This course is offered as part of the Marine Biology Quarter in Spring, 2018.

Taught at the Friday Harbor Laboratories as part of the spring Marine Biology Quarter, this course blends lectures, guest speakers, seminar-style discussions, and field trips to uncover the Indigenous history and environment of the Salish Sea. It begins with “The Distant Past,” a unit that examines the oceanographic and natural features of the region, along with the diverse Native peoples who knew these waters by many names and encountered non-Native outsiders who arrived in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Then it moves into a unit on “The Historic Opportunities and Challenges on the Salish Sea,” which includes topics on treaty-making in the settler-colonial spaces of Washington Territory and British Columbia, competition over fishing sites, opportunities for labor and travel, the Fish Wars of the 1960s and 1970s, and the hardening boundaries across the Salish Sea. The final unit, “The Contemporary Salish Sea,” takes a case study approach as we examine recent marine pollution and indigenous efforts at restoring salmon runs and Native technologies and practices that support a more sustainable future for the Salish Sea.

This course will be credited through the UW History Department as a 300-level course, HSTAA course number to be determined, and will count toward Diversity and I & S (Individuals and Societies) Requirement credits for UW undergraduates.

The instructor for this course is Dr. Joshua Reid from the University of Washington Department of History and American Indian/Native American Studies