Small Town Charm: Opportunities, Challenges, and Contested Belonging in Rural Spaces

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site represents one of the key interpretive hubs for Chinese heritage in the Pacific Northwest. Once home to the John Day Chinatown, its residents provided medical care, groceries, automobiles, and employment to the citizens of eastern Oregon, and were heavily involved in the mining and ranching industries –the main economic drivers of the region. Despite this, much of this story has been lost or distilled down to racialized tropes and paternalistic vignettes. Today, the early Chinese American residents are often lumped in as generic unskilled labor, and the many ways in which they supported and participated in the larger community have been erased or ignored. When critically examined, the material culture and archival data presents a more nuanced and complex story of the Chinese American experience in Eastern Oregon, and highlights how much has been lost in the telling of the story over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds: Diversity, Remembrance, and the Forging of the Rural American West

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow