Just looking at the Pacific Northwest's many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much ...of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s.Of Forests and Fieldstells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country.
Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation.Of Forests and Fieldsnot only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era.
Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history.
www.mariosifuentez.com
Immigrants from South Asia first began settling in Washington and Oregon in the nineteenth century, but because of restrictions placed on Asian immigration to the United States in the early twentieth ...century, the vast majority have come to the region since World War II.Roots and Reflectionsuses oral history to show how South Asian immigrant experiences were shaped by the region and how they differed over time and across generations. It includes the stories of immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka who arrived from the end of World War II through the 1980s.
Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHjtOvH0YdU&list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&index=3&feature=plcp
At the turn of the twentieth century, two distinct, yet at times overlapping, male same-sex sexual subcultures had emerged in the Pacific Northwest: one among the men and boys who toiled in the ...region's logging, fishing, mining, farming, and railroad-building industries; the other among the young urban white-collar workers of the emerging corporate order. Boag draws on police logs, court records, and newspaper accounts to create a vivid picture of the lives of these men and youths--their sexual practices, cultural networks, cross-class relations, variations in rural and urban experiences, and ethnic and racial influences.
Whether the subject is the plants that grow there, the animals that live there, the rivers that run there, or the people he has known there, Paul Lindholdt'sIn Earshot of Waterilluminates the Pacific ...Northwest in vivid detail. Lindholdt writes with the precision of a naturalist, the critical eye of an ecologist, the affection of an apologist, and the self-revelation and self-awareness of a personal essayist in the manner of Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Derrick Jensen, John McPhee, Robert Michael Pyle, and Kathleen Dean Moore.
Exploring both the literal and literary sense of place, with particular emphasis on environmental issues and politics in the far Northwest, Lindholdt weds passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark, the log of Captain James Cook, the novelized memoir of Theodore Winthrop, and Bureau of Reclamation records growing from the paintings that the agency commissioned to publicize its dams in the 1960s and 1970s, to tell ecological and personal histories of the region he knows and loves.
In Lindholdt's beautiful prose, America's environmental legacies-those inherited from his blood relatives as well as those from the influences of mass culture-and illuminations of the hazards of neglecting nature's warning signs blur and merge and reemerge in new forms. Themes of fathers and sons layer the book, as well-the narrator as father and as son-interwoven with a call to responsible social activism with appeals to reason and emotion. Like water itself,In Earshot of Watercascades across boundaries and blends genres, at once learned and literary.
On September 27, 1975, activist Bernie Whitebear (Sin Aikst) and Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman broke ground on former Fort Lawton lands, just outside Seattle Washington, for the construction of the ...Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. The groundbreaking was the culmination of years of negotiations and legal wrangling between several government entities and the United Indians of All Tribes, the group that occupied the Fort lands in 1970. The peaceful event and sense of co-operation stood in marked contrast to the turbulent and sometimes violent occupation of the lands years before. Native Americans who joined the UIAT came from all parts of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Inspired by the Civil Rights and protest era of the 1960s and 1970s, they squared off with local and federal government to demand the protection of civil and political rights and better social services. Both the scope and the purpose of this book are manifold. The first purpose is to challenge the predominant narrative of Anglo American colonization in the region and re-assert self-determination by re-defining the relationship between Pacific Northwest Native Americans, the larger population of Washington State, and government itself. The second purpose is to illustrate the growth in Pan-Indian/Pan-Tribal activism in the second half of the twentieth century in an attempt to place the Pacific Northwest Native American protests into a broader context and to amend the scholarly and popular trope which characterizes the Red Power movement of the 1960s as the creation of the American Indian Movement (AIM). In this book, casual students of history as well as academics will find that Fort Lawton represents the zone of conflict and compromise occupied by Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest in their ongoing struggle with colonial society.
An ethnographic analysis of the social movement challenging industrial food systems and re-imagining social justice within a shifting global legal landscape.
Native Hawaiians arrived in the Pacific Northwest as early as 1787. Some went out of curiosity; many others were recruited as seamen or as workers in the fur trade. By the end of the nineteenth ...century more than a thousand men and women had journeyed across the Pacific, but the stories of these extraordinary individuals have gone largely unrecorded in Hawaiian or Western sources. Through painstaking archival work in British Columbia, Oregon, California, and Hawaii, Jean Barman and Bruce Watson pieced together what is known about these sailors, laborers, and settlers from 1787 to 1898, the year the Hawaiian Islands were annexed to the United States. In addition, the authors include descriptive biographical entries on some eight hundred Native Hawaiians, a remarkable and invaluable complement to their narrative history.
"Kanakas" (as indigenous Hawaiians were called) formed the backbone of the fur trade along with French Canadians and Scots. As the trade waned and most of their countrymen returned home, several hundred men with indigenous wives raised families and formed settlements throughout the Pacific Northwest. Today their descendants remain proud of their distinctive heritage. The resourcefulness of these pioneers in the face of harsh physical conditions and racism challenges the early Western perception that Native Hawaiians were indolent and easily exploited.
Scholars and others interested in a number of fields-Hawaiian history, Pacific Islander studies, Western U.S. and Western Canadian history, diaspora studies-will find Leaving Paradise an indispensable work.
During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. ...Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago-- choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites.Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources. Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.
Prolonged violence in the Horn of Africa, the northeastern corner of the continent, has led growing numbers of Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Somalis to flee to the United States. Despite the enmity ...created by centuries of conflict, they often find themselves living as neighbors in their adopted cities, with their children as class-mates in school. In many ways, they are successfully navigating life in their new home; however, they continue to struggle to bridge old ethnic divisions and find salaam, or peace, with one another. News from home fuels historical grievances and perpetuates tensions within their communities, delaying acculturation, undermining attempts at reconciliation, and sabotaging the opportunity to reach the American Dream.
In conversations with forty East African immigrants living in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, Sandra Chait captures the immigrants' struggle for identity in the face of competing stories and documents how some individuals have been able to transcend the ghosts from the past and extend a tentative hand to their former enemies.
