David Buerge

Unrelenting Grays: Native Myths About Endless Rain

One might wonder why Native stories wished for more rain in damp, dark Seattle, but spring floods signal salmon to return to spawning rivers where people caught them.

The Northwest’s Ancient Cathedrals (And Our Obligation To Them)

Lumbermen in a few decades scythed away our forest cover that was a wonder of the world. Centuries must pass before any of that grandeur returns.

Puget Sound’s Indigenous Languages Are Dying

Puget Sound Salish hangs on by a thread, thanks to efforts to preserve it. Unfortunately, when a language dies the ways its speakers experienced the world vanish with it.

A Native American Movement for Reparations Starts to Find its Voice

A proposal in Vancouver, B.C. could be "the most dramatic statement of urban Indigenous presence in any Canadian city – a new district called Senakw, after the long-displaced village."

My Very Bad, No-Good Christmases

Ah, the season of cheer and misadventure is upon us...

What Should We Call Mt. Rainier?

There is no easy answer to the question "what did native people call it?" Keep in mind that there were many native groups speaking many languages in sight of the enormous peak, and they had their own names for it.

Frank La Mere And The Fight For Native Americans’ Full Treaty Rights

Seattle’s early white residents prevented the Duwamish people, first signatory of the Point Elliott Treaty, from gaining a reservation in the 1860s because river-valley lands made available by treaty were deemed valuable pathways to coal.

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