Miss Spokane and the Inland Northwest: Representations of Regions and Gender

Over the past decade, as I have thought and written about regions and regionalism, the interior Pacific Northwest has been the focus of my scholarly attention. It has offered a particular salient example of the ways regions are formed and contested. Traveling through the towns and cities of eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and southeastern British Columbia and poring through archives and repositories of historical records, I have tried to answer some basic questions. How did the people who lived in this particular place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century think of themselves as part of a region? How did they create the boundaries and meanings that defined this place? How did they represent their region?

In undertaking the research, I was motivated by my disquiet with other regional studies, especially those that defined regions strictly by political, economic, or geographical boundaries. Regional definitions created for external administrative needs—the political boundaries of counties and states, for example—often reveal more about the purposes of those living outside the region than about those within. What, I wondered, could the definitions employed by those who lived within this self-identified region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tell us about regionalism? So, I examined the words and actions of a wide range of settlers and residents—including railroad magnates, grave diggers, civic leaders, reservation Indians, promoters, women homesteaders, union organizers, government agents, novelists, farmers, and investors. What I found were different and often competing discourses about who belonged and who did not belong to this place. The process of looking at the region "from the inside out" allowed me to hear the voices of individuals and groups who were often drowned out in a larger national conversation. It also taught me about the contested nature of regional identity. Regions, I came to understand, are best understood as mental constructs, internally defined through conflicts and debates among different groups of people seeking to control an area's identity and direction.

Scholarly examinations of regions can be complicated by the ways people identify with places. The definitions of regions—the attachments that individuals create to a particular place—are often difficult for outsiders to fathom. I am not native to this place. Perhaps because of that, I find myself intrigued with both the power of regional thinking and its contested nature. In this short essay, I'd like to consider the ways regional thinking is shaped, influenced, and complicated by gender, race, and class. To do so I will share two stories about this particular region. These stories are about how insiders think about and represent regions through words and through images.¹

The first story is about the different interpretations of words. This part of the Pacific Northwest has long been labeled the Inland Empire. Although it may be hard for outsiders to see the Inland Empire today, promotional materials since the late nineteenth century have used empirical language to define the region. "It is a singular fact," noted one Spokane, Washington, committee in 1909, "that the people of the Inland Empire center their pride in the term 'Inland Empire' and hold the Inland Empire in their affections above their affections for their state." The term represented a set of regional bonds that tied people and place together. It reflected a belief in a coherent, shared vision of the place and its future. The regional rhetoric, of course, often conflicted with the lived realities of the inhabitants. Yet despite contestations over its meanings, the Inland Empire has evidenced considerable staying power.²

The ideas and meanings associated with the regional term continue to have currency in Spokane and its hinterland. The city has a self-appointed distinctive history as the "Heart of the Inland Empire." The masthead of Spokane's daily newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, described itself for decades as "the voice of the Inland Empire." But in the 1990s, that designation changed. The Chamber of Commerce, the newspaper, and other regional organizations pronounced a name change. Henceforth this region would be known as the "Inland Northwest."

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