History Cafe

MOHAI invites you to a powerful evening exploring how earthquakes have shaped Seattle’s past—and how they could define our future.
Seattle sits in the shadow of seismic risk, from the massive Cascadia Subduction Zone to the deep tremors of the Nisqually Earthquake. But our community’s relationship with earthquakes goes back much further, woven into Indigenous knowledge, settlement patterns, and the very bricks that built our neighborhoods. Join a panel of experts as we connect history, science, and community resilience.

This event will spark urgent conversations about memory, science, and preparedness. Together, we’ll look at how lessons from the past and present can help us build a safer future—before the ground moves again.

History Café is produced as a partnership between HistoryLink and MOHAI. Support for this program is provided by the Hugh and Jane Ferguson Foundation.

For more information.
Register here to attend the event.

Join local Tribal forestry professionals, who will trace millennia of stewardship by Indigenous peoples to manage forests based on holistic worldviews of connectedness of communities with their environments. With colonization, this ethos was displaced with forest policy centered on timber production, resulting in disruption of environmental processes. Today, Indigenous peoples are asserting greater influence over management of their ancestral forest lands through their exercise of self-determination and application of traditional knowledge and western science.

History Café is produced as a partnership between HistoryLink and MOHAI.

ASL Interpretation and CART captioning are available during the program. In addition, a limited number of Assistive Listening Devices are available upon request. For more accessibility support, email programs@mohai.org two weeks before the program.

Register to attend the event here.

Join Brad Holden, author of Seattle Mystic Alfred M. Hubbard for a discussion of one of Seattle’s most mysterious figures. Hubbard first appeared in the papers in 1919 for his supposed invention of a perpetual motion machine that harnessed energy from Earth’s atmosphere. From there, he transformed himself into a bootlegger, radio pioneer, top-secret spy, and eventually “the Johnny Appleseed of LSD”.

History Café is produced as a partnership between HistoryLink and MOHAI.

ASL Interpretation and CART captioning are available during the program. In addition, a limited number of Assistive Listening Devices are available upon request. For more accessibility support, email programs@mohai.org two weeks before the program.

Register to attend the event here.