Author and assistant history professor Coll Thrush never really quite believed what he read.
In traditional American history scholarship, Native Americans are in most accounts conspicuously absent from urban history. Though present at the time of first contact — either in violent confrontations or peaceful treaties — with the pioneers, beyond that, Native Americans seem to disappear from the text, relegated to reservations.
With such reading in history textbooks, it’s been a commonly accepted notion that Indian tribes and metropolitan cities are mutually exclusive, that one must be eclipsed by the other and could not feasibly coexist.
Never is this more untrue, Thrush explains, than at The Crossing Over Place, the long-held native name for Seattle.
Co-author William Cronon and Thrush debunk that common exclusivity sentiment in “Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place,” which was released last year and will be coming out in paperback this month.
Thrush, an assistant history professor at the University of British Columbia, is coming down from Canada to Eagle Harbor Books, 157 Winslow Way on Bainbridge, at 3 p.m. April 13 to talk about the book — his first major release.
“Native Seattle” notes how Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and participation, even though they were often the scapegoats of disorder. Native people and places played a vital role in making the city what it is today just as the urban changes transformed what it meant to be native.
Illustrated with an atlas of indigenous Seattle created by linguist Nile Thompson, “Native Seattle” takes us back to the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s through the 1880s and on through the turn of the century to the 1930s during which time massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected the indigenous people’s ability to survive in traditional places.
It then follows through the World War II-era which led to a new visibility and authority for Native Americans in Seattle and onto the present where Native Americans have seemingly returned to the center of civic life. WU
Info: www.eagleharborbooks.com or call the bookstore at (206) 842-5332.
Also upcoming at Eagle Harbor
At 7:30 p.m., April 17 — Stephen Arno, Puget Sound native and forest ecologist for the USDA Forest Service, will give a multimedia presentation on the newest edition of the arboriculture reference book “Northwest Trees” which covers 60 species of wild Northwest trees by shape, size, needles or leaves and cones or seeds.
Info: www.mountaineersbooks.org, www.eagleharborbooks.com or call the bookstore at (206) 842-5332.
