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Love Your Asian Body

AIDS Activism in Los Angeles

By Eric C. Wat

The AIDS crisis reshaped life in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s and radicalized a new generation of queer Asian Americans with a broad vision of health equity and sexual freedom. Even amid the...

Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice

By Nik Janos, Corina McKendry

In Portland’s harbor, environmental justice groups challenge the EPA for a more thorough cleanup of the Willamette River. Near Olympia, the Puyallup assert their tribal sovereignty and treaty rights to fish. Seattle housing activists demand...

The $16 Taco

Contested Geographies of Food, Ethnicity, and Gentrification

By Pascale Joassart-Marcelli

Having “discovered” the flavors of barbacoa, bibimbap, bánh mi, sambusas, and pupusas, white middle-class eaters are increasingly venturing into historically segregated neighborhoods in search of “authentic” eateries run by—and for—immigrants and people of color. This...

Jesintel

Living Wisdom from Coast Salish Elders

By Children of the Setting Sun Productions. Edited by Darrell Hillaire and Natasha Frey. Photographs by Fay "Beau" Garreau, Jr.. Contributions by Lynda V. Mapes and Nicole Brown. Afterword by Danita Washington

Dynamic and diverse, Coast Salish culture is bound together by shared values and relations that generate a resilient worldview. Jesintel—“to learn and grow together”—characterizes the spirit of this book, which brings the cultural teachings of...

Signs of Home

The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita

By Barbara Johns. Foreword by Stephen H. Sumida

This beautiful and poignant biography of Issei artist Kamekichi Tokita uses his paintings and wartime diary to vividly illustrate the experiences, uncertainties, joys, and anxieties of Japanese Americans during the World War II internment and...

Barbara Earl Thomas

The Geography of Innocence

By Catharina Manchanda, Halima Taha, and Barbara Earl Thomas

Barbara Earl Thomas’s new body of work carries within it the sediments of history and grapples with race and the color line. At the heart of it lies a story of life and death, hope...

Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist

An Issei Artist’s Journey

By Barbara Johns. Foreword by Gail M. Nomura. Contribution by David F. Martin

Born in Japan, acclaimed Seattle artist Kenjiro Nomura (1896–1956) came to the United States as a child of ten, received artistic recognition by age twenty, and in the 1930s became the best-known artist of Japanese...

Making Livable Worlds

Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice

By Hilda Lloréns

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these ongoing multiple...

Painful Beauty

Tlingit Women, Beadwork, and the Art of Resilience

By Megan A. Smetzer

For over 150 years, Tlingit women artists have beaded colorful, intricately beautiful designs on moccasins, dolls, octopus bags, tunics, and other garments. Painful Beauty suggests that at a time when Indigenous cultural practices were actively...

Love for Liberation

African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground

By Robin J. Hayes

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the...

Racial Erotics

Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire

By C. Winter Han

Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, Racial Erotics shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within...

Art of the Northwest Coast

By Aldona Jonaitis

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often...

Anakú Iwachá

Yakama Legends and Stories

By Virginia R. Beavert, Michelle M. Jacob, Joana W. Jansen

Central to the Yakama oral tradition, storytelling enables Tribal Elders to share lessons, values, and customs with younger generations across the Columbia River plateau and the Pacific Northwest. Drawn from a time before the coming...

Reppin'

Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice

By Keith L. Camacho

From hip-hop artists in the Marshall Islands to innovative multimedia producers in Vanuatu to racial justice writers in Utah, Pacific Islander youth are using radical expression to transform their communities. Exploring multiple perspectives about Pacific...

Mapping Water in Dominica

Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism

By Mark W. Hauser

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748733

Dominica, a place once described as “Nature’s Island,” was rich in biodiversity and seemingly abundant water, but in the eighteenth century a brief, failed attempt by colonial administrators to replace cultivation...

The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence

Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874

By Robert T. Boyd

In the late 1700s when European colonizers arrived on the Northwest Coast, they reported the presence of vigorous, diverse cultures—Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Coast Salish, and Chinookan—with a population conservatively estimated at more...

Louisiana Creole Peoplehood

Afro-Indigeneity and Community

By Rain Prud'homme-Cranford, Darryl Barthé, Andrew J. Jolivétte

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. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness...

Dancing Transnational Feminisms

Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice

By Ananya Chatterjea, Hui Niu Wilcox, Alessandra Lebea Williams, D. Soyini Madison

Through empowered movement that centers the lives, stories, and dreams of marginalized women, Ananya Dance Theatre has revealed how the practice of and commitment to artistic excellence can catalyze social justice. With each performance, this...

Pure Land in the Making

Vietnamese Buddhism in the US Gulf South

By Allison J. Truitt

Since the 1970s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese immigrants have settled in Louisiana, Florida, and other Gulf Coast states, rebuilding lives that were upended by the wars in Indochina. For many, their faith has been...

Latinx Photography in the United States

A Visual History

By Elizabeth Ferrer

Whether at UFW picket lines in California’s Central Valley or capturing summertime street life in East Harlem Latinx photographers have documented fights for dignity and justice as well as the daily lives of ordinary people....