Welcome to The Newsfeed.

I'm Paris Jackson.

We're diving into the latest season of the Cascade PBS series Mossback's Northwest Season 11 takes us across the Pacific Northwest and into our region's expansive past, tackling the mysterious history of the ancient Mima Mounds, the roots of Skid Road and an early 1900s festival that erupted into violence.

I sat down with host Knute Berger to learn about some of these stories and what intrigued him along the way.

A lot of themes came out this season, and one in particular was just the fascinating women you were able to highlight and kind of tell us what sparked some of your interest as you were diving into the research for season 11?

Well, it was interesting because, I kept looking into different stories, and there were some really interesting women from all kind of walks of life that kept kind of coming to the center of the pieces.

So, for example, there was a World War II spy story that I came across that had a really interesting Northwest angle that hadn't really been written about very much.

And it was a woman named Velvalee Dickinson who was a doll dealer.

She dealt in exotic dolls, and she was writing letters, doing basically intelligence gathering for the Japanese on ship repairs at places like Bremerton and Portland and Puget Sound.

And she was writing these coded letters about dolls.

But the dolls were really ships that she was describing.

And so, you know, it was just really interesting to kind of keep stumbling across that.

One episode of this season got a lot of interest, in particular on YouTube in just a couple of weeks about the Mima Mounds.

Tell us about what was so fascinating, the kind of the mystery around it.

It's a fascinating landscape there, Olympia.

All these weird, evenly spaced hundreds and hundreds of humps in a prairie down there.

And they're preserved.

They're in a protected area, but you can walk there.

And despite people studying these things for 150 years, they still don't know what made them.

They don't know.

Was it prehistoric gophers?

Was it a glacier?

Was it flooding?

Was it you know, what was it?

And I was just fascinated that there was no scientific consensus.

So it's a mystery.

Many of the episodes that you cover have relevance to today.

Kind of tell us what you hope people take away from some of the stories that you highlight.

I hope that people see parallels with things that we're experiencing currently.

They can learn, like, what those dilemmas or situations were like.

We did a thing on a free speech riot that occurred here in Seattle in 1913, and it was a riot between these sort of super patriots and socialist street speakers.

People ran rampant and like, burned offices and stuff in downtown Seattle at the time.

It was in the middle of a big festival.

The argument was over who got free speech?

You know, both sides couldn't have free speech in this situation.

And, you know, we still talk about free speech and the difficulties of the press and the politics and divides and whatnot.

This is an example that has some parallels to now.

You can find all of the episodes from season 11 on CascadePBS.org as well as the previous ten seasons.

The latest season of the Mossback Podcast premieres in February.

I'm Paris Jackson, thank you for watching The Newsfeed, your destination for nonprofit Northwest news.

Go to CascadePBS.org for more.