The Oregon Tale: Creating and Maintaining a Rural Fantasy Past

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Rural Oregon is a very White place, but it wasn’t always. Over the past several years the Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project (OCDP) has investigated a dozen sites and documented dozens more where Chinese Americans lived, worked, and built community. This paper will explore the ways in which Chinese Oregonians went from 40% of the population in some areas to an exoticized footnote in the historiography of mining and railroad construction. Structural racism and discriminatory legislation played a large part in this erasure, but ahistorical memory allowed communities to infill and reimagine the gaps left by the removal of the Chinese immigrant community from local history. This revised narrative has not only sidelined the many contributions of Chinese Oregonians in the settlement and development of the state, but has helped to create a mythical past celebrating rural Whiteness that has been weaponized in modern politics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the Sticks but Not in the Weeds II: Historical Whitewashing and Modern Reimagining of Rural America’s Fantasy Past   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow