Historian, writer, and public scholar.

Photo by Rodrigo Sanchez

About Natasha Varner

PhD, she/her

I’m a public historian and writer with a passion for making history legible and accessible to broad audiences. My essays and reporting have appeared in Electric Literature, Atlas Obscura, The Nation, PRI’s The World, Jacobin, and Radical History Review’s The Abusable Past. 

Since completing my PhD in history from the University of Arizona in 2016, I have maintained a career as a public scholar and independent journalist with work orbiting around histories of settler colonialism, labor, immigration, racism, and resistance in the American West and Mexico. My book, La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2020), won the Lewis Hanke post-doctoral research award from the Conference on Latin American History (2017) and was a finalist for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's Best First Book Award in 2021.

I am currently serving as an Us@250 fellow with New America to report on the decades-long struggle to preserve and commemorate the site of a former Japanese American incarceration camp in southeastern Colorado, as well as the impacts of its new designation as a National Historic Site. In summer 2025, I’ll be launching Past Lives Press, a zine imprint focused on publishing labor history and other radical histories. 

Work & Approach

My role as a historian and public scholar extends to my workplaces too. Currently, I am a Heritage Program Manager at 4Culture, where I work to get taxpayer-funded grants into the hands of heritage organizations across King County. In this role, I support and advocate for a range of heritage activities and work with community-based archives, historical societies, museums, and other organizations dedicated to preserving community memory and culturally significant practices.

Previously, I worked as Densho’s Communications and Public Engagement Director for nine years. In that role, I collaborated with descendants, survivors, artists, scholars, and other community-based organizations to educate the general public about the Japanese American WWII incarceration and its intersections with other aspects of American racism and xenophobia. I also worked as a founding member of the Community Archives Collaborative, an organization that supports and advocates for US-based community archives and archivists  documenting the stories and histories of groups traditionally excluded from mainstream archival institutions. Prior to Densho, I worked in scholarly publishing for nearly a decade, including a role managing a Mellon Foundation-funded publishing program for first time authors working in the field of Indigenous studies.

For a hi-res image, see below.

My work comes from and is directly shaped by the communities I have been part of and the places I call home. 

  • My work comes from and is directly shaped by the communities I have been part of and the places I call home. 

    I am from Flagstaff, Arizona and have deep family roots in Tucson. Those places will always be home. I’ve lived in Seattle since 2013 and this place is home now too. I live and work on lands stolen from Indigenous peoples. We all do. But land acknowledgements are too often rendered as rote platitudes, when instead they should be calls to action. That’s at least how I try to see mine: 

    I live on the lands of the Lushootseed-speaking peoples, including the Duwamish, Muckleshoot, Puyallup, Snoqualmie, Suquamish, and Tulalip tribes. Urban Indigenous peoples of many Nations live and thrive in Seattle, but we also have one of the highest per capita rates of murdered and missing Indigenous women. As a settler, I’m committed to doing what I can to repair and support Indigenous-led rematriation efforts. Currently that includes research and writing about settler colonial harm, offering workshops and educational resources to other settlers, serving on 4Culture’s Native Cultural Facilities internal working group, and making monthly donations to Real Rent Duwamish, Chief Seattle Club, and Red Eagle Soaring. This is a working statement that will evolve alongside my personal and community growth, and I am always open to feedback, dialogue, collaboration, and learning about how to make it better.

  • I have also found home in community. I want to offer gratitude to the following spaces and organizations that have fostered my creative, intellectual, and activist growth: Tsuru for Solidarity, the Densho community at large, the Community Archives Collaborative, Casa Latina, The Southside Worker Center, Common AREA Maintenance, The Black Mesa Water Coalition, the National Council of Public History, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, International Workers of the World, Freelance Journalists Union, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

    My community extends to my family too, and I am deeply thankful to have them as a constant source of support and inspiration.