Category Archives: US History

Civil Rights under the Northern Lights: Excerpt from Black Lives in Alaska

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest maps the trials and challenges African Americans have encountered in the forty-ninth state. The earliest arrivals, many of whom worked as whalers, prospectors, and service members, did not always stay long. Others put down roots and lived full lives in Alaska. These Black individuals fought for greater inclusion and helped establish Alaska’s modern civic institutions, contributing to the political and social life of the state even as they endured racism and fought injustice.

The excerpt below touches on Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights. This history reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—self-activity, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places. Even as it reveals the specific context of the state’s complex history, Alaska’s Black history encompasses the themes of the larger nationwide freedom struggle and enriches the history of people of African descent in North America. —Ian C. Hartman

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest by Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer

In the summer of 1962, African Americans and other area activists joined together to picket Carrs, Alaska’s largest grocery store chain. Clarence Coleman, branch president of the Anchorage NAACP, wrote to Roy Wilkins at the national office in New York City: “The first picket line in the history of the Anchorage NAACP began its task of protesting the hiring policies of Carrs Food Center here in Anchorage today 31 July 10 am Alaska Standard Time.”1 Coleman’s statement was not quite true. Five years earlier, Joseph M. Jackson and James E. Owens organized area workers and set up a picket outside of the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union Hall. They and others sought an inclusive union for African American and Alaska Native workers and called for greater transparency in promotion guidelines. Owens stated that direct action “was the only way we’re going to get equality.”2

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska. Many in the Black community took issue with the grocery store’s apparent refusal to hire African Americans to work in any capacity beyond sanitation and other so-called menial, low-level jobs. In one correspondence Bernard J. Carr Sr., an owner of the grocery store chain, conceded he had “two Negro employees,” a garbage collector and a janitor. But he continued, “The time is not right to hire a Negro checker.” Activist Pat Berkley recollected, “They [Carrs] didn’t want to hire any Blacks. And of course, Pop Carr…wasn’t to hire any Blacks because he had hired one [who] became very friendly with a white girl that worked there, so that was the end of that.”3 Still, the NAACP suggested the grocer benefited from a base of African American patrons and, as such, should hire and promote a few as employees. At its Fairview store, over 30 percent of the clientele was Black, yet not a single African American worked in management or any position that interfaced with the public.4

In response, men and women took to the picket line outside of Carrs to raise awareness. Though she was seven months pregnant, Anchorage resident and activist Pat Berkley helped organize the picket and led the women to march on the line during the day; the men walked in the evening. Cars and pedestrians “booed and laughed at [us],” Berkley remembered.5 Despite some negative reaction, the picket seemingly worked; owners agreed to hire a more diverse workforce. Organizer Joseph Kline summarized the terms of the agreement: Carrs grocery would “hire one person immediately. The second within thirty days and the third sixty days after the first.” These positions were supposed to include a clerk, cashier, or grocery checkers, all of which afforded a greater possibility for advancement than the menial positions that the picketers accused Carrs of reserving for Black workers.6

Unfortunately, Carrs failed to hire three African Americans within the agreed-upon sixty days, but the NAACP kept up its pressure, and the grocery store eventually complied. Richard Watts was the first man Carrs hired as a result of the picket. He became the first African American bagger at the store and stayed with the grocer for over forty-five years. In accordance with what the activists envisioned, Watts did not remain a bagger for long. He ascended the chain of management; by the end of a long and distinguished career, Watts had become a district manager and participated in the local business community as a member of the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce.7

The picket of Carrs in Anchorage’s Fairview neighborhood was a watershed moment in the history of civil rights in Alaska.

The Carrs boycott anticipated more extensive changes in Fairview that had come about by the middle of the 1960s. During this decade the neighborhood emerged as a center of activism and civic engagement in Anchorage. Its reputation as one of Anchorage’s most diverse communities only grew, as did the fear that city leadership might continue to neglect the needs of its residents. After the redevelopment and so-called urban renewal of Eastchester Flats, roughly the southern tier of Fairview, men and women on the community council grew more determined to ensure the existing neighborhood would not be left out as Anchorage leadership plotted new recreational outlets for residents. Olivia Holland, Ben Humphries, and John Parks, all active on the neighborhood council, led an effort to set aside land for a park and later spearheaded an effort to deliver public transportation throughout Anchorage. These efforts took considerable effort but would yield tangible results for the residents of Fairview in the decades to follow.8

Beyond the Carrs boycott in Fairview, activists protested and organized against mistreatment and discrimination elsewhere during the early and mid-1960s. In Anchorage and Fairbanks, residents established employment workshops to organize letter writing campaigns and rallies and to reach out to area businesses to connect minority job candidates with desirable employment. The workshops in Anchorage organized pickets at Caribou-Wards and Woolworths; one woman in Anchorage, Lillian Morris, took a lead role in the Woolworths pickets and led the area employment workshop. Fairbanks activists also organized a picket of Woolworths in their hometown. The efforts paid off, at least to some extent. Sears, Roebuck and Company agreed to interview and hire qualified African American, Native, Filipinx, and Mexican applicants. The Spenard Caribou-Wards hired two Black salesclerks and agreed to file and retain applications for a longer period, a concession to the employment workshop. The Anchorage Woolworths hired a Black employee for the first time. These efforts did not approach the level of equity that the Employment Workshop ultimately desired, but they represented a small measure of progress.9

Ian C. Hartman is associate professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

David Reamer is a public historian and journalist who writes for the Anchorage Daily News.

Notes

1 Clarence V. Coleman to Roy Wilkins via Western Union Telegram, August 1, 1962, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, ed. John H. Bracey Jr., Sharon Harley, and August Meier. Available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

2 For reference to the picket on the Local 341 Laborers and Hod Carrier Union, see Papers of the NAACP, Supplement to Part 13, the NAACP and Labor, 1956–1965, edited by John H. Bracey Jr. and August Meier (folder 14), available on microfilm at the University of Alaska Anchorage. For additional reference, see Meier Randall Keenan, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), 284.

3 Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983, Bruce Melzer oral history interviews, Archives and Special Collections, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

4 NAACP News Letter, Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, 1956–1965, Series D: The West, Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

5 Charlie Mae “Pat” Berkley, interview by Bruce Melzer, c. 1982–1983.

6 Joseph H. Kline Jr. to Roy Wilkins, March 3, 1963. Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files, available on microfilm at the Consortium Library, University of Alaska Anchorage.

7 For a brief report on Richard Watts’s career at Carrs, see Christine Kim, “Carrs’ First Black Worker Recalls His Rise through the Ranks,” February 19, 2010 on KTUU. For the announcement of Watts on the board of directors for the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, see “Anchorage Chamber’s 2013–14 Board of Directors Announced,” Alaska Dispatch News, September 12, 2013.

8 “City officials tour Fairview neighborhood park,” Anchorage Times, August 2, 1967, 1.

9 Dianne Anderson, “Protest Group Gets Results, With and Without Picketing,” Anchorage Daily Times, August 13, 1968, 3.

Black History Month Book List

In celebration of Black History Month, we invite you to check out recent books as well as select titles from our backlist in Pacific Northwest, African American, and Black Diaspora historical studies that speak to the profound legacy of Black Americans and this year’s theme of Black resistance.

Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest

Centering the agency and diversity of Black Alaskans, this book chronicles how Alaska’s Black population, though small, has had an outsized impact on the culture and civic life of the region. Alaska’s history of race relations and civil rights reminds the reader that the currents of discrimination and its responses—determination, activism, and perseverance—are American stories that might be explored in the unlikeliest of places.

The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era

University of Washington Emeritus Professor of American History Quintard Taylor’s meticulously researched account is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest. The second edition features a new foreword and afterword.

Revolution to Evolution: The Story of the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity at the University of Washington

Born from a national movement in the late 1960s seeking to address structural and cultural racism, the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity (OMA&D) started as a core group of Black Student Union leaders at the UW who demanded changes in how the school served students of color. In a new book releasing February 21, legendary founding member Emile Pitre shares deep insight into the making of the institution through candid interviews, letters, and reflections of those who participated across decades.

Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

In this rich narrative, Daudi Abe draws on interviews with artists and journalists to trace how hip hop flourished in the Seattle scene. He shows how Seattle hip-hop culture goes beyond art and music, influencing politics, the relationships between communities of color and law enforcement, the changing media scene, and youth outreach and educational programs.

The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City

Combining histories of the city and its African American community with interviews with former Portland Panthers and other key players, this long-overdue account adds complexity to our understanding of the protracted civil rights movement throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime

Beginning with the 1971 appearance of the first Black female superheroine in a comic book—the Skywald Publications character “the Butterfly”—artist, curator, and writer Deborah Elizabeth Waley examines the representation, production, and transnational circulation of women of African descent in the sequential art world.

Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture

How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora.

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

Through interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue and laid the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, this volume explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure.

Barbara Earl Thomas: The Geography of Innocence

Artist Barbara Earl Thomas’s body of work collected here offers a reexamination of Black portraiture and the preconceived dichotomies of innocence and guilt and sin and redemption, and the ways in which these notions are assigned and distorted along cultural and racial lines.

New and Forthcoming Books

From the frontier of health and homelessness in Seattle to nineteenth-century maritime Southeast Asia, our new and upcoming books span the globe to illuminate histories and provide new studies and perspectives on pressing issues. Learn more about these recently released and forthcoming books below.

Don’t forget that our Holiday Sale is ongoing through January 31. Get 40% off all books and free domestic shipping when you order through our website with code WINTER22 at checkout.

Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico

In the first comprehensive study of queer lives in twentieth-century New Mexico, Jordan Biro Walters explores how land communes, art circles, and university classrooms helped create communities that supported queer cultural expression and launched gay civil rights activism in the American Southwest. Wide-Open Desert also frames the significance of and relationship between queer mobility and queer creative production as paths to political, cultural, and sexual freedom for LGBTQ+ people across the nation. In doing so, the book reassesses the power of urbanism on the social construction of contemporary notions of queer identities and politics.

Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle

Newly released in paperback, this Washington State Book Award Finalist explores the tensions between caregiving and oppression, as well as charity and solidarity, that polarize perspectives on homelessness throughout the country. Author and University of Washington professor of nursing Josephine Ensign uses extensive historical research to piece together the lives and deaths of those not included in official histories of Seattle, a city with one of the highest numbers of unhoused people in the United States. Drawing on interviews, she also shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health and social care and public policy debates.

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia

What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? Historian Faizah Zakaria explores these questions and the history of ecological change in the region by centering the roles of religion and colonialism in shaping the Anthropocene. Using a wide array of sources such as family histories, prayer manuscripts, and folktales in tandem with colonial and ethnographic archives, Zakaria brings everyday religion and its far-flung implications into our understanding of the environmental history of the modern world.

Material Contradictions in Mao’s China

This first volume devoted to the material history of the Mao period explores the paradox of material culture under Chinese Communist Party rule and illustrates how central materiality was to individual and collective desire, social and economic construction of the country, and projections of an imminent socialist utopia within reach of every man and woman, if only they worked hard enough. Editors Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho bring together scholars of Chinese art, cinema, culture, performance, and more to share groundbreaking research on the objects and practices of everyday life in Mao’s China, from bamboo and bricks to dance and film.

Chinese Autobiographical Writing: An Anthology of Personal Accounts

Personal accounts help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Chinese Autobiographical Writing contains full translations of works by fifty individuals that illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. Edited by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cong Ellen Zhang, and Ping Yao, the volume includes an array of engaging and readable works that draw us into the past and provide vivid details of life as it was lived from the pre-imperial period to the nineteenth century.

An open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

OAH Annual Meeting Round-Up of History Titles

We are eager to connect with the history community during the Organization of American Historians’ annual meeting. Please visit our virtual booth here.

Here is a collection that highlights some of our recent history titles:

Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake

By Diane Fujino

“A delightful blend of biography, social history and poetics that shifts our reading of Japanese American history. Readers will certainly be inspired if not emboldened.”—Karen Umemoto, University of California, Los Angeles

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

By Robin Hayes

“A conceptually rich book. Its theoretical intervention around a ‘Diaspora underground’ is a brilliant framework that speaks to the nature of a radicalized Black Diaspora formed in response to state repression.”—Quito Swan, University of Massachusetts Boston

The Great Quake Debate: The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology

By Susan Hough

“Seismologist Susan Hough’s account offers a revealing glimpse of the personalities and issues within America’s geologic community in the early twentieth century. But it also can be read as a cautionary tale about science and society.”—Natural History Magazine

The Port of Missing Men: Billy Gohl, Labor, and Brutal Times in the Pacific Northwest

By Aaron Goings

“[P]art whodunit mystery, part biography, and part case study of Grays Harbor’s itinerant workers and their labor movement…The Port of Missing Men makes major contributions to both local history and the larger story of industrial capitalism.”—Oregon Historical Quarterly

Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract

By Phil Deloria

“In his evaluation of Sully and her work, Deloria leaves no stone unturned. What results is a compelling model—grounded in comprehensive historical and cultural analyses—for evaluating the works of women artists disconnected from larger art movements. In the case of Mary Sully, our understanding of her art and life reveals a unique approach by a bicultural woman that rejects limited views on American Indian art in favor of one grounded in an imagined American Indian futurity that should most certainly lead us to question our understanding of American modern art as a whole.”—Woman’s Art Journal

Lil Nas X is in Good Company: Cowboys Have Always Been Black and Gay

Country rapper Lil Nas X had a monumental summer. His hit song, “Old Town Road,” broke records with 19 weeks atop the Billboard’s Hot 100 list. A stunning victory for an African American singer in a music genre that has been persistently imagined as white, even as the music industry hotly debated whether or not the song should be considered country. While riding his groundswell of support, he also came out as gay in a series of tweets. His fans widely celebrated this revelation while the media heralded the news as groundbreaking.

In an era when the nation is divided along political and geographical lines, Lil Nas X’s desire to leverage his stardom into expanding the increasingly narrow definition of the cowboy deserves a deeper look. As I demonstrate in my book Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the America West, the cowboy has always been a contested figure in the American imagination and many groups of people have claimed cowboy identities despite being written out of the popular narrative. For many, the cowboy has always been black and gay.

Working cowhands in the 19th century were often working-class men of color. Influenced by the mounted herding traditions of Mexican vaqueros, American cowboy culture emerged along the cattle trails of former slave states. Enslaved and free black men, alongside Native, Creole, and Mexican people, made up a significant portion of the cattle industry both before and after the Civil War.

These were not solitary heroic figures—they were wage laborers in a rapidly industrializing country. They spent much of their time forming long-lasting relationships with other men whom they depended on for safety and companionship. They worked seasonally in sparsely populated areas in order to drive meat on the hoof towards industrial centers, but they also spent a great deal of time in the West’s rapidly expanding cities.

These classed and racialized realities of working cowboys were present in early versions of western performance, even as the figure of the cowboy steadily became whitewashed by Jim Crow segregation and mythologized in dime novels, Wild West shows, and early rodeo. Black cowboys, whether popular individuals like Bill Pickett, a respected African American rodeo cowboy, or entire black communities, like Boley, Oklahoma, carved out places for themselves in western performance. Feeding an ever growing number of black riding associations and rodeo circuits, like the Anahuac Saltgrass Cowboys Association and the Bill Pickett Invitational, the Boley rodeo helped inspire black cowboys across the country. Likewise, white women, many of them first generation Americans, competed in bronc riding and trick riding in mainstream rodeos in the early twentieth century and formed the Girls Rodeo Association in the 1940s.

During the Cold War, the idea that a cowboy was and had always been a white, heterosexual man solidified in the American imagination. Still, many groups of people, from civic leaders in Oakland to incarcerated people in Texas, used cowboy performance to assert their belonging in the nation. Some of these groups, like the International Gay Rodeo Association, explicitly used the language of civil rights to urge for the reimagining of the cowboy icon. Officially formed in 1985 after a decade of successful gay rodeos in Reno, Nevada, this association tapped into the cowboy craze of Reagan’s America. Gay cloggers, line dancers, two steppers, and rodeoers worked to create spaces where many men and women who had fled rural places in fear could find a connection to the lifeways of their childhoods. Today the association still struggles to normalize the existence of queer cowboys, despite thriving for nearly forty-five years.

Lil Nas X has handled backlash from homophobic fans well. He explained that he understood the consequences of his decision to come out, stating “I know the people who listen to [‘Old Town Road’] the most, they’re not accepting of homosexuality.” Yet as this young man is inundated with both praise and vitriol, told that he is either destined to be forgotten or represents the future, he should not be made to feel alone—the history of the cowboy is the history of black, gay cowboys.

Rebecca Scofield is assistant professor of American history at the University of Idaho and author of Outriders.

If you are attending the 2019 Western History Association conference in Las Vegas, please join us for a special book signing at the University of Washington Press booth (No. 30) on Friday, October 18th at 3 p.m.

Giving Historical Context to Elizabeth Warren’s Plan for Native Americans

On August 16, Senator Elizabeth Warren announced the policy she will pursue for American Indians if she wins the presidency in 2020. While the New York Times called it a plan to “help” Native Americans, the Huffington Post emphasized Warren’s intent to “empower tribal nations,” noting specifically her desire “to reverse” a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that tribal governments have no power to prosecute non-Indian lawbreakers.

Warren promised to seek congressional affirmation that tribes have “inherent jurisdiction over their sovereign territory,” including jurisdiction to arrest, try, and jail non-Indians who commit crimes there. Voters may think that is a radical and unrealistic proposal, but Warren’s choice of words – her call for legislation to “restore” tribes’ jurisdiction over non-Indians – suggests that radical change came with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of existing law. Indeed, a year before the court ruled, the American Indian Policy Commission – a body created by and composed of US lawmakers – adopted virtually the same position on tribal jurisdiction as Warren has. A commission investigation revealed that several dozen tribes were applying their laws to non-Indians as well as Indians, with encouragement from key federal officials.

This historical information is not from Warren’s manifesto; it appears in Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed, my book recounting modern tribes’ efforts to regulate all people and activities within reservation boundaries. Reservations – even those established for Indians’ “exclusive use” – were never entirely closed to non-Indians, but thousands of non-Indians now live on reservations because Congress allowed them to acquire land there in the late 1800s. For five subsequent decades, the undeniably dominant United States tried to dismantle tribal nations and discourage Indian self-governance but did not abolish reservations or deny tribes’ inherent sovereignty. Meanwhile, through several turns of US policy, lawmakers and judges made a jumble of the rules for governing what remained of Indian country.

With stories from Indian perspectives, which the Supreme Court did not consider, Reclaiming the Reservation shows why and how tribes brought the issue of their power over non-Indians to national attention in the 1970s. Several factors had combined to convince them that taking responsibility for reservation conditions was essential for their communities’ survival and was their right under US law. Although tribes featured in the book did want to deter criminal activity, that was a secondary aim – a corollary of their desire to preserve and manage the land and resources on which their future as tribes depended.

Nevertheless, the action that eventually provoked a Supreme Court case about tribes’ jurisdiction over non-Indians was not a land use regulation; it was an arrest and prosecution for assault. A climactic chapter of the book examines the court’s denial of tribal power in Oliphant v. Suquamish Tribe along with the criticism that opinion earned for its blinkered, disingenuous account of relevant history and its evident racial bias. The book does not end there, however, because – as Elizabeth Warren’s familiarity with the issue indicates – tribes’ determination to ensure safe conditions on reservations did not end there. The Supreme Court’s veto of criminal law enforcement has not deterred them from invoking civil power to regulate non-Indians.

As the number of non-Indians who travel, live, or work on Indian reservations has grown in recent years, so have the stakes in the jurisdiction debate. Yet most non-Indian voters today are as uninformed about reservation community histories as the justices were in 1978. Thus, while Senator Warren’s support for tribal power may win her Indian votes, it could alienate more numerous non-Indians, many of them fearful that tribal police and courts will be unfair. Rather than address that fear directly, Warren identified tribal jurisdiction as a sensible response to another, proven threat: criminals are escaping justice through gaps in reservation law enforcement. She cited Native women’s shocking rate of violent victimization, often by non-Natives who never face prosecution – a scandal that motivated Congress in 2013 to approve limited tribal court jurisdiction over Indians’ abusive, non-Indian intimate partners.

That amendment to the Violence Against Women Act was politically feasible because tribal governments are increasingly sophisticated, effective, and accepted as permanent components of an American federation that has three kinds of sovereign polities. Senator Warren’s position on tribal jurisdiction is also a consequence of that historic tribal resurgence – a sign that tribes have persuasively communicated their need for empowerment and their ability to wield power judiciously. Their accomplishment illustrates a central theme of Reclaiming the Reservation: long after Europeans invaded America, Indians continue negotiating with their conquerors for terms of relations that will enable sovereign tribal communities to endure.

Alexandra Harmon is professor of American Indian studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History and editor of The Power of Promises: Perspectives on Pacific Northwest Indian Treaties. Her book Reclaiming the Reservation is part of the Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography.

To hear more about Reclaiming the Reservation, please join us for Professor Harmon’s Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture on November 6th at 3:30 p.m. in UW Allen Library’s Peterson Room.

Photo Essay: ‘Razor Clams’

What is the ultimate Father’s Day gift? Is it buried treasure, or is it spending time with loved ones? Why not both? This year, give Dad a guide to a hobby you can enjoy together.

In Razor Clams, David Berger shares with us his love affair with the glossy, gold-colored Siliqua patula and gets into the nitty-gritty of how to dig, clean, and cook them using his favorite recipes. In the course of his investigation, Berger brings to light the long history of razor clamming as a subsistence, commercial, and recreational activity, and shows the ways it has helped shape both the identity and the psyche of the Pacific Northwest.

Project Razor Clam
Washington State has many symbols – a state song, a state bird, a state tree – and now a move is underway to designate the Pacific razor clam as the state clam. Coastal legislators Brian Blake, Joel Kretz, Steve Tharinger, and Jim Walsh introduced House Bill 3001 in February and they plan to reintroduce the non-partisan bill again during the next legislative session. Rep. Blake, a razor clammer since childhood, says the Pacific razor clam well deserves the official title of state clam for its significance to the state’s history, identity, and economy.

Learn  more about the Pacific razor clam and celebrate the publication of Razor Clams at this event:

July 10 at 1 p.m., Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Redmond Senior Center, Redmond, WA

What drives thousands of people to Pacific coast beaches every year, regardless of the season or the weather? The unique activity known as razor clamming: chasing after the delectable Pacific razor clam, endemic to the West Coast and especially numerous in Washington, Oregon and south-central Alaska. When I first moved to Seattle, I had heard something about the near-mythic activity of razor clamming, and one year I finally tried my hand. I was startled to find a horde lined up on a sandy beach near Ocean Shores, Washington, lanterns and headlamps bobbing in the pre-dawn darkness like so many fireflies, waiting for the low tide. I only managed to get one clam that dig, but I became an aficionado. Over time I learned that razor clamming is sometimes challenging, sometimes cold and wet, but always fun. My wife and I eventually had many questions about the activity and the razor clam itself, which led to writing Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest.

In researching the book I discovered just how important the resource has been for the region’s history and identity. The clams were an important food source for coastal Northwest Native Indians and early settlers. Large-scale commercial exploitation began after 1900 with canned razor clams becoming a cupboard staple. Following WWII, commercial canning petered out, but the undertaking as recreation continued to grow, and today razor clamming regularly attracts folks of all ages armed with shovels, tubes, buckets, nets and a shellfish license. For many people it is their favorite outdoor pursuit, a profound family-centric experience, part ritual and part way of life. Other natural resources have fallen by the wayside, but razor clamming and its time-honored rhythms endure.

The photos below show key aspects of the modern recreational fishery as well as iconic moments from the past.

Digging for Pacific razor clams near Copalis Beach in Washington state. A good low tide and favorable weather can bring out a horde of people. Razor clamming is a quintessentially Northwest phenomenon.

Credit: David Berger

This woman is using the tube to remove a coring of sand and, with luck, a razor clam as well. While the Northwest is famous for shellfish such as oysters and mussels, most of these are farm-raised. Pacific razor clams, by contrast, are only available as a wild food.

Credit: David Berger

An old-timer puts his razor clams in a vintage wire basket once used for gathering eggs. Razor clamming attracts folks of all ages and gender. It’s not too unusual to read in a coastal obituary that “so and so loved to razor clam, and took pride in always getting a limit.”

Credit: David Berger

A family heading to the surf with aluminum tubes and buckets. Razor clamming is a family-centric activity, one of the qualities that make the undertaking so special.

Credit: David Berger

Some people are darn serious about getting their legal daily limit of clams. This gentleman is using a special narrow-bladed shovel to dig for clams. Razor clams are wily and can move down quickly in the soft sand near the water. Shovel diggers by the surf must be quick about their business.

Credit: David Berger

The quarry, the Pacific razor clam. A variety of clams around the world are called razor clams, but this species, Siliqua patula, is only found on the West Coast on certain beaches from northern California to south-central Alaska. It is a large, meaty clam prized for the table. To prepare, razor clams are removed from the shell, cleaned of sand and viscera, and then fried, sautéed or made into chowder.

Credit: David Berger

A razor clam festival in Long Beach, Washington in 1940. A highlight was cooking the “world’s largest clam fritter,” in a giant skillet. The fritter required two hundred pounds of razor clams and twenty dozen eggs.

Credit: Pacific Shellfish Ephemera/Matt Winters Collection

Like salmon, razor clams are an icon of the region and part of cultural identity. In Long Beach, WA, visitors love to take pictures next to a wooden razor clam sculpture as well as the original pan from the 1940s razor clam festival. The razor clam squirts on the hour and is squirting here if you look closely.

Credit: David Berger

A cup of razor-clam chowder at the Razor Clam Festival chowder competition in Ocean Shores. Acknowledging the razor clam’s importance and enthusiastic supporters, Washington state has two razor clam festivals each spring, one at the city of Long Beach, the other at the city of Ocean Shores.

Credit: David Berger

Women and men in 1910 collecting razor clams and Dungeness crabs. The clams are in the wire-wheeled cart in the middle of the photograph. Razor clams have been popular for as long as there have been people on the coast including among the original Native American inhabitants.

Credit: Museum of the North Beach

Commercial clammers with surf sacks harnessed to their bodies. They were collecting primarily for the razor clam canning industry and could easily gather several hundreds of pounds on a good low tide. The canning of razor clams faded away in the post-WWII 1950s era.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the number of people digging razor clams recreationally swelled as folks realized they could drive to the beach with the family, enjoy the seashore, dig some clams, and have a fine meal of the tasty bivalve.

Postcard. Credit: Alan Rammer collection

In Washington and Oregon people are allowed to drive on the beaches. Utilizing a vehicle helps make the activity easier to undertake regardless of the weather, which is sometimes cold, wet, and windy.

Credit: David Berger

Father with his son and a net full of clams, in 2014. Despite the emergence of “nature-deficit disorder” and such distractions as professional sports teams and video games, razor clamming remains a living tradition in the Northwest that attracts many tens of thousands every year.

Credit: David Berger

David Berger has been a contributor to the food feature, “Northwest Taste,” in the Pacific Magazine, and is former art critic for the Seattle Times. He is a recipient of a Metcalf Fellowship for Marine and Environmental Reporting.

Happy 100th birthday, Gordon Hirabayashi!

April 23, 2018 marks what would have been Gordon Hirabayashi’s 100th birthday. As a young man, Gordon learned the hard way that without a vigilant and engaged citizenry, our Constitution is little more than a scrap of paper. He took a stand and became one of the best known resisters to World War II incarceration—and we have much to learn from his example today.

Just days after his 24th birthday, Gordon challenged the government’s right to target and forcibly remove Japanese Americans without due process of law, and turned himself in to the FBI rather than going along with the forced removal. He paid a high price for his act of civil disobedience, spending the next nine months in a jail cell while awaiting trial and appealing his conviction, before being sentenced to prison when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him. It would take more than 40 years to correct that injustice–but Gordon never gave up, and instead continued to fight for the rights of himself and all Americans.

In this excerpt from A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States, Gordon talks about how he arrived at the decision to disobey curfew orders and, later, exclusion orders:

Returning from New York, I became one of the leaders of the UW student conscientious objectors group right after the first peacetime conscription law [Selective Training and Service Act of 1940] was passed. . . . As for confronting the government, with all the information I had, I thought, “They’re wrong!” For me, my position was a positive one, that of desiring to be a conscientious citizen. It was this desire that prevented my participation in the military as a way of achieving peace and democracy and other ideals for which we stood. How could you achieve nonviolence violently and succeed? War never succeeded before. War has always caused more problems than it solved. I can’t say it’s wrong for everybody, but I can’t approve of it for myself. I couldn’t put my life on the line and put my efforts toward war with how I feel.

I wanted to work toward justice and peace in my own way. And there were others with whom I could do that, namely, liberal members of churches and political parties. We had a lot of protection actually. If we had to go to prison, treatment was all right, since the concept of conscientious objection was not ipso facto disloyal.

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, I went to the Quaker meeting as usual. After the meeting, a student came down from an apartment across the street: “I skipped the meeting this morning. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor! We’re at war!” It didn’t sound real. It was unbelievable, but it slowly sank in.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, acting under his emergency war powers, issued Executive Order 9066, which delegated broad powers to the secretary of war as well as U.S. military commanders to protect the national security. That protection included the right to remove any suspect individuals from military areas.

A proclamation, generally referred to as the curfew order, was issued on March 24, 1942, restricting the movement of certain individuals. General John L. DeWitt, who was the top military man in charge of the Western Defense Command, issued the curfew. It was applied to all enemy aliens—Germans, Italians, Japanese, plus non- aliens of Japanese ancestry—confining them to their residences between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., and restricting their travel to areas within a radius of five miles from their homes. The government and military kept using this term “non-alien” in identifying the second-generation Japanese Americans, who, after all, were actually U.S. citizens by birthright. The military seemed to feel more comfortable carrying out these orders if they didn’t have to think about applying them to other Americans. At first I responded as an ordinary citizen and obeyed government orders.

As I thought the situation over, however, I reasoned that a citizen is a member of a state: a person, native or naturalized, who owes allegiance to a state and is entitled to protection from it. An alien is someone who is not a citizen. What, then, is a “non-alien”? I felt forsaken as a citizen to be included in this strange kind of categorization. It appeared that the federal government was more interested in suspending citizens’ rights than in protecting constitutional guarantees regardless of race, creed, or national origins.

At my YMCA dormitory, there were about fifteen of us, mostly locals, but some from different states and a few internationals: one or two Chinese, a Filipino, and some Canadians. They became my time- keepers. “Gordon, it’s five to eight,” and I would rush back from the library, which was about two blocks from my UW dormitory, Eagleson Hall. And then it happened. One night, I thought to myself, “I can’t do that. I have to change my philosophy or I can’t do this, or I’m not true to myself, and if I’m not, I’m not a very good citizen to anybody. Why am I dashing back and those guys are still down there, and I could stay longer and get some more work done, too?”

So I went back to the library, and the first dorm mate who saw me said, “Hey! What are you doing here?”

I said, “What are you doing here?” “Working,” he responded.

I retorted, “Well, I’ve got work to do, too, same as you. Why should I be running back if you’re not running back? We’re both Americans!” My dorm mates never turned me in. They could have. I never was arrested for curfew violation or caught as I was roaming around the University District. If I had been living a half a block away at the Japanese Students Club, I would have been one of the forty or so residents who would be returning at five to eight. If that had been the case,I wonder whether openly confronting the racist curfew order would have occurred to me?

Members of the University of Washington Japanese Students Club in 1941. Courtesy of the UW Nikkei Alumni Association.

If I were to maintain my integrity in terms of my belief that I am a first-class American citizen, but then accepted second-class status, I would have had to accept all kinds of differences. But how is it that I could raise a question about being a first-class citizen when every day I experience differences that restrict my rights because of my ancestry?

The curfew and exclusion orders were issued, making the Nisei subject to those restrictions purely on the grounds of ancestry, but many Nisei found it possible to find a way to accept those orders in the name of loyalty and patriotism. I heard various reports from the Japanese community. Nisei came to have their lunch at the YMCA, and I dropped over to the Japanese Students Club from time to time. I heard that the Issei leaders were being picked up.

Among the community, all sorts of rumors were rife, and the concentration camp fever hit us all. Others will be picked up. There was a kind of resignation among us that because the Issei were prohibited from naturalizing, they were still Japanese subjects. And with war, they were technically enemy aliens. Therefore we expected that some restrictions would fall on them, that they would all be put into some kind of confinement. I remember trying to assure the Issei that, at worst, some things like that could happen, but if they did, we Nisei would look after their needs.

Shortly after the curfew order, the government posted an official proclamation on telephone poles and post office bulletin boards: NOTICE TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY, BOTH ALIEN AND NON-ALIEN. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 57 commanded all Japanese and Japanese Americans out of their homes and into special, totally segregated, camps.

In response to the Army’s Exclusion Order Number 20, residents of Japanese ancestry appeared at Civil Control Station in Sacramento. Photo by Dorothea Lange, Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Soon enough, the districts of Seattle were on a deadline to move all persons of Japanese ancestry, “both alien and non-alien.” All this time I was thinking that when the last bus came, I would probably be on it. About two weeks before my time came, I said to myself, “If I am defying the curfew, how can I accept this thing? This is much worse, the same principle, but much worse in terms of uprooting and denial of our rights, and the suffering it’s going to cause.” While I had to agonize over that for a couple of days, the answer was inevitable. I found it necessary to keep myself internally intact.

I was a senior at the University of Washington. At the end of winter term in March 1942, I dropped out of the university. It was clear to me that I would not be around long enough to complete spring session. I volunteered for the fledgling local American Friends Service Committee, with Floyd Schmoe as my boss. [. . . .]

The top priority was to sensitively respond to needs arising among the Japanese Americans. The Quakers were responding to calls for help. My assignment involved helping those families with little kids whose Issei fathers had been picked up and interned immediately after Pearl Harbor because they were leaders of the community. The mothers were busy closing the houses, arranging for storage, and preparing young children to carry their things on the trek to camp. Gosh! Something seems wrong; helping people to go behind barbed wires and into flimsy shacks. What a mixed-up life this is—the American way. It really horrified me to help these families pack up their belongings, drive them down to the temporary camp at the Western Washington Fairgrounds in Puyallup, and leave them behind barbed wire.

Japanese Americans from Seattle arrive at the Puyallup detention facility, which was also known as “Camp Harmony” (a euphemism coined by army public relations officials days before the first Nikkei arrival and a name in common usage by camp survivors). Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry.

Those who saw me waving goodbye expected to see me within a few weeks, a prisoner myself. Then, somewhere in a period of a few days, it occurred to me that if I can’t tolerate curfew, how can I go with this camp deal, which is much worse? As long as I had come to this stage, I thought I couldn’t do it. It was only about a week before the last evacuee left, but by then, I knew I wouldn’t go! [. . . .]

My parents, who still lived in Thomas, were expecting to be uprooted sometime in May, and because we lived south of Seattle, the family was initially going to be sent to the center for Japanese Americans erected at Pinedale, California. They thought that I would be home in time to join them for the exodus. I had to explain what was happening to me and tell them that I would not be joining them. Because of travel restrictions and demands on my time by the Quaker service work, I had to telephone home to give my parents the unpleasant news.

My mother pleaded, “Please, put your principles aside on this occasion, come home, and move with us. Heaven knows what will happen to you if you confront the government. You are right and I agree with you, but this is war. We’re all facing unknowns. We are going to be moved, but we don’t know where or for how long. The worst of all would be that if we are separated now, we may never get together again.”

That was quite a concern to her if I continued to defy the government. My brother Ed heard Mom crying and begging. She had read The Count of Monte Cristo, and as that was her only reference to jails and prisons, she worried about the consequences of my decision. I might face the firing squad or something like that. I told her, “If I change my mind because of your pressure, it wouldn’t be good. I need to retain my own self-respect, because when I take this stand, I am following what I think is right. I can’t change my views, since I’d rather remain true to my beliefs and be true to you as your son.”

After the war, my brother Ed observed, “Once they had done all they could do to dissuade Gordon and saw they couldn’t change his mind, they became his greatest supporters and were proud of him, in spite of the terrifying thought of his being in prison.”

In a 1999 interview with Densho, Gordon reflected on his mother’s support, and his decision to take a stand:

—

Excerpt from A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States
By Gordon K. Hirabayashi
With James A. Hirabayashi and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

This post originally appeared on the Densho Blog.

#TinyDeskContest Staff Pick: No-No Boy’s “Two Candles In The Dark”

I am a huge National Public Radio nerd (I know), and from late February through the end of April you’ll often find me watching and listening to the wonderful submissions from unsigned talent to the annual Tiny Desk Contest.

I was especially thrilled to see the 2018 submission from No-No Boy, the amazing multimedia project of Brown University doctoral students Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama that takes inspiration from the oral histories of World War II incarceration camp survivors and aims to shine a light on the Asian American experience, including Saporiti’s family’s history living through the Vietnam War and Aoyama’s grandmother’s incarceration in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. (Their submission, “Two Candles In the Dark,” is a featured staff pick this week on the All Songs Considered blog.)

I’ve been a fan of their music and other work for a while now, and my little publicist heart is especially excited that their contest submission video features not only No-No Boy by John Okada, but also Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone, Desert Exile by Yoshiko Uchida, Years of Infamy by Michi Nishiura Weglyn, and A Tragedy of Democracy (Columbia UP) by John Okada coeditor Greg Robinson, among many other scholarly books on the Asian American experience. Can you spot any other university press titles?

I hope you’ll join me in rooting for No-No Boy for Tiny Desk Contest (the winner will be announced in late April). In the meantime, check out the project on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Soundcloud. You can (and should) also listen to interviews with and songs by No-No Boy on Order 9066, an eight-part series podcast from APM Reports and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and anywhere else you are able.

—Casey LaVela, Publicity Director

November 2017 News, Reviews, and Events

News

University Press Week is November 6-11 (next week!) and we can’t wait to celebrate the value of our books and expertise of our authors with this year’s theme, #LookItUP: Knowledge Matters.

Find a run-down of online and offline events on the UP Week site and join in with the #ReadUP and #LookItUP hashtags on social media.

In huge literary news, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated Seattle as a City of Literature in the Creative Cities Network. Please join us in heartily congratulating all involved in the bid, with a special mention to UW Press staffer and Seattle City of Literature cofounder Rebecca Brinbury! Find more from UNESCO, Seattle City of Literature, and the Seattle Review of Books. Read and write on, Seattle!

Monthly Giveaways

Reviews and Interviews


The Atlantic interviews Pumpkin author Cindy Ott in an article about what counts as a pumpkin. WDEL also interviews the author about the connection between pumpkins and fall.


Tell Me Something I Don’t Know with Stephen J. Dubner features Smell Detectives author Melanie Kiechle in a recent podcast episode all about the senses.
High Country News reviews The Tao of Raven by Ernestine Hayes: “As with Blonde Indian, Hayes blurs the boundaries of genre in The Tao of Raven, which braids sharp grandmotherly meditations and gripping personal history into the fictional storyline of another troubled, typical family. . . . Her prose is as insistent as it is lyrical.”—Rob Rich


Inquirer.net USA reviews A Time to Rise edited by Rene Ciria Cruz, Cindy Domingo, and Bruce Occena: “A Time to Rise comes out at an opportune time as another fascist regime emerges in the Philippines. As in the past, former KDP activists have responded to the call to fight back.”—Boying Pimentel


International Examiner also reviews: “This nearly 20-year project is a remarkable documentation of one of the leading revolutionary Asian American Movement organizations. . . . A Time to Rise provides much greater complexity to teaching and learning about both Filipino American and Asian American movement history. . . . More than lessons of the past, A Time to Rise illuminates the way forward to complete unfinished revolutions.”—Tracy Lai


KING 5 Evening features Razor Clams author David Berger in a new series on Wild Food. Langdon Cook (James Beard Award-winning writer and author of books including Upstream and The Mushroom Hunters) reviews the book on his blog: “For the uninitiated, David Berger’s Razor Clams is just the ticket to understanding what all the fuss is about. Berger is a lively guide to Siliqua patula‘s ecology, culinary lore, and historical importance in the region. . . . Readers looking for such nourishment will find much to savor in this account of a beloved bivalve.”


CASSIUS publishes an article by author David J. Leonard about the Las Vegas shooting, white male terrorism, and how race shapes our reaction to gun violence. Playing While White gets a byline mention. The Undefeated also publishes an adaption from the book. The Seattle Times publishes an opinion piece by the author on WSU football coach Mike Leach using his platform to thwart conversation on racial equity rather than advance it, where the book gets a byline mention.


The Seattle Times reviews “Witness to Wartime” and prominently mentions The Hope of Another Spring: “The book and exhibition, together, shed a powerful new light on a troubling chapter in U.S. history. . . . Compelling as both artwork and history.”—Michael Upchurch


The Everett Herald reviews Territorial Hues by David F. Martin (dist. Cascadia Art Museum): “If you love the Northwest and Northwest regional art, be sure to check out Territorial Hues.”—Gale Fiege


Asia Pacific Forum interviews Queering Contemporary Asian American Art editors Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe.


Publishers Weekly interviews author Ingrid Walker in an article about the recent Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association fall tradeshow. High gets a mention.


The Eureka Times-Standard features Defending Giants by Darren F. Speece in an article about the 40th anniversary of the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC). Truthout reviews the book: “Eloquent, inspiring, eminently readable nonfiction with precious lessons for those fighting the ever-greater environmental destruction wrought by corporate greed. . . . A tale fully relevant to here and now.”—Robert James Parsons

New Books

Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake
By Joanna L. Dyl
Foreword by Paul S. Sutter

Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, this close study of San Francisco’s calamitous earthquake and aftermath demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.


Chinook Resilience: Heritage and Cultural Revitalization on the Lower Columbia River
By Jon D. Daehnke
Foreword by Tony A. Johnson

A collaborative ethnography of how the Chinook Indian Nation, whose land and heritage are under assault, continues to move forward and remain culturally strong and resilient. Chinook Resilience offers a tribally relevant, forward-looking, and decolonized approach for the cultural resilience and survival of the Chinook Indian Nation, even in the face of federal nonrecognition.

Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader
Edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey

The foundational essays and new writings collected here take a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS), and demonstrate the ingenuity and dynamism of queer feminist scholarship.


Living Sharia: Law and Practice in Malaysia
By Timothy P. Daniels

What role does sharia play today in Malaysia? Drawing on ethnographic research, this book traces the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics to provide cultural frameworks for understanding sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims in Southeast Asia and beyond.


Mobilizing Krishna’s World: The Writings of Prince Savant Singh of Kishangarh
By Heidi R. M. Pauwels

Through an examination of the life and works of Savant Singh (1697-1764), this remarkable study explores the circulation of ideas and culture in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in north India, revealing how the Rajput prince mobilized soldiers but also used myths, songs, and stories about saints in order to cope with his personal and political crisis.


The Rebirth of Bodh Gaya: Buddhism and the Making of a World Heritage Site
By David Geary

This multilayered historical ethnography of Bodh Gaya—the place of Buddha’s enlightenment in the north Indian state of Bihar—explores the spatial politics surrounding the transformation of the Mahabodhi Temple Complex into a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002.


The Jewish Bible: A Material History
By David Stern

Drawing on the most recent scholarship on the history of the book, this beautifully illustrated material history shows how the Bible has been not only a medium for transmitting its text—the word of God—but a physical object with a meaning of its own.

Events

NOVEMBER

November 1 at 6:30 p.m., Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, Dungeness Valley Lutheran Church, Sequim, WA

November 2 at 6 p.m., Paula Becker, Looking for Betty MacDonald, Washington Athletic Club, Seattle, WA

November 2 at 7 p.m., David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and staff of HistoryLink, Waterway, King County Library System – Mercer Island, Mercer Island, WA

November 4 at 1 p.m., David Berger, Razor Clams, Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, Seward Park Audubon Center, Seattle, WA

November 8 at 6:30 p.m., Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, Dungeness Valley Lutheran Church, Sequim, WA

November 9 at 6 p.m., Zoltán Grossman, Unlikely Alliances, Orca Books, Olympia, WA

November 9 at 12:30 p.m., David Biggs, Quagmire / War in the Land (forthcoming 2018), University of Washington, Southeast Asia Center, Thomson Room 317, Seattle, WA

November 9 at 7 p.m., Ingrid Walker, High, King’s Books, Tacoma, WA

November 10 at 7 p.m., James Longhurst, Bike Battles, BikePGH and Healthy Ride, Pittsburgh, PA

November 10 – 13, Emily T. Yeh, Mapping Shangrila, 2017 Machik Weekend, New York, NY

November 11 at 10 a.m., David Biggs, Quagmire / War in the Land (forthcoming 2018), Seattle Asian Art Museum, Saturday University, History Flows from the Mekong Mud, Seattle Art Museum, Plestcheeff Auditorium (SAM), Seattle, WA (Get tickets)

November 12 at 4 p.m., David B. Williams, Jennifer Ott, and staff of HistoryLink, Waterway, Eastside Heritage Center, Bellevue, WA

November 14, Geeta Patel, Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA

November 16 at 7 p.m., Melanie A. Kiechle, Smell Detectives, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA

November 16 at 6 p.m., Zhi LIN (dist. for Tacoma Art Museum), Tacoma Art Museum, Artist Talk: Conversation with Zhi LIN and Chief Curator Rock Hushka, Tacoma, WA

November 17 at 10 a.m., David E. Wilkins and Shelly Hulse Wilkins, Dismembered, Symposium on Tribal Citizenship, San Diego State University, Scripps Cottage, San Diego, CA

November 18 at 3 p.m., Seattle7Writers Holiday Bookfest with Kathleen Alcalá (The Deepest Roots) and David B. Williams (Seattle Walks), Seattle, WA

November 19 at 2 p.m., Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest, Snoqualmie Valley History Society, King County Library System – North Bend, North Bend, WA

November 22 at 7 p.m., Cindy Domingo, A Time to Rise, with Vincente Rafael (Motherless Tongues), Duterte’s War: The Current Crisis in the Philippines and Beyond, Third Place Books – Seward Park, Seattle, WA

DECEMBER

December 2 at 11 a.m., Zoltán Grossman, Unlikely Alliances, Hoquiam Timberland Library, Hoquiam, WA

December 10 at noon, Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Full Circle Bookstore, Oklahoma City, OK

December 14 at 7 p.m., Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, MA

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