Coll Thrush

Raised in the treaty territory of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe near Seattle, Coll Thrush is a graduate of Western Washington University and the University of Washington. He is professor of history and Killam teaching laureate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam territory, and faculty associate with UBC’s Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. 

Coll is the author of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place, which won the 2007 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography and was re-released as a tenth-anniversary second edition in early 2017. He is also co-editor with Colleen Boyd of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American History & Culture (2011), author of Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (2016), and founding co-editor of the Indigenous Confluences book series at the University of Washington Press. Coll’s most recent book, published in May 2025, is Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific. It is a critical cultural and environmental history of shipwrecks, settler colonialism, and Indigenous survivance on the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. 

Coll’s current projects are a memoir-history entitled The Train to Weeping Water: An American Inheritance in Six Landscapes, which centers on the experiences of his great-grandfather, a rider on the so-called “orphan trains,” and the intergenerational legacies of migration, child separation, and settler colonialism. His other project is an autobiographical novel called SlaughterTown, about a group of kids coming of age in the 1980s against the backdrop of the Green River Killer case.