Teenagers started this: the Young Naturalists Society, collecting specimens in the fields and forests around Seattle, founded the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in 1899, and it remains Washington State's oldest public museum. Named in 1932 for Thomas Burke, a Seattle judge who funded its first permanent building, the Burke moved into a striking new building in 2019 designed to make collections visible and research transparent: labs sit behind glass, collection storage is viewable, and the building communicates that a museum is a working institution, not just a display case. The Burke holds one of the most significant collections of Pacific Northwest Coast Indigenous art and artifacts in the world — objects representing the Duwamish, Suquamish, Lummi, Makah, and dozens of other Coast Salish nations.
The Duwamish, the original inhabitants of the land Seattle occupies, are woven throughout. The museum also holds 16 million natural history specimens — fossils, plants, birds, fish — a critical archive of the Pacific Northwest's natural world. The collection is a form of memory the city owes to the land beneath it.