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A review by _micah_
Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place by Coll Thrush
challenging
informative
medium-paced
4.5
A fascinating monograph of the Indigenous-settler histories of Seattle and, by extension, the Indigenous-settler history the Pacific Northwest as a whole. Though there were moments when I wished for more present-day oral histories, the archival research is thorough and takes the reader from the landing of the Denny party on Alki beach up through the Indigenous activisms of the 1970's, repeatedly noting the many ways that civic bureaucracies of Seattle utilized Indigenous imagery (especially that of non-Seattle area Haida artwork) while simultaneously ignoring or actively ghettoizing Indigenous communities. The volume is completed with an annotated atlas of place names that, among other things, will serve anyone wresting with the myth of the "uncultivated land" of the PNW on settler arrival.
Thrush's shines in his analyses of "place-story," a "term to capture the conjunction between sites of history and the accounts we make of them." It's a simple enough concept, but one that has followed me as I've reflected on my life in modern Vancouver and Spokane and, especially, as I've tried to make sense of the changes that happened in my hometown of Portland between 1990 and 2020. He returns to the idea of place-story throughout, regularly revisiting the ways in which Indigeneity became a metaphor for the displacement of one (white settler) city population for another, while also poking at the bigger idea: How do we make place-stories that matter? I find this especially relevant while living in a modern settler architecture that feels built on alienation. I am not just a person, living in a place, but attached to somewhere with histories and stories I am now also intrinsically tied to. As Thrush references Fred Moody's Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: "What kind of city is Seattle becoming?" was also "What the hell am I turning into?" As Seattle has changed, so to has anyone who has lived there, and Seattle is a reflects the constant adaptation of settler culture and the Indigenous peoples who refused to be passive.
Native Seattle is for anyone looking for a dive into PNW histories of empire, or just looking to get a firmer understanding of what their own local histories might be missing in their place-stories. As we are reminded again and again, there are stories bigger and deeper here than any traditional settler history would teach us.
Thrush's shines in his analyses of "place-story," a "term to capture the conjunction between sites of history and the accounts we make of them." It's a simple enough concept, but one that has followed me as I've reflected on my life in modern Vancouver and Spokane and, especially, as I've tried to make sense of the changes that happened in my hometown of Portland between 1990 and 2020. He returns to the idea of place-story throughout, regularly revisiting the ways in which Indigeneity became a metaphor for the displacement of one (white settler) city population for another, while also poking at the bigger idea: How do we make place-stories that matter? I find this especially relevant while living in a modern settler architecture that feels built on alienation. I am not just a person, living in a place, but attached to somewhere with histories and stories I am now also intrinsically tied to. As Thrush references Fred Moody's Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: "What kind of city is Seattle becoming?" was also "What the hell am I turning into?" As Seattle has changed, so to has anyone who has lived there, and Seattle is a reflects the constant adaptation of settler culture and the Indigenous peoples who refused to be passive.
Native Seattle is for anyone looking for a dive into PNW histories of empire, or just looking to get a firmer understanding of what their own local histories might be missing in their place-stories. As we are reminded again and again, there are stories bigger and deeper here than any traditional settler history would teach us.