The Pacific Northwest Historians Guild brings together scholars concerned with the study and dissemination of regional history. Founded in Nov. 1980, the Guild fosters teaching and appreciation of Northwest history and promotes communication among regional historians.
We look forward to having you attend the Guild’s 32nd Regional History Conference.
Here’s a link for more information and to register:
2025 History Conference
October 11th, 2025, Seattle Public Library
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And don’t miss our monthly Zoom lecture! Coming up next is
Coll Thrush, Thursday, September 25th at 7 PM
SEPTEMBER MEETING ANNOUNCEMENT
Free and open to the public
Join us as we welcome author Coll Thrush to present his latest book, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific. The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginning with a Spanish galleon that came ashore in northern Oregon in 1693 and continuing into the recent past, Wrecked includes stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers.
Commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place-names, and the remains of the ships themselves, the shipwrecks have created a rich archive. Whether in the form of a fur-trading schooner that was destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast open up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence. Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights how the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. As a critical cultural history of this iconic element of the region, Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast.
Coll Thrush is a professor of history, faculty associate in critical Indigenous studies, and Killam teaching laureate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, in unceded Musqueam territory. He is the author of 2007’s Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, a second edition of which was released in 2017; co-editor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American History & Culture (2011); and author of Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (2016). Coll is also a founding co-editor of the Indigenous Confluences book series at the University of Washington Press.
This FREE Zoom meeting will start at 7 pm, Thursday, September 25th
Registration is required at this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/VU3zlUK1TRGjTICGP2IRLw