History Pub: The March 1910 St. Johns “Anti-Hindu” Riot: Its Global Impact Presented by Johanna Ogden

All Ages | Doors 6:00PM
McMenamins Kennedy School Theater
5736 NE 33rd Ave, Portland, OR 97211
Monday March 31st, 2025 7:00PM

Ever think of St. Johns as a center of resistance to British rule of India? Neither did author Johanna Ogden until she began researching Oregon’s early 1900s Indian community. Ogden will discuss the causes and consequences of the 1910 riot, focusing on Ghadar, the global radical nationalist organization that migrant Indian laborers founded in its wake. She will examine how a small Indian settlement in the West became a center of resistance against the British and launched an era-defining U.S. Supreme Court case as well as the US and British governments’ efforts to suppress them. In the early 1900s, Oregon was at the center of two entwined quests for Indian independence and civic belonging that rocked the world. To understand why one of the smallest western Indian settlements became a resistance center, Ogden’s Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River mines the colonial underpinnings of labor, race, and place-making and their regional and global connections, rendering a history of whiteness and labor as much as of Indian-ness and migration. Punjabi Rebels complicates our understanding, not just of the global fight for Indian political rights but also of multi-racial democracy.