Aoki Center/HistoryDepartment Collaboration - The Free People of Color Lecture Series: Professor Joshua Reid, University of Washington "From “Fishing Together” to “To Fish in Common With” Makah Marine Waters and the Making of the Settler Commons in Washington Territory" The acquisition of Indigenous lands through the erasure of Native peoples drives settler colonialism. Yet this settler colonial logic did not just unfold on land—it also unfolded across Indigenous marine spaces. This paper examines the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay that the Makah Nation negotiated and signed with the United States to illustrate how the logic of elimination established a marine settler commons that privileged non-Native users and sought to remove Indigenous peoples. This example also complicates the usual settler colonial narratives that explain how nation-states replaced communally held Indigenous homelands with individually owned, fee simple property. Conversely, this case study shows that the United States replaced propertied Indigenous marine spaces with a settler commons premised on equal access in which theoretically anyone could fish. Within two generations of the Treaty of Neah Bay, however, open and equal access to these fisheries fell victim to technological advances and state laws that privileged settlers over Natives. This marine-oriented example encourages us to consider a wider scope for the contexts and effects of settler colonialism in both the North American West and other places around the world. Joshua L Reid (registered member of the Snohomish Indian Nation) is an associate professor of American Indian Studies and the John Calhoun Smith Memorial Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington where he also directs the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. He is author of The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (Yale, 2015), for which he has received numerous awards. Reid researches and teaches about histories of American Indians and Indigenous peoples, the North American West, the environment, and Pacific Worlds. Reid currently directs the university’s Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest and edits the Emil and Kathleen Sick Series on Western History and Biography with UW Press and the Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. He serves on the editorial advisory board of the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, is a Distinguished Speaker for the Western History Association, and member of the board of the National Council for History Education. He is also the chair of program committees for the American Historical Association’s 2020 conference and the Western History Association’s 2019 conference. Reid currently researches Indigenous explorers in the Pacific, from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and is completing an edited volume on Indigenous communities and violence. Professor Reid's research interests include American Indians, identity formation, cultural meanings of space and place, the American and Canadian Wests, the environment, and the indigenous Pacific. He teaches courses on American Indian History, the American West, U.S. History, and Environmental History. ------------------ The Free People of Color Lecture Series is hosted by the Aoki Center at King Hall and the UC Davis Department of History to explore the rights of people of color in the United States following the Civil War and inquire how that history continues to shape our thinking today.