This project moves to look to the present as a link to the past in order to imagine new liberatory futures built around relationality, solidarity, and radical care. The so-called “northwest” is broadly used to refer to the contemporary groupings of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, both Inland and Pacific, in the settler colonial frameworks of the United States.
In examining settler colonialities and collective imaginaries, I hope to expand beyond singular historical narratives that reify settler colonial claims of permanence and perpetuity, and instead move to recognize and hold together a plurality of coalitional multidirectional memory. My use of multidirectional memory is a launching off point, a methodological framing inspired by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor’s approach to utilizing a framework of multidirectional memory as a method towards pluralist memory justice (2020). While Atshan and Galor were focused on coalescing Palestinian, Jewish, and German collective memories of trauma, I hope to call attention to a plurality of social histories throughout the northwest, to trace legacies and patterns of power as it’s mediated through juridicial, historical and archival processes.
Power does not function through merely top-down, as is often reflected in traditional archival materials that serve to document dominant histories. What is not always captured through traditional archival lenses are the ways in which power can function horizontally and in all directions, particularly from subaltern perspectives. Multidirectional memory moves away from a scarcity approach to memory and trauma towards the potentiality of coalitional memory that resists the tendency to place all histories in relation to the nation-state. In bringing together a variety of memory projects throughout the northwest, I seek to challenge narratives of liberal white purity often used to obfuscate past and ongoing acts of state violences related to imperialism, racism, compulsory cisheteronormativity, and settler coloniality.
This essay explores records predominantly from Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) including the WSU Office of the President Records, Thomas S. Foley Congressional Papers, and the Bob Weatherly Papers. Additionally, I discuss recent curatorial efforts through the WSU Queer Oral History Project. These initial research records spanned from 1980–2024. Additional archival photographs are from the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal.
This project would not have been possible without the support of the team of amazing students, faculty, and staff in the WSU Libraries and in MASC. Special thank you to Lotus Norton-Wisla for first sharing copies of the Bob Weatherly Papers over breakfast and tea. I’m grateful for her continued collaboration and willingness to build multidisciplinary scholarship grounded in community activism. An earlier iteration of this paper was presented at the Pacific Northwest History Conference in October of 2024. I thank M.A. Miller and Nikki Bruegeman for your critical perspectives that complicate and expand how I’ve thought of queer histories. Thank you Bibhushana Poudyal for your continued feedback and encouragement to explore subaltern histories, reminding me of the importance to stay grounded in struggles against oppression in all that we do.
Thank you to my dear friends, family, and loved ones for your continued support and patience with me over the years. My work would mean nothing without you all.
I turn to university based community archives throughout the northwest for models of storying past liberatory struggles and contemporary connections to collective coalitional memories. I’m interested in examining how modes of multidirectional power impact the way that oppressed communities engage in community and land based archives. This zine explores various archival collections and materials from Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, to build towards a foundation for coalitional liberatory memory work in this region. From existing collections, to contemporary collecting projects, and community events, I hope to explore histories, stories, and communal practices that move to expand beyond a one-dimensional perspective of identity in relation to place.
Challenging Limitations Inherent to Top-Down Perspectives & Records
In looking towards Washington State University, nestled in the rural Palouse prairies of eastern Washington, I seek to critically engage with and challenge traditional archival approaches which have shaped the largest LGBTQ+ related materials and collections that are now housed in the Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC). I aim to theorize how power can be traced through archives, showcasing the agency of subaltern communities through multidirectional memory while simultaneously highlighting the limits of Western Liberalism and processes of settler colonialism. Centrally, I seek to question how collections at WSU either reinforce, reflect, or push against the reification of a hegemonic nation-state throughout the 20th century into contemporary historical projects.
Institutional archives are often presented and interpreted as arbiters of objective historical realities, privileging certain mediums, perspectives, and materials over others. As I searched through finding aids and metadata looking for queer representation, I found that the bulk of place based queer materials were usually mediated through the perspective of those who wanted to deny civil and legal protections from queer communities. Of the collections that were specifically tied to the Palouse region or Washington state more broadly, there are two collections that stand out, both for their overwhelming size and for the pervasive thread of homophobia that sought to eliminate homosexuality from public spheres, effectively advocating for the persecution and denial of queer existence.
The first collection that I want to turn our attention to is the WSU Office of the President Records, which contained over 100 letters directed to the university’s board of regents in 1980. At the time, the university was considering enacting protections for LGBTQ+ students that would allow queer students to equally participate in student organizations on campus through a rule that would explicitly ban discrimination based on one’s sexuality. The over 100 letters addressed to the board of regents vehemently opposed any such protections for queer students, often going into extreme detail as to why queer students should be denied the right to attend the university or participate in student organizations, effectively arguing that these students had no right to existence.
In addition to these letters, WSU holds the Thomas S. Foley Congressional Papers, a large collection containing records from Foley’s time serving as Washington’s 5th district representative from 1965–1995. Within the Thomas S. Foley Congressional Papers collection, there are similarly dozens of letters addressed to the representative advocating that he vote against what was at the time referred to as the “gay bill of rights” in 1984 which would have extended legal protections to gay and lesbian men and women as a protected class.
I often think back to these two collections as examples of explicit homophobia which echo many perspectives that I see reflected in contemporary media in our era of escalating anti-trans and queer legislation that is sweeping across our country. Part of my work as a community educator has involved hosting public events in the archives and facilitating community engagement with existing collections. These events became a regular community engagement event series entitled, Queering the Archives. Both the WSU Office of the President Records and the Thomas S. Foley Congressional Papers have garnered the strongest emotional responses from participants.
When we first started researching these collections, we hadn’t yet combed through every letter. As we continued reading, we were searching and hoping that there would at least be traces of support for queer life, but we have yet to find any in these collections. I chose not to directly quote or engage with these letters as an act of self-preservation and as a refusal of their continued legacies. Seeing my students directly engage with these letters has shown me enough about the limitations of these materials towards enacting change or teaching us anything other than how little the world has changed in the past fifty years. These letters preclude the futurity of queer lives and moves towards the obfuscation of queerness from life entirely.
Through these Queering the Archives community engagement events, we heard a strong desire for broader and more diverse representations of queerness. The feedback gathered from students, faculty, staff, and community members led to new collecting priorities and initiatives that have been driven through the partnerships between the WSU LGBTQ+ Center and MASC. From here, we launched the WSU Queer Archives Oral History Project. In the first year, I conducted 8 oral history interviews in partnership with Drew Gamboa, the WSUQA Graduate Research Assistant and PhD student in the Department of History.
Through these interviews, we talked to queer alums, faculty, and staff with some connection to the Palouse region from the late 90s to up to about 2020. We talked with Dr. Pua Abustan, who founded and advised the Queer People of Color Alliance at WSU while working on their PhD in Education. Dr. Abustan shared stories about student advocacy and protests, and shared insight into how these students sought to carve out spaces for queer students of color in rural Washington. We also talked with Rigoberto Contreras, a gay latino from Sunnyside Washington and WSU graduate. Rigo shared stories about being gay man from a migrant family, growing up in an agricultural community, the large number of Latino’s at WSU, and his experiences going to a gay bar in Pasco with his friends, and reconciling his faith with his queerness. We also talked with Nikki Bruegeman, who shared stories about her COVID 19 oral history project, experiences growing up in Walla Walla, her experiences going to WSU, and broader conversations about navigating rural Washington as a queer person of color.
While these oral histories were largely focused on more contemporary histories, it felt imperative to begin doing reparative work to reconcile the violences that were overwhelmingly documented and represented in the WSU’s collections. The Board of Regents Letters and Thomas Foley Papers reflect the ways in which power is traditionally structured in many archival objects, functioning as a formalized written record appealing to the reification of hegemony through juridical violences leveraged as political tools of exclusion. Their presence in an institutional archive serves to highlight their function as legal documents which retain high value through “objective” approaches to assessing primary source documents. These legal documents fail to realize the subjectivity of queer lives and bodies, instead rendering them as objects instead of fully realized subjects, demonstrating how power has traditionally been mediated through the priorities and biases of both curators and donors. These materials do not reflect the agency or personhood of queer communities and in fact move towards their active erasure, mirroring public discourses which render queer lives as both invisible and disposable. This top-down approach to queer representations shows the ways in which history is often written, dominated, and negotiated through the lens of oppressors. This reckoning and rupture that are reflected in these violent records points to the limitations of Western Liberalism as minoritized groups are rendered as “other”. The excavation of queer violence and trauma activates and engages with the necropolitical ends of the state, and in many ways serves to buttress the centrality of the state as self-evident.
On the other hand, these oral histories served to reposition the direct voices of queer individuals in narrating their own relationships to space, community, and coalitional approaches to identity. To challenge what is privileged in traditional institutional archives requires recognizing how archives function as bodies of record and stewards of objectivity, often in service of the state. Archives in the United States and Global North broadly privilege and center the written word as a tool towards the preservation of hegemonic cultural knowledge. Institutional archives are constructed to center objects tied to the reification of the state, yet archives simultaneously offer a space to make legible diverse representations of communities which have been actively silenced and excluded from such spaces.
Hidden Transcripts and Creative Modalities Towards Expansive Representations
There is vulnerability and risk in sharing queer stories and secrets of survival to a state institution that has historically and presently been complicit in both queer erasure and in ongoing processes of colonization. In this way, we must turn to hidden and creative mediums, and forms of communal embodiment to see more accurate representations of queer life, desire, joy, resistance, and community. In a recent call for donations to WSU’s archives, I collaborated with WSU faculty, June T. Sanders, to curate art and ephemera tied to queer experiences on the Palouse. Together, we drafted a call for submissions and conducted outreach to the broader campus community to encourage artists and organizers to share materials related to their experiences and relation to the Palouse region as part of the Higher Ground Exhibition.
The exhibition featured eighteen artists and community members which included poetry, zines, journals, photographs, stickers, posters, and other visual artwork, embodying complex iterations of gender and sexuality. Part of our goal with this project was to bring more contemporary queer representation into the WSU archives, reaching for broad perspectives from queer communities themselves. Expanding our call to specifically ask for art and ephemera enabled us to create more opportunities for artists to present nuanced interpretations of queerness that resisted commodification of identity into something that is easily palatable, and instead complicated the ways in which identity is often flattened. These creative modalities center narratives which are primarily intended for queer centric spaces, unconcerned with legibility for those who may be outside of similar lived experiences. Materials included a poem which describes a gay baseball game in the middle of wheat fields, a sensual self portrait with a ball-gag, a watercolor submitted to the Whitman county fair along with its blue ribbon, journal entries describing starting testosterone and ways in which to burn a flag. These materials play with how we conceptualize archival materials, finding a balance between the archive and the repertoire, synthesizing a queer epistemology for cultural reproduction that is both elusive and subversive.
I am interested in re/presenting archival practices and historiographies in direct relation to indigenous communities and QTPOC diasporas. José Esteban Muñoz’s framework of disidentification functions as a practice of liberatory reframing, complicating one-dimensional understandings of identity under systems of Western hegemony by rejecting singular and totalizing conceptions of identity (1999). Disidentification simultaneously functions to reframe and redefine methodologies in order to repurpose these tools towards liberatory ends. In this way, I move to disidentify and represent archival practices and historiographies in relation to indigenous and QTPOC diasporas.
In seeking to ground communal embodiment as a radical act in collective memory work, I’ve found that intentional gatherings in the archives have created wellsprings of radical liberatory potential that connect and move beyond the limitations and walls of our institution. Diana Taylor utilizes a theory of acts of transfer in performance studies, which can be used to expand how we conceptualize cultural reproduction to include that which is relational and embodied through communal practices in queer life. When moving beyond the totality of the written word to include various acts of embodied performance and materiality, we can hold the ways in which queer spaces function as acts of transfer that reconstruct and disidentify social contracts beyond hegemonic constraints. While Diana Taylor makes clear distinctions between the archive, one that traditionally holds and values writing above all, and that of the repertoire, which is more about embodied action and social agency as a form of cultural reproduction, I want to challenge these distinctions to see how they can inform each other to disidentify and push archive practices to be more expansive. In other words, I’m interested in what archival practices can learn from the repertoire, or these embodied acts of transfer, to hold more nuanced narratives of queer life and memory.
As I’ve moved into more of a curatorial role to document and preserve queer subjectivity within the WSU archives through oral histories and Higher Ground Exhibition, I have sought to center the agency and consent of community members to engage in reciprocal processes of learning, engagement, and sharing. Institutional archives must actively resist and interrogate their extractive tendencies which have caused harm to historically marginalized communities that many universities are now actively seeking to include. Decentralizing institutional power and decision making is an approach to mitigate power imbalances for the communities who have systematically been erased through archival silences.
When trying to build reciprocal relationships in community-based archives, both archivists and researchers have a responsibility to facilitate agency and co-creation with community members and donors invested in queer history and memory. I’m grateful for the support and spirit of collaboration that I’ve found with the amazing team at MASC for creative and bold projects. It’s important to think of these archival spaces as living spaces that hold a multiplicity of dreams, hopes, aspirations, and visions for a future through collective pasts. Communities must be actively involved in negotiating representation, visibility, and invisibility in ways that resist cooptation and leave room for subversion of power and institutional representations of queerness. As we consider relations to land, we must stay committed to exploring genealogies of histories and thought beyond white settler colonialism.
As a move to ground this work towards more explicit connections to land, I’ve chosen to incorporate materials from the Bob Weatherly Papers which span from 1885–1995. Weatherly was a retired rancher who went on to become the principal historian for Asotin County, Washington. Weatherly was born in Clarkston, Washington in 1921. In his records, Weatherly meticulously kept notes on which describe the life of Albert Hester, a queer settler in the region who was born in 1870 and passed away in 1927. Hester is known and remembered through public records with headlines such as “Rests in Dress,” “Former Anatone rancher spent most of life dressed in ladies’ clothes,” and “Eccentric man remembered because of dresses he wore.”
Hester moved to the United States at age 15 from Germany. Documents in the Weatherly Papers continually imply that Weatherly was well educated, and was a teacher in the midwest before moving out “west” to work as a prospector across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho borders. Census records show Hester establishing residency in Asotin County by 1889, and that Hester operated a gold mine outside of Warren, Idaho.
These records pertaining to Albert Hester bring a lot of questions to mind regarding the ethics of memory work. How did Hester want to be remembered? How must we hold, respect, honor, and question the stories that are left behind?
What does it mean to place these stories within larger frameworks of history that consider processes of settler colonialism? Hester moved the region during a period of transition from Oregon, Washington, and Idaho territories into statehood. This process involved forceful displacements and violations of treaty rights for the nimíipuu (Nez Perce Tribe).
Through the 1855 Treaty, the nimíipuu ceded 7.5 million acres, but after gold was discovered in this region in 1860, Congress moved to reduce that allotment by 90% in 1963, effectively removing an additional five million acres. The tribe was left with approximately 750,000 acres. This was further reduced through processes known as allotment, which continued to allow settlers to trespass on tribal land, to eventually be recognized as residents & landowners by the US federal government.
These juradicial violences were coupled with processes of land theft through allotment, which created catastrophic conditions for the nimíipuu and ultimately erupted through the Nez Perce War of 1877, reducing the tribe to 1/10th of their original size. This era brought with it a post-Enlightenment era of private land enclosure, with the US government cutting up land on maps and distributing it to those willing to play the game of settler colonialism. This land-grab movement continues to impact displaced communities such as the Nez Perce Nation, who continue to fight for having their treaty rights upheld.
Albert Hester acquired a government deed in 1900 to 140 acres of land that spanned the Grand Ronde River in southeastern Washington, just outside of Anatone. It’s worth noting that Washington became a state in 1889. Hester came to this region as a prospector, looking for gold, a better life. A driving factor for migration to the American west. Maybe Hester even moved out west to be able to build and start a new life, rooted in their own queerness. Although Hester was sensationalized for being “eccentric,” did their complicity in settler colonialism and whiteness allow them to be accepted in their community? What do these records tell us about how settler colonialism creates differing relationships to power depending on proximity to processes of displacement?
There are gaps and silences that will likely never be filled by traditional archival documents that will insatiate the desires of historians seeking a record told through legal documents, journals, and clear declarations on queerness. In imagining the past, there are impossibilities in what can be told, represented, and found. Instead, we are left imagining, desiring, and longing for stories that can never be objectively “known.”
When reading these records describing Alber Hester’s life and the community of early Anatone, Washington, I can’t help but wonder, what’s missing? How and why were these records documented and saved? What led to them being found again in 1991 when Bob Weatherly wrote his first story?
We will likely never know the degree to which Hester was accepted in their community, but it can be inferred through conflicting narratives that Hester was subject to certain degrees of social isolation. On the one hand, language describing Hester as a hermit seems to suggest isolation from dominant public spheres of masculinity on the frontier, violence is implied through headlines. The sensational photo of Hester in their dress, while remarkable and ethereal, still feels exploitative, especially in light of the note that accompanied the 1914 portrait of Hester, where the photographer, Eva Washburn, explains that Hester is blurred & moving in protest of being photographed. Did Hester feel that this was a stolen photograph or moment? What are the ethics of its reproduction?
There is still a lot that can be read into Hester’s life through what Emma Pérez describes as the decolonial imaginary or Sadiya Hartman’s critical fabulation– Hester as a perverse socialite who fed her (?) neighbors and community, who turned towards the land to live a radical life of love and care, surrounded by creativity and loved ones. Hester as educating and building critical networks that challenged settler narratives of relation to land, place, and each other.
Josie Cohen-Rodríguez is a Mexican/trans/queer abolitionist educator from the border towns of Yuma, Arizona and San Luis, Mexico (Quechan homelands). Currently, Josie is based between the Palouse prairie of eastern Washington and north Idaho (Palus & Nimiipuu homelands) where she works as an educator and community organizer. Josie is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literary Studies at Washington State University with research interests in comparative literatures, history, community/place-based archives, queer of color epistemologies, aesthetics, genre, and transnational critique. She works with an amazing team at the WSU LGBTQ+ Center, where she writes zines with students, supports programming and equity initiatives, and facilitates community engagement with the WSU Queer Archives.
Cover — Portrait of Albert Hester by Eva Lawrence Washburn. Bob Weatherly Papers, MASC, WSU.
Fig. 1 — Kopac, Emil. Looking Down into Lamáta/White Bird (1932). Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, MASC, WSU.
Fig. 2 — WSU Queer Archives Research Guide screenshots.
Fig. 3 — WSU Queer Oral History Project participants, 2023–2024 (Cage 967). MASC, WSU.
Fig. 4 — Higher Ground Exhibition, April 26, 2024. Photo: Frankie Beer, WSU Libraries.
Fig. 5 — Higher Ground Exhibition, April 26, 2024. Unprocessed Collection, MASC, WSU.
Figs. 6–7, 10–18 — Bob (Robert P.) Weatherly Papers, 1885–1995. Box 12 Folder 445, MASC, WSU.
Fig. 8 — ‘ickum’kiléelixpe (Battle of Big Hole), 1927. Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal.
Fig. 9 — Nez Perce Treaty Period, 1855–1863. NPS Photo.
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548: Seminar in Critical and Cultural Theory
Archives, Rhetoricitiy of Technologies, & Anti-Oppressive Interventions
Bibhushana Poudyal, PhD
December 2024
By: Josie Cohen-Rodríguez
Literary Studies PhD Student, Department of English
Washington State University