Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest

The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest

Carpenter, Marc James

Hardcover

Series: The Lamar Western History

19th Century United States HistoryRegional: Pacific Northwest

ISBN10: 0300275730
ISBN13: 9780300275735
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Oct 28 2025
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.47
Height: 1.29 Width: 6.55 Depth: 9.41
Language: English
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.

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