Join us for a discussion of “Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place” by Coll Thrush.

Please email RSVP@samishtribe.nsn.us to join the Book Club email list! Book Club members will receive invitations to all discussions and can choose which to attend. 

In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native.

In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region.

This event is co-hosted by Samish Indian Nation's Chelángen Department and Prevention/Intervention Program.