I am a longtime Seattle resident who recently moved to Issaquah. Recently, I walked down to the hatchery to watch the Chinook spawning. It’s a beautiful thing.

However,on the boardwalk near the bridge at the hatchery (on the Squak-side of the creek), there is a display relating to old-growth forest. The first subheading on this sign reads, “When people came, the forests went.”

This sub-head is not only inaccurate, it is offensive and problematic, for at least two reasons:

First, this statement erases the 10,000+ year documented history of human life in this region, which did not result in deforestation. Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest are people, and this sign erases the humanity of these peoples and their long history of sustainable life.

Second, the trees did not fall when people came, they “went” (to use the same euphemism as the sign) when the European settler-colonialism swept to the Pacific Coast. To claim that “people” in the abstract sense caused the deforestation of Western Washington does not give blame where blame is due: on the European colonizers, who, it should be noted, first conquered the native tribes in wars of conquest, then decimated the forests.

This may seem like a trivial matter to you, but it is historical revisionism of the worst sort – the same kind that prevents Turkey from acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, the same kind that prevents China from discussing Tibet as an independent nation. History is written by the victor, but moral people must not allow false history to become enshrined in the culture. Truth is important.

This sign should be removed and replaced with a more accurate representation of the history of this region.

Max Wilbert, Issaquah