What do Pacific Northwest shipwrecks have to do with settler colonialism?
Author and historian Coll Thrush recently published a book, “Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific,” which explores this topic through six years of extensive research. He shared his findings in a recent KUOW Book Talk at the Central Library, in conversation with KUOW Book Club host Katie Campbell.
“We are all inside the story [of colonialism],” Thrush told about 160 people gathered at the Library to hear about that story. “And right there, I think [people] start to latch on to something that is quite disorienting but also really empowering.”
The conversation was recorded and is now available as a “Meet Me Here’ podcast.
>>Listen to the KUOW conversation with Coll Thrush.
Among accounts of early shipwrecks and the sense we’ve made of them, he talked about the role of shipwrecks in the movie “The Goonies.”
“It was so much fun to write about ‘The Goonies,’” he said. “It spoke to the ways in which shipwreck have become central to regional culture, and it tells us so much about how settlers claim place and how Indigenous people continue to claim place and those intersections.
“If you pull back all the layers of folklore … you get to the original Indigenous oral tradition, which is the bedrock of all this history of the Northwest.”
Thrush also spoke about how the trauma of shipwrecks like the SS Pacific, with only two known survivors, became a way for settlers to claim place: “Settlers saying that our dead are here, so this place is ours now.”
“Wrecked” won the 2026 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.
The next KUOW Book Talk in the spring series is with Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe on Monday, March 23, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Central Library, Level 1, Microsoft Auditorium. LaPointe will discuss her celebrated essay collection, “Thunder Song,” which explores Indigenous identity, resilience, and community, weaving together stories of trauma, healing, and creative expression. Register here.