Winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Treaty Justice was supported by a generous grant from the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission and made possible in part thanks to the support of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe and Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. The book was also supported by the Tulalip Tribes Charitable Fund, which provides the opportunity for a sustainable and healthy community for all. Additional funding was provided by a grant from the Hugh and Jane Ferguson Foundation.

UW Press also thanks Michael Burnap and Irene Tanabe, Vasiliki Dwyer, Ellen Ferguson, Kelby Fletcher and Janet Boguch, Mary Hotchkiss and Mary Whisner, Barbara Johns in memory of David Getches, Sandeep Kaushik and Elizabeth Goodwin, Suzanne Kotz and Stephen Tarnoff, Michael Repass, and Cynthia Sears for their generous gifts in support of the book.

Read an excerpt from Treaty Justice in the Seattle Times Pacific NW Magazine.

Upcoming Events

UW Press is proud to join the Northwest Treaty Tribes, the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission (NWIFC), and the Washington State Historical Society in commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Boldt Decision.

  • US v WA: 50th Anniversary. February 6 and 7 at the Muckleshoot Events Center in Auburn. The Northwest Treaty Tribes and the NWIFC present two full days of events and programming, including a presentation of Treaty Justice by Charles Wilkinson’s family; a screening of Fish War, a documentary produced by NWIFC and North Forty Productions; and a series of panels reflecting on the impact of the Boldt Decision.
  • Usual and Accustomed Grounds. Exhibition on view February 10–September 1 at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. This exhibition focuses on the story of the Native fishing rights movement in Washington State and marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Boldt Decision. Through artifacts, photos, and footage, learn about how tribal people and nations resisted termination policies and fought for treaty-protected fishing access, cultural survival, and sovereignty—with impacts still felt today.
  • Boldt at 50: Reflecting on Treaty Justice and Tribal Sovereignty. February 12, 7:30 pm at Town Hall in Seattle. Centered around Wilkinson’s Treaty Justice, a panel will discuss the significance of the Boldt Decision and its enduring impact on the tribal sovereignty movement in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Featuring Jeremiah “Jay” Julius, a fisherman and member of the Lummi Nation; Lynda V. Mapes, author and Seattle Times journalist specializing in the environment and Native American issues; Nancy Shippentower, a Puyallup elder and activist; and Coll Thrush, noted historian and author of Native Seattle. The event is set to open with Native drummers and will also feature remarks from Darrell Hillaire, executive director of Children of the Setting Sun Productions (CSSP), and a film clip from CSSP. Books will be available from Third Place Books.
  • Symposium: The Boldt Decision at 50. March 30, 10:00 am–5:00 pm at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. This daylong symposium will explore the history of the ruling that served as an affirmation of Tribal fishing rights and sovereignty, featuring a lecture from state historian John Hughes; a panel conversation with representatives from the Nisqually Tribe, the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, and the Squaxin Island Tribe; and an opportunity for program participants to connect with panelists and purchase copies of relevant historical scholarship. Guests will also have the rare opportunity to view the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek.

Related Books

Introducing the UW Press Spring 2024 Catalog

We are excited to share our Spring 2024 catalog, packed with great books to come in the new year. Inside you’ll find definitive books on Native history and culture; the first biography of one of Montana’s most celebrated writers, Norman Maclean; richly illustrated books on the natural world; essential histories; illuminating art books and exhibition catalogs from our publishing partners, including the Seattle Art Museum, National Nordic Museum, and the Autry Museum of the American West; and more.

Photograph by Mary Randlett, PH Coll 723. Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Mary Randlett, photographer, UW 41874.

The catalog cover, taken from the forthcoming book Treaty Justice, features a photograph of Billy Frank Jr. (1931–2014), a leader for treaty rights and environmental stewardship, and author and longtime tribal advocate Charles Wilkinson (1941–2023) on traditional Nisqually land at the southerly reach of Puget Sound. An expert and compelling account of the Boldt Decision, which affirmed the fishing rights and tribal sovereignty of Native nations in Washington State, Treaty Justice will be published in January to coincide with the 50th anniversary of this landmark civil rights event.

We invite you to view the full catalog and explore all of our forthcoming books. Now is also a great time to subscribe to our newsletter or update your preferences so that you can receive email alerts when your favorite books are released.