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The Ends of Kinship

Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York

By Sienna R. Craig

For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad have shaped...

Totem Pole Carving

Norman Tait, Bringing a Log to Life

By Vickie Jensen

In 1985, photographer and writer Vickie Jensen spent three months with Nisga’a artist Norman Tait and his crew of young carvers as they transformed a raw cedar log into a forty-two-foot totem pole for the...

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....

Emerald Street

A History of Hip Hop in Seattle

By Daudi Abe. Foreword by Sir Mix-A-Lot

From the first rap battles in Seattle’s Central District to the Grammy stage, hip hop has shaped urban life and the music scene of the Pacific Northwest for more than four decades. In the early...

My Unforgotten Seattle

By Ron Chew. Foreword by Carey Quan Gelernter

Third-generation Seattleite, historian, journalist, and museum visionary Ron Chew spent more than five decades fighting for Asian American and social justice causes in Seattle. In this deeply personal memoir, he documents the tight-knit community he...

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

By Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, Aldona Jonaitis

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to this volume foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of...

The River That Made Seattle

A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish

By BJ Cummings

With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Chief Se’alth and his allies fished and lived in villages here and...

Haboo

Native American Stories from Puget Sound

By Vi Hilbert, Jill La Pointe, Thom Hess

The stories and legends of the Lushootseed-speaking people of Puget Sound represent an important part of the oral tradition by which one generation hands down beliefs, values, and customs to another. Vi Hilbert grew up...

Eat a Bowl of Tea

By Louis Chu. Foreword by Fae Myenne Ng. Introduction by Jeffery Paul Chan

At the close of the Second World War, racist immigration laws trapped enclaves of old men in Chinatowns across the United States, preventing their wives or families from joining them. They took refuge from loneliness...

Proud Raven, Panting Wolf

Carving Alaska's New Deal Totem Parks

By Emily L. Moore

Among Southeast Alaska’s best-known tourist attractions are its totem parks, showcases for monumental wood sculptures by Tlingit and Haida artists. Although the art form is centuries old, the parks date back only to the waning...

Return to the Land of the Head Hunters

Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema

By Brad Evans, Aaron Glass, Bill Holm

Photographer Edward Curtis’s 1914 orchestrally scored melodrama In the Land of the Head Hunters was one of the first US films to feature an Indigenous cast. This landmark of early silent cinema was an intercultural...

Troubling Borders

An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora

By Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Lan Duong, Mariam B. Lam, Kathy L. Nguyen

Juxtaposing short stories, poetry, painting, and photographs, Troubling Borders showcases the creative work of women of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and Filipino ancestry. This thematically arranged collection interrupts borders of categorization and gender, in what...

Protecting Whiteness

Whitelash and the Rejection of Racial Equality

By Cameron D. Lippard, J. Scott Carter, David G. Embrick, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

The standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch, the rise of white identity activists on college campuses, and the viral growth of white nationalist videos on YouTube vividly illustrate the resurgence of white supremacy and overt racism...

Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

By Bertram D. Ashe, Ilka Saal

From Kara Walker’s hellscape antebellum silhouettes to Paul Beatty’s bizarre twist on slavery in The Sellout and from Colson Whitehead’s literal Underground Railroad to Jordan Peele’s body-snatching Get Out, this volume offers commentary on contemporary...

Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North

By Coppélie Cocq and Thomas A. DuBois

Digital media–GIFs, films, TED Talks, tweets, and more–have become integral to daily life and, unsurprisingly, to Indigenous people’s strategies for addressing the historical and ongoing effects of colonization. In Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in...

Quiet Odyssey

A Pioneer Korean Woman in America

By Mary Paik Lee. Edited with an Introduction by Sucheng Chan. Foreword by David K. Yoo

Mary Paik Lee left her native country in 1905, traveling with her parents as a political refugee after Japan imposed control over Korea. Her father worked in the sugar plantations of Hawaii briefly before taking...

School Photos in Liquid Time

Reframing Difference

By Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even...

Fifth Chinese Daughter

By Jade Snow Wong. Introduction by Leslie Bow. Illustrated by Kathryn Uhl

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography portrays her coming-of-age in San Francisco's Chinatown, offering a rich depiction of her immigrant family and her strict upbringing, as well as her rebellion against family and societal expectations for a...

Aiiieeeee!

An Anthology of Asian American Writers

By Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Wong, Tara Fickle

In the eyes of mid-twentieth-century white America, “Aiiieeeee!” was the one-dimensional cry from Asian Americans, their singular expression of all emotions—it signified and perpetuated the idea of Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, self-hating, undesirable, and...

Outriders

Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West

By Rebecca Scofield

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness...