A Provocative Retelling of Shipwrecks and the Stories They Leave Behind
Wednesday, November 12th: 6:30pm-9:00pm Free event - ticket required.
Book Talk with Coll Thrush: Wrecked—Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific.
Join us at the Vancouver Maritime Museum for an evening with Coll Thrush, acclaimed historian, author, and VMM Board Member, as he shares insights from his latest book, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific.
The rugged coastline of the Pacific Northwest has claimed more than two thousand ships, earning it the name “Graveyard of the Pacific.” In Wrecked, Thrush explores these wrecks not as isolated tragedies, but as stories that reveal the entangled histories of Indigenous peoples and newcomers along these shores.
This event offers a thought-provoking look at how shipwrecks can help us understand colonialism, survival, and the unfinished business of history on the Northwest Coast.
Evening Schedule
6:30 PM – Doors open (bar and book sales available)
7:00 PM – Book talk with Coll Thrush
7:45 PM – Audience Q&A and reading
8:15 PM – Book signing and conversation (bar and book sales continue)
9:00 PM – Event concludes
About the Book
A provocative retelling of shipwreck tales from the Northwest Coast
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, Wrecked includes stories of many vessels that met their fate along the rugged coast and the meanings made of these events by both Indigenous and settler survivors and observers.
Commemorated in museums, historical markers, folklore, place-names, and the remains of the ships themselves, the shipwrecks have created a rich archive. Whether in the form of a fur-trading schooner that was destroyed in 1811, a passenger liner lost in 1906, or an almost-empty tanker broken on the shore in 1999, shipwrecks on the Northwest Coast opens up conversations about colonialism and Indigenous persistence. Thrush’s retelling of shipwreck tales highlights the ways in which the three central myths of settler colonialism—the disappearance of Indigenous people, the control of an endlessly abundant nature, and the idea that the past would stay past—proved to be untrue. As a critical cultural history of this iconic element of the region, Wrecked demonstrates how the history of shipwrecks reveals the fraught and unfinished business of colonization on the Northwest Coast.
About the Author
Coll Thrush is professor of history and Killam teaching laureate at the University of British Columbia and associate faculty at UBC’s Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. He is the author of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (2007/2017) which won the Washington State Book Award; co-editor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American History & Culture (2011); and the author of Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (2016). His most recent book, published this past May, is Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific. He is also a founding series editor of Indigenous Confluences at the University of Washington Press.
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