659 Reviews of union loggers looked at Spotted Owl protection legislation in the 1980s as an attack on their way of life as jobs were lost and towns deserted. Oregon and Washington’s forests became a veritable battleground between logging companies and their employees and groups pushing for environmental protectionism. In a region where union workers like the Wobblies once concerned themselves with issues of environmental and socio-economic justice, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO)–dominated union workers in the latter twentieth century rallied around issues of job preservation and anti-environmentalism. Loomis’s research utilizes an impressive amount of archival sources, including newspapers , journals, trial notes, military reports, magazines, correspondence, and corporate papers, among others. Unlike some other well-researched historical narratives, Empire of Timber gives commentary on contemporary social and ecological problems from a historical perspective, as well as a possible means to help solve some of those problems. Empire of Timber is well-written and arduously researched and should be on the reading list of anyone interested in the history of labor, environment, nationalism, or social causes. Robert M. Lambeth University of Montana ROOTS AND REFLECTIONS: SOUTH ASIANS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Amy Bhatt and Nalini Iyer foreward by Deepa Banerjee University of Washington Press, in association with the South Asian Oral History Project and the University of Washington Libraries, Seattle and London, 2014. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 299 pages. $20.00, paper. What characterized the migration experiences of South Asian immigrants in the Pacific Northwest ? How did self-identified Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Jains, Christians, and others, often with deep national affiliations to their homelands, navigate their new lives, careers, and communities? Amy Bhatt and Nalini Iyer address these and other significant questions in Roots and Reflections. While their attention is fixed on the Seattle metro area, Bhatt and Iyer analyze immigrant experiences and community formation alongside broader geopolitical and transnational histories, effectively decentering historical scholarship on South Asian immigrants that has too often focused on major urban locations such as Chicago, New York City, and in California. The result is an impressive study that demonstrates the value and relevance of oral history and communitybased academic scholarship. Drawing on thirty oral histories collected since 2005 by the South Asian Oral History Project (SAOHP) at the University of Washington Libraries, the authors incorporate a rather impressive array of historical methodologies. They highlight the extent to which migration , settlement, education, and employment informed South Asians’ experiences in and perceptions of the Northwest and, conversely, the impact these immigrants had on the growth and distinctiveness of the region. Bhatt and Iyer emphasize the explanatory power of oral history as “a form of storytelling” that “provides insight into the everyday . . . matters that give texture to lives.” The result, they contend, is “a more nuanced understanding of how communities are formed and how individuals situate themselves within larger cultural phenomena” (p. 9). The book opens with a discussion of the earliest South Asian immigrants to the Northwest : migrant workers and students from the Punjab region between modern-day India and Pakistan who settled in Bellingham, Everett, Seattle, and Astoria during the decades prior to World War II. Subsequent chapters rely heavily on the SAOHP collection, as narrators reflect on migration networks and discuss their experiences in the Seattle-area through the prism of generational and gender differences, family formation, employment challenges, and the transmission of culture and traditions to younger South Asians. Push and pull factors ranged from the painful legacies of British colonialism; economic downturns in South Asian countries during decolonization; opportunities at U.S. universities; and chain migrations of the Indian Subcontinent’s professional classes, who were marshaled into medical, military, scientific, and technological industries during the Cold War. Changes to fed- 660 OHQ vol. 117, no. 4 eral laws had a profound impact on migration, as the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 (misspelled “Cellar” in the book) removed barriers to immigration throughout South Asia by eliminating the quota system based on national origins (a holdover from the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921) and establishing preference visa categories that emphasized immigrants’ employment skills as well as family reunification. Changes in national...
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Mar 25, 2024
Serra Sevde Hatipoglu + 2
Open Access
