Showing papers in "Pacific Historical Review in 2006"

Indigenous Assimilation and Absorption in the United States and Australia

Abstract: Using a comparative mode of analysis, this article offers a new perspective on Indian assimilation policy in the United States. It focuses on one aspect of assimilation policy common to the United States and Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-the practice of removing indigenous children from their families and communities and placing them in institutions. The article argues that there is a subtle difference in the way that Americans and Australians described "assimilation" taking place-namely, the extent to which white Americans and white Australians openly planned to "whitewash" indigenous identity through interracial relationships. Nevertheless, while children of mixed descent played a very different role in the grandiloquent words used by reformers and politicians to describe their nation9s policies, similar ideas about their role in the absorption and eventual disappearance of the indigenous population into the white one can be discerned in both contexts.

City of the Changers

Abstract: Between the 1880s and the 1930s indigenous people continued to eke out traditional livings along the waterways and shorelines of Seattle9s urbanizing and industrializing landscape. During those same years, however, the city9s civic leaders and urban planners oversaw massive transformations of that landscape, including the creation of a ship canal linking Puget Sound with Lake Washington and the straightening of the Duwamish River. These transformations typified the modernizing ethos that sought to improve nature to ameliorate or even end social conflict. The struggle of the Duwamish and other local indigenous people to survive urban change, as well as the efforts by residents of nearby Indian reservations to maintain connections to places within the city, illustrate the complex, ironic legacies of Seattle9s environmental history. They also show the ways in which urban and Native history are linked through both material and discursive practices.

Environmental Inequality and the Urbanization of West Coast Watersheds

Abstract: In the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Los Angeles, urban development decreased the poor's access to water and marine resources. Modernization in these cities either reduced services to the poor and to ethnic minorities, be they Native Americans, Asian Americans, or Hispanic Americans, or diminished these groups' ability to supplement their incomes by fishing or foraging. Industrial development, shipping channels, and sewers all contributed to a larger pattern of environmental racism and environmental inequity in the United States. This forum contributes to the study of environmental justice by exploring how marginalized peoples adapted to urban growth and the reallocation of resources in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Oyster Growers and Oyster Pirates in San Francisco Bay

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century San Francisco Bay hosted one of the American West9s most valuable fisheries: Not the bay9s native oysters, but Atlantic oysters, shipped across the country by rail and seeded on privately owned tidelands, created private profits and sparked public resistance. Both oyster growers and oyster pirates depended upon a rapidly changing bay ecosystem. Their struggle to possess the bay9s productivity revealed the inqualities of ownership in the American West. An unstable nature and shifting perceptions of San Francisco Bay combined to remake the bay into a place to dump waste rather than to find food. Both growers and pirates disappeared following the collapse of the oyster fishery in the early twentieth century.

The Illusion of Progress

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between pacification and modernization theory during Lyndon B. Johnson's stewardship of the Vietnam War. It uses Johnson's South Vietnamese pacification program, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), to reveal the hopes, intentions, and limitations of the administration's approach. This article contends that CORDS represented Johnson's attempt to define the Vietnam conflict as a progressive expression of the Cold War through modernization theory. It also argues that CORDS's inability to resolve the contradictions implicit in development and security exposed the limits of Johnson's vision for both Vietnam and the Cold War. Finally, the article illustrates how interadministrative debates regarding the intersection of pacification and modernization anticipated intellectual tensions that divided modernization theorists and dominated the field in the 1970s.

Water Use, Ethnic Conflict, and Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Los Angeles

Abstract: Beginning in 1873, Los Angeles replaced zanjas, or open canals, with pipes for irrigation and sewage. From the city's founding, the zanjas had carried irrigation and waste waters between the Los Angeles River and the citizens. Whereas Mexican public philosophy supported maintaining the zanjas for open access and maximal use, European American newcomers championed enclosed pipes as a means to improve sanitation and enhance opportunities for revenue. Yet city governors did not distribute sewer services equally, denying sewerage to Mexican and Chinese Angelenos. In doing so, they established new relationships of institutional, infrastructural, and environmental inequality between brown residents and the city government.

Pirates of the Salish Sea: Labor, Mobility, and Environment in the Transnational West

Abstract: This article illustrates that a transnational perspective reveals how nature and work intertwined to shape workers9 responses to evolving regional class relations in the western Canadian-U.S. borderlands. Labor and environment are intimately connected in all the West9s extractive industries, and workers engaged and learned about the natural world through their labor. In the watery borderland between Washington and British Columbia, they also used the fl uidity of this border to cross the international line and enter more advantageous markets, escape authorities, and express dissatisfaction with class inequities and ethnoracial tensions. These activities earned them the epithets "bandits" and "pirates," especially from U.S. and Canadian canners who sought to manipulate ethnic differences to exploit workers more effectively. The Fraser River salmon fi shery offers a microcosm through which to assess how western labor and environmental history intersect, and what these linkages can reveal about issues of power and human agency.

Mission Intolerable: Harrison Salisbury's Trip to Hanoi and the Limits of Dissent against the Vietnam War

Abstract: Recent scholarship has shown that U.S. policymakers went to war in Vietnam despite full knowledge of problems they would find there. Why then did policymakers set aside their worries and head down a highly uncertain road? This article proposes examining why institutions that criticized U.S. policymaking did not do so as forcefully as they might have. Specifically, it explores constraints that operated within the news media by investigating the controversy that swirled around a series of stories written by Harrison Salisbury and published by the New York Times in 1966 and 1967. These stories, written during and after Salisbury's extraordinary trip to North Vietnam, directly challenged several of the Johnson administration's claims about the war. Predictably, administration officials criticized the series. More surprisingly, Salisbury encountered condemnation from other publications and even his own paper. The article describes these critiques and discusses constraints on independent, critical reporting within the media.

The Alaska Pipeline as an Internal Improvement, 1969-1973

Abstract: Over four years after oil companies first applied for a permit, Congress authorized the Alaska Oil Pipeline in November 1973. Running from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific, the pipeline crossed 600 miles of federal land, which made it a "major action significantly affecting the environment," thus triggering an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Standard accounts tell of revolutionary environmental laws running into the economic reality of the 1970s. What has been lost in the telling is that the pipeline approval offered Congress an opportunity to investigate the wisdom of a proposed internal improvement. The pipeline controversy was not just the first battle of the environmental decade. It also continued nearly two centuries of debate over internal improvements, public financing of private investments, federal incorporation, monopoly charters, and national security. The pipeline approval was as much a decision about political economy as it was an environmental policy decision.

Still Potentially Dangerous in Some Quarters

Abstract: The charges that led Gen. John L. DeWitt to deport Sylvester Andriano from the Western Defense Region in 1942 were bogus, the product of an anti-Catholic campaign by Communist Party activists, Masonic anti-Catholics in the Italian community, and recent Italian anti-Fascist exiles (fuorusciti). This wartime abuse of civil rights in the name of national security grew from a discourse of demonizing the religious, not solely the racial and ethnic, Other. The article makes several arguments about ethnicity and religion on the Pacific Coast: Faith-based political activism played a significant role in the region9s urban political culture, as did cultural politics between Catholics and anti-Catholics. Irish American Catholic clergy welcomed, rather than excluded, Italian American laymen into the Church9s highest councils in San Francisco, where the Irish had long dominated civic life. However, Italian Americans were bitterly divided between devout Catholics and disaffected anti-clericals.

Loyalty Questioned: Nuevomexicanos in the Great War

Abstract: Over four years after oil companies first applied for a permit, Congress authorized the Alaska Oil Pipeline in November 1973. Running from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific, the pipeline crossed 600 miles of federal land, which made it a "major action significantly affecting the environment," thus triggering an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Standard accounts tell of revolutionary environmental laws running into the economic reality of the 1970s. What has been lost in the telling is that the pipeline approval offered Congress an opportunity to investigate the wisdom of a proposed internal improvement. The pipeline controversy was not just the first battle of the environmental decade. It also continued nearly two centuries of debate over internal improvements, public financing of private investments, federal incorporation, monopoly charters, and national security. The pipeline approval was as much a decision about political economy as it was an environmental policy decision.

Who Saved the Emperor

Abstract: The dominant school of literature on the occupation of Japan stresses the role of Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur in "saving" Hirohito and the imperial institution from the harsh policy intended by officials in Washington and the American public. MacArthur9s role in emperor policy was actually much less influential than is commonly believed. Washington9s choice to retain Hirohito and the imperial institution evolved out of a wartime assumption that the emperor was central to U.S. plans for postwar Japan and East Asia. Rather than a flash of inspiration from the supreme commander, American policy toward the emperor represented a confluence of motivations that crystallized in the early days of the occupation.

Is Vancouver the Future or the Past? Asian Migrants and White Supremacy

Abstract: In the two decades since the World Exposition of 1986 put Vancouver, British Columbia, on the map as a global tourist destination, the city has achieved an almost iconic status as the harbinger of a coming transnational Pacific world. Utilizing incentives to attract wealthy migrants and foreign capital investment, Vancouver rapidly shed its obscurity as the resource-based, provincial backwater at the end of the transcontinental railroad. The future of Vancouver would no longer be as a lonely western outpost of British and European civilization—it would achieve its destiny as the catalyst of Canada’s new engagement with Asia and what was now called the “Pacific Rim.” In the decade that followed Expo 86, policy initiatives 04-C3807-ESS 4/17/06 10:37 AM Page 307

Dancing on the Rim, Tiptoeing through Minefields

Abstract: This article uses border crossings by the author9s family to illustrate the problems of historical narratives that do not consider who and what exists beyond national borders, as well as across conceptual boundaries of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. The national U.S. narrative rarely crosses the borders of what became three North American nations, or those between a pre-colonial North American past and a post-colonial national history, or profound social divisions. Histories that cross national and social boundaries clarify what Sarah Carter terms their "categories and terrains of exclusion." Fears triggered by the attacks of September 11, 2001, revealed changing constructions of the U.S.-Canadian border. Without stories that cross national and social divides, it is hard to recognize humanity across those borders or to imagine a connected future. Such histories must recognize analytic categories and narratives divided and erased by social and national borders, and the unequal power inscribed in androcentric, ethnocentric, and nationalist narratives.

The Two Mrs. Cheneys

Abstract: This commentary reviews Sisters, Lynne Cheney's Western historical novel The novel seems to be at odds with Cheney's conservative political views It considers feminism, lesbianism, and Native Americans in a positive light and is critical of US empire and capitalism as practiced on the early Wyoming frontier The author considers why Cheney may have felt freer to explore such topics in literature, even though she has not embraced these liberal positions in her political speeches and writings over the years There seem to be two Mrs Cheneys, the creative writer and free-thinker, and the conservative wife of the Republican Vice President

Lange's Antecedents: The Emergence of Social Documentary Photography of California's Farmworkers

Abstract: Photographers focusing on California farmworkers are often described as heirs to a tradition that emerged midway through the Great Depression, mainly from the heroic efforts of one iconic photographer, Dorothea Lange. By calling attention to a diverse group of underappreciated antecedents who have never been linked together, this article presents a more sequential, less tidy account of how social documentary photography focused on farmworkers in the Golden State in the years before Lange moved out of her studio into the countryside. Without ever referring to their work as social documentary photography, these photographers, largely on their own and with little knowledge of one another, broke with standard commercial practices, turned a probing eye on the fields, recorded history as it unfolded, and created a visually stunning, realistic, often uncomfortable body of work.