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, historian Coll Thrush presents stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and explores the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers.
Coll Thrush is a settler historian who was raised in Auburn, Washington, in the treaty territory of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. A graduate of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University in Bellingham and the University of Washington in Seattle, Coll is professor of history and associate faculty in critical Indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, on unceded Musqueam territory. In 2021, Coll was named a UBC Killam teaching laureate. He is also the founding co-editor of the Indigenous Confluences book series at the University of Washington Press.
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