A conversation with historian Coll Thrush about their book

Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific

(University of Washington Press, 2025)

Coll Thrush is Professor of History and associate faculty in Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. He earned a B.A. from Fairhaven College at Western Washington University and PhD in History from the University of Washington. His first book, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (University of Washington Press, Weyerhauser Environmental Book Series, 2007) won the 2007 Washington State Book Award and came out in a 2nd edition in 2017. In 2011 Thrush and Colleen E. Boyd co-edited Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). His next monograph was Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity, 2016). Just last week, he published his new book Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific (University of Washington Press, Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography, 2025).

The Writing Westward Podcast is produced and hosted by Prof. Brenden W. Rensink for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. Subscribe to the Writing Westward Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and other podcast distribution apps and platforms. Follow the BYU Redd Center and the Writing Westward Podcast on Facebook, Bluesky, or X/Twitter, or get more information @ https://www.writingwestward.org.

Theme music by Micah Dahl Anderson @ www.micahdahlanderson.com