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REVIEWS
HAUNTED BY WATERS: A JOURNEY THROUGH RACE AND PLACE IN THE AMERICAN WEST
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by Robert T. Hayashi
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| University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2007. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 214 pages. $34.95 cloth. |
| This is one of the best books on the history of the American West that I have ever read. Hayashi brilliantly blends past, present, and place in this well written and incisive book. |
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Haunted by Waters has four broad chapters on Idaho's history: Jefferson's vision for the West; Japanese Americans in early Idaho; the internment center of Minidoka; and an exploration of how Shoshone, Mormons, and Japanese Americans have shaped and been shaped by Idaho's landscape. Each of these chapters is interspersed with Hayashi's meditations on race, water, and modern culture as he travels across Idaho searching for streams rich in trout and for his own and our collective past. |
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Hayashi begins with a perceptive investigation of Jefferson's vision of a West dominated by rectangular, white-owned farms, an expectation starkly at odds with the geographic reality of arid, mountainous Idaho. Jefferson, he notes, "was a man of the Enlightenment who believed knowledge was best grounded in rational scientific inquiry, but who also held deterministic environmentalist views based upon a Romantic sensibility that made logic and illogic companion pieces" (p. 19). Nor did Jefferson anticipate that people from China would constitute more than a fourth of Idaho's non-Indian population in 1870. Hayashi excels at detecting the delicious interplay between the mythic and actual West, such as shopping at a "Circle K, that curious blend of modern American convenience and Old West symbolism" located at the intersection of "Vista and Nez Perce" (p. 38). |
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Much of Haunted by Waters is devoted to tracing the history of Idaho's Japanese Americans, people who came to work on railroads and sugar-beet farms, people who often tried and succeeded at making themselves at home here. Hayashi writes eloquently of how difficult it is to reconstruct the lives of these brave and hidden pioneers. The record becomes clearer and more patently racist during World War II, when Japanese Americans in California, Oregon, and Washington were forced into places like Minidoka, Idaho. Hayashi deftly depicts internment from the perspective of its residents: people who raised crops, protested the construction of a barbed-wire enclosure, created works of art, and nurtured a community under very unpromising circumstances. Indeed, many resented the forced closure of the camp. Camp administrators were determined, in the words of a historian of the War Relocation Authority, to accomplish "as broad a distribution of the Japanese as possible," a decision that served to further fragment Japanese-American communities and their histories (p. 107). Indeed, the agency's director moved on to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he would promote termination, the ill-conceived breaking up of reservations and tribalism. |
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Haunted by Waters closes with a chapter on how Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and communalistic Mormons have persisted in a state where powerful white residents often resented and resisted their presence. |
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Though not a conventional history, this book is informed and supported by sound historical scholarship and relevant sources. Most of all, it is a personable and penetrating exploration of how people of color, particularly Japanese Americans, have made their mark on the history and the landscape of a place whose leaders sought to marginalize and expel them. Part of the burden of Pacific Northwest history is for all of us to come to terms with this weighty and largely unacknowledged legacy of racism and other expressions of white dominance. Robert Hayashi has provided us with an invaluable tool for doing just that. |
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| DAVID PETERSON DEL MAR
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| Portland, Oregon |
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