A01=Marc James Carpenter
Author_Marc James Carpenter
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9780300275735
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 27 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
Marc James Carpenter grew up in Oregon and now works as associate professor of history at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. He has published in American Indian Quarterly, Oregon Historical Quarterly, and Settler Colonial Studies.
