A Reflection on Narratives of Diversity and Whiteness in Present-Day Idaho
By Kristin Green, Ph.D. Candidate, University of New Hampshire
Keywords: Migration, Whiteness, Idaho Diversity, Tribes, National Forest Lands
I recently visited Idaho City—a historic mining town near Boise, Idaho—where a sign struck me,
“Boise Basin’s population was diverse and international during the 1860’s gold rush,” it read, “By 1870, Chinese immigrants comprised nearly half the basin’s population of four thousand people.” As I read this sign, I thought of a phrase recently uttered by a friend and a phrase I’ve used myself: “Idaho is so white.”
The Boise Basin isn’t singular; Idaho County, located in a completely different part of the state, had a similar population, of which at least half were Chinese immigrants. I’d been shocked when I learned about it several years ago—I’d had no idea of the extensive role of Chinese miners in Idaho’s mining history. I was shocked because the information contradicted what I thought I generally knew about mining history across the Inter-Mountain West, where I’d lived for 14 years. How could my ‘broad sense’ have been so misguided? I believe my false understanding was rooted in narratives of Idaho’s whiteness, yet historical and contemporary population demographics complicate this narrative.
According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Idaho’s Diversity Index—the probability of two people being from different race and ethnicity groups when selected at random—is 35.9% (up from 28.2% in 2010); Owyhee County is 25.6% Latino and Jerome County is 37.9% Latino; and five federally recognized Tribes hold lands within the area currently known as Idaho – the Nez Perce, the Coeur d’Alene, the Shoshone-Bannock, the Shoshone-Paiute, and the Kootenai. Once Idaho’s ‘whiteness’ is understood as something other than a ubiquitous population trend, narratives like “Idaho is so white” can be critically examined. Moreover, such narratives perpetuate false normativity with contemporary consequences for respecting Indigenous rights.
Importantly, ‘observations’ of Idaho’s whiteness are often expressed with an air of criticism or apology, perhaps acknowledging a settler colonial history as if to suggest– ‘Idaho hasn’t always been white, but it has been for the last 150 years.’
This perspective conceals ongoing settler-colonialism, fitting with Audra Simpson’s articulation of “a colonial history of what had seemed so very ‘eventful’ and episodic, but was, in fact, processual and structural” where ‘settler time’ represents “the dominance of the present by some over others, and the unequal power to define what matters, who matters, what pasts are alive and when they die” (2017, p. 4, 5). Temporal perspectives are key in asserting settler normativity (Simpson, 2017), fixing Indigenous claims to the past and weakening them in the present (Bruyneel,2007), and shaping conceptions of environmental governance (Whyte, 2021). My research thus considers how diversity has existed and shifted throughout Idaho since the beginning of colonialism and upend ‘settler time’ in multiple contexts.
My dissertation research specifically focuses on stewardship of lands and waters within Nimiipuu (Nez Perce people) homelands now claimed as part of the National Forest System. The Nez Perce Tribe, like other Tribal Nations in the region, has a treaty that affirms continuous rights within National Forests and other “open and unclaimed lands” (Treaty of 1855), including the right to hunt and fish.
Tribal exercising of these rights is affected by other management activities on National Forest lands, where there is sometimes an explicit directive to preserve “the economic and social history of the region and the American West” (P.L. 96-199, 1975), thus entangling historical narratives and contemporary management. Yet, whose American West is represented and over what timeframes is not self-evident.
Popular narratives are critical to these questions and essential to the current recognition of continuous treaty rights on National Forest lands. If dominant conceptions of the past are rooted in power, then grappling with these narratives is necessary to ensure just futures.
— Kristin Green
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