Marc James Carpenter presents 'The War on Illahee'

Third Place Books welcomes author and historian Marc James Carpenter to our Ravenna store for a conversation about his new book, The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest. Focusing on a series of conflicts between Indigenous residents and settlers in the Pacific Northwest during the 1850s, Carpenter explores how the region's history of colonial violence has been at turns commemorated and systematically forgotten.

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About The War on Illahee. . .

How a generation of pioneers and their historians knowingly hid the violent history of Indigenous dispossession in the Pacific Northwest

The small, mostly forgotten wars of the 1850s in the American Pacific Northwest were part of a broader genocidal war—the War on Illahee—to seize Native land for Euro‑Americans. Illahee (a term for “homeland” in Chinook) was turned into the states of Oregon and Washington through the violence of invading soldiers, settlers, and serial killers. Clashes over the brutality of invasion—should it be celebrated, isolated, or erased?—left behind accidental archives of atrocity, as history writers disagreed over which stories they should tell and which stories they could sell. By the 1920s, the War on Illahee had been disappeared.

Drawing on records from the perpetrators themselves, the papers of historians, and previously suppressed evidence from Indigenous survivors, Marc James Carpenter has written both a new history of pioneer atrocities within and beyond the wars on Native people in the American Pacific Northwest, and a new history of how these wars were remembered, commemorated, and forgotten. The overlapping distortions have embedded inaccuracies in our histories and textbooks all the way to the present. Beyond reshaping the history of the Pacific Northwest, this searing book opens broader conversations about settler colonialism, historical memory, problematic monuments, and the historical profession.

Dr. Marc James Carpenter grew up in the Pacific Northwest, got his PhD at the University of Oregon, and now works as an associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown. His work has earned multiple awards, including the 2022 Purrington/White prize from the Western History Association. Although he has published a number of depressing articles in scholarly journals and public forums, The War on Illahee is his first full-length monograph.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.