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I bring all this up because this past week, on Tuesday, students at the University of Washington in Seattle called on their school to do a similar public reckoning with a pivotal moment in this city’s history.

The student senate voted overwhelmingly that the UW continues, today, to “white-wash” . That’s the world’s fair that put Seattle on the post-gold rush map, and created the grand layout of the UW campus.

The students requested the UW take down several plaques and historical displays that glorify this exposition, and, like Victoria, replace them with something that also points to the fair’s exploitative side.

That history is indeed problematic. Fairs and expos at that time were obsessed with presenting human exhibits — either carnival “freak shows” or, in this case, living displays of tribespeople from around the world.

, a cottage industry of carnival showmen sprang up who would travel to far-flung spots and bring back Indigenous people, presumably voluntarily, so fairgoers could gawk at them.

Seattle’s expo had at least two such exhibits — “Igorrote Village,” located just west of where UW Medical Center is today, and another called “Eskimo Village,” about where the physics building is today along 15th Avenue Northeast.

“One has to be already aware of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition’s racist legacy in order to know of the events that exploited Indigenous peoples for profit,” , who included members of UW’s American Indian and Filipino American student groups.