Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM [1273] Article JOHN SHUFORD* “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest Introduction .................................................................................... 1274  I. Terms, Concepts, and Meanings: A Few Words ................. 1275  II. “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town” ................ 1279  III. Where, or Who and What, Is the Inland Northwest? ........... 1283    * John Shuford, J.D., Ph.D., Director, Institute for Hate Studies, Lecturer in Philosophy, and Adjunct Professor of Law, Gonzaga University. I am forever grateful to the late Professor Keith Aoki, who passed away on April 26, 2011. I am a better person for having had opportunities to learn from and work with Keith as his student, mentee, colleague, coauthor, and friend for more than a decade. I am also grateful to Keith’s many colleagues and friends, especially Professors Steven W. Bender and Ibrahim Gassama, who collectively form a vibrant, caring, intellectual, and professional community committed to extending Keith’s thought and advancing his unique contributions. I wish to thank the editorial staff at the Oregon Law Review, all of whom helped bring this Article to completion, as well as Margaret Hallock and the University of Oregon’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics for hosting (un)Bound by Law: The Keith Aoki Memorial Symposium and Celebration of Life on October 1, 2011. Earlier drafts of this Article were presented at the Keith Aoki Memorial Symposium and at the Gonzaga University School of Law’s Race and Criminal Justice in the West Conference on September 24, 2011. Thanks to my partner, Alex, for her keen editorial and intellectual contribution here and loving support always; our little daughter Juliana for her remarkable patience and good humor despite too often seeing only the back of my head during this most unusual past year; and to my assistant, SaeRom Konecky, for her excellent research and editorial support. Finally, I wish to thank Mona Aoki, who helped gather, box, and ship books, articles, and papers that I used to complete this Article and two others in the past year that complete my work with Keith and extend his influence. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1274 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 IV. Whitopias of the Inland Northwest ...................................... 1286  V. Organized Hatred and Extremism—The Inland Northwest Within the Pacific Northwest .............................................. 1293  VI. Company Towns in the Pacific Northwest—Histories of Xenophobia, Racial Discrimination, and Domestic Terrorism ............................................................................. 1297  VII. Secessionism and Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest ..... 1305  Conclusion: Insights and Hopes ..................................................... 1315  INTRODUCTION [T]he world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealized past.1 The past is never dead. It’s not even past.2 his Article relates “the Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town,” which is unfolding somewhere in the Inland Northwest3 within the American Pacific Northwest. Insofar as the tale involves a federally recognized tribe, it is a tale that one might tell with attention to Indian law and policy, tribal sovereignty, and tribal interests and histories. However, this tale also implicates a nexus of historical influences and contemporary phenomena, and this Article presents the tale as an heuristic tool for surfacing and exploring some of these influences and phenomena, including white “amenity” in-migration, “whitopia” communities, company towns, secessionism, xenophobia and hate, racial exclusion and discrimination, domestic terrorism, and contested regionalisms.4 Some of these influences and phenomena have deep roots; others have unsettling current manifestations in the Inland Northwest region and throughout the Pacific Northwest (or   1 ROBERTSON DAVIES, A VOICE FROM THE ATTIC 351 (1960). 2 WILLIAM FAULKNER, REQUIEM FOR A NUN 92 (1951). 3 For reasons that readers will discern, the author is not at liberty to identify the locale, communities, and actors involved. 4 It is a kind of tale that Keith Aoki, with his uncanny ability to make connections others often missed, would have appreciated for many reasons, and one that he helped me to discern, scrutinize, appreciate, and articulate. Keith’s particular genius was seeing and showing us how situations that at first might appear to be nothing more than anachronistic, locale-bound conflicts have much to teach us about dynamics of white political, legal, economic, and cultural activity, both historic and contemporary, and how these dynamics bear on local and regional conditions of immigration and in-migration by persons of color. It is a kind of tale that calls forth the cross-conversational modes and methodologies of narrating, analyzing, drawing out meanings, advancing questions and insights, noting ironies, and offering conclusions and recommendations informed by critical race theory, cultural geography, critical regionalism, state and local government law, and translocalism, all of which Keith brought to bear and directly shaped in legal scholarship. T Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1275 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest Cascadia,5 as it is now sometimes called6). Having presented the tale, and having worked to surface and explore facets of past factors, present conditions, and future possibilities that it implicates, the Article concludes with five insights and a few hopes. I TERMS, CONCEPTS, AND MEANINGS: A FEW WORDS Plato called rhetoric “the art of winning the soul by discourse,”7 and Aristotle, his greatest student, called it “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all the available means of persuasion.”8 Whether the methods of persuasive rhetoric happen to lie in making appeals to reason, emotion, or character, the point is that terms, concepts, and meanings are profoundly rhetorical—that is, their aims are to appeal to and persuade identified and identifiable audiences.9 Anxieties over techniques, strategies, and aims, especially as arising from devotees to specific conceptions of knowledge and truth, have contributed to equating “rhetoric” with “sophistry”10 (or “spin- doctoring,”11 by contemporary phraseology). Yet to say that terms, concepts, and meanings are rhetorical is simply to say that they are parts of language practices, and as such they do more than define and describe; they also reflect and shape intricate, often latent and unruly, interrelations—political, economic, ideological, cultural,   5 See Carl Abbott, Competing Cascadias: Imagining a Region over Four Decades, URBAN WEST (2010), available at http://theurbanwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07 /Competing-Cascadias.pdf. 6 See, e.g., Cascadia Flag, PEOPLE’S REPUBLICS, http://thepeoplespdx.com/shop-prop- gear/cascadia (last visited May 24, 2012) (proclaiming “Cascadia” as self-identification and decrying “Pacific Northwest” as identification based on “an Atlantic centered map” and imposed by “Atlantic empires”). This website also describes “Pacific Northwesterners” as “remain[ing] a nameless object or second thought to the power centers of Washington DC and Ottowa [sic],” and the site analogizes individuals “remaining the Pacific Northwest” to “being an object much akin to a man of color being called ‘boy.’” Id. 7 Andrea A. Lunsford, Some Definitions of Rhetoric, STANFORD UNIV., http://www .stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lunsford/pages/defs.htm (citing Plato’s The Phaedrus) (last visited May 24, 2012). 8 Id. (citing Aristotle’s Rhetoric Book I). 9 See generally WILLIAM A. COVINO & DAVID A. JOLLIFFE, RHETORIC: CONCEPTS, DEFINITIONS, BOUNDARIES (1995). 10 See Steven Mailloux, Introduction, in RHETORIC, SOPHISTRY, PRAGMATISM 9–11 (Steven Mailloux ed., 1995). 11 Jonathan Powell, Aeneas the Spin-Doctor: Rhetorical Self-Presentation in Aeneid, 27 PROCEEDINGS OF THE VIRGIL SOCIETY 184 (2011). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1276 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 epistemological, ethical, and so on.12 Their functions, purposes, referents, and significances can be fluid, shifting, elastic, contested, and plural, or relatively fixed, static, constant, and univocal over long periods and among groups of people.13 Bearing in mind these insights about terms, concepts, and meanings helps to surface and then frame challenges of looking at complex histories and relations, as well as currents and dynamics of social change. For example, comparing the historic role of the Ku Klux Klan in the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century14 with its life today15 is much like talking about two different entities. The former held popular acceptance and participation and wielded political and cultural impact among the white mainstream,16 while the latter is identified as an extremist hate group and has irregular societal impact.17 Times and social conditions do change. Likewise, references to areas like “the Inland Northwest”18 themselves expand, contract, or otherwise shift, carrying multiple names and meanings, some of which are implicated in secessionist   12 See DOUGLAS REICHERT POWELL, CRITICAL REGIONALISM: CONNECTING POLITICS AND CULTURE IN THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE 24 (2007). 13 See id. at 24–25. 14 See TREVOR GRIFFEY, SEATTLE CIV. RTS. & LAB. HIST. PROJECT, THE WASHINGTON STATE KLAN IN THE 1920S (2007), http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/kkk _powell.htm (“The Klan’s extraordinary growth in the early 1920s came through aggressive marketing driven by organizers like [Luther] Powell who fought like competing salesmen.”). 15 Ku Klux Klan—History, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE, http://www.adl.org/learn /ext_us/kkk/history.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in _America&xpicked=4&item=kkk (“Fragmentation, decentralization and decline characterized the Klan during [the 1970s to early 2000s].”) (last visited May 24, 2012). 16 Kevin Boyle, The Not-So-Invisible Empire, N.Y. TIMES (Nov. 25, 2011), http://www .nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/the-not-so-invisible-empire.htm (last visited May 18, 2012) (discussing the widespread, mainstream political and cultural influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s); Sura Rubenstein, An Oregon Century: Roaring with The 1920s, http://www.oregonlive.com/century/1920_intro.html (last visited May 18, 2012) (chronicling the swift rise to political power and influence, and equally swift decline, of the Ku Klux Klan throughout Oregon in the 1920s). 17 Brian Palmer, Ku Klux Kontraction, SLATE (Mar. 8, 2012, 4:55 PM), http://www .slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/03/ku_klux_klan_in_decline_why_did _the_kkk_lose_so_many_chapters_in_2010_.html (speculating as to possible reasons for the major decline in Klan chapters despite the growth of organized hate and extremism). 18 References to “the Inland Northwest,” and “company town” in quotations are meant to invoke these terms in ways that draw attention to their rhetorical aspects and notify the reader of the author’s specifically rhetorical purposes in making the references. For disambiguation of references to “the Company Town” (and “the Town” or “Town”) from “company town,” see infra note 41. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1277 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest and white nationalist movements.19 Such movements within the territorial United States and Canada once enjoyed greater political traction and heft.20 Today, secessionism tends to be more imaginative and fanciful as expressions of regionalist cultural spirit, yet political extremist versions remain, including some which seek to draw adherents to white nationalism from within the ranks of cultural regionalists and from areas that remain predominantly white or have become more so in recent years without direct influence from organized racism.21 Similarly, census data from a century ago meant something quite different from what it means today, and as data-gathering techniques and categories continue to evolve so too do the purposes for gathering and using census data.22 This insight extends to racial meanings, concepts, and terms. Although census data-gathering techniques on race have proliferated categories and options (including both self- identified and ascribed categorizations),23 the commitments to using racial categories to gather data and apply it to manifold official purposes remain—no matter how arbitrary, inconsistent, and flawed those categories and the concept of “race” happen to be.24 Much of the salience and meaning of race still lies in how one is “raced,” or how one is seen and treated within social contexts, broadly understood as racialized contexts.25 Racialized ascriptions may   19 See Abbott, supra note 5, at 1–3. 20 See id. at 23 (explaining that “[l]ong before the era of railroads, continental visionaries like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Hart Benton (speaking in 1825 on the Oregon question) anticipated sister republics on the Pacific slope”). 21 See Cascadia Related Links, MICRONATION INDEX, http://www.angelfire.com/nv /micronations/cascadia.html (last visited May 24, 2012) (listing contemporary and historic Cascadian nationalisms as separatist and secessionist activities); Hunter Wallace, Northwest Homeland, OCCIDENTAL DISSENT (Mar. 8, 2010), http://www.occidentaldissent .com/2010/03/08/northwest-homeland-2 (discussing both the practical potential for, and the obstacles to, a contemporary white nationalist “Northwest Homeland” in the Cascadia region and the “[m]illions of White liberals [who] live in the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland corridor”). 22 See generally Data Collection, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, http://www.census.gov/history /www/innovations/data_collection (last visited May 11, 2012). 23 See Nampeo R. McKenney & Claudette E. Bennett, Issues Regarding Data on Race and Ethnicity: The Census Bureau Experience, 109 PUB. HEALTH REP. 16 (1994). 24 Id. 25 See KENAN MALIK, THE MEANING OF RACE: RACE, HISTORY AND CULTURE IN WESTERN SOCIETY 4–5 (1996) (“Race exists only as a statistical correlation, not as an objective fact. The distinction we make between different races is not naturally given but is socially defined.”). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1278 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 diverge from or cohere with one’s self-concept and social affiliations, to greater or lesser extents, and it is certainly beyond one’s full control how and why one participates in racialized conditions.26 One takeaway insight from this discussion is this: to be white today is to be regarded, and thus treated, in ways that shape, and are shaped by, historical, cultural, economic, legal, and other social conditions, including regional conditions where one lives, and to participate in those conditions in ways that one neither freely chooses nor fully controls.27 This is an especially important insight regarding the meanings of whiteness in regions and locales marked by historic or ongoing class antagonisms, anti-immigrant sentiment, racially discriminatory and exclusionary laws, and extralegal measures to discourage nonwhites from settling, integrating, and developing economic and political power. In the context that this Article explores, and as discussed in the ensuing Parts, secessionist attitudes and activities along, accompanied by de facto geographic and residential segregation, remain part of contemporary regional conditions. Although regional secessionisms today might be primarily imaginative, recreational, or concerned with environmental stewardship,28 and although de facto segregation might not necessarily be “about race,” these contemporary phenomena are neither politically insignificant nor racially neutral nor detached from historical influence.29 Rather, these phenomena are shaped by histories of racial exclusion and discrimination, organized hate and extremism, white supremacism, and even domestic terrorism, with   26 How far and wide is the difference between W.E.B Du Bois’s explanation for his time and then-Senator Barack Obama’s 2007 explanation? Compare W.E.B. DU BOIS, DUSK OF DAWN: AN ESSAY TOWARD AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RACE CONCEPT 153 (Transaction Publishers ed. 2009) (1940) (“I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction: the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” (emphasis added)), with 60 Minutes: Barack Obama (CBS television broadcast Feb. 11, 2007), http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=2459484n (“If you look African American in this society, you’re treated as an African American.”). 27 See RICH BENJAMIN, SEARCHING FOR WHITOPIA 184–85 (2009). 28 See Welcome to Cascadia, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www .cascadianow.org/welcome-to-cascadia (last visited May 24, 2012) (identifying the Cascadian Independence Project is a grassroots effort working to “strengthen personal freedom and maintain a robust local economy while creating a sustainable society that values and protects our unique ecosystem [in the Pacific Northwest]”); Cascadia (Independence Movement), WIKIPEDIA (May 15, 2012, 5:18 AM), http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_(independence_movement) (“Potential boundaries differ, with some drawn along existing political state and provincial lines, and others drawn along larger ecological, cultural and economic boundaries.”). 29 BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 184–85. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1279 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest complicated relations to legal and extralegal mechanisms. Historic influences contribute to current manifestations of unintentional or structural racism, which persist alongside engrained attitudinal racism and organized hatred within the same local and geographic areas, in ways that might not be intentional but also might not be so accidental. II “THE TALE OF THE TRIBE AND THE COMPANY TOWN” Your Country. How Came It Yours? Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here.30 “But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!31 These enduring rhetorical questions and powerful responses come from W.E.B. Du Bois, the Harvard-educated, New England-born, preeminent African American intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as internationally significant political and cultural thinker. The first passage appears in Du Bois’s turn-of-the- twentieth-century masterwork, The Souls of Black Folk.32 As it unfolds, Du Bois calls into question the notion that America is a nation whose creation and greatness came solely from the hands and minds of white forefathers.33 Here, and later in The Gift of Black Folk,34 Du Bois reminds readers that America has always been a nation of diverse people and contributions, and that African Americans have made numerous, valuable, and distinct contributions to a nation that had taken those gifts but denigrated and excluded the givers, even as the nation and entire world had benefitted.35 As Du   30 W.E.B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK 262 (1903). 31 W.E.B. DU BOIS, The Souls of White Folk, in DARKWATER 29, 30 (1920). 32 DU BOIS, supra note 30. 33 DU BOIS, supra note 31, at 30 (“This assumption that of all the hues of God whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan leads to curious acts . . . .”). 34 W.E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS, THE GIFT OF BLACK FOLK: THE NEGROES IN THE MAKING OF AMERICA (1924). 35 See John Christoffersen, Du Bois’ ‘The Gift of Black Folk’ Shows Role of Blacks in History, SPOKESMAN-REV., Feb. 24, 2009, http://www.spokesman.com/stories /2009/feb/24/dubois-the-gift-of-black-folk-shows-role-of (stating that Du Bois “argued that blacks were crucial to conquering the wilderness, winning wars, expanding democracy and creating a prosperous economy”). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1280 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 Bois continued to advance this message and sought to make greater inroads against attitudinal, organized, and structural racism, he sometimes also focused on the workings of whiteness.36 In the second passage, which appears in “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois penetrates unspoken assumptions of enduring white privilege and unarticulated mindsets of white racial superiority.37 One can easily imagine the preceding lines and general insights also having come, though differently, from other voices, including Native American ones. For thousands of years, the continent’s first peoples developed and maintained distinct traditions, including linguistic, cultural, spiritual, and economic ones, among others, that supported their ways of living, helped them thrive, and then allowed them to survive and revive.38 Yet even today, there are those who resent their presence, who would deny their rights to pursue their interests and their even more basic right to exist, who reject notions of tribal sovereignty,39 and who also deny, in articulated and unarticulated ways, that American Indians, on individual and collective levels, contribute positively to America and the wider world.40 It is in this context, located somewhere in the Inland Northwest within the greater Pacific Northwest, that this tale of two neighboring communities unfolds. The first community (rhetorically designated herein as “the Tribe”) is a federally recognized American Indian tribal nation, a major employer, and an economic force that grows in political, legal, and cultural power. Most of the lands, waterways, and natural resources that the Tribe manages and controls run adjacent to and continuous with the site of the second community (rhetorically designated herein as “the Company Town,” or simply “the Town” or   36 DU BOIS, supra note 31, at 31 (“How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul . . . .”). 37 Id. at 30. 38 See generally TOWN OF HANKSVILLE, WWW Virtual Library—American Indians, http://www.hanksville.org/NAresources/indices/NAhistory.html (last visited May 24, 2012); History: Native American, UNIV. OF WASH. LIBRARIES, http://guides.lib .washington.edu/content.php?pid=87308&sid=649463 (last updated Mar. 16, 2012). 39 See, e.g., Federal Indian Policy in the News, CITIZENS EQUAL RIGHTS ALLIANCE, http://www.citizensalliance.org/links/pages/news/National%20News/1News_Intro_Page.ht m (last updated May 2, 2012) (arguing that the federal government’s Indian policy is “separating America into hundreds of ‘sovereign,’ but totally dependent, red apartheid nations”). 40 Id. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1281 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest “Town”41). According to census data, the Town remains almost entirely white. A handful of harvest- and resource-extraction, as well as transportation, businesses have dominated the Town and the adjacent area. A small collection of men, and now a few women, run the political, legal, economic, and civic apparatus. The wealthiest person behaves as Town boss, with all expectations of loyalty and authority. A “natural resources advisory council” operates as a shadow entity of the local government. Some of its members, and some of the region’s elected officials, sit on boards for, or otherwise participate in, regional and national 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations created to “protect private property rights” by opposing tribal sovereignty, Indian rights and interests, casino gaming, and federal Indian law and policy.42 There are rumors and allegations that beneath the Town leaders’ current conduct lie decades of undue influence, corruption, and other criminal activity stemming from Town leaders using office, institutions, and legal structures to operate outside the law.43   41 Throughout this Article, capitalization differentiates references to the Company Town of this tale from other historically identified, rhetorically designated, or generically made references to company towns, which appear in lowercase. Rhetorically, “company town” signposts conditions that unfold when a single business or business owner (or a small handful of them) controls or excessively influences a small town or area, and its residents, over an extended period. This may include operating a municipality, or treating one, as a private entity; dominating its public apparatus and natural resources; or otherwise consistently collapsing the public-private distinction. In such circumstances, the company may be, or at least be perceived as, responsible for the area’s economic and cultural life. It receives, and perhaps even expects or demands, loyalty from the locals. A paternalistic “town boss,” whether an actual single person, a few people, a single company, or small set of companies, usually provides the face or object of that loyalty. Historically, hundreds of company towns and thousands of less-permanent enclaves like work camps spread across the Pacific Northwest from the late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. In many cases, these towns provided for, and controlled, all or nearly all the necessities and luxuries of town life, include real estate, commercial and residential buildings, modes of employment, retail business (e.g., grocery stores and gas stations), food service, health care, utilities, education, libraries, political and legal mechanisms (including rules, laws, and law enforcement), churches, and entertainment and recreation. Beyond or even in conjunction with the rhetorical uses to which I put the phrase “company town,” some company towns still exist today, in more traditional as well as contemporary forms. See discussion infra Part VI. 42 See, e.g., CITIZENS EQUAL RIGHTS ALLIANCE, supra note 39 (praising the success of a small band of citizens in a small Oregon town in stopping a local tribe from building a resort and casino). 43 The unofficial allegations include graft, cronyism, nepotism, political patronage, control of print and broadcast media, misappropriation of state and federal funds, undocumented payments (e.g., bribes and kickbacks), anticompetitive practices, selective law enforcement, police harassment, voting interference, denial of service at privately Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1282 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 State and federal government are now more involved in upholding and supporting tribal sovereignty, and Town leaders, though resistant, are slowly acceding to tribal law enforcement and tribal regulation over the land, waterways, and natural resources under the Tribe’s management. As the Tribe has prospered, the Town has struggled. Town leaders have lost some influence and authority as the handful of “traditional” businesses that once dominated the area face hard times. Already dozens of Townspeople commute to work for the Tribe every day. Now finding themselves having either to coexist and cooperate with the Tribe or resist and compete against it, Town leaders have chosen the latter course. Town leaders also resist moving toward tourism- and service-related businesses to supplement or replace their dwindling industries, perhaps because such businesses would attract streams of visitors and newcomers who would bring growth, change, new ideas, and new tastes and thus might threaten the Town leaders’ privilege, control, and “way of life,” while also benefiting the Tribe’s business and, therefore, the Tribe itself. One who is close to this tale says Town leaders and many Townspeople have this view: everything was fine with the Tribe until they got their hands on some power. This view is hardly surprising, as it expresses a felt loss of privilege within social change shaped by regional and national experiences of racialization and socioeconomics. Town leaders are indeed losing control over the area, the lives of locals, and in some measure over their own tempers and lives, as well. Loss of control and attitudinal racism appear inseparable influences behind the resentment and resistance, given the occurrences of Town leaders heatedly confronting tribal members or employees, Town leaders and other members expressing deep-seated anti-Indian views in public spaces, and other such incidents. How volatile is this situation? Some white Tribe employees say that for personal safety they will not enter or remain in the Town after dark. With so many forces of commerce, social inquiry, travel and transportation, and communication in the Inland Northwest, as discussed in the next Part, readers might wonder how much longer this clash and its underlying conditions can persist, and how much longer the Town can remain as such. However, the author encourages readers to explore other questions: How and why did this situation develop as it has, and what conditions allow it to persist? What does   owned businesses as public accommodations, and intimidation (both public and private) by physical force, threat, economic coercion, and discriminatory governmental hiring practices. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1283 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest any of this tell us about the Inland Northwest, as part of the Pacific Northwest, and the curious workings of whiteness herein? The balance of this Article focuses on exploring these and other directly related questions. III WHERE, OR WHO AND WHAT, IS THE INLAND NORTHWEST? The Inland Northwest, as a region, is a geographically, socially, culturally, economically, politically, and, in some ways, legally identified place. Like all regions, it is also a rhetorical construct and strategy, open to multiple uses, interpretations, and contestations.44 The Inland Northwest, as commonly identified, spans dozens of counties and hundreds of miles in Central and Eastern Washington and North Idaho, naturally bounded by the Columbia River and several mountain ranges (the Cascades to the West, the Rockies to the East, and the Blues and Wallowas to the South and Southeast), and imaginatively and legally by Canada, Oregon, and Montana.45 A handful of international and interstate highways, including the nation’s longest interstate highway, crisscross the region and link the half-million people who live within fifty miles of its largest city, Spokane, and the 1,812,805 people who live throughout the region. Four of Washington’s thirteen largest cities46 and two of Idaho’s ten largest cities47 are there. Spokane is larger than the cities of Boise, Tacoma, and Salt Lake,48 and when one includes Coeur d’Alene and   44 POWELL, supra note 12, at 24. 45 See Abbott, supra note 5, at 1–3. 46 See generally Census 2010: Washington: Cities, SPOKESMAN-REV., http://data .spokesman.com/census/2010/washington/cities (last visited May 24, 2012) (noting that Spokane is the second-largest Washington city with a population of 208,916; Yakima is the eighth largest with 91,067; Spokane Valley is the tenth largest with 89,755; and Kennewick is the thirteenth largest at 73,917); see also State & County QuickFacts, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html (last visited May 12, 2012) (select “Washington” then choose the city from the “Washington Cities” dropdown box). 47 See generally Census 2010: Idaho: Cities, SPOKESMAN-REV., http://data .spokesman.com/census/2010/idaho/cities/ (last visited May 12, 2012) (Coeur d’Alene is the seventh-largest city in Idaho with a population of 44,137; and Post Falls is the tenth largest with 27,574. Hayden, which is Coeur d’Alene’s immediate neighbor and the location of Richard Butler’s now-defunct Aryan Nations compound, is the eighteenth largest with 13,294); see also State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46 (select “Idaho” then choose the city from the “Idaho Cities” dropdown box). 48 Spokane (population 208,916) is smaller than Seattle (population 608,660) and Portland (population 583,776) but larger than Boise (population 205,671), Tacoma (population 198,397), Salt Lake City (population 186,440), Vancouver, WA (population Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1284 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 Post Falls, Idaho, Spokane’s metropolitan area is roughly the same size as those of Madison, Wisconsin, and Colorado Springs, Colorado.49 Other Inland Northwest metropolitan areas like Yakima50 and the Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco,51 all in Washington, crack the nation’s top 200 metropolitan areas, too. Yet many parts of the Inland Northwest are sparsely populated, especially those large expanses where environmental conditions are especially rugged, where land is used for agribusiness and extractive industry, and where land is reserved to Indian tribes or devoted to public recreational use.52 “Where,” “why,” and “how” one defines the Inland Northwest region turns out to be quite significant to the larger context of the tale that motivates this Article. Narrower and specialized definitions exist, such as the one that an Inland Northwest regional consortium of “economic development agencies and corporations”53 promulgates. Here the Inland Northwest consists of those counties where Spokane, Pullman, Coeur d’Alene, and Moscow are located, plus a few   161,791), Eugene (population 156,185) and Salem (population 154,637). See State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46 (select desired state and then choose a city from the dropdown box). 49 Spokane is also the country’s 107th-largest metropolitan area, behind Seattle- Tacoma-Bellevue (fifteenth largest), Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro (twenty-third largest), and Salt Lake (fiftieth largest), but in the mid-eighties if one includes Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene. See Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, http://www.census.gov/popest/data/metro/totals/2011/index.html (last visited May 24, 2012) (select the “Estimates of the Population Change for Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Rankings: July 1, 2010 to July 1, 2011 (CBSA-EST2011-05)” Excel table). 50 See id. 51 See id. 52 The sparsely populated especially include those areas with large expanses of privately held lands used for farming, ranching, logging, mining, and recreation, public lands (federal, state, and county) set aside for recreation or wildlife preservation, and reservation lands of varying size for the regions confederated tribes and bands (Yakama, Nez Perce, Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, Kalispel, Colville, and Kootenai). See generally THOMAS J. KIMPEL, WASH. OFFICE OF FIN. MGMT., MINORITY GRAPHICS—2010 AMERICAN INDIAN OR ALASKA NATIVE (2010), available at http://www.ofm.wa.gov/pop/race /minoritygraphics/aian10.pdf; see also Population Density by County: 2010, WASH. STATE OFFICE OF FIN. MGMT., http://www.ofm.wa.gov/pop/popden/map_county.asp (last visited May 12, 2012) (providing that many of the counties in central Washington have a population density of less than fifty people per square mile); State Fact Sheets: Washington, U.S. DEP’T OF AGRIC., http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/WA.htm#TCEC (last updated May 2, 2012) (providing that the top five counties in agricultural sales in 2007 were in south-central Washington). 53 Contact Us, INLAND NW. ECON. ALLIANCE, http://www.inlandnorthwestregion.com /contact.asp (last visited May 24, 2012). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1285 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest adjacent ones.54 The rhetorical choice is intelligible given the consortium’s purpose of attracting and promoting economic development through business, investment, real estate, and residential growth; these are relatively affluent areas with colleges and universities,55 and plentiful leisure and recreational pursuits.56 However, even when presuming good intent in how and why such definitions are developed and used, such economically circumscribed constructs of the region implicate and reproduce strongly racialized assumptions, functions, impacts, and histories.57 For example, the economic development consortium’s regional definition excludes from the common geographic definition twelve Washington counties and four more in Idaho.58 It makes checkerboard hops over contiguous counties, narrows the regional population by some 1.03 million people, and represents the region as 92% white with a non- disaggregated “Hispanic” population of only 1.7%.59 It also excludes   54 The Region, INLAND NW. ECON. ALLIANCE, http://www.inlandnorthwestregion.com /region.asp (last visited May 24, 2012). 55 The Inland Northwest provides the home for excellent universities and colleges (e.g., Washington State University, Central Washington University, Eastern Washington University, University of Idaho, Gonzaga University, Whitworth University, and Whitman College, as well as top-ranked community colleges (e.g., Spokane Falls Community College). See generally Colleges and Universities in Washington, WASH. HIGHER EDUC. COORDINATING BD., http://www.hecb.wa.gov/AboutOurSystem/InstitutionList (last visited May 24, 2012). 56 Specifically, the Inland Northwest is known as a haven for skiing (water and snow), boating, fishing, hunting, windsurfing, hiking, camping, cycling, wine tasting, casino gaming, running (the “Bloomsday”), nature viewing, equestrian, the lively arts, and, of course, basketball (including the “Zags” and “Hoopfest”). See generally About the Spokane Region, SPOKANE REG’L CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU, http://www.visit spokane.com/visitor-info/about-the-spokane-region (last visited May 24, 2012); What to Do, COEUR D’ALENE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, http://coeurdalene.org/what-to-do (last visited May 24, 2012). 57 See Demographics, INLAND NW. ECON. ALLIANCE, http://www .inlandnorthwestregion.com/region_demo.asp (last visited May 24, 2012) (listing select communities as part of the region amounting to a total regional population of only 783,553). 58 The consortium’s list of counties excludes these Washington counties: Okanogan, Chelan, Kittitas, Yakima, Klickitat, Benton, Franklin, Walla Walla, Grant, Douglas, Lincoln, and Adams as well as these Idaho counties: Benewah, Clearwater, Lewis, and Idaho. See Communities, INLAND NW. ECON. ALLIANCE, http://www .inlandnorthwestregion.com/region_communities.asp (last visited May 24, 2012); State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46. 59 Compare Demographics, INLAND NW. ECON. ALLIANCE, supra note 57 (regional population of 783,553 with a Hispanic population of 13,564), with State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46 (providing that the 2010 Census data for the traditionally Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1286 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 several counties with Indian reservations, large agribusiness enterprises, and state institutions and facilities, all of which increase the regional totals and percentages of persons of color.60 Indeed, four of the excluded Washington counties are home to the Inland Northwest’s largest shares of Latina/o and American Indian populations.61 Even if the definitional intent might be benign, the practices and results are skewing the racial demographic data, selectively excluding diverse cities and counties and lopping off enormous parts of the land area has the effects of whitewashing the Inland Northwest, producing a smaller, more isolated region, and reshaping it as a remote yet ready haven for white newcomers who seek economic advantage and communities filled with “people like us.”62 Here the author can only wonder: Is it the unspoken purpose of this economic development consortium, through its regional definition, and perhaps other practices, to attract affluent whites who wish to get away from larger populations in general and people of color and recent immigrants in particular? IV WHITOPIAS OF THE INLAND NORTHWEST The Inland Northwest is home to a relatively large population base and several features of a high quality of life. In addition to its world-   accepted geographic region including all Inland Northwest counties shows a population of 1,812,805 with a Hispanic population of 317,695, or 17.5%). 60 See, e.g., Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Indian Reservation, GOVERNOR’S OFFICE OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, http://www.goia.wa.gov/Tribal-Information/Tribes/yakama .htm (last visited May 24, 2012); State Fact Sheets: Washington, supra note 52 (showing that the top five producing counties in agricultural sales in 2007 are also five of the excluded counties: Yakima, Grant, Benton, Franklin, and Walla Walla). These five counties have some of the largest Hispanic populations in Washington. See Census 2010: Washington: Counties, SPOKESMAN-REV., http://data.spokesman.com/census/2010 /washington/counties (last visited May 24, 2012) (select “2010 Hispanic” from the “Compare” dropdown box). 61 These counties include Yakima, Franklin, Grant, and Benton. See Census 2010, supra note 60. 62 Compare KENJI YOSHINO, COVERING 23 (2007) (“As the sociologist Milton Gordon identified decades ago, the demand for ‘Anglo-conformity’ is white supremacy under a different guise.”), with BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 306 (“[The] increasing socioeconomic inequality in America . . . [is] the product of deliberate political choices that cater to rich people’s interests and general partisanship.”). Benjamin also indicated that in carving out these homogenous communities, developers impose a heavy burden on minorities to conform to certain whitopian standards and “cover” their differences. Id. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1287 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest caliber higher education institutions,63 abundant recreational pursuits, and amazing natural beauty, it offers relatively low costs of living and housing coupled with light congestion and pollution levels as compared with other Pacific Northwest major metropolitan areas.64 Of course, these features are attractive and valued widely across demographic groups, yet when one considers census data as disaggregated by county and urban areas65 one may be inclined to ask: How did the Inland Northwest become and remain so white? Why are some areas relatively diverse while others are extremely racially homogenous? Why have certain parts of the Inland Northwest become and remained so white, perhaps becoming even more racially homogenous than before?66 A closer look at census data and settlement patterns over the past two decades puts these questions into context. Some parts of the Inland Northwest, including many counties checker-boarded and excluded by the regional economic development consortium’s definition, already are diverse or are becoming so quickly.67 Other parts of the region, including those   63 See Colleges, supra note 55; Colleges & Universities, IDAHO.GOV, http://www.idaho .gov/education/suniv.html (last visited May 24, 2012). 64 See Welcome to the Outrageous Outdoors!, TOUR THE INLAND NW., http://www.tourtheinlandnw.com (last visited May 24, 2012) (highlighting all of the recreational activities in the area); Lifestyle, GREATER SPOKANE INC., http://www.greater spokane.org/lifestyle.html (last visited May 24, 2012) (discussing how the region has “low-cost living” and “award-winning education”); see also Stressful Cities 2012 List, SPERLING’S BEST PLACES, http://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/stressful_cities_2012 _list.aspx (last visited May 24, 2012) (looking at factors such as the divorce rate, length of average commute, unemployment, and crimes, both the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett and Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton metro areas were ranked in the top twenty most stressful cities). 65 See Census 2010: Washington, supra note 60 (showing, for example, that Spokane County (population 471,221) is 89.2 % white, while Franklin County (population 78,163) is 60.5 % white). 66 These are especially salient questions when one considers that by as early as 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority, and that in several metropolitan areas and states this is already the case. The trends are clear: as the white population ages and shrinks in proportion of the overall population, foreign-born persons and persons of color (including people who identify as multiracial) are increasing in percentage, most significantly in younger generations. Immigration trends of recent decades have changed the demographic and social conditions in cities and suburbs, as well as rural areas dominated by agribusiness and food-packing and processing industries. See BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 12. 67 See Census 2010: Washington, supra note 60; State Fact Sheets: Washington, supra note 52; KIMPEL, supra note 52 (discussing how in Washington State’s portion of the Inland Northwest, Kittitas, Yakima, Chewelah, and Franklin counties are home to the region’s largest shares of Latina/o and American Indian populations, and much of the land Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1288 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 within the consortium’s focus, remain racially homogenous;68 some have become more so. One reason for persistent, even, and growing racial homogeneity is the phenomena of white “amenity migration,”69 or “lifestyle migration,”70 which most often takes the form of in-migration (that is, within a region or nation) rather than immigration. Amenity migration refers to migration patterns driven by choice and taste rather than, say, the political or economic necessities that tend to drive immigration. That choice and taste is for benefits and amenities thought to come with particular lifestyles (for example, consumerist and cultural activities, and opportunities to live among “people like us”) that a city, locale, or other sense of “region,” large or small, may offer. Entire industries and communities have sprung up in recent years around recruiting amenity migrants through advertising and other messaging that holds out a promise or vision of sought-after lifestyles. As one form of amenity migration, in recent years more and more whites have moved to predominantly white cities and counties, as well as extremely white small cities and exurbs.71 This has happened in specific parts of the Inland Northwest, including in and around the greater Spokane/Coeur d’Alene area. Rich Benjamin identifies these   in these areas is reserved to federally recognized tribes or devoted to large-scale agribusiness). 68 For example, although Census data from 2000 to 2010 show that in the combined areas of Idaho’s Kootenai, Latah, Bonner, and Nez Perce counties and Washington’s Spokane County, the nonwhite and multiracial population grew by forty-four percent, over that same period and in those same counties the white population grew by almost twelve percent. Thus, white population growth essentially negated the percentage gains of people of color in the area’s total population. See State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46. 69 See generally RAYMOND CHIPENIUK, DEFINING AMENITY MIGRATION: RESULTS FROM SURVEY OF EXPERTS (2008), available at http://www.banffcentre.ca/mountain culture/mtnconferences/am/pdf/survey-results_defining-am-and-am-migrants.pdf (indicating that a majority of the thirty respondents defined “amenity migration,” in their own words as some variation of the following: migration motivated, not by economic reasons, but by reasons of recreation or leisure lifestyle); see also Social and Economic Values in Natural Resource Planning, U.S. DEP’T OF AGRIC., http://www.fs.fed.us/rm /value/Amenity%20Migration%20and%20Recreational%20Homes.html (last updated Apr. 2, 2008) (“A research program on amenity migration . . . seeks to understand the impact of increasing geographic mobility on how people value and use public lands.”). 70 See Kate Torkington, Defining Lifestyle Migration, 19 DOS ALGARVES 99, 102 (2010), http://www.dosalgarves.com/revistas/N19/6rev19.pdf (“This type of migration is clearly not motivated by economic hardship or the search for work or some form of financial security.”). 71 See BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 260–61. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1289 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest areas as “whitopias”72 and “extreme whitopias,”73 respectively, both of which offer quality-of-life opportunities that attract whites across the political spectrum even as those opportunities may function to maintain and grow the communities as white playgrounds. “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”74 takes place within the Inland Northwest’s web of whitopias and extreme whitopias,75 including Spokane county and adjacent counties in Washington and Idaho (Pend Oreille, Boundary, and Kootenai counties), as bounded by other extreme whitopias (Central Idaho’s Valley County and Northwest Montana’s Flathead and Ravalli counties). Nearly one-fourth of Idaho counties are whitopias, thus making the state sixth-ranked nationally in percentage of whitopia counties.76 With overall and by- county populations much smaller than those in the other top-ten whitopia states, and with only one-third to one-half as many counties as most of them,77 Idaho’s place is probably even closer to the   72 Id. at 5. A whitopia is a county or metropolitan area that is whiter than the nation overall, its respective region, and its state; that has posted at least six percent population growth since 2000, the majority of which has come from white migrants (often upward of ninety percent); and that has “je ne sais quoi—an ineffable social charisma, a pleasant look and feel.” Id. 73 Id. at 321 (indicating that an extreme whitopia is a county or metropolitan area that is at least ninety percent non-Hispanic white, with total population growth of ten percent or more since 2000 and with at least seventy-five percent of that growth coming from non- Hispanic whites). 74 See discussion supra Part III. 75 It is worth noting the specific limits Benjamin built into his constructs and therefore what demographic and social conditions they do not highlight. For example, a county or metropolitan area can be overwhelmingly white without counting as a whitopia or an extreme whitopia, if those areas did not hit Benjamin’s population growth or white migration thresholds between 2000 and 2010. This may be true of many rural areas in the Inland Northwest and the wider Pacific Northwest, such as areas that started life as company towns or that even today resemble and operate like ones. Similarly, though some master planned communities, if they are incorporated cities, could qualify as whitopias or extreme whitopias, unincorporated areas with similar demographic conditions would not qualify because they are not incorporated. Yet, as I shall discuss later in this Article, both types of areas might be predominantly white company towns, either under a traditional or more contemporary company town arrangement. 76 See BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 321–32 (showing that ten of Idaho’s forty-four counties are whitopias or extreme whitopias, placing it behind New Hampshire, Utah, Connecticut, Tennessee, and Minnesota); U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, COUNTY BUSINESS PATTERNS: 2009, http://www.census.gov/econ/cbp/download/index.htm (select “State and County Geography Reference”). 77 See Do You Live in a Whitopia?, RICHBENJAMIN.COM, http://www.richbenjamin.com /whitopia.html (last visited May 24, 2012). On the “Top Ten States Containing the Most Whitopias,” Idaho with ten whitopian counties is tied with Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, behind Tennessee, Minnesota, Georgia, Missouri, Kentucky, Utah, Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1290 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 nation’s top slot. This is despite Idaho’s several counties with large expanses of land devoted to Indian reservations and agribusiness that draws Latina/o workers.78 By Benjamin’s terms, the “je ne sais quoi—an ineffable social charisma, a pleasant look and feel”79 that characterizes the Inland Northwest’s whitopias involves pursuits, places, and spaces primarily populated by and marketed for appeal to whites, especially of certain economic means.80 Regional demographic trends and economic development messaging suggest that selectively racialized, statistically manipulated representations of demographic, economic, and geographic data are dangled before prospective white amenity migrants as attractive lifestyle benefits.81 These same representations might also simultaneously communicate lack of welcome or even exclusion to recent immigrants and people of color, especially those who are not affluent or even middle-class and those who might not wish to live in a whitopia or feel comfortable doing so.82 Recall here the regional economic development consortium definitional messaging to target specific audiences, and consider the possible double-effect of this messaging for people of color and recent immigrants: you might not feel very comfortable due to the lack of visible diversity; if you choose to come, you will have to fit in.83   and Virginia. Id. However, states like Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia each have well over 100 counties, bringing the percentage of whitopian counties in those states overall down into the single digits or low teens. By contrast, nearly twenty-three percent of Idaho’s counties are whitopias. 78 See Abelardo Rodriguez, Indian Tribes in Idaho, 873 U. IDAHO EXTENSION 1 (2011), http://www.cals.uidaho.edu/edcomm/pdf/BUL/BUL0873.pdf (stating that the five reservations in Idaho “comprise almost two million acres in trust” within twelve Idaho counties); see also State Fact Sheets: Idaho, U.S. DEP’T OF AGRIC., http://www.ers.usda .gov/statefacts/ID.HTM (last updated May 2, 2012); Census 2010: Washington Counties, supra note 57 (providing that Cassia, Gooding, and Jerome Counties, which were among the top five counties in agricultural sales in 2007, have some of the largest Hispanic populations in Idaho). 79 BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 5. 80 Id. at 7–8. 81 See Contact Us, INLAND NW. ECON. ALLIANCE, supra note 51. As discussed in previous Parts, this consortium’s description of the Inland Northwest selectively chooses certain counties over others thereby mischaracterizing the region in terms of population size and diversity in an effort to make the region more attractive to investors. 82 See BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 185, 306. 83 Anthony G. Greenwald, Cognitive Response Theory (Nov. 16, 2000), http://130.18.140.19/persuasion/theory14.htm. In that report, Dr. Greenwald, a psychology professor at the University of Washington explains how persuasive communications, such as marketing or advertising, generate a cognitive response which “triggers an attitude change.” Id. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1291 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest A word of caution is in order: to wish to live among “people like us” is not necessarily a wish for racial exclusion or even an intentional move for racial self-segregation, and the residents of these newer, growing “white flight” enclaves do not necessarily espouse racist views, hold overtly racist attitudes, or participate in racially motivated political and social activities. Rather, that wish may simply be a wish to feel comfortable and at home, part of which is being among those who uphold similar values, beliefs, and tastes. Benjamin has characterized whitopias as “racism without racists.”84 Structural—rather than attitudinal—racism functions to maintain and grow predominantly white communities.85 Furthermore, the wish to live among “people like us” can allow for a certain range of diversity, at least so long as the differences appear relatively minor, positive, and within a range comfortably tolerable to the majority. However, to apply Kenji Yoshino’s notion of “covering”86 here, one is eligible to reap the benefits of “amenity migration” in proportion to how willing, able, and successful one is at “covering” one’s salient social differences. For some, “covering” can be extremely difficult and involve significant personal cost.87 For others, it might be relatively easily done and advantageous, individually or in small circles, insofar as it permits access to privilege (for example, the area’s lifestyle benefits).88 It is also worth noting that even if whitopias and extreme whitopias are manifestations of “racism without racists,” the demographic and geographic conditions in which they developed are not the result of mere accidents; whitopias and extreme whitopias have happened within a context of demographic, cultural, and geographic conditions that also manifest larger historical influences.89 These metropolitan and peripheral areas became and remained predominantly white, in mindsets and material conditions, well before the recent wave of   84 BENJAMIN, supra note 27 at 185, 188–89. 85 Id. at 190–92. 86 See YOSHINO, supra note 62, at 22 (“[I]ndividuals no longer needed to be white, male, straight, Protestant, and able-bodied; they needed only to act white, male, straight, Protestant, and able-bodied.”). 87 See id. at 24 (“Many covering demands occur at [an] intimate and daily level.”). 88 Id. at 22–23 (noting that not all members of minority or disadvantaged groups are necessarily engaged in covering at all times, some may simply have personalities that better fall in with the majority). 89 See BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 185–88. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1292 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 white amenity migration.90 In some cases, these communities abut areas that have sought to remain or become almost exclusively white.91 In other cases, white amenity destinations may be former sites of racially exclusionary or discriminatory company towns and work camps, secessionist activity, organized hate and extremism, domestic terrorism, and warfare; some of those conditions and practices may persist in those communities today.92 In other words, oftentimes whitopias are areas that were made predominantly white, remained so, and now in some ways are kept so by “racism with racists” too. Notice the dual relationship of those two kinds of locales and mindsets. Whitopias develop and grow in previously racially exclusionary areas; racial exclusion made and maintained those spaces in which whitopias could develop.93 On the flipside, rural areas (like the Company Town) may persist in the shadow of whitopias almost without notice, as the whitopias grow as racially homogenous communities by attracting white amenity migrants.94 Little, if any, immediate criticism of whitopias qua whitopias tends to come from within extreme whitopias, and enclaves that would maintain racial exclusion can persist with little nearby scrutiny or pushback coming from those who are choosing racially homogenous communities and, simply by virtue of their presence, helping to increase demographic homogeneity.95 Each type of locale may simultaneously occlude and, in some ways, facilitate what is going on in the other.   90 See infra Part VI. 91 Like the “Company Town” from my tale. See supra Part II. 92 See, e.g., LINDA CARLSON, COMPANY TOWNS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST 43–47 (2003) (discussing how African Americans and European immigrants were strongly discriminated against in company towns run by white men); Cascadia Related Links, supra note 21 (listing secessionist organizations); Wallace, supra note 21 (presenting a highly racist white nationalist blog). 93 BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 7 (“The places luring so many white Americans . . . were already overwhelmingly white.”). 94 Id. at 8 (“[T]he place’s very whiteness implies other perceived qualities . . . [including] higher property values, friendliness, orderliness, hospitality, cleanliness, safety, and comfort.”). 95 An interesting counterexample may arise when the presence of those enclaves, or activity within them, adversely affects white amenity migration, housing prices, and other conditions of whitopia economic development. Such problems may lead to, or at least inform, efforts to scrutinize and push back against those enclaves. One irony of these oppositional activities is that their success may actually contribute to white amenity migration and to increased costs of living that may effectively prevent more people of color from settling in the area. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1293 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest V ORGANIZED HATRED AND EXTREMISM—THE INLAND NORTHWEST WITHIN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST Organized hate groups, extremists, and those with xenophobic beliefs inhabit Inland Northwest regional spaces of whitopias and extreme whitopias, including spaces like the Company Town.96 Each of these spaces is shaped by persistent demographic conditions and the effects of larger histories. Each also bears the influence of those who have used legal and extralegal means against those whom they consider[ed] racially inferior, and each is inhabited by those who, in their own ways and according to their own tastes, seek to live surrounded by “people like us.” The insights drawn from the previous Part, as applied to this specific context, raise a further sensitive topic: whether the Inland Northwest, with its many whitopias and extreme whitopias, and the persistence of Company Towns, is an especial haven for xenophobia, organized hate and extremism, or features of “racism with racists.” In other words, does the former set of phenomena contribute to the presence of the latter? This might be one way to explain sad regional infamies: the 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade bombing attempt by Kevin Harpham,97 a spring 2011 manhunt in Lolo Pass,   96 See Associated Press, Washington: Maximum Sentence in Bomb Attempt, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 21, 2011, at A29 (discussing how white supremacist, Kevin Harpham, was given a maximum sentence of thirty-two years in prison after he planted a bomb at Spokane’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in January 2011); Kim Murphy, White Supremacists Revive Dream of a Homeland in Northwest, L.A. TIMES, Feb. 9, 2012 [hereinafter Murphy, White Supremacists], http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/09/nation /la-na-mlk-bomb-20120209 (indicating that Harpham is not necessarily an extreme example—many “prominent white nationalists, radical constitutionalists and other apostles of the far right” have settled in the Northwest in search of a “homeland”); Kim Murphy, The American Redoubt, Where Survivalists Plan to Survive, L.A. TIMES, Feb. 8, 2012 [hereinafter, Murphy, American Redoubt], http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/08/nation /la-na-american-redoubt-20120209 (“Though white separatists for years have called for a racial homeland in the inland Pacific Northwest, an even bigger movement of survivalists, Christian fundamentalists and political doomsayers is fueling the idea of a defensible retreat to the high country west of the Rockies.”); David Holthouse, High Country Extremism: Pioneering Hate, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AM. (Nov. 15, 2011, 1:19 PM), http://mediamatters.org/blog/201111150012 (detailing a movement called “Pioneer Little Europe” which “seeks to create a homeland for white supremacists in northwest Montana”); see also Ryan Lenz, A Gathering of Eagles: Extremists Look to Montana, INTELLIGENCE REPORT, Winter 2011, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence - report/browse-all-issues/2011/winter/extremists-are-coming-together-in-mon. 97 Harpham was a regular poster on Vanguard News Network, a white supremacist website. See Murphy, White Supremacists, supra note 96. The bomb contained one Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1294 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 Montana, for a former militia leader,98 and going back a generation Richard Butler’s defunct Aryan Nations, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and the Montana Freemen.99 Here again, caution is in order: the nexus of historical influences and contemporary phenomena, in its dynamics and real consequences, appears not appreciably different from many other areas throughout the American Pacific Northwest and in other U.S. regions. For example, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center100 (SPLC) and the Martin Prosperity Institute,101 Montana topped the national list of “Active Hate Groups” per capita in 2010–2011, and some are located on the edge of the Inland Northwest in extreme whitopia Flathead County (home of Kalispell, Montana), but most are based near Wyoming and North Dakota on the Great Plains.102 While Idaho came in fifth nationally on that same list in 2010–2011,103 it has now surpassed Montana with eighteen SPLC-recognized organized hate groups and an overall population of 1,585,000. Even so, of the thirty- four SPLC-recognized organized hate groups in Washington and Idaho, only four groups (albeit one with five regional chapters) are   hundred heavy fishing weights coated in rat poison and was wired with a remote detonator. Id. 98 Nicholas K. Geranios, Burgert, Other Extremists Increase Profile in Northwest During 2011, MISSOULIAN, Dec. 15, 2011, http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional /burgert-other-extremists-increase-profile-in-northwest-during/article_bcb6ac58-2755 -11e1-9d37-001871e3ce6c.html (“[On] June 12[, 2011] outside of Missoula, . . . former militia leader [and patriot activist] David Burgert opened fire on two Missoula County sheriff’s deputies” before “disappear[ing] into the forest.”). 99 See Nicholas K. Geranios, Extremists Finding Fertile Ground in Northwest US, ABC NEWS, June 22, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=13899888#.T4 ItP3idEhd. 100 See Hate Map, S. POVERTY LAW CTR., http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate -map (last visited May 24, 2012) (showing that Montana has ten active hate groups). 101 See Richard Florida, The Geography of Hate, ATLANTIC, May 11, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/the-geography-of-hate/238708 (indicating that Montana has the highest concentration of hate groups at 13.8 per million people). It is possible, however, that these numbers may have fluctuated as Montana’s population has increased since the time that Mr. Florida wrote The Geography of Hate. See State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46, and since the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that Montana currently has only ten active hate groups. Hate Map, supra note 100. 102 Also worth noting is that the ratio of 10 to 13.8 groups per million people sounds very high until one remembers that Montana has only approximately one million residents living in a state that is almost identical to California in square mileage. See State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46. As of May 12, 2012, California is home to eighty-four SPLC-recognized hate groups, which is nine more than the combined totals of the contiguous states of Oregon (fifteen), Washington (sixteen), Idaho (eighteen), Montana (ten), Nevada (twelve), and Utah (four). See Hate Map, supra note 100. 103 Florida, supra note 101 (Idaho had 8.9 groups per million people in 2010–2011). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1295 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest based in the Inland Northwest as commonly defined, including two in Spokane County and others in nearby Kootenai and Boundary counties.104 Most of the rest of Washington’s hate groups are based in or near the Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma and Portland-Vancouver- Beaverton metro areas, in other sizeable Puget Sound cities along the Interstate 5 corridor like Everett and Bellingham, or in outlying areas around the Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula; many of these areas historically were home to company towns.105 Meanwhile, of the fifteen organized hate groups based in Oregon, most operate out of the greater Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton area; perhaps not surprisingly, whitopias and extreme whitopias appear in these parts of Oregon and Washington, too.106 Thus, on geographic and demographic levels, the basic conditions of organized hate and extremism in the Inland Northwest appear no more attenuated than in other areas across the United States’s side of the Pacific Northwest. The continued presence of organized hate and extremism is really a Pacific Northwest problem and (as discussed in Part VII) is one not delimited by national boundaries. Yet there is still the question of why organized hate groups and extremists of a generation ago set up shop in the Inland Northwest. Is there more to the story than the physical isolation and ability to blend in, or operate with minimal interference, that rugged terrain, harsh winters, and sparsely populated, overwhelmingly white urban and rural areas provide? This would seem a crucial question to answer, if possible, as it could offer predictive and perhaps even preventive assistance on where organized hate groups and extremism might seek to take root. One theory regarding their presence in the Inland Northwest a generation ago is a variant of the whitopia/“racism with racists” dynamic identified in the previous Part: even if not everyone agreed with their beliefs and practices, very few people would   104 See Hate Map, supra note 100. 105 Nine of the groups listed on the Washington site on the SPLC Hate Map are in the Seattle-Tacoma area. The index listing of Pacific Northwest company towns in the Carlson book shows that a majority of the towns were in King County. See id.; CARLSON, supra note 92, at 213–41. 106 See Hate Map, supra note 100; CARLSON, supra note 92, at 213–41; BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 323–24, 328, 330. Clark County, where Vancouver, Washington, is located, is home to the Neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement and is also a whitopia. Many of the surrounding counties are also designated as extreme whitopias or a whitopias including the Oregon counties of Columbia, Deschutes, and Linn—as well as Skamania County, Washington. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1296 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 actually bother the organized racists and extremists or oppose their presence.107 This turned out not to be true, as shown by the example of sustained, eventually successful opposition to Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations in Kootenai County, Idaho.108 Nonetheless, some have argued that the cultural fabric of the Inland Northwest includes a certain live-and-let-live attitude, a code of noninterference, and a tolerance that borders on permissiveness.109 Libertarian ideals, persistent cowboys-and-settlers vs. Indians mindsets, and real and imagined circumstances of life on or near the frontier and its remote, rugged conditions also influence its long- standing, mostly white population, which is growing thanks to white amenity migrants who are not necessarily prioritizing demographic diversity as a sought-after lifestyle benefit.110 Where winters are harsh, and where death and danger (for example, from bears and predatory species) is or is feared not to be far away, one can ill afford to alienate neighbors and what help they might provide toward survival or meeting everyday challenges. The thinking is that it is wisest (and expected) to stay away from controversial topics (for example, politics, religion, and race), to adopt (or at least appear to hold) the same views as others, and to avoid involving oneself in another’s personal matters, even if those others are adherents of organized hate who put themselves into the public sphere.111 It is   107 See discussion supra Part IV; Holthouse, supra note 96. The Pioneer Little Europe leader April Gaede picked the Flathead Valley for some of the same reasons Butler picked North Idaho: “historically its population is more than 95 percent white and politically conservative with a strong libertarian streak.” Id.; see also Extreme Tolerance (KSPS-TV 1999) (examining the Pacific Northwest's, and particularly the Inland Northwest’s, popularity among extremist organizations, and positing a prevailing regional attitude of extreme tolerance as a significant factor in this development). 108 Jonathan Martin, Richard Butler, Who Led Aryan Nations, Dies in Idaho at 86, SEATTLE TIMES, Sept. 9, 2004, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews /2002030871_butlerobit09m.html (“[Butler] lived to see his racist movement bankrupted, his 20-acre compound auctioned off and his followers convicted of violence.”); Extreme Tolerance, supra note 107 (highlighting the effective work of the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment and the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations in combating Richard Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian (also known as Aryan Nations) and the splinter-group, The Order, which declared war on the U.S. federal government). 109 See Extreme Tolerance, supra note 107; see also Holthouse, supra note 96 (describing how the “live and let live mentality” of the Flathead Valley “leads to some individuals with fringe beliefs finding refuge”). 110 See Extreme Tolerance, supra note 107; see also BENJAMIN, supra note 27, at 8. 111 See Extreme Tolerance, supra note 107; see also Nicholas K. Geranios, White Supremacist Running for Sheriff in Idaho, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Mar. 29, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/03/29/white_supremacist_running_for_sheriff_in_idaho Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1297 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest possible for organized hate to take root if enough people in both the general populace and in positions of power have similar attitudes to those with racist and extremist beliefs, or will simply look the other way and allow the beliefs to go unchallenged. All of this and more may be true of the Inland Northwest, and it may well have contributed to the local problems discussed herein, even as they continue in some dimension today. However, the persistence of organized hate groups and places like the Company Town described in Part II are part and product of larger, more complex currents of influence. It would be a mistake to think of these phenomena as unique to or isolated within the Inland Northwest, and to think of the people responsible for them as relegated to its geographic and political outskirts or distant past. These dynamics and their real consequences are not appreciably different from many other areas throughout the Pacific Northwest and other regions. The demographic makeup of the Pacific Northwest, in which many cities, counties, and locales remain predominantly white, have been shaped by histories of racial exclusion and discrimination, supremacist attitudes and organizations, separatist and secessionist mindsets, and land and resource usurpation accomplished through warfare and domestic terrorism as well as legal, political, and economic frameworks. Some of these histories are not so far in the past, if they are past, and their influences persist not just in remote enclaves but also in some of the region’s largest counties and metropolitan areas. VI COMPANY TOWNS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST—HISTORIES OF XENOPHOBIA, RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, AND DOMESTIC TERRORISM Part II introduced “the Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town” as a heuristic device to begin surfacing and exploring some of the workings of whiteness in the Inland Northwest within the greater Pacific Northwest of the past and of today. That Part introduced and relied upon a rhetorical meaning of “company town” as applied to the Company Town referenced in the Tale, and also alluded to the   (reporting that, candidate for Bonner County, Idaho, Sheriff is an avowed white supremacist who decided to run for public office, in part due to his political opposition to “federal overreach”); Associated Press, N. Idaho Sheriff Candidate Hosts Cross Burning, SPOKESMAN-REV., May 9, 2012, http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/may/09/n- idaho-sheriff-candidate-hosts-cross-burning (discussing how the Bonner County sheriff candidate held a cross burning with other Ku Klux Klan members in early May 2011). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1298 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 historical dimensions of company towns, primarily in the Pacific Northwest context. The present Part turns to a discussion of the historic conditions of company towns, to what extent they still exist, and their place within wider regional histories of xenophobia, racial exclusion, and other discrimination, as well as organized hate, extremism, and domestic terrorism. Company towns developed in the United Kingdom and North America in the mid-nineteenth century.112 Often these towns bore the name of the particular company, industry, or business owner that founded them or primarily shaped their existence. Pullman, Illinois, is one of the most famous examples,113 and regional ones include Washington’s towns of Concrete114 and Davenport.115 From the 1880s through 1920s, company towns were prominent across the North American continent, and they continued to play important roles, if in smaller numbers, through the 1950s in the Inland Northwest and the wider, transnational Pacific Northwest.116 Though their heyday has passed, some traditional company towns continued to operate as such into the 1990s; a few, like “Scotia, the Company Town”117 still exist today. Contemporary iterations of company towns include the Disney-owned Lake Buena Vista, Florida,118 master-planned communities such as Disney’s Celebration, Florida,119 and unincorporated bedroom communities of an area’s major employers or industries. Prior to World War I, the U.S. Army estimated the existence of hundreds of company-owned or company-dominated towns and cities   112 See HARDY GREEN, THE COMPANY TOWN: THE INDUSTRIAL EDENS AND SATANIC MILLS THAT SHAPED THE AMERICAN ECONOMY 8–11 (2010). 113 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 10. 114 About Concrete, CONCRETE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, http://concrete-wa.com /about-concrete (last visited May 24, 2012) (stating that Concrete was so named because it had two cement plants). Concrete is the setting and location of the film This Boy’s Life (Warner Bros. Pictures 1993), featuring Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin, and Leonardo DiCaprio, a true story of author Tobias Wolff’s life in this company town circa 1957. 115 Welcome to Davenport, WA, DAVENPORT CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, http://www .davenportwa.org/cityofdavenport.html (last visited May 24, 2012). 116 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 7–8. 117 Scotia is a privately owned Redwood timber industry town formed in the 1880s in Humboldt County, California. See GREEN, supra note 112, at 41–43. 118 Lake Buena Vista is one of a handful of company towns that is entirely owned by Disney-related companies and in which almost all residents are Walt Disney World Resort employees. See Building History: Company Towns, MIKE ROWE WORKS, http://www .mikeroweworks.com/2010/01/building-history-company-towns (last visited May 12, 2012). 119 See id. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1299 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest and 1500 logging camps in the Pacific Northwest alone,120 as spread along the region’s waterways, mountain ranges, valleys, and plains.121 Major industries included railroads and resource extraction and processing in logging, lumber milling, mining, quarrying, commercial fishing, and the like.122 Most often, a single company owned, or primarily controlled, and operated all or most necessities within the locale and thus controlled locals’ lives.123 These towns were usually unincorporated, many in remote, rugged areas, and often located at great distance from capitals and major industrial/urban areas and beyond significant interaction with or support from any level of government.124 Nonetheless, from World War I through the immediate post–World War II era, many company towns provided natural and manufactured materials, construction, or services under government contracting in industries connected to national defense.125 Historically, intentional homogeneity of the workforce was common not just in company towns in remote areas but also within incorporated cities that developed around major employers.126 Where recruitment measures were insufficient to produce homogeneity, then legal discrimination and exclusion according to language, culture, ethnicity, belief, race, and nation of origin were used.127 Some towns maintained discriminatory hiring practices such as strong preferences in Puget Sound areas only for Swedes and Norwegians, or exclusion of Greeks and Italians in Central Oregon areas, and so on.128 This was not always the case, and work crews were often more diverse in settings where it was especially difficult to recruit workers due to low-pay or dangerous working conditions, or where the company sought to prevent or dissolve labor organizing by using differences in background to impede formation of class solidarity.129 The relation of the work and industry to federal government interests played some role in shaping company town demographics, as some industries and   120 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 3. 121 See id. 122 See id. 123 Id. at 101. 124 Id. at 115–16. 125 Id. at 174. 126 Id. at 45. 127 Id. 128 Id. at 44. 129 Id. at 45. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1300 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 towns eventually became subject to federal government contracting regulations regarding employment of racial minorities.130 Yet in many Pacific Northwest areas, federal mandates did little to change residential and employment demographics by race,131 and more often than not company towns and incorporated areas near them remained primarily homogenous. Even as historic company towns have disappeared from the maps and faded into oblivion, some persist as towns though in different form after the company’s operations have gone. In some cases, material conditions—geographic remoteness, racial homogeneity, economic or civic vacuum, the presence of a paternalistic town boss or minioligarchy that effectively controls the area’s necessities and luxuries of life—continue to haunt these locales and influence the surrounding area so that change is minimal and gradual. Demographic homogeneity can also serve as a recruitment tool for contemporary iterations, like Disney’s Celebration, Florida, the hybrid “company town” and “extreme whitopia” planned living community whose population is ninety-one percent white.132 Stepping back into Pacific Northwest history, Oregon has had a particularly important historical role in shaping Pacific Northwest demographics. This history begins with the Oregon Territory and the early state, including mid-nineteenth century Indian wars and legal racial exclusion of blacks, and continues through discriminatory and exclusionary laws and policies aimed against Chinese, Hawaiians, Japanese, “mulattos,” and blacks during the first half of the twentieth century.133 Under Oregon’s Alien Property Act of 1923, “Asians and   130 See Exec. Order No. 8802, 6 Fed. Reg. 3109 (1941). The Fair Employment Act of 1941 prohibited racial discrimination and required proto-affirmative action in government contracting and defense employment. Id. 131 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 46–47. 132 Community Profile, TOWN OF CELEBRATION, http://www.celebration.fl.us/town-info /community-profile (last visited May 24, 2012); State & County QuickFacts, supra note 46 (choose “Florida” and choose “Celebration CDP” from the “Florida cities” dropdown box). 133 Introduction to Oregon’s Tribes, OREGON BLUE BOOK, http://bluebook. state.or.us/national/tribal/tribalintro.htm (last visited May 29, 2012) (discussing presence, organization, and recognition of the nine tribes in contemporary Oregon); Oregon History: Prehistory to Indian Wars, OREGON BLUE BOOK, http://www.bluebook.state.or.us /cultural/history/historypre.htm (last visited May 29, 2012) (providing overviews of Oregon history and pre-history, including human presence in region dating back at least 10,000 years and basic details of Native American ways of life before and during the Oregon Territory era); Oregon’s Indian Tribes, OREGON BLUE BOOK, http://bluebook .state.or.us/national/tribal/tribal.htm (last visited May 29, 2012) (providing links to further information about each of Oregon's nine federally recognized Indian tribes); Oregon Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1301 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest specifically Japanese were barred by law from owning land or businesses”134 via specific prohibitions against Japanese purchasing or leasing land in the state.135 After statehood, many local governments also enacted and maintained their own racial exclusion laws against blacks and regulated against Chinese merchants and Chinese-owned businesses.136 The Ku Klux Klan had a special role in helping make the Pacific Northwest white. Klan members serving in the Oregon legislature pushed forward the Alien Property Act,137 and around that same time, national-level attention from the Klan increased in the region while regional-level Klan representation took on national prominence.138 Speaking at the Klan’s 1924 Atlanta convention, Oregon’s Grand Dragon declared, The Klan in the western states has a great mission to perform. The rapid growth of the Japanese population and the great influx of foreign laborers, mostly Greeks, is threatening our American institutions; and, Klans in Washington, Oregon and Idaho are actively at work to combat these foreign and un-American influences.139   History: Statehood to Present, OREGON BLUE BOOK, http://www.bluebook.state.or.us /cultural/history/historypost.htm (last visited May 29, 2012) (providing links to specific sections on Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and minorities generally in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon in the 1920s; and late-twentieth century changes in recognition of Indian tribes); Timeline of Black History in the Pacific Northwest, HIST. OR. CITY, http://www .historicoregoncity.org/end-of-the -oregon-trail-history/oregon-trail-history/100-blackhistorytimeline (last visited May 24, 2012) [hereinafter Timeline]. 134 Stephen Williamson, The Ping Yang School Bombing: Oregon’s Unsolved Case of Domestic Terrorism, PING YANG ON THE MOHAWK (2003), http://members.efn.org/~opal /pingyang.htm. 135 See William G. Robbins, Walter Pierce (1861–1954), OR. ENCYCLOPEDIA, http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/pierce_walter_1861_1954_ (last visited May 24, 2012). Pierce was elected to be governor of Oregon in 1922 with the support of the Ku Klux Klan. Id. He supported the Act, which was “directed at immigrant Japanese in Portland and the Hood River Valley.” Id. 136 See Timeline, supra note 133. 137 See Robbins, supra note 135; Subtopic: The Rural-Urban Interface: A Tendency Toward Conformity, OR. HISTORY PROJECT, http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory /narratives/subtopic.cfm?subtopic_ID=83 (last visited May 24, 2012) (“Under the Klan’s influence, the Oregon legislature passed an Alien Property Act in 1923.”). 138 Ku Klux Klan—History, supra note 15 (“At its peak in 1924, 40,000 uniformed Klansmen paraded through the streets of Washington, D.C., during the Democratic National Convention.”). 139 143 CONG. REC. S11893 (daily ed. Nov. 6, 1997) (statement of the Klan Dragon of Oregon). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1302 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 Prior to statehood, Oregon was also a hub of organizing activity for the anti-Union Knights of the Golden Circle (KCG). The KCG, which operated as a secret society from Antebellum through Reconstruction, was linked to visions for a slaveholding Pacific Confederacy or Pacific Coast Republic140 within a hemispheric annexation agenda aimed at a “golden circle” of territories in the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico.141 Regarding racial discrimination against blacks, it was not until 1926 that Oregon’s constitution was amended to remove the exclusion law from its state Bill of Rights,142 and 1927 until the prohibition against black voting was removed,143 though it took until 1951 before Oregon’s anti-miscegenation law was removed.144 Perhaps not surprisingly, then, even as late as the 1950s, some company towns in Central Oregon and elsewhere had virtually no Italians or Greeks among the employees and residents,145 while discriminatory hiring and residential exclusion in other Oregon cities and towns resulted in negligible numbers of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians.146 In Eugene, Oregon, prior to 1965, blacks were allowed to live only in three areas, all on the outskirts of town or in unincorporated areas,147 much of which was Army tent housing (called “Tent City”) or was located several miles from the nearest gas station and running water.148 By some measures, Washington State’s early racial history appears better, though such a   140 Timeline, supra note 133. 141 Knights of the Golden Circle, WIKIPEDIA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights _of_the_Golden_Circle (last visited May 24, 2012); see also A Brief History of Cascadia 1846 to 1952, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www.cascadianow.org/a-brief -history-of-cascadia-1846-to-1952 (last visited May 24, 2012) (distinguishing antebellum secessionist advocacy for a new national “Republic of the Pacific” from the activities of the Knights of the Golden Circle and claiming that the “American government . . . launched a successful propaganda attack to destroy the Pacific movement by associating it with . . . the Knights of the Golden Circle, which was a pro-Confederate, pro-slavery organization.”). 142 Timeline, supra note 133. 143 Id. 144 Id. 145 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 45. 146 Id. 147 EUGENE HISTORIC REVIEW BD., EUGENE MODERNISM 1935–65, at 10.2 (2003), available at http://www.hp-nw.com/images/Modernism/Eugene%20Modernism %201935- 65.pdf. 148 Id. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1303 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest claim warrants a closer, careful examination.149 In 1868, Washington lifted its previous territorial ban on interracial marriage,150 and upon the state’s founding in 1889 Washington’s constitution banned racial discrimination in schools.151 Yet Washington’s company towns of the early twentieth century maintained racial exclusions or discriminatory hiring practices.152 With these kinds of laws and widespread practices, it should come as no surprise that, for example, census data from one century ago lists Oregon’s and Washington’s populations as ninety-seven percent white and Idaho’s as almost one hundred percent white.153 Of course, these figures did not include American Indians and were drawn through racial categories and data collection methods quite different from those that are in use today.154 What may come as surprise, though, is that people nonetheless came from all around the world to live and work in this region, probably in greater number than census records indicate and even when denied residence and work within incorporated areas or company towns, or when faced with hostility and violence.155 We know from regional history that around the turn of the twentieth century, coal mining and timber towns like Roslyn and Port Blakely, Washington, respectively, had Baptist churches that provided “colored” services.156 Port Blakely also had a Buddhist temple within a neighborhood that Japanese families had built for themselves.157 Meanwhile, in Oregon, Punjab Sikhs and Hindus worked in the lumber mill at Crawfordsville,158 a still-existing unincorporated area in Oregon’s Willamette Valley about forty-five minutes from both the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. Some of the hostility and violence that these people faced would count today as domestic terrorism.   149 See Jason A. Gillmer, Crimes of Passion: The Regulation of Interracial Sex in Washington, 1855–1950, 47 GONZ. L. REV. 393, 395 (2012). 150 Act of Jan. 23, 1868, § 1, Wash. Sess. Laws 47, 47-48. 151 Wash. Const. art. IX, § 1. 152 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 46–47. 153 Id. at 43. 154 Data Collection, supra note 22. 155 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 45. 156 Id. at 77. 157 Id. 158 Stephen Williamson, Sikhs and Hindus from India, PING YANG ON THE MOHAWK (2003), http://members.efn.org/~opal/indiamen.htm. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1304 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 Here is just one example, which is particularly disturbing in its target and its message: Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Mohawk Valley area just outside Eugene-Springfield was home to a one-room grade school called Ping Yang. Within a six-year period from the time that it was first built, Ping Yang School was the target of one unsuccessful arson attempt and two unsuccessful attempts to dynamite the building before it was finally destroyed by a terrorist bomb in 1901; no one was ever arrested in any of these incidents.159 Just why the school was targeted and why it had been given the name “Ping Yang” remains the subject of speculation.160 The Mohawk Valley attracted Japanese immigrants and blacks to work in the lumber mills and on the railroads, but Chinese workers and families were excluded from the area.161 Even if the perpetrator(s) and the motive(s) remain speculative, it was not unheard of at the time for vandals or terrorists to blow up or set fire to buildings.162 Indeed, a historian of the Ping Yang incident claims, “Events like this happened all over the West” and notes, “The first attempts to establish a university in Eugene, Oregon failed because someone set fire to the buildings.”163 There is reason to think that racism may have played some role in the Ping Yang School bombing. Each of the three bombing attempts came well after the initial arson attempt, and indeed occurred once Japanese immigrants and blacks had started to settle in the area.164 The same historian notes, “Early Oregon was much more racially and culturally diverse than our histories tell us.”165 The same can be said of other areas, especially rural company towns dedicated to difficult labor in dangerous conditions. As previously mentioned, some of those towns intentionally recruited black, Japanese, Chinese, and Eastern and Southern European workers, especially to break up or   159 Williamson, supra note 134; Stephen H. Williamson, Tales of Lost and Forgotten History, STORIES BY STEVE (2007), http://members.efn.org/~opal/storiesbysteve.html; see also Finn J.D. John, Ping Yang School Near Marcola Blown up Three Times with Dynamite, OFFBEAT OR. HISTORY (Mar. 14, 2010), http://www.offbeatOregon.com /H1003b_PingYang.html. 160 Williamson, supra note 134 (“It appears that Ping Yang was the name of the entire area, not just the school.”); see also John, supra note 159 (indicating that Ping Yang may have been named for the then capital of Korea, Pyongyang). 161 See generally Williamson, supra note 134. 162 Id. 163 Id. 164 Id. 165 Id. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1305 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest prevent labor organizing.166 However, these workers were culturally non-assimilable and were the first to be let go when conflicts or social enmities flared, when preferred white European workers needed work, or when the numbers of nonwhites grew to be significant.167 As a result, “The Pacific Northwest became a mostly white, European area because people of other races were kept out by exclusion laws and physical violence.”168 VII SECESSIONISM AND NATIONALISM IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST Racial exclusion, discrimination under law, and extralegal measures including domestic terrorism are just some of the means by which the Pacific Northwest as a whole, and specific subregions and locales in particular, became predominantly white and continued to privilege whiteness in myriad ways. Recurring secessionisms and nationalisms, including the mid-nineteenth century vision for a Pacific Coast Republic169 or slaveholding Pacific Confederacy,170 also helped to shape this area as a predominantly white, whiteness- privileging region. As noted in previous Parts, the Inland Northwest and greater Pacific Northwest have long been home to independent-minded, politically fractious individuals and groups resolved to stand against external impositions of authority,171 both real and imagined.172   166 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 45. 167 Id. at 47. 168 Williamson, supra note 134. 169 Dorothy Hull, The Movement in Oregon for the Establishment of a Pacific Coast Republic, 17 Q. OR. HIST. SOC’Y 177, 179 (1916) (describing the Antebellum movement in the Oregon Territory for the establishment of a Pacific Coast Republic). 170 See Junius Rochester, Mainstream or Menace: Confederates and Yankees in the Pacific Northwest, 1861–1865: A Talk by Junius Rochester, HISTORYLINK (Mar. 1, 2008), http://www.historylink.org/_content/printer_friendly/pf_output.cfm?file_id=8538 (describing Confederate activity in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War years and legislative efforts in the Washington Territory to prevent a Pacific Confederacy or Pacific Coast Republic). 171 A Brief History of Cascadia 1846 to 1952, supra note 141 (“The American government however launched a successful propaganda attack to destroy the Pacific movement by associating it with a group called the Knights of the Golden Circle, which was a pro-Confederate, pro-slavery organization. At the same time, other movements inside of Cascadia, such as the Klamath movement, Trinity and Jackson movements all sought to wrench certain areas of Cascadia free from U.S. control. These too failed, largely by being put down through various uses of force.”). 172 See, e.g., Cascadia Flag, supra note 6. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1306 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 Historic company towns were most often privately owned, unincorporated, and located legally, geographically, and administratively beyond significant interaction with or support from county, state, or federal government. Many were located in remote, rugged areas at great distance from state capitals and major industrial and urban areas.173 Many were also located within areas where secessionist mindsets and activities had shaped regional history, politics, and culture.174 These kinds of historic influences propelled nineteenth-century efforts to found a white-only State of Lincoln in the Inland Northwest, the mid-twentieth century push for a State of Jefferson that linked company towns large and small throughout Southern Oregon and Northern California,175 and similar ideations and movements including the States of Jackson, Klamath, Pacifica, Shasta, Siskiyou, and Trinity.176 Common across these contexts are recurrent assertions that “distant seats of power,” whether at state levels or in the form of the so-called “eastern federal governments,” interfere with autonomy, exert too much control over local affairs, fail to understand or respect local concerns and ways of living, and use force to thwart local democracy and independence.177 Today, these histories and dynamics manifest in recurring secessionist and nationalist visions, sometimes organized activities too, such as those for predominantly white states like Jefferson (in Southern Oregon and Northern California) and Kootenai (in the Inland Northwest), and a transnational bioregional democratic republic of Cascadia.178 The visions and activities may be   173 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 115–16. 174 See id. at 213–24; see also Jefferson Statehood Project, STATE OF JEFFERSON, http://www.jeffersonstate.com (last visited May 24, 2012). 175 See generally Cascadia Related Links, supra note 21. 176 See A Brief History of Cascadia 1846 to 1952, supra note 141; see also Gail L. Jenner, History of the State of Jefferson, JEFFERSON BACKROADS, http://www .jeffersonbackroads.com/history.html (last visited May 24, 2012) (describing historical visions for States of Jackson, Jefferson, and Shasta); Stan Mottaz, History of the State of Jefferson and the State of Jefferson Mathematics Congress, STATE OF JEFFERSON MATHEMATICS CONG., http://www.humboldt.edu/sojmc/history.htm (last visited May 24, 2012) (discussing historical visions for States of Jefferson, Klamath, and Siskiyou); State of Jefferson, JEFFERSON PUB. RADIO, http://www.ijpr.org/page.asp?navid=1033 (last visited May 24, 2012) (identifying historical visions for Jackson Territory and States of Jefferson, Klamath, and Shasta). 177 See A Brief History of Cascadia 1846 to 1952, supra note 141. 178 See A Brief History of Cascadia 1952 to 1983, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www.cascadianow.org/a-brief-history-of-cascadia-1952-to-present (last visited May 24, 2012) (“David McCloskey, a Seattle University Sociologist and founder of the Cascadia Institute, coined the term Cascadia in the late 1970’s. According to Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1307 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest imaginative and playful, politically and economically driven, or explicitly shaped by race relations and racial attitudes.179 Some contemplate a new republican citizenship180 based in lifestyle, as well as ecological and egalitarian values,181 yet with racialized impact as a new democratic republic that grows through recruiting and attracting white amenity migrants. Others contemplating the same basic geographic or bioregional areas, yet proceeding under a different name and slightly altered flag,182 are explicitly racially motivated in their efforts to attract and recruit white migrants,183 organize   McCloskey, this ‘initial’ Cascadia included parts of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Western Montana, British Columbia and South East Alaska, running in the north from the top of the Alaska panhandle to Cape Mendicino, California in the south––and was the first to adapt the area to follow ecological boundaries over preexisting political ones.”). 179 See id.; Wallace, supra note 21. 180 See Cascadia Flag, supra note 6 (“We have a name, we are Cascadians and we have a home and it is called Cascadia.”). 181 Id. (“Holding similar views about environmental policy, equal rights, freedom of expression, local democracy, global community and the freedom of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia to decide their own fate, Cascadia is a unique coastal-mountain bioregion between San Francisco and the Alaskan panhandle in which the dominant culture is one of respect and honor for the environment and strong tradition of democracy and social justice.”). 182 Compare Tricolor Flag, NORTHWEST FRONT, http://northwestfront.org/about /tricolor-flag (last visited May 24, 2012) (utilizing the same colors as the Cascadian tricolor flag but with vertical rather than horizontal color blocs, without the Douglas Fir in the center panel, and given a different symbolic significance: “The sky is the blue, and the land is the green. The white is for the people in between.”), with Our Flag, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www.cascadianow.org/our-flag (last visited May 24, 2012) (“The blue of the flag represents the moisture rich sky above and Pacific ocean along with the Salish Sea, lakes and other inland waters. Our home is of continuous cascading waters flowing from our sky and mountains back to the Pacific. For Cascadia is a land of falling water from the Pacific to the western slopes of the Rockies and Cascades where water cycles as vapor and then rain and snow to run through creek and river back to the Pacific. The white represents snow and clouds and the green to represent the evergreen forests and fields of the Pacific Northwest. The lone standing Douglas Fir symbolizes endurance, defiance and resilience, named for explorer David Douglas, the first written account of the bioregion as a land of cascading waters and from where our primary mountain range takes its name. All these symbols of color and icon come together to symbolize what being Cascadian is all about.”). 183 See The Fundamental Principles of Northwest Migration, NORTHWEST FRONT, http://northwestfront.org/about/principles-of-migration (last visited May 24, 2012) (calling for mass white migration and repopulation in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana within the next decade). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1308 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 politically, and form a constitutionally governed white Northwest Homeland.184 One of the most famous and influential Pacific Northwest secessionist movements came in 1941, just before the United States entered World War II, with the call to create a “State of Jefferson” along the Southern Oregon and Northern California borderland.185 The Jefferson movement arose out of myriad frustrations with each state’s respective government and specifically the lack of investment in infrastructure to support the natural-resource-extraction activities by company towns and other private businesses.186 Today, many in the Oregon-California borderland and surrounding counties refer to the area as the “State of Jefferson,” a territory that some stretch from Coos Bay to Mendocino and Ukiah to the West to Lakeview and Susanville in the East, and from Roseburg down through Chico.187 Perhaps more playfully than politically, secessionism remains a historical artifact of the area and a living feature of its cultural fabric. Jefferson Public Radio, located in Jefferson County, Oregon, describes itself as broadcasting from the “State of Jefferson.”188 It is common to find “Welcome to the State of Jefferson” on restaurant receipts in Ashland, Oregon,189 and “The State of Jefferson” stenciled on farming equipment and heavy machinery in the rural areas on both sides of the Oregon-California border. Likewise, the Inland Northwest is no stranger to secessionist activity in response to similar conditions that drove the Jefferson movement. It is also no stranger to racially exclusionary secessionist activity. As far back as 1865 and as recently as 2005 or so, some have called for the creation of a separate “State of Lincoln” in the Inland Northwest, to comprise the North Idaho panhandle and Eastern and Central Washington, perhaps also Western Montana, and extending basically between the Washington’s present day borders   184 See Northwest Migration, WIKIBIN, http://wikibin.org/articles/northwest-migration .html (last visited May 24, 2012) (laying out the articles of a white nationalist Northwest Republic Constitution as drafted by Tacoma resident Harold Covington). 185 CARLSON, supra note 92, at 213–24. 186 See id. 187 Id. 188 History and Mission, JEFFERSON PUB. RADIO, http://www.ijpr.org/Page.asp?NavID =1031 (last visited May 24, 2012). 189 Ashland is also the only municipality and branch of Oregon government to utilize any form of sales tax (a five-percent tax on restaurant and take-out food). Food and Beverage Tax, CITY OF ASHLAND, http://ashland.or.us/Page.asp?NavID=9180 (last visited May 24, 2012). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1309 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest shared with Oregon and Canada.190 Other secessionist activities include proposals for smaller states, such as the “State of Kootenai” for the North Idaho panhandle.191 As in the Jefferson context, historic company town areas remain very much part of these secessionist mindsets and activities. So too, however, is organized hate—a linkage that shapes visions for a racially exclusionary white Northwest Homeland, which is one variant of Cascadian secessionism and nationalism. At minimum, the territory of an independent Cascadia192 would involve transnational change including British Columbia’s secession from Canada along with secession by Oregon and Washington from the United States. Some versions of Cascadian independence also envision Alaska, Idaho, and sections of California, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, and Yukon as breaking away to form a new Republic of Cascadia,193 either as merged into a single sovereign nation or formed as a confederation, perhaps as inclusive of these smaller imaginary breakaway states.194 Both geographically and popularly, the Cascadian independence movement is the largest and most ambitious secessionist and nationalist vision in the contemporary Pacific Northwest. Its pursuit of an independence agenda blends romantically revisionist regional historicism and selectively packaged, future-looking regional pragmatism. Historically, its advocates claim, Cascadia represents the reclamation of the region’s prior status and the redemption of Thomas Jefferson’s vision for “an independent nation in the Western portion of the North American continent that he dubbed the ‘Republic of the Pacific.’”195 This Cascadian vision romanticizes the pre–Civil   190 See Lincoln (Northwestern US State), WIKIPEDIA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Lincoln_(Northwest_state) (last visited May 24, 2012). 191 Id. 192 Cascadia Flag, supra note 6 (“Cascadia is the region that is often called the “Pacific Northwest” which includes Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, Northern California, Northwestern Wyoming, Western Montana and the panhandle of Alaska.”). 193 See Cascadia (Independence Movement), supra note 28. 194 Id. 195 Joseph Ellison, Designs for a Pacific Republic, 1843–62, 31 OR. HIST. Q. 319, 319 (1930) (“One of the early dreamers of a Pacific republic was the great American expansionist Thomas Jefferson. As early as 1812, when the American frontier settlements were still struggling east of the Mississippi, when Oregon was yet a kind of everyman’s land, and when the native Californians were still in their pastoral state, basking in the sun and dancing their fandango, Jefferson prophesied that the time would come when the Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1310 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 War past, when the area was “[l]ong united by similar indigenous cultures” and later designated as a “single political unit: the Oregon Territory—shared by several nations.”196 It posits a similarly romantic enduring “sense of self identity” about Cascadia, even though the region has long been “divided into different political jurisdictions.” Furthermore, it contends that Cascadia of today is virtually the same as “the Republic of the Pacific” from long ago, and that Thomas Jefferson’s visionary purpose was for the area to become a “great, free and independent empire” separate from the United States economically and politically but comprised of American settlers engaged in democratic self-governance and linked to the United States through trade. All of which essentially ignores prior histories of the region, plus two centuries worth of more recent events, and the making of the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent creation of U.S. territories for the young nation’s benefit. Augmenting this romanticized, retroactive rationale is a forward- looking, nonviolent secessionism, a pulling away from both the United States and Canada to reunify the region and re-form it as a “bioregional democratic republic” through a “peaceful and nonviolent horizontal organizing structure.”197 In reality, this so-called “Evergreen Revolution”198 is motivated by appeal to longstanding secessionist concerns and discontents like “America is too big, and our interests are better represented by the people themselves, rather than in a distant seat of power,”199 and those in “Washington and Oregon have much more in common with those in British Columbia than those in Washington D.C.”200 Perhaps just as importantly, Cascadianism involves attitudinal and cultural affiliations, as well as consumerist and environmentalist activities, at the heart of which lies aspirations for something that is simultaneously old and new. Namely, a promise of freedom to affiliate politically by lifestyle,   whole Pacific coast would be covered with American communities independent of the Government of the United States.”). 196 About Cascadia, supra note 25. 197 See Our Vision, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www.cascadianow.org /our-vision/ (last visited May 17, 2012); Steps to Bioregional Independence, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www.cascadianow.org/steps-to-bioregional-independence/ (last visited May 17, 2012). 198 A Brief History of Cascadia 1983–present, supra note 176. 199 Cascadia Flag, supra note 6. 200 Cascadia Bioregionalism, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www .cascadianow.org/cascadia-bioregionalism (last visited May 24, 2012). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1311 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest culture, consumption, and connection to bioregion201 within enormous, resource-rich expanses, now as dotted by highly affluent cosmopolitan cities and major urban areas amidst rural and natural environs.202 Cascadia has been recognized as a “megaregion” by the National Committee for America 2050, and through the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER), the Canadian and U.S. governments recognize the area from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Portland as the “Cascadian Corridor.”203 In January 2011, Time identified Cascadia as one of the world’s “Top 10 Aspiring Nations,” even as it asserted that Cascadia “has little chance of ever becoming a reality.”204 Regardless of practical possibilities, however, the persistence of visions and activities like Cascadia, Jefferson, and Lincoln across generations may portend more than romantic dalliance with regional affiliation. The mainstream popularity of Cascadianism, combined with other visions like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Kootenai, reflects many things: not only a tolerance but indeed a playfulness around secessionism and nationalism as cultural signifiers and meanings; a taste for independence and change; and a certain political receptivity to dissolution of government, or at the very least a sympathy with the sentiment behind it. A 2005 research study conducted by the Western Standard found that thirty-one percent of British Columbians and forty-two percent of Albertans were favorable to exploring secession from Canada (though not necessarily for the purposes of forming   201 See, e.g., Our Flag, supra note 182 (“Designed in 1994 by Portland native and professor Alexander Baretich, [the Cascadian national flag] can increasingly be found in cities throughout the Pacific Northwest and is becoming a common sight at soccer games, occupy protests and of course, on locally made microbrews (among our favorite, the Secession IPA or Cascadian Dark Ale).”); Cascadia Bioregionalism, supra note 200 (“The delineation of a bioregion has environmental stewardship as its primary goal, with the belief that political boundaries should match ecological and cultural boundaries.”). 202 Welcome to Cascadia, supra note 28 (“[Cascadia] boasts an economy that generates more than $750 billion worth of goods and services each year, which would place Cascadia in the top 20 economies of the world. It’s [sic] largest city Seattle has an economy slightly smaller than Thailand, but larger than Colombia and Venezuela.”). 203 See Cascadia Bioregionalism, supra note 200; As a Megaregion, CASCADIAN INDEPENDENCE PROJECT, http://www.cascadianow.org/as-a-megaregion (last visited May 24, 2012) (defining “megaregion” as areas where “boundaries begin to blur, creating a new scale of geography,” in which these “areas have interlocking economic systems, shared natural resources and ecosystems, and common transportation systems link these population centers together”). 204 Kayla Webley, The Republic of Cascadia, TIME, Jan. 10, 2011, http://www.time .com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2041365_2041364_2041373,00.html. Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1312 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 Cascadia or joining the United States).205 A 2008 Zogby International poll found that twenty-two percent of Americans agree that states or regions have the right to secede peacefully from the United States.206 Rhetorically, then, Cascadia signifies a massive geographic, economic, ecological, cultural, linguistic,207 technological, and recreational transnational super-region with political and racialized consequence. Many of Cascadia’s meanings, and its associated businesses and practices as political and cultural ideas, appeal not only to white amenity migrants attracted by a Cascadian lifestyle but also strongly to young white men with (supposedly) disposable income for recreational pursuits including the outdoors, professional sports,208 and craft or microbrew beer.209 Cascadian independence   205 Kevin Steel, A Nation Torn Apart, W. STANDARD.CA, Aug. 22, 2005, http://www .westernstandard.ca/website/article.php?id=928. 206 Middlebury Institute/Zogby Poll, MIDDLEBURY INST. (July 23, 2008), http://middleburyinstitute.org/zogbysecessionpoll2008.html. 207 See Cascadian English, REPUBLIC OF CASCADIA, http://republic-of-Cascadia .tripod.com/cascadianenglish.html (last visited May 24, 2012) (asserting the existence of a distinct, dominant regional language called “Cascadian English”). 208 The region’s Major League Soccer teams, Vancouver Whitecaps, FC Seattle Sounders, and Portland Timbers all compete against each other for the “Cascadia Cup.” See Matt Gaschk, A Cup on the Line, SEATTLE SOUNDERS FOOTBALL CLUB, Sept. 23, 2011, http://www.soundersfc.com/News/Articles/2011/09-September/Cascadia-Cup.aspx. Several of the region’s professional sports teams, including the Vancouver Canucks, Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Mariners, and the Seattle Sounders, utilize some form of Cascadia’s national colors of blue, white, and green. The Canucks sell jerseys, T-shirts, and hats in the team colors (or Cascadian national colors) that feature the cartoonish visage of “Johnny Canuck,” a white lumberjack who is the team’s homage to a Canadian hero/superhero of comic strips, political cartoons, and propaganda. Johnny Canuck first appeared in print in 1869 and reemerged in World War II as a square-jawed fighter pilot. He has also appeared as a Quebec habitant, a farmer, and a rancher. The “Johnny Canuck” white lumberjack was the Canucks original logo in 1970. See Johnny Canuck, WIKIPEDIA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Canuck (last visited May 24, 2012). Thousands of the rioters, looters, and vandals—primarily young white men who had been drinking—who destroyed areas of downtown Vancouver after the team’s Stanley Cup loss were wearing Canucks apparel in the team colors/Cascadia national colors. See Photos: Riots, Fire, Destruction After Vancouver’s Loss, NAT’L POST (Aug. 25, 2011, 1:31 AM), http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/16/photos-riots-fire-destruction-after-vancouvers- loss; see generally SEATTLE MARINERS, http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id =sea (last visited May 24, 2012) (Major League Baseball); SEATTLE SEAHAWKS, http://www.seahawks.com (last visited May 24, 2012) (National Football League); SEATTLE SOUNDERS, http://www.soundersfc.com (last visited May 18, 2012) (Major League Soccer); VANCOUVER CANUCKS, http://canucks.nhl.com (last visited May 24, 2012) (National Hockey League); see also SEATTLE SOUNDERS WOMEN, http://www.sounderswomen.com (last visited May 24, 2012) (United Soccer Leagues W- League); SEATTLE THUNDERBIRDS, http://www.seattlethunderbirds.com (last visited May 24, 2012) (Western Hockey League). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1313 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest advocates might be quick to assert the distinctness of this movement, and most other contemporary secessionist/nationalist activities too, from the region’s recent history of organized white separatism and supremacism,210 which also rely heavily on strong appeals to young white men, as well as white amenity migrant recruitment. Despite this disclaimer and denouncement, real caution around the more loosely organized Cascadian independence movement is warranted, for both Cascadian independence and some specifically white racist movements utilize overlapping semiotic and imaginative appeals to young white men and white amenity migrants for similar political and ideological purposes. Namely, promoting among a primarily white populace ideations of independence from existing state and federal governments for supposed failures to protect quality of life and other interests of said populace. Even if Cascadian independence avows commitments to robust civil liberties, equal rights for all, and social justice, some Cascadianisms in fact call for a racially exclusionary white homeland   209 Regional microbreweries like Rogue (Newport, Oregon), Lost Coast (Eureka, California), Hopworks Urban Brewery (Portland, Oregon), Fish (Olympia, Washington), and Philips (Victoria, Canada) draw upon themes of nationhood, citizenship, republicanism, secession, and independence in their marketing schemes, as well as the phrase Cascadia and its “national” colors of blue, white, and green. Rogue invites people to become citizens of the “Rogue Nation.” See Citizenship, ROGUE, http://www.rogue .com/nation/rogue-citizenship.php (last visited May 24, 2012). Lost Coast proclaims that is brewed in the “Humboldt Nation,” while Fish and Philips identify as being brewed in the “Republic of Cascadia.” See Beer, HUMBOLDT-NATION.COM, http://www.humboldt- nation.com/category/pages/beer (last visited May 24, 2012); Fish Tale Ales, FISH TAIL ORGANIC ALES, http://www.fishbrewing.com/fish-tale-ales (last visited May 24, 2012); Phillips Times, PHILLIPS, http://phillipsbeer.com/whats-with-the-cascadian-flag-on-our- box (last visited May 24, 2012). HUB’s bottling for its “Secession Ale” features a map of Cascadia, from Oregon through British Columbia, set against the Cascadia national flag (three equal-width horizontal color bands of blue, white, and green and emblazoned with a vertical Douglas Fir in the center). See Hopworks Releases Secession Cascadian Dark Ale, HUB, Jan. 4, 2012, http://hopworksbeer.com/2012/01/news/hopworks-releases- organic-secession-cascadian-dark-ale; see also No Equal Amber Lager, RED HOOK, http://redhook.com/ecs-noequal (last visited May 24, 2012) (describing this beer as being brewed as “a collaboration with the Emerald City Supporters . . . Sky of Blue, Sea of Green and a Lager of Amber”). The label is emblazoned with the Seattle Sounders FC logo (“Red Hook is the Official Craft Beer of Sounders FC”), a shadow image of a person waving a Cascadia flag against a Seattle city skyline backdrop, an “ECS” crest (again in Cascadia colors) with feathered wings and topped by a grinning skull, and the slogan “We Are Here, Supporting Sounders Drinking Beer.” See id. 210 See A Brief History of Cascadia 1952 to 1983, supra note 178 (“Unrelated to any of the other secessionist movements and regarded with near-universal hostility among residents of the Northwest was the Northwest Territorial Imperative, a secessionist proposal promoted by the Aryan Nations during the 1980s.”). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1314 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 maintained through white nationalist constitutionalism and militarism, as initially facilitated by white amenity migration. These include unquestionably racist and extremist developments like the Northwest Homeland/Northwest Migration Movement and its Northwest Front Party, which also utilize Cascadia’s national colors, lay claim to the same vast expanse of land and cities, and call for the creation of a militarized white-only homeland.211 Like many regional historic attempts at white nationalism, these movements would utilize racial exclusion laws, armed forces, a national police force, and other constitutionally created mechanisms to found and maintain a white-only Northwest Homeland.212 Especially concerning about this version of Pacific Northwest white racism, which seems to have peaked around 2006 but persists today, are its effort to go “mainstream” among sympathetic whites, including direct and ambient appeals to recent or prospective amenity migrants to Pacific Northwest “whitopias” and “extreme whitopias,”213 and to use constitutionalist mechanisms to gain power. The Northwest Front Party met in Southwest Washington in 2006 to draft the Northwest American Republic Constitution.214 Its architects drew lessons from the failures of Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations, and sought to kick out, and keep out, the symbols and popular associations with Neo- Nazism and skinheads in order to appeal to mainstream white audiences.215 If presented with appropriately tailored messages and widely appealing symbols, the theory went, those white amenity migrants leaving more diverse areas would be more likely to become sympathetic to the cause, join the movement,216 and help these white racists take control of local government.217   211 See Home, NW. FRONT, http://northwestfront.org (last visited May 24, 2012) (“The Northwest Front is a political organization of Aryan men and women who recognize that an independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest is the only possibility for the survival of the White race on this continent.”). For fuller discussions of these developments and their recent historic and ideological connections to, as well as departures from other regional white racist influences, see ROBERT L. TSAI, AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN CONSTITUTIONS: VISIONS OF POWER AND COMMUNITY AFTER THE FOUNDING (forthcoming 2013) (manuscript at Ch. 8) (on file with author). 212 See Home, supra note 210. 213 Id. 214 The Northwest Constitution, THOUGHTCRIME (June 1, 2006, 7:03 PM), http://downwithjugears.blogspot.com/2006/06/northwest-constitution-june-2006.html (calling for edits to the proposed “Northwest American Republic” constitution on the drafter’s blog). 215 See Home, supra note 211. 216 Butler Plan Introduction, NW. FRONT, http://northwestfront.org/about/the-butler- plan (last visited May 24, 2012) (calling for the introduction of the “Butler Plan” which Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1315 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest Given the permeability of sport hooliganism by organized hate, extremism, and xenophobia,218 prudence suggests paying closer attention for the appearance of organized hate within Cascadian cultural and recreational contexts, and the potential utilization of these contexts as spaces for organized hate to enter and gain influence toward building public presence. This would include taking heed of the manipulability of Cascadian semiotics, the recurrent linkages of masculinity, alcohol-fueled violence, and sport fan culture, and explosive incidents like the mass vandalism of the Vancouver riots in the summer of 2011. Prudence also suggests keeping in mind Faulkner’s keen insight: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Forestry in the Pacific Northwest––that regional industry historically so identified with company towns and work camps, which contributed so much to the formative context that the author has described herein—is today a regional industry shaped by Latina/o immigration and ongoing institutionalized racism.219 With the strongly anti-Latina/o immigrant animus reflected in the U.S. immigration debate, the proliferation of state- and local-level laws that have upset the balance of immigration federalism,220 and the regional persistence of organized hate and white racism described herein, could a dangerously combustible mix be coming together in the Pacific Northwest once more? CONCLUSION: INSIGHTS AND HOPES I began this Article with a tale of the unfolding clash of the Tribe and the Company Town, which I have used heuristically for what it   includes engaging white refugees in a “vigorous and dynamic program of political action, propaganda and educational activity”). 217 Id. 218 For a discussion of the occurrence and dynamics of such phenomena in the English football context, see generally THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL: CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY (Jon Garland et al. eds., 2001); JON GARLAND & MICHAEL ROWE, RACISM AND ANTI-RACISM IN FOOTBALL (2001); Jon Garland & James Treadwell, ‘No Surrender to the Taliban’ Football Hooliganism, Islamophobia and the Rise of the English Defence League, 10 BRIT. SOC’Y CRIMINOLOGY 19 (2010); James Treadwell & Jon Garland, Masculinity, Marginalization and Violence, 51 BRIT. J. CRIMINOLOGY 621 (2011). 219 See generally BRINDA SARATHY, PINEROS: LATINO LABOUR AND THE CHANGING FACE OF FORESTRY IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST (2011). 220 See generally Keith Aoki & John Shuford, Welcome to Amerizona—Immigrants Out!: Assessing “Dystopian Dreams” and “Usable Futures” of Immigration Reform, and Considering Whether “Immigration Regionalism” Is an Idea Whose Time Has Come, 38 FORDHAM URB. L.J. 1, 15 (2010). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1316 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 raises regarding whiteness in the Inland Northwest and greater Pacific Northwest. I excavated underexplored features of regional history, politics, law and government, culture, and economics, doing so to show how these features bear on present circumstances and to show some meanings and functions of whiteness within predominantly white areas of the Inland Northwest and the greater region. In closing, this Article offers five final insights as well as a few hopes. The first insight is that histories, symbols, and practices are almost endlessly and boundlessly appropriable, and as such it is not so easy (if even possible) to erase or delimit their ranges of meaning. Today’s imaginative riffs on secessionism and nationalism as historical and cultural artifacts of the Pacific Northwest region occur within a larger context of racism, exclusion, domestic terrorism, organized hate, and extremism, both from yesterday and today. For the author, a lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest with familial ties to the region that span nearly 150 years, who enjoys many distinctly Cascadian pursuits, who loves this land, and who connects with others through regional sentiment and state of mind, these are oddly uncomfortable admissions. However, it is vital to recognize that not everyone sees and experiences the region similarly, that there are multiple legitimate ways to connect deeply to place, and that some symbols and practices of affiliation are not so straightforwardly simple and playful. Indeed, some symbols and practices might actually perpetuate conditions of not feeling (or indeed actually being) safe, welcome, and included. The second insight is that any minority population—especially a racial, religious, or ethnic minority—can become a target for hostility, discrimination, and exclusion through legal and extralegal channels. Today’s so-called “illegal immigrants” from Mexico, Central America, the Pacific Rim, and Eastern Europe are yesterday’s excluded, discriminated against, and terrorized workers and families from China, Japan, Southern and Central Europe, the Southern United States, and so on. The thousands of recent efforts made at state and local government levels to regulate immigrants and immigration, such as Arizona Senate Bill 1070, Georgia House Bill 87, Alabama House Bill 56, and similar legislation in Indiana, Utah, and Alabama, should receive vetting not only for constitutionality but also for the lessons of history.221   221 See id.; John Shuford, In the Key of Aoki: Immigration Regionalism (eco), 45 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. (forthcoming 2012). Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 2012] “The Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town”: 1317 What We Can Learn About the Workings of Whiteness in the Pacific Northwest The third insight is that economic, political, and social change may bring to the surface or especially inflame attitudinal racism, anti- immigrant sentiment, and xenophobia among those who are accustomed to enjoying privilege, influence, and largely unchecked power but who now experience themselves as on the losing end of what they perceive as a zero-sum game. The powers-that-be do not like having to share power, especially with those whom they have always regarded as inferior, any more than they enjoy the experience of feeling their power slip away. If or when circumstances begin to change, the privileged regard change as a problem, one brought on by the formerly powerless rather than by those whose privilege is invisible to them and whose influence may be waning. The fourth insight flows from the others: “crime” is a contested category that, like so many other things, is influenced by power, including power that is not always legitimately held and exercised. The regional histories discussed herein prompt the questions: Who gets to define and determine what is, or is not, a crime? Who gets to determine what is prosecuted, what is punished, and what is dealt with in other ways, and how this all happens? For example, how else can one plausibly explain the phenomenon of a grade school in a small logging community, one that had begun to attract nonwhites, being the repeat target of arson and bombing without a single arrest ever made? How can one plausibly explain the phenomena of near- absolute white racial homogeneity in some counties and micropolitan areas without reference to laws and extralegal measures that permit(ted) or criminalize(d) presence according to one’s background? Assuming, arguendo, that there is substance to the allegations within “the Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town,” how else can one plausibly explain the ability of the Town boss and political machine to engage in a width and breadth of such activities, apparently for decades, with impunity? The vulnerability of nearby racial minorities and those in the Town who are economically dependent upon staying in the good graces of the Town boss and political machine is only part of the situation. The absence of effective resistance from within or nearby only compounds an apparent lack of scrutiny and intervention from without. The fifth and final insight is this: perhaps what is most surprising about “the Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town” is not that such things still happen in the Inland Northwest. Rather, it is that we do not hear more often about such things and related issues happening Shuford 7/24/2012 1:01 PM 1318 OREGON LAW REVIEW [Vol. 90, 1273 throughout the Pacific Northwest. The conditions that have shaped the Company Town and its resistance to the Tribe are generations old and stretch widely across the people and places of the entire region. Despite the heavy prevalence of whitopias and extreme whitopias, and questions of how they might stand in relation to larger problems, the Inland Northwest and its “Tale of the Tribe and the Company Town” are not exceptional. This fact, not the persistence of small rural Towns run by Town bosses who harbor racist attitudes or the scattered presence of organized hate groups, is far scarier and far more serious. This Article also closes with a few hopes for the future, in light of the complicated relationship between past, present, and future as noted in the Introduction through literary references to Davies and Faulkner. For those who seek a safer, simpler way of life surrounded by “people like us” as their return to an idealized past, the author hopes that they recognize the Pacific Northwest for what it is: a place changed for the better as increasing demographic diversity has helped transform several major metropolises into cosmopolitan, globally prominent, and economically dynamic cities. The author also hopes that they recognize some of the unintended consequences and high costs that may come with white amenity migration, and that the newer expressions of cosmopolitanism, dynamism, and global prominence continue to spread throughout the Pacific Northwest and increasingly into the Inland Northwest even as distinctive qualities of life and mindsets in its subregions and locales remain. For those who seek to regain unfettered economic and political control over entire small areas and populations, as well as the disempowerment of American Indian tribes and persons, as their return to an idealized past, the author hopes that they accept that a different day has arrived and that it is time to leave behind the vestiges of Company Town life. For those imbued with desires to identify regionally and who riff playfully on tropes of nationalism, citizenship, and secession, the author hopes that they thoughtfully reject the worst that those tropes may also connote in favor of developing expansively appealing, widely inclusive, justice-minded visions of regional cultural spirit and identity as consistent with the aforementioned cosmopolitanism, dynamism, and global prominence. Yet for those who seek a new, separate, white homeland as their return to an idealized past, the author has no hope other than for their repentance.