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.” Commemorated in museums, locally-published books, historical markers, folklore, place names, and in the remains of the ships themselves, the Graveyard of the Pacific has produced a rich archive ranging from Indigenous historical narrative to American tourist literature and debris on a Canadian beach. Wrecked is a critical cultural history of this iconic element of regional history, using shipwreck to open up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence along the coast. Whether in the form of a fur trading schooner destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an empty tanker broken on the beach in 1999, shipwreck on the northwest coast reveals patterns of storytelling and meaning-making that illustrate the fraught and unfinished business of colonization in the Graveyard of the Pacific.
Coll Thrush is 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.
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