Asian American Comparative Collection (AACC)

Idaho's most famous Chinese woman resident, Polly Bemis, arrived in Idaho Territory in 1872. For the next 60 years, she made a life for herself first in Warrens (now Warren) and then along the remote Salmon River with her husband Charlie Bemis. Her story has received widespread attention in novels, movies and popular lore, but these sources often mix the fascinating details of Polly Bemis’ real life with myths and fiction. For over two decades, Priscilla Wegars has been compiling documentary evidence about Polly Bemis to produce more accurate accounts of her life.

The AACC’s Wah Lee Collection consists of personal letters, photographs and artifacts related to Sergeant Wah Lee (1924–2000). Born in Guangzhou, China, Lee attended UC Berkeley before enlisting in the Army in 1943 as an airplane electrical mechanic for the 39th Bombardment Group. The items in this collection provide a personal perspective on Lee’s experiences as a Chinese American serving in WWII and his life in the years that followed.

About 1950, the F. S. Louie Company of Berkeley, California, began wholesaling tablewares to restaurants through an increasingly large distribution network. Although they came in a standard number of patterns and forms, F. S. Louie’s wares could be personalized to include the name, address and phone number of the restaurant for which they were made. Before closing the business in the early 2000s, the founder's son generously gave the AACC many examples of products that remained in the company's inventory. The AACC also contains two company catalogs and a selection of ceramics featuring restaurant names. Together, these items comprise a rich archive of F. S. Louie wares, maker’s marks, distribution networks and Chinese American restaurants operating in the mid- to late twentieth century.

Despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary, myths and rumors about secret underground “Chinese tunnels” abound in communities across the American West. AACC research on this topic explores some of the origins of these rumors and the factual, aboveground Chinese American history that they obscure.

One of the first online resources for identifying archaeological Japanese ceramics, the HJCCC contains digital photographs and tools for identifying and describing Japanese ceramics manufactured during the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa eras (roughly the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). This collection includes comparative examples of Japanese ceramics that were found on North American archaeological sites and a variety of resources for identification, analysis and further research on historical Japanese ceramics.

Likely written in or around 1896, this document is a report to the Meiji-era Japanese government’s Foreign Affairs Office in Tokyo that details working conditions, wages and economic opportunities for Japanese Americans living in Idaho at the time. An English translation and the original Japanese text will be available soon.

The Kooskia Internment Camp is a World War II detention facility that was located in a remote area of north central Idaho, 30 miles from the town of Kooskia. Unlike other Justice Department internment camps and the Japanese American Incarceration camps administered by the War Relocation Authority during the war, the Kooskia Internment Camp housed prisoners who volunteered to relocate from other camps and who received wages for their work. A total of around 265 male Japanese citizens; 24 male and 3 female European American civilian employees; 2 male internee doctors, one Italian and one German; and 1 male Japanese American interpreter occupied the Kooskia Internment Camp at various times between May 1943 and May 1945.

A multi-agency collaboration to rehabilitate legacy collections and research Asian American archaeological sites across the state of Idaho, the AALCP began as a partnership between the Boise National Forest and University of Idaho more than a decade ago and has subsequently grow to include other private and public partners. To date, this project has conducted work, from collections analysis to excavation, on 18 archaeological sites including the Boise Chinatown, the Polly Bemis Ranch, the Pon Yam House and a variety of mining sites in southern Idaho’s Boise Basin.

Started by Kathy Mae Min in 2020, the Oral Histories of the Post-1965 Lives of Asian Americans in Idaho project features oral histories from Asian Americans and Asian immigrants whose families arrived in Idaho after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which abolished racially restrictive quotas that, for most of the twentieth century, excluded nonwhite migration to the United States. Currently consisting of 16 interviews, this collection includes interviewees from a wide range of ethnicities and background whose experiences reflect a rich and complex history of race, identity, migration and contested belonging in Idaho’s late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.