-Welcome. I'm Margaret O'Mara.
I'm the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair
of American History here at the University of Washington.
And on behalf of myself, my colleague and co-organizer,
Jess Cavalari,
whose many talents extend beyond sound checks.
But it is much --
many fruitful areas of serious fellowship.
And all of the departments and units
that brought this event into being;
the Department of History,
the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest,
the Quaternary Research Center,
the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. We cannot do this alone.
And I am just so delighted
to welcome this stellar all-star panel,
as well as celebrate the working contributions
of our one-time colleague and honored guest, Richard White.
Let me begin with the acknowledgment
of the nations and peoples
whose lands are beneath and surrounding us.
The University of Washington
acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land,
the land which touches the shared waters
of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip,
and Muckleshoot nations.
This acknowledgment is particularly meaningful today,
given this forum's subject,
a book about a great river
that empties into the same shared waters
of this Coast Salish peoples,
and that whose basins encompasses the lands
of the Yakima, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce.
In 1995, Richard published what he termed, modestly,
a little book with large ambitions,
an intertwined human and natural history of the Columbia River,
titled The Organic Machine.
In it, he defined the river as, "An energy system,
which, although modified by human interventions,
maintains its natural, its unmade qualities."
The book is a meditation on the inextricable relationships
that bond human society and culture
to the energy and flows of the natural world.
Written at a time of fierce battles over the fate
of wild salmon
and other endangered species of the Pacific Northwest.
It was a call to action for anyone invested
in environmental concerns to, "Think in new ways,
not merely about the Columbia,
but about nature and its relation to human beings
and human history."
It has since become one of the more heavily cited
and generative works of modern environmental history
and of river historiography in particular.
Thirty years later,
we are delighted to welcome Richard back to the UW
to celebrate that volume and its legacy,
as well as the broader intellectual legacies of Richard
and those he trained and mentored here.
Several members of the Richard White diaspora
are here on this panel;
his former students, the students of his students,
and historians of the region influenced by his work.
We've invited each of them, in turn,
to deliver informal remarks that meditate on this book,
the state of the field of environmental history,
the history of the Pacific Northwest,
how they situate their own work in those fields,
and any new and fruitful intellectual directions
they see emerging in these fields.
After our panelists deliver their comments,
which I'm going to invite each of them
to come up here to the podium in turn and speak and then go back,
I will turn to Richard
to deliver his own remarks and reactions.
And then we will turn to Q&A. So a note on the Q&A,
partially because of amplification purposes,
you see we're recording this for posterity
and also for the Seattle Channel.
And so in order to make sure that all of the questions
are as amplified as the answers the panelists will give,
you all should have received index cards as you came in.
And those are places for you to write any questions that arise.
Lee Gray, our colleague who's in the back holding index cards,
is happy to deliver more to you if you need them.
And so towards the end,
as we turn to Q&A, Lee will come around and pick up index cards,
and then I will ask questions from those.
I expect I will not have time to get to all of them,
and so I apologize in advance for that,
but we'll try to get to the most salient ones in particular,
if there are clusters of questions
that are around the same idea.
We'll try and do that.
But then afterwards, when we end the formal program,
I really hope you all will be able to stick around for a bit.
We have refreshments in the back
and have informal conversation with one another
and with the panelists.
That's our order of show.
So what I'm going to do now is introduce our panel all at once
at the top and in the order
in which they will deliver their remarks,
and then I will invite them to come up.
So the first set of remarks
are going to come from Nathan Roberts.
Nathan is a lecturer in the Department of History,
where he's been so since 2016,
teaching a broad array of courses in our department,
including environmental history, the history of the 1960s,
and the history of the Pacific Northwest.
He is currently finishing a book manuscript for UW Press,
which is based on a dissertation that he completed here in 2014
under the direction of Linda Nash.
The project is titled,
Building the Nation in Framework and Veneer, U.S.
Forestry in the Philippines, 1900 to 1937.
And it should be coming out from UW Press before we know it.
Our second set of remarks, our second speaker today,
will be Jennifer Seltz.
Jen is an Associate Professor of History and Affiliate
Faculty in Environmental and Energy
Studies at Western Washington University.
Her teaching and research ranges around Western
and environmental history,
with emphases on 19th and 20th century cultures
of health and medicine,
and more recently, Pacific Northwest energy history.
She has published on 19th century epidemics
around the Salish Sea,
and on the cultural history of natural childbirth.
And she is completing a manuscript on contests
over environment and health in the 19th century West.
Our third speaker will be Coll Thrush,
Professor of History and Killam Teaching Laureate
at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver
on unceded Musqueam territory,
and faculty associate for the UBC's
Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies.
He is the author of Native Seattle, Histories
from the Crossing-Over Place.
Co-editor with Colleen Boyd of Phantom Past,
Indigenous Presence,
Native Ghosts in North American History and Culture.
The author of Indigenous London,
Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire.
And most recently, the author published this year,
May 2025 from UW Press, of Wrecked, Unsettling Histories
from the Graveyard of the Pacific.
On stales at bookstores near you right now.
His current projects are a memoir history entitled
The Train to Weeping Water,
which centers on the experiences of his great-grandfather,
a rider on the so-called orphan trains.
And did an autobiographical novel called SlaughterTown
about a group of kids coming of age in the 1980s
against the backdrop of the Green River Killer case.
Good stuff.
The last of our panelists to speak will be Jennifer O'Neal.
She's Assistant Professor
in the Department of Indigenous Race and Ethnic Studies
at the University of Oregon.
Her interdisciplinary research and teaching
focuses on Native American history, politics,
and culture with an emphasis on sovereignty,
self-determination, cultural heritage,
global indigenous rights, social movements,
transnational activism,
and data sovereignty across a variety of fields,
mediums, and forms.
Her work is dedicated to centering indigenous
traditional knowledge,
developing place-based education,
and implementing guidelines for ethical research
of Native American communities and management
of cultural heritage collections.
Over the past 20 years,
she's assisted in leading the implementation
of best practices for Native American archival materials
and non-tribal repositories in the U.S.
through the collective development of the protocols
for Native American archival materials.
She's currently developing an indigenous knowledge and data
sovereignty research center at UO,
to bridge connections between tribal communities, faculty,
and students engaged in research with Native nations in Oregon
and across the Pacific Northwest.
And then, last but hardly least, Richard White.
Richard is a historian of the United States
specializing in the American West,
the history of capitalism, environmental history,
history and memory, and Native American history.
He is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History
Emeritus at Stanford University, where he taught for 30 years.
But prior to that, he was here at the University of Washington,
which he's also an alum.
Are you a double dog, Richard?
Yes. BA and PhD.
Didn't think you'd hear me say double dog in this, did you?
So a proud product of this university
and a contributor to it.
We were at the Burke earlier today,
and we were trying to persuade them to let him in for free
because he's an alum, a former faculty member.
You checked all the boxes.
They said yes.
His work at the state occasionally spilled over
into Mexico, Canada, France, Australia, and Ireland.
He is a MacArthur Fellow,
a recipient of the Mellon Distinguished Professor Award,
and his work has won numerous academic prizes.
He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
His many books, in addition to The Organic Machine,
include Who Killed Jane Stanford?
A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit,
Spirits and the Birth of a University.
Highly recommended for those who like Gilded Age conspiracies.
The Republic for Which It Stands,
The United States during Reconstruction
and the Gilded Age,
part of the Oxford History of the United States.
Railroaded, The Transcontinentals
and the Making of Modern America from 2011.
The Middle Ground, Indians, Empires,
and the Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 to 1815.
It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own,
A History of the American West.
The Roots of Dependency, Subsistence, Environment,
and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos.
And Land Use, Environment, and Social Change,
The Shaping of Island County, Washington.
Thank you all for being here.
Without further ado, let me turn to our panel.
Nathan, I'll invite you up.
[ Applause ]
-All right. I'm going to apologize ahead of time
that I did not print out my remarks,
and so I'm going to read off my laptop.
Sorry, it's a little gush, but that's what's happening.
I want to also start, those of you who don't know me or know,
I also got my BA here, got my master's degree here,
got my PhD here with Lynn Nash, with Sasha Harmon.
So it's a real pleasure to be able to stand up here
and talk with you all about this topic.
I also want to say, by way of introduction,
how I got to The Organic Machine
was in a class here at this university
and the program on the environment
taught by Coll Thrush.
And the description that I remember getting from Coll
when I was an undergrad was that it is a small book
with a lot of big ideas.
And that notion of a lot of big ideas,
I think, has stuck with me a long time, and it's partly
how I got to what I wanted to talk about here today.
So what I want to talk about is something
I took away from the book,
but at the time was more of a curiosity
than any kind of a conclusion.
It was like one of those things that gets planted in your brain,
and you just kind of keep percolating on it
until it starts to make more sense later on.
So I'm going to talk about that a little bit.
It's composed, this idea, of two pieces.
One that is a very direct part of what Richard is doing,
and he says it in the introduction
about what he's doing.
And the other is a little bit out of focus,
and something that I think,
for me, was important to extract from it.
The first is about the history of relationships,
which he says right away
that this is not one history of humanity,
told along a second history of the river,
but rather about relationships.
The second piece here is about materiality.
And for anyone who maybe is not super familiar with that term,
I'll just talk for a moment about how I'm using it,
which is that environmental historians can use
the term materiality to get around some
of the other drawbacks that come with other terms.
For example,
to talk about environment often can feel
like we're talking about something that's outside of us,
instead of us being part of it.
To talk of the physical world can obscure a lot,
because a lot that is in the material world
is not tangible or physical.
Gases in the environment, microbes, things like that.
So materiality is a way to try to get around some of that,
and it situates us in the environment,
and reminds us that we pass through it
as it passes through us.
In Richard White's terms,
the natural and the cultural can't be disentangled.
So with respect to that idea about entanglement
of the cultural and the natural,
which is of course a major theme of the book,
what has become central to some environmental histories
is to examine relationships among the material world
that are apart from what humans created, intended,
or were able to control.
So I'm going to just very briefly read the passage
that has stuck with me for so long that I still enjoy,
I think we all enjoy Richard's writing,
just as the way the words come off the page.
But this passage is the one that's kind of stuck with me
and worked on me for a while.
It's in the last chapter on salmon,
and it's the part of the chapter
where he's gone to the dam and is there looking at the river.
"Standing by the fish ladder at Ice Harbor,
the first dam on the Snake River,
on a hot July afternoon in 1994, I see fish everywhere.
There are large carp and schools of shad,
neither native to the river,
but only a few Chinook, no sockeye,
and only a scattering of steelhead.
The river has changed.
To say that there should be thousands of Chinook and sockeye
passing upriver on a given day in early July
instead of the nineteen Chinook of July 11, 1994,
is, perhaps, to miss the point.
If this were the old Columbia River system
there would be salmon, but this is a different river.
It is not the river salmon evolved in.
This new river produces carp and shad."
So I think the reason that this has remained with me
and kind of influenced my thinking is because of the way
it shifts the focus away from the human nature,
from the nature-culture relationship,
and just looks into the river.
It suggests, without needing to digress on the point,
that something is happening out of view.
It reminds us that the tree falling
in the woods makes a sound.
The material relationships taking their course
out of the view of humans can be significant players
in what humans call their history.
We can take, for example,
the terrible case of mercury poisoning in Japan in the 1950s.
This story can be told, and often has been told,
as one of humans dumping wastewater laden
with mercury into a bay.
People who ate the shellfish from that bay
were poisoned by the presence of methylmercury.
To reference another roundtable, one that Linda Nash was part of
in the Journal of Environmental History in 2008,
they discussed that in the 1960s,
researchers started investigating
that mercury poisoning
and later confirmed that the mercury
that had entered the bay entered as mercury sulfate.
The ones in the bay had been digested by bacteria
and that turning it into methylmercury,
the much more toxic compound to human beings.
So while human activities, of course,
were to blame for the mercury sulfate ending up in the bay,
human actions, practices,
and intentions were not part of the relationship
between bacteria and the mercury sulfate.
They were also not part of the shellfish behaviors
that took up the methylmercury.
And while humans, of course, harvested them,
sold them, ate them, and so on, humans, of course,
have nothing to do with the relationship
between methylmercury and human brain cells.
Those relationships are out of what either humans create
or are able to control.
So that relationship is the tree falling in the woods.
It is the chemical, biophysical,
geophysical, whatever properties of the Columbia River
that made it a new river that produced carp and shad.
So the significance of this is to see a more complex world,
a world full of these relationships
that we might not appreciate otherwise,
while I think at the same time
also giving us techniques to start to understand
a more complex world.
It certainly brings historians and social scientists
more in contact with the so-called hard sciences,
biology and geology and so on. The result, I think,
is not just simply interdisciplinary scholarship,
but I think it really can be better history.
I reflect back on
when Linda gave me an article during my graduate work
by the fisheries scientist Becky Mansfield.
The piece was about centering the proteins
within the fish pollock when it is processed
and turned into Surimi fish product or Krab.
And the way
in which those end up culturally understood
in Japan and British Columbia differently.
And I remember Linda and I talking about that,
that she felt like somebody who has that handle on the science,
but also has a good head for history,
could really illuminate these many connections.
So in conclusion,
I think the focus on relationships in the book,
it reminds us that history that just focuses on humans
or just focuses on the environmental world
is omitting a lot.
But it also suggests that there are relationships
within the material world all around us and inside of us
that go unrecognized and yet compose our history.
Thanks. [ Applause ]
-Thank you very much to Margaret
and to all the sponsoring departments,
especially the history department
and the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest
for having us all here
and for Richard for coming up to Seattle.
Nathan, while you were talking,
I couldn't remember when I first read The Organic Machine,
when I sat down to think about this.
But when you were quoting that passage,
I did remember,
and of course it was probably an incorrect memory,
but I think that it was our second year of grad school
when Richard found himself teaching a very ad hoc,
independent study of like a dozen graduate students, maybe.
And at the time,
I didn't realize what a position this was,
to take on and overlook all of these students,
and everybody wants to talk about environmental history.
But I do remember a conversation about that passage
and about the complexity of being able to recognize
a river full of carbon shale,
but also to moor the giant salmon that nobody else can see.
Never again.
So that's not where I meant to begin
but that's what I thought of, listening to that.
I have, since that class a long time ago, I think,
I have looked at
and assigned The Organic Machine pretty often
over the last 15 years,
usually for courses in Pacific Northwest history
or energy history.
And when I've done that,
I've read it opportunistically as you do for teaching,
and I have realized that even a book
that's this short can actually be chopped
into shorter assignments for students.
So they only read 10 or 15 pages at a time.
And I just have thought,
is this the fastest way and the best way
to introduce undergraduates to
how the dams on the Columbia happened?
Will they understand from the first 15 pages of this book
that energy history means something other
than history of gas prices?
And of course, in both cases, the answer is yes.
But it was a pleasure to go back
and read the book all the way through this time,
less instrumentally,
and to appreciate what Richard does manage to do
in just 113 pages, and how elegantly he does it.
And I appreciate what Nathan said about the ideas
that are modeled rather than told.
I think that's also distinguishing factors.
The distinguishing part of this book,
and why it's been so generative,
is that much stuff is shown rather than told in it.
I had not ever really realized that the book moves more
or less with some back and forth,
west to east and south to north,
following the Columbia upriver
and through time from the early 19th century at Astoria
to late 20th century at Grand Coulee,
or I guess to Ice Harbor. And in 113 pages,
it does cover most of the key topics
for any Pacific Northwest history class,
at least my Pacific Northwest history classes.
And it does so more and more briskly.
I'm trying not to say powerfully or energetically,
as it goes on, in what I think is not accidental,
given Richard's love of concision.
And every chapter title is shorter than the one before.
It goes from Knowing Nature through Labor, and energy --
and Salmon Society on the Columbia
to just Salmon by the end.
Right. And so I want to talk about --
thank you.
I want to talk about just a few things
that have stood out to me on this rereading and ways
that I think this book has shaped environmental history,
has shaped my own work,
and also offers a model going forward for other kinds
of environmental history.
And certainly, I think what's gotten most attempted
maybe over time is the approach
that's laid out in the longest of those chapter titles,
which I realized
that I had mixed up a little bit what Richard says
and argues in that chapter
with what he argues much more politically in an essay
published the same year in the anthology Uncommon Grounds;
Are You an Environmentalist or do You Work For a Living?
And I'm not going to revisit the wilderness debates
of the mid and late 1990s here.
But I do want to talk first about the first word
in that longest chapter title
and about what knowing and knowledge
mean in this book and perhaps in environmental history since.
And one of the things that struck me
about The Organic Machine, rereading it this time,
was how it builds on what was already
a pretty venerable tradition or approach
in American studies and in environmental history
in 1995 of intellectual and cultural history.
And this is a book about ideas of nature.
It's a classic topic.
This is a book which maybe persuaded graduate students
who were interested in smallpox
that they had to read not only Emerson, okay,
but also Lewis Mumford.
And it does insist
that these ideas help explain electrification or dams
or industrial applications of nuclear waste,
but also that ideas emerge from human experiences of the world.
And they're rooted in senses and in perception.
And it insists or shows
that those perceptions themselves have a history
and can and should be historicized.
And at the same time,
that those perceptions are never only individual.
They're never only just about how any one person senses' work.
But they are social, communal, political,
based in relationship.
And I have to say that although Richard says
that quite plainly in the book,
I didn't really fully understand that
or understand how that could work in writing
a different kind of history
or writing history which shows us something
that we didn't know before until I read Linda Nash's work.
And I think what Linda did in some ways
takes up most fully what Richard models in The Organic Machine.
That's first in an article on another more obscure river,
a river closer to where I live now,
in her article in the Journal of American History 25 years ago
on the changing experience of nature
on the Saskatchewan River,
which introduced probably not to all historians,
certainly to me, the concept of phenomenology, right?
And of mediation and of a dynamic relationship
between the people in the world and the ideas
that they were bringing to experiences of nature.
And this, I think,
has been important not only in my own work,
but important in -- and taken for granted perhaps
in environmental history since then.
And phenomenology also begins with embodied knowledge,
of course.
And Linda takes out
and extends Richard's insistence in Organic Machine
that history of bodies
and of knowledge about bodies
is crucial to environmental history itself.
This was not something that was a given, I think, in 1995,
that you could find a history that's of bodies,
which also was about nature, right?
And I'm trying to think of recent examples of this,
and Eric Lewis's recent book,
a recent history book on labor unions
in the force of the Pacific Northwest
in the early 20th century,
begins with this wonderful chapter on disease
and environmental history and how gross logging camps were.
That I think would not be possible as part
of a combined environmental labor history without this book
and without Linda's work.
And I have found, continue to find,
the idea that you don't have to separate the history of bodies
from the history of the world outside bodies.
Can I actually grab a water bottle?
Thank you. Speaking of bodies.
Okay.
So The Organic Machine, as a work of intellectual history,
both intellectual history work rooted in ideas
about perception, rooted in the phenomenological approach,
although that never appears in the 113 pages of the book.
And also, most obviously, it is an energy history.
An energy history has emerged as a field,
or has become bigger as a field, I think,
in the last 10 or 15 years. Very understandably, I think,
in the face of the political and environmental
and social crises that we face. And so,
when I started looking around where I live in Bellingham
and where my campus is, and in particular,
you can see from the Student Union,
you can see a couple of refineries.
What are those doing at the edge of the Salish Sea?
And in particular,
after the Lummi Nation managed to defeat a proposal
for a coal terminal that's off Cherry Point
in its historic herring and other fishing grounds.
And ending up with what I think Richard would
have particularly appreciated,
the irony of the very large number
of affluent White environmentalists
who found themselves incredibly grateful to the Lummi Nation
and to the Army Corps of Engineers
for stopping this coal terminal.
And so, I became interested in what it would look like
to teach a regional energy history.
Well, what do you know, there's really only one model for that,
and it comes in The Organic Machine.
And it is something that lays out a model for
how to look at energy history expansively,
not only as a history of a given commodity,
not only as a history of policies,
not only even as a history
of what people have thought about energy,
but to understand the system at different scales.
And in its insistence
that we need to learn how to see differently this,
and we need to understand the complexity of
how we've gotten to accidentally construct these systems.
The Organic Machine
which humans manage without fully understanding
what they have created,
that still strikes me as a worthwhile goal
for any work in history,
and for anyone trying to teach people to look at the landscapes
through which they move and live and see it differently.
-It's really great to be here,
and as Jen said, it's a little strange to be here, too.
I was thinking about all the genealogies that are represented
in the panel and in the audience and so on.
So the first time I applied for graduate study
at the University of Washington, I didn't get in.
I was incredibly naive about the graduate school process
and wrote a terrible application essay
in which I claimed I wanted to write about,
oh, just about everything that happened in the American West.
So while waiting for the next year's round
of admission to take place,
I managed to talk my non-matriculated self
into a seminar with Richard.
There I met a host of already enrolled graduate students
who would not only serve as role models and mentors,
but who would also go on to transform the fields
of indigenous and environmental history.
Sasha Harmon, Jay Taylor, Liza Black, Deb Blackhawk,
Linda Nash, Matt Klingel, and others.
This was in 1995,
which is to say that The Organic Machine
and the thinking behind it
were already our baseline for historical analysis
and our bellwether for good writing.
For some of us,
and how lucky we were, it's just always been there.
And what a there it was.
The book took the iconic landscape
of Celilo Falls and Lewis and Clark
and Woody Guthrie and Hanford
and turned it into a master class on useful disorientation.
And I mean disorientation in the best possible way, of course.
I mean it in the sense of pulling apart the just-so
stories of settler colonialism and capital N Nature
in favor of eddies and entanglements
between the natural and the cultural,
between the indigenous and the settler,
between the past and the present.
In The Organic Machine, the river cascades through
and erodes deeply held settler notions of the environment,
whether that be a landscape
that must first be evacuated of indigenous people and then,
"preserved," or a place that, in Richard's words,
must be lovingly transformed into, for example,
a series of dammed reservoirs.
Each of the steps in this process
was logical according to the vicissitudes and particularities
of time and culture, Richard writes, but,
"It was the result that was mad."
There is madness here, and fear,
not least of which is that which is inspired
by the disappearing salmon themselves.
After all, as The Organic Machine notes both wryly
and soberingly, "Half of nothing is nothing."
And yet the river continues its work.
The many groups who have been in seemingly unending conflict
over the use of the river are, in Richard's words,
"Fighting over something they in part created,
but which contains within it something they have not made.
This unmade world is called nature."
These are, as has been said, big ideas in a small book.
The Organic Machine also taught us the art
of the declarative sentence. It opens that way.
"The Columbia River is born fewer books than barges,"
and rolls on from there.
Machines replaced bodies, Richard continues.
Machines overcame nature, but what seemed simple was not.
This economy of language has always been a feature
of Richard's authorship,
perhaps most notably in his responses to long
and tortured graduate student emails.
They were like haiku responses.
But The Organic Machine, at only 120 pages,
or 113, I guess, is one of the best examples I know of,
of writing that is both lyrical and efficient,
always just what it needs to be to tell the story
of this complicated place.
It is also concerned centrally with metaphor.
Richard was critical of the metaphor
so often used to describe what has happened to the Columbia,
most notably rape and death, and offered a story
that is more about complex forms of transformation.
Perhaps salmon are the best metaphor or metonym
for the river, but then so are dams,
if what we want to talk about
is the energy of the river as system.
I will never forget first encountering the idea
that steamboats
and the laser light show in the Grand Coulee Dam were,
at their heart, natural phenomena.
Three decades on,
I still tell those stories to anyone
who shows even a bit of interest,
and I can still see the light bulb go on each time,
and yes, that's a pun.
But this is not a book devoid of judgment
about what has happened on the Columbia.
Indeed, there's a thread of something like mourning
that weaves through The Organic Machine.
The book ends on a critical and even allergenic note,
"We have not come to terms with our history on this river."
But the sense of mourning is not only
for the loss of the salmon or the cancer rates
downwind of Hanford.
It's for our cultural misunderstandings of the place,
its energy regimes, its systems of labor,
and the very nature of history itself.
At the core of this story, then, is failure.
What has failed, Richard writes,
is our relationship with the river.
Despite environmental history's strident warnings
against simplistic declensionist narratives,
I can't help but notice The Organic Machine's
emphasis on failure, not just of settler actions,
but also of the settler imagination.
Reading the book again 30 years further into the Anthropocene,
I was struck by how prescient it is even today.
So many still seem trapped in robust misapprehensions
of the relationship between nature and culture,
even as climate catastrophe deepens.
We still can't quite get it right, and as Richard mourns,
"Our knowledge has ultimately made little difference."
Perhaps the one bright spot in this ongoing story,
though, is the way in which
indigenous communities and nations
along the Great River have fought for
and gained much in the way of sovereignty,
cultural reawakening, and environmental co-management.
These are the things I was thinking about
as I read The Organic Machine for the first time in a while.
The book only seems more urgently important.
Speaking historiographically,
the legacy of The Organic Machine
continues in the work of a new generation
of scholars writing about the region.
I think, for example,
about Marc Carpenter's new book, The War on Illahee,
which is a story of settler violence
against indigenous people and peoples
across the Pacific Northwest in the middle of the 19th century.
Here, Carpenter adds the labor of genocide
to Richard's framework of energetic transformation.
I think, too, about my own student, Kaden Jelsing,
whose forthcoming book on indigenous
and settler prophecies in the Old Northwest
and on the Columbia Plateau
will illustrate the entanglement
of seemingly incommensurable native and newcomer worldviews,
while always linking those senses of futurity
to physical and narrative transformations
of the environment.
And I think about the emergent work of Jamey Jesperson,
whose research on trans and two-spirit people
in the early colonial Northwest picks up where Richard left off,
by writing back into the story,
figures like the prophet and trader Kocomenepeca,
who appeared up and down the Columbia
in the early 19th century
and who serves in The Organic Machine
as an emblematic figure of kinetic relations
in the Great Rivers Territory.
Follow these up-and-coming scholars'
intellectual genealogies,
and Richard and The Organic Machine are there.
This book is a basalt.
It is bedrock for writing about the Pacific Northwest.
I also keep coming back to this book in my own work.
I'm currently writing a piece with a former student,
Sarah Fox, now in Prescott College,
that brings together our respective research
on maritime disaster
and what she calls a settler wasting cycle to think with
and through a single question.
How is a shipwreck like a radio isotope?
As we ruminate together about
how historians might write in the wreckage
of the Pacific Northwest,
colonial past and Anthropocene present,
The Organic Machine casts a large shadow.
Indeed, I sometimes wonder,
in this piece we're provisionally calling
Debris Fields, and which focuses on the lower Columbia River,
whether we're saying anything new at all,
given the capaciousness and elegance
of Richard's original arguments.
One marker of a great book is that it inspires work,
there's that word again, that it did not itself do.
It sometimes seems, though,
as in the case of The Organic Machine,
as if Sarah and I can only say, Richard was right.
All we can do is extend and add nuance to a story
that has already been masterfully told.
For all this, the river continues to teach us.
Whether we call it Nch'i-Waàna, Wimahl, swah'netk'qhu,
or Columbia,
the river asserts a kind of agency over those of us
who pay attention to it.
And it is that paying of attention that is the secret.
Indeed, there is a kind of reverence
that is necessary for insightful observation
and creative interpretation.
Maybe Richard wouldn't quite put it that way,
but that's how I see it.
The Organic Machine,
from its publication to its legacy three decades on,
tells us that the Columbia River,
which is ultimately so much more than just a heck
of a lot of water in a rocky channel,
will remain a teacher for us all,
settler and indigenous alike,
as we take the time
to consider it as an entity in its own right,
with all its flows of energy and cultural prosperance.
As Richard writes, the river,
"Retains a life of its own beyond our control."
Listening to those teachings,
however, means having a high tolerance for the unexpected,
the unplanned, and the highly ironic.
Ultimately, that's what The Organic Machine has been for me
and so many others, a deeply disorienting book
that teaches us to see what was always already there,
sometimes beneath the surface,
but all too often right in front of us.
Thank you.
-Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for having me.
Again, my name is Jennifer O'Neal.
You will quickly see that I am the outlier.
I am the non-connected-to, did-not-go-here-to school.
So as everyone else has done,
I'm going to share a little bit more about who I am,
where I come from, as well as how I'm connected to,
or my origin story with this book as well.
First [speaks in native language] Jennifer O'Neal
[ Speaking in native language ]
Hello, my name is Jennifer O'Neal.
I'm very happy to be here with you today to reflect on
and discuss this beautiful book.
I'm a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon,
and on my mother's side, I'm Chinook and Cree,
and my dad's side, I'm Modoc and Shasta.
And I tell this, and I tell this story because my family,
particularly on my mother's side,
I come from a long line of ancestors who called
the Columbia River home for hundreds and thousands of years.
I'm a direct descendant of Chief Con Conley,
whose leadership and family
stood at the forefront of Native lifeways,
traditions, diplomatic relations on the Columbia River,
whose story is very much central
in the first chapter of this book.
I'm also directly connected,
and my family are descendants of also the Hudson's Bay Company.
So both sides of my family are interconnected to large,
not only families,
but companies who came and shaped life along this river.
And also, my family later then intermarried
with a lot of the Hudson's Bay Company
and settled at French Prairie in Oregon,
which is by St. Paul.
So as I reflect on this book,
I reflect directly on the beautiful indigenous families,
leaders, and communities that knew the river,
its shapes, its life, its movement.
More importantly, they knew and understood the human
and more-than-human relations within and alongside the river.
So as indigenous peoples, and particularly for myself,
our work is directly related to the land,
to the rivers, to the water.
We are the land, and the land makes us who we are.
A huge theme, of course,
throughout this book is talked about is energy,
these energy systems.
For indigenous people,
we are that energy system,
and we are directly connected to the river that sustains us.
We are all interconnected.
For our people, for our families,
for our lifeways, for our traditions,
and for the work and the scholarship work that we do,
it is about relationships.
And you've heard that term already mentioned quite a bit.
And I will add to that, in addition to relationship,
it is about relationality,
how everything is connected.
Everything that happens on this river happened to my ancestors,
happened to those that came after,
and happened to the salmon,
to other animals surrounding the river.
So for me, as I think back, not just on this book,
but how the river has shaped my family, my ancestors,
it is very personal.
And it is also very much something
that still is connected to my family.
It's very central to the work that we do.
And so as I was asked to think through this book,
and also think through my connection to it,
I will say I read this
when I was getting my master's degree in history
at Utah State University, which was many years ago,
when Clyde Milner was there,
and when the Western Historical Quarterly was there.
And also, I did that under the direction of Anne Butler.
So I was really lucky to work under a lot
of really great American West historians.
And I remember, as part of our American West seminar,
this was one of the central books
that we read for that class. And from that,
it really shaped how I could see historians thinking
and being in connection with this river,
and the ways that environmental historians were connecting
and building out these structures in the field.
But what is really interesting to also see,
as we reflect on this book and what has come out of it,
is also just how the state of environmental history
has also evolved and changed,
and also how it has come into relationship with other fields,
like Native American Indigenous Studies.
Because as we've witnessed over the past 15 to 20 years,
the growth of Native American Indigenous Studies
and the ways in which
environmental historians are working together alongside
and with that field.
So that is where I want to kind of highlight a few
of my comments,
is just how these two fields are working together
and informing each other's work, which is really important.
Because that is how I situate my own work as a historian,
but also someone
who is directly within Native American Indigenous Studies
and how indigenous research methods and theories
inform the work that I do. Because where I come from,
who I am, I cannot undo that from the work that I do.
It is directly related to everything I do.
So there is a call to action then for the ways
in which environmental historians approach their work.
Meaning ensuring that when we do work on rivers or on the land,
that it is in direct conversation
with those indigenous peoples whose land we are talking about.
And in those conversations,
then we are getting an indigenous perspective
of looking at how these stories come to be,
how they reflect on that work.
And particularly around this call to action,
I want to address that particularly right now,
there is such a huge movement for dam removal.
And of course,
this is a large part of the history of the Columbia River,
is all of the numerous dams that are on this river.
But a huge movement,
particularly by indigenous activists,
to have a lot of these dams removed.
And we're seeing so much of that activity,
particularly along the Klamath River right now,
which stands as an example of the ways
in which indigenous peoples have been calling for
that work to be done to save fisheries, to save wetlands.
And we're seeing historic ways
that the salmon are finally coming back to headwaters
that they had never been at before.
So it's important just to know
that if there are examples of that happening,
the ways in which, thinking through,
how could that also happen on the Columbia River?
What are the ways in which, in small ways,
that could happen?
And there's incredible activist work happening
by indigenous groups like the Save Our Salmon Initiative,
that work with different tribes along the river.
The Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission,
who also works on a lot of these issues.
But the last thing I want to focus on too is just the ways
in which centering indigenous perspectives and ways
of knowing can really help as we do this work
to ensure those stories continue to be told.
And so in a lot of my own work,
whether it's in my teaching or in the research that I do,
it's ensuring that those perspectives are told
and thinking through who gets to tell these stories,
whose knowledge are we centering?
And how this can bring us new
and fruitful directions in working with tribal members,
tribal elders, and the ways in which that work informs
and builds upon all this great work that's come before it.
So one of the tribal elders that I work a lot with,
and there are some in this room also
who may have worked with her, is Linda Meanus,
who, if you don't know, I also brought a copy of her book,
My Name is LaMoosh, right there.
And I just acknowledge that because there's
such great work coming out of tribal elders.
This is from OSU Press.
And it builds on this history that Richard has talked about,
but from a tribal perspective and one
in which that tells her own story.
And I just want to read a quote from her, not from that book,
but there's the new volume that's come out,
The Voices of the River by the Confluence Group.
And this is a new publication.
The first volume came out in 2022, and they're now, I think,
on to their third or their fourth volume.
It's all tribally produced.
And in their first volume,
she wrote all about Celilo Falls & the Power of Water.
And of course, this is a huge part of Richard's book,
he's talking about these dams as well as just this history
and the energy it's produced, its impact on the salmon.
And the reason I share a couple of these quotes
is because although I am here as one tribal descendant,
one tribal member sharing my perspective,
I feel it's very important to also bring tribal elders'
viewpoints into this.
So in this article,
it's titled Celilo Falls & the Power of Water.
And she says, at Celilo Falls,
the energy of the water was really powerful.
I can just feel the mist spray your face,
even if you stood far away.
The falls had a roar
that was so loud you could hear it from miles and miles away.
Even in the next town over, The Dalles, you could hear it.
It was an echo that you could feel in your heart.
And later in this article,
she says, we have a relationship with the river, a connection.
It's a connection between us and the water and Mother Earth.
Water has its own intelligence.
It flows wherever it wants.
It does what it wants.
It's like they say, water is life.
And at the end,
she encourages folks to take a trip along the Columbia River.
Enjoy the river. Enjoy nature and the view.
Look at the rocks and the water.
There's history here.
And I share those, her words,
because those are the stories
that we hope to continue to carry on.
The ones from the people who have relatives and ancestors
who fished on this water,
who knew where the water rippled at a certain way
and the ways in which --
the best places to spear the fish and can tell those stories.
And it's important to note that this continues on
and there's so much work still left to do
as we gather these stories.
And particularly in these connections
that people make between this history as well as
this new evolving indigenous perspective.
So I hope this helps us to give you more of that context
as well as just a bit of my own work
and how I try to bring those perspectives in
as we think about the future of this work
and where it might go next.
So thank you so much.
-This was never the book I intended to write
when I started out to do it.
And what I'm going to talk about
is the sort of prelude to the book
and then the postscript to the book
because the way I feel about this book
and most books I write it's similar to my children
or actually my graduate students is they go out in the world
and they do their own work in the world.
Once I've written the book, it really no longer belongs to me.
It's how other people read it,
how other people use it.
And so all I can contribute to much of this
and I'm again impressed by the conversations
and the insights people have had into the book
which are sometimes better than my own insights into the book
is that how I came to write it
and then how it's led to the work that I do today.
The book was an accident.
It started out to be a small book.
It started out to be a great big book
and I wasn't going to write it by myself.
I was going to write it with a colleague
and we were going to write a book about energy
in American history.
And we were going to write about all the different forms
of energy that had gone into American development
and the results of what they had been
and we immediately ran into big problems.
It's a major problem
that goes to a lot of environmental history
is that sources are close to you.
We couldn't get into a lot of sources that we wanted to use.
So by the time I came to Washington
I'd been thinking about this big energy book but I put it aside.
I would never write it and I never will write it.
But I came here as a chair in Pacific Northwest history
and I was coming back to a place
where I'd done graduate work and I knew the Northwest
and I knew the University of Washington and Jere Bacharach,
who was chair then, offered me the chair.
And I said,
what happens when the donor takes the chair away from you?
And he said, I've already thought about that.
We're going to back you up with another position.
It won't be a chair but you'll keep the same salary.
And I said, fine. I'll go on.
And I came and I met the donor and the donor asked me,
he said his ambitions for this
was to show what was distinctive about the Pacific Northwest.
And the first lesson I learned
is you don't make jokes with donors.
And what I told him was, well, you know,
I guess what's distinctive is it's not Canada.
And he did not think that was particularly funny.
And when I went to -- so one thing I learned after that,
when I went to Stanford, again, I had named chair.
And the first question I asked,
they thought it was a joke but it wasn't a joke, asked,
is the donor alive? They said, no.
I said, that's good because I don't take chairs
with living donors.
I only take dead people's chairs.
And said, that has been actually worked out very well for me.
Most of the time.
But the project here reduced down to hydro,
in terms of energy.
But I was interested, of course, in much more than the dams.
I was fascinated by dams.
But I was interested in what I think
the speakers have said better than me,
the relationship between human beings and the natural world
and how it expressed itself through the river.
It ended up being a short book
because I did it with Arthur Wang who was a publisher.
Arthur's dead now.
He was one of the founders of Hill & Wang.
There was no Hill.
Arthur invented Hill because Arthur said,
who is going to buy books from some guy named Wang?
They'd think it's computers.
So he just invented Hill. It became Hill & Wang.
And Arthur told me I wanted a very short book
because students read less now.
And so I wanted the book short. And Arthur enforced that.
So much of this being a short book is due to Arthur
who wanted a very short book.
And he got one.
It also went from my experience at the time.
In the 1990s, I was here and Beverly, my wife,
had just come down with MS.
And many of the things that people have quoted in the book
come out of a trip we took because when she had MS,
she couldn't do the things we usually did in the summers.
There was a bad attack.
She couldn't go, leave the country.
We couldn't go hiking. We couldn't do a lot of things.
So I suggested that we go on a dam tour
because we drive all the way up to Columbia
into Canada seeing all the dams on the way up.
She was not real thrilled by that.
She didn't have a lot of choices of what she could do.
So we drove up along the Columbia.
Many of the times
that I describe in the book are from that trip.
What I don't describe in the book is
when we crossed over into Canada because Columbia, of course,
is not just an American river.
It's a Canadian river.
And I don't know why but I'm always in trouble
with Canadian border crossings and this one was no different.
We went over, I think it was the Borer,
but I can't remember where the Borer crossing was.
We're following the Columbia so it was nobody there but us.
It was like 5 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon.
And the Borer agent was there and said, where are you going?
And I said, I'm going to look at dams.
And he looked at me and Beverly, I can see, she said,
"Why did you say that?"
So we were there for three hours.
He took the car apart looking for everything
which I thought was kind of funny.
Beverly didn't think it was very funny.
He also wanted to call Arthur Wang.
He said, "Who's publishing this book?"
I said, "Oh, Arthur Wang, Hill & Wang."
He said, "Do you have his phone number?"
I said, "I don't have his phone number."
So I said, "But you can probably look it up.
There's an office in New York."
So he called Saturday night in New York
to Hill & Wang calling to talk to Arthur Wang to see,
I guess he was going to ask him was I really writing a book?
Was I there to blow up dams?
I didn't know what it was. But in the end,
he let us put the car back together and we went on.
So all of that was at the time, this book becomes, you know,
it's a series of accidents.
It's a series of things that happened when I wrote it.
And that was a period in which I wrote it and I wrote it.
And it's been fairly successful.
I never thought I would speak 30 years later.
But it's not the book that I would write now.
I mean, it is the book I would write then.
But it's not the kind of book I write now.
And as usual, I am grave doubts about the kinds of books
that I'm writing now
because I live in a very different kind of time.
And I'm writing a book about California.
It's a book about the --
it's not an environmental history of California.
It's, what I call it is a forensic history.
And it violates many of the caveats
I've made about how you should write history.
It violates many of the things
I've told my graduate students about
how you should write history.
Because what I'm doing is writing very much
from the present.
All books are written for the present,
but what I'm writing is a book about how did we get this way?
How in the world did we get into this kind of mess?
Which in part is what The Organic Machine's about,
but this one is very different.
Because I leave out everything
that was another way of thinking of the world.
This is a much narrower one.
What you do with forensic history and the way
it gets its name,
and the way it gets its name is,
I guess I just gave it that name,
is it's forensic in the way
that investigations of crimes are forensic.
What you're trying to do is figure out
how something happened, how a crime has been committed,
how damage has been done, and who's responsible for it.
Academic historians, for very good reasons,
shy away from forensic history.
I've shied away from forensic history most of my life,
but lately I've been working both sides of the street.
I've narrowed my focus to those events that
either in California or elsewhere in the West
have prepared the way for global warming,
or have created structures
which are particularly vulnerable to global warming.
And the danger of this kind of history,
I'll be very frank, is it excludes so much.
An awful lot of things happen
that could have been other possibilities.
And what I've been interested in most of my history
is the kind of possibilities.
If the past is not closed, the present is not inevitable,
then in fact there are other ways we could have gone.
There are other ways that people could go.
And that is what I think history does,
but it's not what I'm doing in this book.
I'm doing this book, I'm writing
towards a particular kind of public crisis in California.
I'm not writing about California,
more than the Northwest as a place of paradise lost.
That's the way that changes in California
were framed in the 1960s, and I have no interest in that.
California was never a paradise,
and the grimmest parts of the book I write
are the very beginnings of Americans in California,
so there's no illusions about that.
Nor am I writing a narrative of how an economy of greed
and plunder wrecked California.
Even though I think that greed and plunder
are very much part of the DNA of modern capitalism,
and that is particularly well represented in California,
that is not what really happens. It's part of what happens,
but it's really not what happens.
Americans came to California in the same way
they came to the Pacific Northwest
with no intention to pillage and ruin.
My thesis is quite the opposite.
They came to California seeing themselves
as finishing the land,
the theme that Linda picks up in some of her work,
of perfecting the land,
of working with nature, not against it.
In the same way that is one of the things
that seemed important to me,
and really the kind of thing
that seems on the surface to be illogical,
they saw dams as being literally a part of nature.
I'm not trying to catalog their sins,
but rather to discover how some of the changes they made,
often with the best of intentions,
became hardwired into the state's
environment and politics.
I'm after structures of both material, infrastructure,
and structures that in fact are immaterial.
Policies, thoughts, ideas.
And my story is a mix of good intentions gone awry
and the worst of intentions gone equally awry.
Very little turns out the way they expected it would happen.
In doing this,
I've learned much from my graduate students,
including graduate students who are sitting here.
And I figure it's only fair that I could plunder their books,
for example, and I have done that.
And I've taken an awful lot in particular from Linda Nash.
And much of what I've found applies to the Columbia
as much as to California.
It's that many of the things that we say now,
that we should really consult science, for example,
which we should consult science,
but we should not be naive about it.
Much of what happened to the California environment
was under the control of experts.
It was under the control of scientists.
What happened to the fisheries, what happened to the forests,
what happened to most of those resources
was not simple corporate plundering.
It was under management agencies
that the management went in ways that they never fully expected.
I'm also skeptical of infrastructure,
even though currently today under the abundance writings,
a lot has been said about the problem with the left
is it can no longer imagine infrastructure.
And there's a lot of truth in that.
But the problem also is that much of what we face
is a lot of really bad infrastructure,
which is already decaying as we go.
It's a sort of burden on the future.
And then as soon as we start building infrastructure,
it is the kind of infrastructure which anticipates the future.
The thesis of the book fits California,
but it also fits the Pacific Northwest,
is that the world that is crumbling is the world
that we made and the world that we designed.
But we never designed it for the kind of environment
that we have created.
We have managed to do both.
We have succeeded in creating infrastructure
which in many ways is incredible what they have done
in rearranging California like in rearranging Columbia.
But it was built for an environment
that because of global warming and
climate change no longer exists
and the result is already disaster.
I'm often accused of being too pessimistic about this.
People tell me that I should see the bright side of it.
There's no particular bright side to much of this,
but on the other hand,
what it brings me back to is the idea that it is good
that the natural world is separate from us
and not fully under our control.
That in fact, whatever we kill,
whatever is happening in the current environmental crisis
in California, what is going to die is not going to be nature.
We're going to be the ones who pay much of the price
for what happens and it could be a terrible price.
It's not an inevitable price.
But what I want to do is in this book,
the forensic part is to sort out the policies that led us there,
the infrastructure that's vulnerable and
not to in fact predict what's going to happen.
Pretty good idea of some of the things
that are going to happen because they're happening already.
But at the same time that if we're going to cure problems,
we have to recognize what the vulnerable parts are.
So the forensic part of this book
is figuring out what is vulnerable.
It's a part that is utterly missing
from The Organic Machine.
The organic machine is about what we had done
to the Columbia River,
how it had changed,
but I treated the dams as they're there
and they were given.
And the climate around the dams,
they're there and that's a given.
And neither the dams being there is a given.
And certainly, the climate
that is going to form those dams is not a given.1
And then it's a very different perspective of what is going on.
There's nothing in The Organic Machine that I would disavow.
But it's also a book that I could write in the 1990s.
It's not a book I would write the same way today.
But that's for me the significance of writing books
is that they preserve not just the past that they record,
but they preserve the moment in which they're written.
That it's very much the kind of thing,
the way I thought about the world in the 1990s.
I'm not disavowed that world.
As I've said, I've been asked the question would I rewrite it.
No, I wouldn't rewrite it.
But it's also,
I'm writing a history now that's very different.
Do I think that's a better history?
No. Do I think it's a more dangerous history?
Yeah.
Because I think, in fact,
once I've narrowed the world too much,
I could be making grave mistakes
that I ordinarily would not make.
But on the other hand, there are times
when the moment you write a book demands a certain kind of book.
And so, that's the book that I'm writing.
And I look back at this,
and I look back at myself writing The Organic Machine.
To me, who wrote The Organic Machine,
would not be really fond of the book I'm writing now.
The one who's writing this book now can still look back
and look at the virtues of The Organic Machine.
The Organic Machine might seem to be a book
that's a little pessimistic, but at the same time,
it might end up being more optimistic than the one
I'm writing right now.
But the one I'm writing right now seems to me
a necessary warning,
which probably won't be heeded or paid much attention to,
but it's one of the advantages of being my age.
I can't write big books anymore.
I don't write for the long term.
It's got to be something that's going to come out
within two or three years after I started.
And it's got to be focused on what I can do,
and it's got to be focused on what I think is important.
So for younger scholars, this is not a recommendation,
everybody should be writing forensic history.
It's the second-best kind of history,
but it can be a necessary history.
So it's interesting now as I look at this
and look back at The Organic Machine,
it reveals to me parts of that book
that I ordinarily had not seen.
But I will just end it there.
Thank you. -Thank you so much, Richard.
Thank you, everybody, for these really wonderful comments.
And again, we're going to turn to Q&A.
If you do have questions
that you've written down on your index cards,
Lee will pick them up.
He's walking around the perimeter
and bringing them up to me. And so we're just doing that.
And then I will repeat -- read out the question,
and so it will all be captured and everyone can hear properly.
But let me start.
I want to begin,
picking up where Richard left off,
which is recommending warning younger scholars
not to immediately embark on forensic history necessarily.
So as there are many younger scholars
of environmental history and environmental studies
more broadly in this room,
I'd love to hear from you as well as other members
of the panel what you think younger scholars
should be thinking about.
And this is kind of a bit of a state-of-the-field question,
kind of where the field of the study
of the environment and history of the environment stands now.
But the things that really you see as exciting developments
and one
where there are particularly fruitful avenues of inquiry.
So I'll throw it open to everyone
and see if anyone wants to take a first bit of that question.
-I'll give myself that right away.
-All right.
Why don't you pick up your microphone for me.
-Even when I was a graduate instructor,
I think people who are at this table can testify,
I never told a graduate student what
their dissertation should be about.
What I would do is help them write what they wanted to write
and be very critical of it.
And now, particularly at my age, in the age of gerontocracy,
I am not about to say what their dissertation should be about.
-Is this on? Is this working? Okay.
I'll just say for myself and
to sort of amplify what Jennifer had said,
that I've spent a lot of time in the indigenous studies world
in the last 10 or 15 years.
And that's a really exciting space.
It's interdisciplinary. It's politically engaged.
It has everything to do with the land and the water.
And that intersection of that with environmental history is,
I think, a really important and powerful space to be focused.
And so people whose work is touching on that zone
to really engage with things
like the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
and these other organizations
that are doing really powerful work.
It's not always history.
And not a lot of historians attend that conference,
which I think is worth thinking about.
But those intersections of inquiry,
I think, are really, really powerful.
And so that would be my -- I don't know about advice.
No, I don't want to give advice after what Richard just said.
But that's something
that I found really truthful over the last 10, 15 years.
-I mean, I'll say that I would like to read energy histories
which go beyond either being like yay capitalism
or boo capitalism
and also go beyond policy histories
which get away from both place and people.
And, Richard, I never knew
that you had a big energy history book planned
and now I'm sad that that never happened.
It would have been very useful.
-They will never let you into the archives.
Even now in Pennsylvania,
they have a record of everybody who died of black lung disease
in hospitals in Pennsylvania.
You're not going to be able to get into those types of records.
And anybody who, maybe it's better now,
but try to get into the records
about Bonneville Power Authority, good luck to you.
-Okay, is this on? All right, thanks.
Yeah, thanks for your comments
call to about just the importance of working with
whether it's with NISA
or if you are working on these types of projects,
just the importance of collaborating with,
including working with tribal communities,
ensuring that that work
that these communities have done as well is honored,
is brought into the conversation,
not just brought in, but central to your work.
Because one thing, and sorry I didn't get to it,
because I wanted to make sure we had enough time,
but in his last section, the chapter on salmon,
there's of course a comment or a section
that talks about the knowledge that we have
has not helped what is occurring or that we're in this place.
And I was just going to push back against that
or say whose knowledge.
Because more often than not,
when I work with a lot of tribal community partners,
particularly in Oregon,
on different types of research projects
or when we bring them to campus or for certain conferences,
I just remember very vividly we were doing
a climate change conference on campus in 2014,
so many years ago,
but we brought a indigenous scholar from Alaska
who very clearly said,
we do not care what you know until we know that you care.
Because, and she repeatedly said,
what we have been telling you about what is happening
to the earth and what is happening to rivers and lakes
and the forest,
these are things we've been telling you for years
but you haven't been listening.
Or we have this knowledge
or maybe your knowledge might not have been working
but the knowledge that indigenous people have,
they know a lot of this history.
It might just not be from a Western perspective.
So that's why it's really important just to make
sure this knowledge is embedded in those communities
and also there may be knowledge
that communities aren't willing to share either.
So respecting that as well.
But there's just such a wealth of knowledge and conversations
happening in NISA or in indigenous science.
And it's important
that environmental history be part of those conversations
and approach the work in that way.
-Yeah, I'm just going to say there are a number
of people here
who go to our Cascadia Environmental History Retreat
and we hear a lot of times people will say,
who are kind of interested in some of the work
that's going on, they'll say like,
"Oh what I'm studying is," and they'll say it
and they'll often remark,
"but I'm not an environmental historian."
And then I think usually the response from a lot of us is,
well, I'm not sure that that's true exactly,
kind of what you're talking about.
If your history is located in a place,
which it certainly is,
then you've got some kind of environmental history
possibility there to think about.
So I guess my feeling is that what environmental history does
and what it offers is, as I was talking about before,
is all these connections
that if we have come from a world
in which the enlightenment rationality has broken
everything up and we need to start putting some of that back
together, putting the people in place,
knowledge based in place,
learning how to live in this place that we all inhabit,
we have to start putting some of that back together.
And that's all those connections that we're talking about,
whether it's the people and the knowledge,
the physical environment, and so on.
And so I just think, for me, for younger people or whatever,
the possibilities within environmental history
are just enormous.
And how you can find these new connections
or these connections we've forgotten about
and begin to tell histories that they really have the --
I think they have the possibility to, like I said,
remake a world that is more habitable or just,
and better, I hope.
-Thank you.
I have a question from the audience asking,
can you speak a bit more about efforts
to undo the dams on the Columbia?
Anyone like to take that up?
-Well, I will just add,
and there are a lot more experts on this than me,
I am certainly not an expert,
but I do know that there's efforts by,
as I mentioned, both activist groups that are indigenous-led,
like the Save Our Salmon group,
that it's an initiative along the Columbia River,
not just Washington and Oregon,
but also into Idaho and up into Canada as well.
And a lot of the work that they do is focused on not only
ensuring the health and vitality of salmon,
but the ways in which they can also work
towards the removal of dams. And also,
a lot of that
happens with the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission,
although that's more official with many of the tribes
that are in that compact together along the river.
And as I mentioned,
the bulk of a lot of activism recently has been
on the Klamath River in Oregon and California,
but a lot of this work for the undamming
is currently right now bringing a lot of awareness
around it about why it needs to be done,
or what are possibilities, or what are avenues,
what would that look like, because --
and really trying to utilize the Klamath River as an example,
because that has been successful
and it was so many years of fighting for that,
and so you have to find specific ways to bring that forward,
and a lot of times that's through legal channels,
or having to bring it to court
in order for there to be some official mechanism
where it happens.
So again, I'm not the expert for that,
but there's incredible groups working on it,
and it will continue to be something
we will see tribes along the river,
as well as activist groups along the river focused on
because there are so many dams along the Columbia River,
the fish and the fish that are coming out of it
are not healthy,
and many tribal members will not eat the fish
that come out of the river because of that reason.
And it's because there are so many dams
that preclude the fish from making it all the way up to
where they need to spawn.
And so just the life cycle of that is
where many people are concerned.
-I mean, I've only followed this from afar
since I left Washington.
The major efforts recently, of course,
have been along the Snake,
and those seem to be making progress until very recently.
Now they're clearly no longer making any progress.
I presume those will probably come back
as an effort to move them.
There are the big dams on the Columbia.
I certainly won't be around to see them come down,
but there's no reason
that many of the smaller dams on tributaries wouldn't come down,
and there's no reason
that the Snake River dams wouldn't come down.
They're now being, and Margaret can speak more to this,
the excuse later is we need the power for AI.
But in fact,
many of these dams do not produce that much electricity.
And the reasons they were built in
were pretty feeble to begin with and have only gotten feebler.
So I expect to see that that push is going to continue
and it will be some success.
-Yeah, to the point that Richard alluded to,
the phenomenon on the Columbia that post-date,
The Organic Machine itself
is the arrival of very large hyperscale data centers,
usually single owner-occupant
by the very large technology companies,
and that now have revved up their capital expenditure
and their size and everything else
as we are in our so-called AI revolutionary moment
of the last several years.
And so entrenching, it's interesting,
and this is something my own research touches on,
but the degree to which that entrenches
and provides rationale for keeping the dam infrastructure
as is and not thinking about the river
as a source of hydropower and hydro energy
and without thinking about the alternative uses
and the alternative rights and sovereignty
of people over the river itself,
so that's to be continued.
An evolving and unfolding story, indeed.
I have a -- thank you. Oh, great.
A question for the panel.
Has thinking about relationships or relationality
changed how you experience your environment on a daily basis?
That's an interesting question.
-Yeah. It's really interesting for me being in Vancouver
because Vancouver is unceded territory.
It's never been ceded by treaty or war.
It's the unceded territory of three indigenous nations,
the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh.
And I will say, until recently,
it was a very stark contrast with down here.
I feel like the UW is sort of catching up to UBC.
I feel like the public awareness of things such as treaties here
has finally caught up with the sort of discourse
that we see in British Columbia.
Josh is saying maybe not.
But there's a conversation that happened in Canada
around the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
for example,
that has not happened here.
And so there's a lot more public discourse
around the question of relationality
and how we inhabit with each other.
And that's been really formative for me.
It's really -- leavened my work, I guess,
both as a teacher and maybe especially as a teacher,
as well as a writer and researcher.
In terms of relationality in my own work,
my work tends to be about big scales,
and so it's hard for me to do community-based research.
Indigenous London includes 40 different nations,
and so there's no way to do that close community-based research.
But I think there is still a way
to have a sensibility of relationality in that work.
I think there's still a way to do that.
So it's something that I still continue to work with.
But I would really encourage people to look north
of the border for some of the public conversations
that are going on there.
It's a very different space, especially British Columbia.
-So relationships is a flexible enough concept
that I can go a totally different direction
than what Coll is talking about. I mean, I can think of --
I think of two examples,
and one is looking at the landscape around Bellingham
and trying to make sense of it as a landscape of energy flows
and what is my relationship or the relationship of my students
and my families and communities
to energy infrastructure that we can't see
and energy flows that we can't see
or that only become visible in terms of catastrophe.
So I think of that as a form of relationality
or trying to think relationally and make sense of historically.
The other one.
You know, I both felt very stupid as a historian
of medicine and environment, but also,
like, it's very useful at the beginning of the pandemic.
It's like, oh, look at this.
Here we are.
Our relationships to each other are revealed by the passage
and the travels of this path in ways
which could not be more obvious and very useful
to think through at least for a while.
That's --
neither of those things are exactly like everyday life,
but close enough. -For me, it is everyday life.
I mean, ever since my dissertation at UW, it's --
I see the landscape as a set of the story.
Whenever I go, I don't think I've ever seen nature.
It started when I had really basic questions.
One of the things I found out
is it's really good to talk to people
like foresters or fisheries experts or other scientists
about the real simple question.
Why aren't there trees here? Why is this prairie --
why was this grassland wooden white spruce scanty?
And very often,
they don't have a particularly good answer for it.
And when you begin to go back, is the way I look at it
and my first question is why is this growing here?
Why is this an even stand of trees right here?
Why is the species change right here?
And all this stuff is a story.
The story is always going to be a relationship
between human beings and nature.
Many of the things that have happened
are hiding in plain sight right in front of you.
To take a walk around any place whether you're in the city
or whether you're in the forest
or whether you're in the mountains
is to see a story about the human relationship
with the natural world.
That's a very complicated story
and it's usually pretty interesting
and so it's become habitual for me.
Largely it dates from my walking into labs
and to the forest school here and other things,
and just asking really naive questions
which turned out to be the best kinds of questions to ask.
-I'll just add that just in general
as I mentioned in my comments that because of who I am,
where I come from,
the work that I do is inherently relational built
on relationships,
not only with tribal communities that I work with
but within my own family and also just being on the land.
I'm definitely a type of person who --
I have to be on the land.
I have to be in connection with the land not just
in related to my research but as a person.
Meaning every single weekend I get out on the land
in some way even if it's just a walk along the river
to see how the leaves are changing
and to see the different ways in which
and think through the ways in which the California people,
who were once on this land and how it's changed
so that I remember and you continue to see the ways
in which the land changes and also remember the ways
in which the land used to exist. But I think something
to remember too in the larger conversation
around relationality and relationships
particularly in connection with the land is,
as environmental historians,
I also feel that the work that we do can be very political.
And the political is personal and the personal is political.
And that is all interrelated.
And you cannot take one away from the other
and especially the ways in which we choose to engage with
or refuse to engage with people, places, and land.
And because of that
and I think of the work of folks like Chief Starblanket
at the University of Victoria,
talks about these everyday acts of resurgence.
And so when I go out to be on the land
or in partnership with you folks
and thinking through and having these conversations,
and just the way that we can be in partnership
with tribal communities and how we do our work,
that can be these everyday acts of resurgence
that are relational, that are of value,
that bring care to the work that we do.
That can often feel very exhausting
or extractive in academia.
So I try to remember those things.
-Thank you.
Nathan, I don't know if you have anything to add.
I'm thinking a bit about back to your remarks
and the relation between the human and other animals
and the non-human. That's certainly is something
that comes up so strongly in the book.
-Yeah, I think the one thing I was thinking about
was just the way
in which we talked a little bit about the book
having all these big ideas in it.
But big ideas don't have to be some outreach theory
that you have to use $25 words to talk about.
And I think that, when you think about the everyday
or trying to get students,
especially, to think about some of the relationships
that we're talking about,
the relationships that they have every day with their family,
their environment, their grocery store, whatever it is.
I think there's really big ideas in there that just --
because teaching is so much a part
of what I'm thinking about all the time,
is trying to get those big ideas into what I'm talking
with students about.
Because like Coll was saying,
that moment of seeing the light bulb blink on
when you start to think about some
of these environmental history ideas that are,
and they can be sort of mind altering,
about how you look at the world,
this sort of like matrix effect of all of a sudden,
you can see all these connections that exist.
So that's the one that I really think of
is just trying to introduce big ideas out there
that other people are walking around trying to wrestle with
and that's what I think. -Thank you.
Here's another question from the audience and it's for Richard
but also for all the panelists, it looks like.
Have any other places or infrastructure
that you've encountered felt like organic machinery,
or is the Columbia special in that regard?
-I don't think that Columbia is special.
The Columbia is most intensely -- sorry.
The Columbia is most intensely developed
but California comes pretty close.
There's very few rivers that run unimpeded to the sea anymore,
and the Columbia for the density of dams
and for the planning of the creation
of this kind of landscape that I call The Organic Machine,
the Columbia was the best place for me to study.
But the lessons I've learned from the Columbia
certainly apply to other places that I've begun to look at.
The West itself is a landscape
which natural features have been turned into a kind of machinery.
And it probably comes through in the book.
But I don't hate dams.
There's a part of me that when you go into a dam,
there's something incredible about it.
Human beings have created it
and when you go into the power houses of dams
there are no human beings.
There's the dam and the river doing the work.
There are human beings, of course, some place around them.
But that's what first got me the metaphor,
is this is something that once created, keeps on going.
And to a certain extent,
the reason why it's still on is they don't need repairs.
But if we all vanished,
those dams would continue churning out electricity
for a certain amount of time.
And that just always spooked me every time I go into them.
And I think that's the kind of landscape
that I have thought of.
But it's a kind of landscape
which I think applies as a metaphor to much
of what human beings have done in the 20th and 21st century.
-Anyone else want to speak to that?
I have a related question
which is that this I mean really the genesis
of this particular event came from,
at the beginning of this calendar year 2025,
the UW History Department annual history lecture series.
The theme was river histories and it was four lectures.
I delivered one about the Columbia
but there were three other lectures
about rivers all over the --
river systems all over the world.
Which sort of leads me to kind of ask you all
thinking about the river as a unit of analysis,
one that transcends political borders.
You had to cross --
you had your Canada Crossing experience.
But also,
I think brings in this bigger question
of global environmental history and these patterns are --
to what degree are we looking at, again,
a local environmental
or regional environmental history
with global implications.
Or is this what is distinctive to the Pacific Northwest.
And but where are their resonances that you all see,
asking a panel of people
whose work is situated in North America, granted.
But thinking about the larger implications
of these processes and stories and relationships, globally.
And is the river a way
to think about those connections across time and space.
-Yes?
Again, I don't feel qualified at all
to talk about global environmental history.
But I think what this book does well is does just offer a way
to shift thinking or shift vision.
So you could be along an engineered river system
almost anywhere in the world and say, yes,
how did these dams get here?
Did there used to be fisheries here.
What did the forest look like?
What is the mouth of the river look like at all?
And so as a method I do think that some of the --
some of the global environmental history
is that even sort of provincial Americanists read have tended
to be about river systems and waterways.
Whether it's -- I can't remember all those names, but --
-[ Speaks indistinctly ]
-But you also said --
I mean, you started by saying they transcend
international borders.
But of course they don't because the border infrastructure itself
becomes part of the river system.
And that if there was anything I could say like
oh you could have used another five pages,
would have been more talking about the treaty
and about Canada and about the relationship
between the US and Canada,
and the Indigenous and First Nations?
-I mean, one of the first things I encountered
because I first started thinking about rivers
because I was involved in fishing rights demonstrations
on the Nisqually River.
I spent --
where I was supposed to be in my senior year in college
but I was actually at the Nisqually River
for most of the fall quarter.
And thinking about how people understood rivers
and thinking about how people understood it through work
was something that flowed out of working with native fishermen
on the Nisqually.
So that was the seed of an idea, it went on later on.
When I started working on the Columbia,
one of the first things I thought was asking about well
how do native peoples understand the Columbia River
and I realized that was the wrong question.
Because they never thought of the Columbia River
as a single river,
they thought of it as a series of discrete sections
which they lived on and knew intimately,
which yielded to another one which had a different name,
which clearly was connected with theirs.
But no point could I find somebody thinking about
the entire river.
And I realized that was not that different than me
because when I got in trouble going over to Canada
to look at dams, the Americans let me look at dams,
it only recently occurred to me,
wait you're writing a book about this river
but it flows through two countries.
You're stopping at the border, the river doesn't stop.
So there's a way in which we segment these rivers
and it's not just us but it happens in other countries too.
At Stanford I had students who were more my students
but it was on the committee who were working on African rivers
or working on the Amazon and working on others.
And these rivers become really complicated cultural artifacts
and natural artifacts.
They're not necessarily understood as a single entity
and their meaning changes over time
and it changes according to perspective of that
because the question of whose knowledge is very appropriate.
Different people living on the river think about them
in quite very different ways.
-I was just going to bring attention
to the intersection of tribal law and environmental history
because there's some really great work happening
by a couple of scholars.
I just wanted to point out whose work I use in my classes.
Elizabeth Kronk Warner and Jensen Lillquist
who wrote an article Laboratories of the Future,
Tribes and Rights of Nature,
which came out in 2023.
Because their article really examines,
again from a legal perspective,
these issues around the rights of nature laws
generally kind of two elements,
legal personhood as well as substantial rights for rivers.
And looking at precedents like in New Zealand
with the Treaty of Waitangi
and how the Mori people are using that
to create legal frameworks to enable legal personhood
for ecosystems in New Zealand.
So there's incredible work that can be done
or that I've seen being really approached,
particularly around activism and indigenous law,
to see and look at these precedents that have been set
and then how can they also be examined here
in the United States.
So incredible article that they did in 2023.
And they provide lots of different examples of
how different communities are putting this forward.
And so they provide some
different case studies of this work.
And we were lucky to have Elizabeth come
a couple years ago to our campus
and talk about this issue as well as shared stewardship.
-All right.
I want to bring us close to a close
but I have a couple of really interesting questions
that I want to ask, one that builds on the last one.
And then the last one I want to --
maybe I'll ask them and,
well, let me ask them quickly in succession.
Would you, and if so,
how would you write an organic machinery industry
on Mississippi
which perhaps this is a good topic
for the North Americanists.
So how are there, again, what makes --
how might the Mississippi be a different energy system
and labor system.
-Goodness. You stomped us. -Richard?
-The thing about the Mississippi,
which is unlike the Columbia,
is it wanders and it changes position.
The Mississippi is just as much a controlled river system
as the Columbia is.
Now, the major mechanism is not dams, the dams are on it.
It tends to be levees to keep the river
which tended to wander over hundreds of miles
in the same channel.
And many of you, I imagine
have read John McPhee's Control of Nature.
And eventually we're going to lose.
It's something we're losing already.
The Mississippi is going to break out and go someplace else.
So that is going to be about energy and power
but it's not necessarily operating in the same way
about as the Columbia.
So you can write a history of it
but it would not just be the Columbia in Midwest,
it's going to be a very, very different, different river.
And my guess is within the next 20 to 25 years,
you will see the Columbia very --
the Columbia and the Mississippi very much in the news.
And it probably will be because it has changed its bed
and it has moved in a new direction.
And we've already faced once,
what do we do when the Columbia no longer --
or the Mississippi no longer flows by New Orleans,
but veers probably to the West.
And that'll become a major question because it's --
already, you can see what's happened in the Gulf
at the last [indistinct]
So everything is right in front of us.
It's not that it's going to be news.
We're just not paying attention.
-I don't think I have anything.
-It's all right. One final question, which --
an interdisciplinary question,
interdisciplinary grounded question.
How can the arts, literature, cinema, kinetic sculpture,
et cetera, contribute to environmental history?
-Well, one of the publications I was telling you about
is a perfect example of that. The Voices of the River,
this comes, again, directly from the Confluence Project.
And within it, it's not just academic articles.
This is Native voices who are including poems and artwork.
And all the artwork in here,
on the outside as well as on the inside,
is contributing to these stories, like work like this.
That is just incredible by Native artists.
So this is a perfect example of the ways
in which Native artists are contributing to this work
and telling a different story visually,
but also really focused on these stories
in a way that aren't just from an academic setting,
but tell us a different perspective,
whether through a poem, or through artwork,
or through literature,
or through, like I said, Linda's story about Celilo Falls,
so tribal elder story.
These are these really unique stories
that we need to continue to gather and ensure
that there's places for these types of stories and knowledge
to be gathered and told.
-I mean, one of the first things
that I learned from Richard, it was a reminder by Richard,
was that historians don't have monopoly on the past.
So I don't think it's a question over whether artists,
writers, musicians, sculptors,
they're not contributing to environmental history,
they're telling their own stories of the past,
which historians should pay attention to.
-And I actually, I wrote a book, it came out during COVID,
so it sort of disappeared for a while,
with everything else during COVID.
I mean, I did it with my son, who's a photographer.
And what the book consists of is, we made a bet.
And I bet him that, because we're arguing over photography,
and I bet that if he took a series of landscape pictures,
and I wouldn't even tell him what to take
or where to take them, the decision was his,
I could use those to write a history of California.
I lost the bet, it wasn't a history of California,
but I was right that it was a history.
And the argument in it was that any time you take a photograph,
and he sees things differently than me, I mean,
photographers see the world differently.
And he would take the photographs.
But what I could read into it,
into any single photograph,
was a history that went back usually millennia,
sometimes longer than that,
because of how these landforms took place,
why it was, when you're taking this picture,
there's a palm tree there,
that palm tree had once been a farmstead.
All the places that, in fact,
had been native village sites over lakes,
which no longer existed.
That every single one of these things,
which seems to be a picture only of the present,
is, in fact, a picture of the past.
And so the book was literally a series of photographs
in which he would take the photographs,
and I would narrate the past,
the history that comes out of it.
So I think, and again, to what Jen says, we're not --
historians don't own the past.
I mean, it's one of the things I learned about with --
I wrote a book about my mother.
And my mother's vision of the past
through memory is very different from the one
that I have as a historian.
I learned the same thing when I was on the Nisqually.
The Nisqually was a history of stories.
I could not drive around with Frank and Maiselle Bridges
without hearing stories.
I mean, literally, we'd be silent for a while,
and a story would pop up,
because we were at a place that brought forth the story.
And it wasn't just native peoples.
My Irish relatives did the same kind of thing.
So the past is the common territory.
We're the peculiar ones. Most families have storytellers.
Most families have stories about things
that happened in the past.
We have a set of stories bounded by a set of rules
which we have created.
And everybody else
but us thinks it's really peculiar
to tell a story that way.
But that's the way we tell the stories.
-Yeah, I, you know,
at this Cascadia Environmental History Retreat that we have,
we always watch a film that has something to do --
it's about some sort of topic.
And a lot of them are kind of from the,
really, the perspective of an artist,
really, at least a lot of the ones we've seen recently.
They aren't really like a documentary just coming at you.
It's really stretching your mind about
how you think about the natural world.
We were talking about this the last time there,
and I was reflecting on like the films of Werner Herzog,
for example, and just how much watching a film like that,
you just see nature, if you want to call it that,
or the environment, whatever.
It's all over everything he does.
And there's all these odd interactions between people
and the natural world.
So I think there's a lot there to be told,
and I love this idea about historians not owning the past,
which means a lot of people can sort of get involved with that,
because we all kind of understand it
a little differently, and our way is not the only way.
So I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of room
there for those other kinds of expression.
[ Applause ]