Resilience Through Writing: A Bibliographic Guide to Indigenous-Authored Publications in the Pacific Northwest before 1960

Resilience Through Writing: A Bibliographic Guide to Indigenous-Authored Publications in the Pacific Northwest before 1960 includes nearly 2,000 entries by over 700 individuals, 29% of them women, most of which were largely unknown. Coverage has been thorough, with writings from coastal and interior regions of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and northern California. Entries include newspaper letters to the editors, school compositions, speeches, legal statements, and articles in miscellaneous relatively obscure publications. These materials thus provide new perspectives on Native American/First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest. The potential value of this material to descendants; tribal members; tribal historians; and scholars of Indigenous literature, political science, and culture change is enormous. By producing this bibliography and allowing the Journal of Northwest Anthropology (JONA) to publish it in our Memoir series, Robert Walls has given those interested in Northwest Indigenous writings the roadmap to years of research.

Robert Walls is Assistant Teaching Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is also concurrent faculty in the Department of Anthropology. After receiving his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Washington, he received his Ph.D. in Folklore and American Studies from Indiana University. 

Over the course of his career, he has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research on a wide range of topics. From 1988 to 1990, he completed the first survey of folk and vernacular architecture in Washington state for the Washington State Folklife Council, resulting in the documentation of hundreds of structures. During the 1990s, his work with families in timber-dependent areas of the Pacific Northwest led to numerous public presentations and publications on working-class occupational culture, the social character of logging communities, and the environmental history of community-based attitudes toward sustainable forest resources.

His current research, teaching, and consulting focus on the ethnography and ethnohistory of Indigenous peoples of North America; more specifically, his concentration is on Coast Salish and settler-colonial relations in the Pacific Northwest. Walls' publications include two books: Bibliography of Washington State Folklore and Folklife (University of Washington Press, 1987), and The Old Traditional Way of Life: Essays in Honor of Warren E. Roberts, co-edited with George Schoemaker (Trickster Press, Indiana University, 1989). 

He is currently preparing a book, The New Canoe: Early Native Literature in Salish Country and Beyond, which will be a study of Indigenous literacies and post-contact writing in northwestern North America. The book will focus on the relationship of early Native writing to treaties, culture, and the forces of assimilation, and how such practices of inscription enhanced the resilience of Native societies.