R. Gregory Nokes

A piece of history that deserves to be known- I always thought the Rock Springs massacre in Wyoming was the biggest attack on Chinese in America re: casualties, but the one in Hells Canyon on the Oregon side of the border potentially surpasses that (~34 vs ~25, but it varies depending on which account you read). I picked this up from Book Bin in Corvallis last March, and started reading it this past week in anticipation of a roadtrip from the mid-Willamette Valley to my hometown in eastern Idaho, during which we pass relatively close to the exit for Hells Canyon in Wallowa County, OR via I-84.

What I found most fascinating was Nokes' investigative tack, as he first heard of this in the 1990s and was shocked that there could be a century-long cover up by a small town community. As a fourth generation Chinese American, I'm not as surprised by the blatant racism and/or disregard of personhood towards my ancestors. I've also found it an incredibly curious thing that at one point the west (including the currently-very-homogenous intermountain states of Idaho and Wyoming) had sizable populations of Chinese living and working, but between legal barriers and active campaigns by their white neighbors to drive them out, many either returned to China or were killed. A review of the treatment of Chinese laborers in America from 1880s is worth a review by people of today as there are extensive parallels to 1) the way we discuss migrant labor and continue to Otherize people who do jobs for cheap that most citizens won't and 2) attempts by the current administration to create immigration bans based on nationality for populist concerns instead of actual, verifiable evidence.

I deeply appreciate the dogged effort Nokes went into to find all the information he could on this incident, and to probe into why knowledge was buried (or intentionally forgotten) for so long. The western United States is full of ghosts of people who look like me; let us strive to remember their presence and not repeat the past.… (mais)

A good example of a non-fiction read based on local history. Nokes was a newspaper reported for the Oregonian. Here he investigates an incident in 1889 in the Snake River Canyon of Oregon. More than 30 Chinese miners were brutally murdered. At that time in the US, Chinese lives were considered of so little value that their names were not even recorded and the perpetrators were never brought to justice.
What I found most disturbing in this book was the continued cover-up of the incident, which continued well into this century. Otherwise upstanding citizens were willing to lie and hide evidence in order to protect the "good name" of their community. Scary.… (mais)