Name: History Pub - Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River
Start: 2025-03-31T19:00:00-07:00
Location: McMenamins Kennedy School

McMenamins and Oregon Historical Society present
History Pub
Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River
Presented by Johanna Ogden
McMenamins Kennedy School Theater
Monday, March 31, 2025
7pm/doors 6pm
$5 advance/$6 doors
All ages
Oregon is commonly perceived to have little, let alone notable, South Asian history. Yet in the early 1900s, Oregon was at the center of two entwined quests for Indian independence and civic belonging that rocked the world. 𝑃𝑢𝑛𝑗𝑎𝑏𝑖 𝑅𝑒𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑖𝑎 𝑅𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟 traces the story of the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Bhagat Singh Thind's era-defining US Supreme Court citizenship case. Ghadar sought the overthrow of India's British colonizers while Thind utilized sanctioned legal channels to do so. Despite widely differing strategies, both the movement and the man were targeted, often in coordination, by the highest levels of the US and British governments. The empires' united message: India would not be an independent country and Indians could not be citizens.
In the decades that followed, it was a verdict Indians refused to abide. Johanna Ogden's detailed history of migrants' experience expands the time frame, geographic boundaries, and knowledge of the conditions and contributions of Indians in North America. It is the story of a people's awakening amid a rich community of international workers in an age of nationalist uprisings. To understand why one of the smallest western Indian settlements became a resistance center, 𝑃𝑢𝑛𝑗𝑎𝑏𝑖 𝑅𝑒𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑠 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. The first work to rejoin the lived experience of Thind and Ghadar activists, Punjabi Rebels complicates our understanding, not just of the global fight for Indian political rights, but of multi-racial democracy.
Johanna Ogden (MA, University of British Columbia) is an independent historian and local activist based in Portland. She has published multiple articles in 𝑂𝑟𝑒𝑔𝑜𝑛 𝐻𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑄𝑢𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑦, including "Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging," which received the Oregon Historical Society's Joel Palmer Award, and has spoken extensively across the Pacific Northwest and in India. She is the author of 𝑃𝑢𝑛𝑗𝑎𝑏𝑖 𝑅𝑒𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑖𝑎 𝑅𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟: 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑙𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑙 𝐹𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝐼𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐶𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑧𝑒𝑛𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝.