One of the biggest themes I've been reflecting on this year and through this summer has been the linkage between history and futurity—the ways imagining better futures necessitates a familiarity with the past. As a society so fixated on progress and development, we hold an incredibly poor understanding of our histories and the origins of our institutions and practices. Clearly, inequities didn't arise yesterday, and dismantling systems of oppression as we move towards just futures requires a nuanced understanding of their historical origins.
But the historical education we receive growing up is, for the most part, incredibly narrow, dry, and seemingly irrelevant. Despite attending middle and high school in the greater Seattle area, I never received a drop of education about the land I called home—it wasn't until I left Washington that I began to learn about Native and settler-colonial histories around the Salish Sea, or the ways my Eastside city was built on Japanese American farmland seized during Japanese internment in WWII.
More and more, I am struck by the importance of understanding our local histories in all their complexities. The Duwamish River alone is the site of layers and layers of stories—Duwamish tribal histories, histories of settlement and colonization, histories of industrialization and degradation and environmental injustice. It's this historical context—the story of a river losing its stewards of time immemorial to colonization; of riverbanks ripped apart, buried, and straightened into a shipping canal; of pollution beyond recognition, beyond habitability—that gives meaning to the Green Futures Lab's work. Even as we orient to the future, our work is inextricably grounded in the past, focused on healing the socioecological scars of a river torn open.
In deepening my own understanding of the Duwamish River, I've drawn on the Burke Museum's Waterlines project, as well as writing from Coll Thrush, a scholar of Pacific Northwest Native histories and author of the book Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place. I'm hoping to read his book soon, in addition to BJ Cummings' very recently published The River That Made Seattle: A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish, which sounds like an incredible and much-needed telling of local histories around the Duwamish. With that said, I do find it worth noting that both of these authors hold settler identities, as do I.
In orienting around the Duwamish in my days in the field, I'm working to approach these histories with humility and care, given my positionality. It's important to me to acknowledge how the extractive processes of data collection, even with the intent of restoration, can feel parallel to the Duwamish River's histories of exploitation. In other words, I find it critical that the work of seeking out green futures not forget to center the past that necessitates this work.
To return to a broader scope of thinking around past, present, and future, I've also been reflecting on the ways we are allowed to imagine our futures. It's striking to me that even within the narratives of upward progress pushed onto us a young age, we are given so little space to imagine alternatives—instead, our futured imaginations are confined to our personal trajectories ("what do you want to be?"), or to the realm of scientific and technological innovation. Why should we readily accept and envision a Hyperloop future but not one that involves collective work towards abolition, racial equity, and co-creation? But of course, the answer lies again in the past, deeply tied to institutionalized power and a fear of upending the status quo.
There's much more to be said about truths in both directions of the timeline that I won't speak to for now. Maybe—and this will be my last thought—it's no longer appropriate to consider time as linear, when our past so clearly guides and informs our futures. Why only consider growth in the forward sense? What about the expansion of all of the histories we are learning, uncovering, and retelling even as time moves on? In some ways, I want to think of time, a storied existence, as simultaneous growth of past, present, and future.
Maybe time is a river, each drop carrying its own story as it empties out into the sound. Or maybe time is a tree, growing earthward and skyward, drawing its strength both from what exists above and below. Maybe even as we fixate on the uppermost branches, our roots are unfurling, strengthening, grounding, allowing our futures to stretch towards the sun.
