CHINESE DIASPORA ARCHAEOLOGY IN NORTH AMERICA by Chelsea Rose J. Ryan Kennedy (review)

314 OHQ vol. 122, no. 3 Canyon became subject to “more powerful and abstract outside forces,” to which “residents increasingly responded with anxiety, alarm, and anger” (p. 7). Yet, he does not provide a convincing conceptual framework to explain the qualitative shift in residents’ cultural disposition . If settlers had always been dependent on “outside” capital and markets for their livelihoods in one way or another, it made me wonder whether there was something else to their fears than the greater scale of external investment and, perhaps, influence. Although he takes aim at the contradictions of local “us versus them” sentiments on several occasions, Reinhardt himself sometimes slips uncomfortably into analysis that utilizes the category of “outsider” uncritically. In this way, particularly in the epilogue, he sometimes seems to lose sight of the fact that all of today’s non-Native residents (or their ancestors) were once outsiders themselves. Indeed, in their own small way, they transformed the North Santiam Canyon by serving as capitalism’s vanguard. The car traffic and Dollar General stores that they (and he) may bemoan are the logical outcome of the profit motive they introduced. This begs the question: At what point did settlers become “insiders?” Reinhardt’s ambiguous, implicit answer — that, in effect, the residents’ identity has always been reactionary, if worthy of our sympathy — undercuts his otherwise precise bottom-up history of “struggle.” In the end, therefore, I struggled to put my finger on the exact shape of the “struggle” that Reinhardt sees: To what ends are they (or we) struggling? The high stakes of answering such questions about the social, economic, and ecological future of the North Santiam Canyon have become all the more apparent after the summer of 2020, in which so much of that heritage went up in smoke. While the ultimate consequences remain to be seen, what is clear is that in order to save such spaces — whether from “outsiders ” or, to quote the writer Bernard DeVoto, from “The West against Itself” — it will take passionate, professional, and engaged voices like Reinhardt’s as well as a society willing to look unflinchingly at the ways in which we are all implicated in the destruction of those places even as we struggle to make them accessible, livable, and sustainable. Taylor E. Rose Yale University CHINESE DIASPORA ARCHAEOLOGY IN NORTH AMERICA edited by Chelsea Rose and J. Ryan Kennedy University of Florida Press, Gainesville, 2020. Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, index. 368 pages. $95.00, cloth. While researching my book Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace, I relied on archaeological studies to augment historians’ traditional arsenal of archival sources, public records, and oral histories. It was, therefore, a true pleasure to revisit this dynamic area of study in Chelsea Rose and J. Ryan Kennedy’s collection of essays, Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in North America. The fourteen chapters of this volume offer a wide-ranging, accessibly written overview that showcases its many exciting possibilities of the field. Each essay speaks to critical conceptual, practical, and even personal challenges archaeologists bring to the study of Chinese lived experiences in Exclusion-era North America. In their introduction, Rose and Kennedy state their intention to challenge prior conventions of the field by emphasizing transnationalism, heterogeneity within the community, and the significance of inter-ethnic relations; and they succeed. Each essay in the volume does just that from different vantage points and, importantly , at different scales of human experience. One can compare Douglas E. Ross’s thoughtful and theory-driven consideration of diaspora as a framework for Chinese archaeology to Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis’s finely grained and deeply empathetic analysis of elderly Chi- 316 OHQ vol. 122, no. 3 nese men who immigrated to California in their twenties and chose to live out their days in allbut -forgotten corners of the Sacramento Delta. A review of 900 words cannot do justice to the richness and variety of the essays, so I will offer more detailed discussion of just a few to offer a sense of the volume’s impressive scope and variety. Although nearly all essays broach the subject of Chinese American transnationalism, the concept is rendered most concrete...