I’ve been reading an account of my great-grandparents going on a church history trip. They took a 5000 mile tour organized by Chi’s Tours in Salt Lake City with the tour directed by Terue Kawai. (It looks like Chi’s Tours is still in business, and I see a mention of Terue Kawai in her sister’s obituary in the Deseret News, and a mention of her living in Pasadena, which is where my great grandparents also lived.)

Off the top of my head, this is one of only a very small handful of references in my family history (perhaps two) mentioning minorities in the Western states. So I appreciate your efforts, and those of Brandon and others who are telling the stories of these people who can be so easily overlooked.

(I hope nobody objects to my recycling Trib columns — they go offline after a couple of months at the Trib site, and I like having them available to googlers. Every once in a while I get email from a descendant of someone I’ve written about who missed it the first time around. I love the way pieces can just hang out there in cyberspace until the one person to whom it will mean the most is ready to look for it.)

I thought it was one of your Tribune columns.

As Mark pointed out, folks sometimes want to reduce Utah history to Mormon history. But the state’s past is much more complex and diverse than that. This is the same thing I try to do on the Beehive Archive radio show and blog, but I have to admit that I think you do it better!

I just wanted to thank you for this post. Utah has a very rich and interesting history, but we often just look at the Mormon history part of it. I appreciate this reminder that other immigrants also found a home in the beehive state and contributed to the community.

We’re told by revelation that the people of the “Isles of the Sea” (presumably of the Pacific) are of Joseph, but we don’t know how that connection came about.

Pacific Islanders are tied genetically with East Asians (“Orientals”, but that is not a current term), but we don’t know any of the stories behind those genetic ties.

DNA studies tell us modern day Natives of this Hemisphere have a good degree of Asian ancestry, but other than the “Alaskan land bridge migration” theory, we don’t know how that came about either, and how those lines got admixed with the Lehites.

South Asians are another large group related more to Caucasians than East Asians (technically the people of India _are_ considered Caucasian).

Asians are such a large percentage of world population now, and taking a larger and larger role in world affairs. It’s going to be interesting.

namakemono, this is the only one I’ve done, although I keep my eyes open for more (lots of information relating to the Chinese is available in the period newspapers, but I haven’t happened to run across a story as opposed to bare bones data. As with the blacks and Greeks and a few other minorities, the Chinese only seem to have made it into the public record when they were accused of crimes, so there’s a very skewed image available.

Thanks, Brandon. I’d love the link. As you probably realize, this was original a column for the Tribune, where I try to write about as many different flavors of Utahns as I can identify.

With that story in mind, I half expected to find my great grandfather’s name among the convicted.