ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: CANDACE WELLMAN

In 1986, I earned a B.A. in History/Secondary Education at WWU. Since then, I have volunteered as a Research Assistant at the Bellingham State Archives. After 24 years of research, I have published 3 books. 

My focus is one that local and regional historians, as well as national ones, have ignored: the contributions to the establishment of Whatcom County communities by Indigenous women married to officials and military officers in the earliest days of Bellingham Bay colonization. They are an example of what happened in many communities across the West, but were ignored in favor of the stereotype of the white woman settler. 

In 2017, WSU Press published my first book, Peace Weavers, Uniting the Salish Coast through Cross-cultural Marriages, which won the WILLA prize from Women Writing the West. In 2019, WSU published four additional biographies, Interwoven Lives, Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities, which was the runner-up for the WILLA prize. In May 2023, WSU Press published my third book of local, regional and national import, Man of Treacherous Charm, Territorial Justice Edmund C. Fitzhugh. 

My first book was published at age 70 - It's never too late to discover a talent for writing and presenting programs on history. Where at first I described myself as an amateur local historian, now I'm a professional one. Along the way, I even managed to make a scientific-anthropological discovery that took me to the back rooms of the Smithsonian and has had a lasting effect on Northwest Indigenous women's history.