In partnership with Dawson Community College and Montana State University Billings efforts through the Yellowstone Consortium of International Studies and Foreign Language, Mark Johnson will explain how unique transnational, intergenerational translation projects brought students with the necessary language abilities into positions to help tell the history of Chinese communities in Montana through their own words.

Join students from across the state who will share their original research through Montana’s branch of the National History Day event! Mark Johnson will share his research on the history of Montana’s Chinese communities and the historian’s craft about researching and writing for the public.

Hosted by the River and Plains Society and supported by Humanities Montana, learn about Montana’s historic Chinese communities, where they settled, what contributions they made to the region’s development, how they were treated, and how they fought for their rights to live and work in Montana.

Join the Mai Wah Society to celebrate Chinese New Year! Described as the shortest, loudest, and coldest parade in Montana, join those interested in keeping this cultural tradition alive. Chinese New Year was celebrated by Chinese Montanans as early as the late-1860s. The 2024 event will include dragon dancing, firecrackers, blessings to local businesses, and refreshments at the Mai Wah Museum. Come one, come all (and dress warm!). For a history of Chinese New Year in Montana, see the Winter 2023 edition of The Big Sky Journal.

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. Navigating life in this new land, Montana’s Chinese residents gained comfort through the continuation of their spiritual and cultural practices. Yet, publicly practicing cultural traditions invited unwanted attention from anti-Chinese forces who sought to expel the Chinese from the region. In this lecture, Mark Johnson will detail how Chinese Montanans achieved cultural continuity and togetherness through these practices while resisting tensions and threats from their detractors. Sponsored by and held at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library.

A visit with high school juniors at Seattle Prep who are studying American history, specifically the American West and immigration. The topic of the Chinese experience in Montana illuminates both of these topics and will serve as an inquiry-based approach for students to engage with primary sources and grapple with sourcing issues of how to tell histories when few sources exist.

Join a group from the Montana Historical Society on a tour led by Mark Johnson to explore Helena’s Chinese cemetery (China Row, outside Forestvale Cemetery) to explore Chinese American burial traditions, connections with villages in southern China, and how Chinese communities in Montana kept traditions alive.

Join a group from the Montana Historical Society on a tour led by Mark Johnson to explore Helena’s Chinese cemetery (China Row, outside Forestvale Cemetery) to explore Chinese American burial traditions, connections with villages in southern China, and how Chinese communities in Montana kept traditions alive.

Join the Mai Wah Society for the celebration of Mooncake Festival! This event formally ends the season of the Mai Wah Museum and celebrates the harvest moon. Delicious mooncakes will be served. Children’s activities are available. Join everyone at the Mai Wah for a celebration of this important Chinese cultural event!

This session is part of the Montana History Conference. Due to Chinese cultural traditions that discouraged women from migrating combined with American legal obstacles that excluded Chinese women from entering the nation, Chinese communities in Montana had a severe gender imbalance. The scarcity of women made family formation difficult. The few Chinese women in the region suffered negative stereotypes and assumptions about their character from non-Chinese Montanans and experienced confinement and oppression within patriarchal Chinese cultural traditions. Despite these obstacles, several extraordinary Chinese women emerge in the documentary record, exhibiting perseverance and a strength of spirit that helped them carve out influential roles in Montana’s Chinese communities and beyond.

Join this small group lunch session at the Montana History Conference in Helena, Montana. Get there early and choose from the topic you would like to hear more about. Then, similar to the “Great Conversations” or “Ask An Expert” format where a knowledgeable speaker at each table leads the table group in a casual conversation about their area of expertise, join a conversation about Montana’s history. Mark Johnson will share about his new research on the importance of Chinese gardens in the early development of Montana.

From the Conference Program: “Thinking Like Historians: Studying history is so much more than learning facts and dates. Learn new ways to engage students and teach them how to interrogate sources and construct historical arguments while discovering intriguing, under-told Montana stories. The Educators Workshop will begin with Mark Johnson, author of The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky, introducing lesson plans he’s created for teaching Montana’s Chinese history. Teacher Leader in Montana History April Wills will discuss how ChatGPT can improve social studies education, and retired Billings librarians Kathi Hoyt and Ruth Ferris will lead attendees in a gallery walk of primary sources for teaching Indian Education for All. Melissa Hubbard, co-director of National History Day in Montana, will discuss how the program offers students the opportunity to become historians. End the day with a presentation by Teacher Leaders in Montana History Jennifer Graham and Ron Buck, who will share strategies for bringing history alive.”

Sponsored by Brigham Young University and the Charles Redd Center for Western History, join author Mark Johnson as he delivers the 2023 William Howard and Hazel Butler Peters Lecture about his book The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana.

This teacher workshop is supported by the Foundation for Montana History. Twenty K-12 teachers from across Montana will gather to learn about the history of the region’s Chinese communities. Participants will dine at the historic Pekin Noodle Parlor, the longest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in America, and tour the Mai Wah Museum, key to preserving and interpreting the region’s Chinese history. Teachers will visit the Chinese section of Mt. Moriah Cemetery following the workshop. Interested teachers, reach out here. The exact date is still to be determined. Check back for details!

Wednesday, June 7 at Gulch Distillers, join Mark Johnson for a conversation about the history of Montana’s Chinese Communities. This conversation is part of Helena’s Craft a Better Community series, sponsored by the Foundation for Montana History. Books will be on sale at the event, with profits going back to the Foundation for Montana History.

This teacher workshop is part of a grant sponsored by the Montana History Foundation helping to translate and interpret four historic Chinese cemeteries across Montana. Twenty K-12 teachers from across Montana will gather to learn about the history of the region’s Chinese communities. Participants will dine at the historic Pekin Noodle Parlor, the longest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in America, and tour the Mai Wah Museum, key to preserving and interpreting the region’s Chinese history. Finally, teachers are welcome to take part in the Tomb Sweeping Festival at the Chinese section of Mt. Moriah Cemetery following the workshop. Interested teachers, reach out here.

Hosted by the Max S. Baucus Institute and Montana World Affairs Council, come to hear author Mark T. Johnson discuss the history of Chinese communities in Montana. This event is free and open to the public, but registration in advance is required. Click here to register.

Chinese settlers were key to Montana’s development and populated cities and towns across the state. However, this population, so crucial to Montana’s history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts. This talk, part of the Western Heritage Center’s High Noon Lecture series, focuses specifically on the experiences of Chinese residents in Billings, examining the pressures they faced, how they advocated for their rights, and how they fought to keep their culture alive in an often-hostile environment.

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of the West, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. Yet this population remains underrepresented in historical accounts. Using documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English for the first time, The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky recovers the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words and deepens understanding of Chinese experiences in the West through a global lens. Through these experiences, Chinese Montanans emerge as empowered and active, advocating for their rights in America while both shaped by and shaping events in China. Sponsored by Carroll College’s History and Sociology Departments.

Mark Johnson will be a guest speaker for the graduate history seminar on The Global West for the University of Wyoming.

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of the West, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. Yet this population remains underrepresented in historical accounts. Using documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English for the first time, The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky recovers the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words and deepens understanding of Chinese experiences in the West through a global lens. Through these experiences, Chinese Montanans emerge as empowered and active, advocating for their rights in America while both shaped by and shaping events in China.

A book talk on The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky with specific focus on the experience of Chinese Montanans in the northwest part of the state, hosted by the Northwest Montana History Museum.

Join a meeting of the Lewis & Clark County Genealogical Society when the history of Chinese communities in Montana will be the topic of conversation. The Society meets at the Covenant United Methodist Church, 2330 East Broadway, Helena.

As part of the Butte-Silverbow Public Archives Brown Bag Lunch Series, this session “The War of the Woods: Chinese Wood Choppers and Unlikely Allies, Montana 1880-1900” focuses on new scholarship on the experiences of Chinese Montanans. This presentation examines tensions in wood harvesting around Butte, Montana in the early 1880s. Wood was crucial fuel for the residents’ warmth, but more so for the process of “heap roasting,” an early smelting technique used to process ore. Wood crews provided key labor for the city; however, when a Chinese crew took a contract to deliver 10,000 cords, some white workers objected. A mob of more than 200 angry woodsmen harassed the Chinese workers, threatening violence if they didn’t withdraw. This mob was stood down by a lone constable from Butte, who later formed a posse and arrested the mob’s ring leaders. Would a crime against non-citizen Chinese Montanans be prosecuted? Find out at this session, which features early environmental issues in Montana, labor rights, legal questions, and the pressures on Montana’s early Chinese community.

Part of the Yellowstone Writing Project’s Fire on the Page Conference, Mark Johnson will lead a 90 minute breakout session (10:00-11:30) exploring the history of Chinese communities in Montana, the various ways of telling these histories, and the role high school students and their families had in bringing these stories to light. Click here to register for the event.

Join former Concordia International School Shanghai History Teacher Mark Johnson to learn how historians construct meaning from sources and piece together historical narratives from fragments of the past. By investigating a historical mystery from the Chinese experience in the American West, students will inquire, analyze, hypothesize, and think critically about history while deepening their understanding of the experience of Chinese migration during the late-nineteenth century.  

Join the Mai Wah Society to celebrate Chinese New Year! Described as the shortest, loudest, and coldest parade in Montana, join those interested in keeping this cultural tradition alive. Chinese New Year was celebrated by Chinese Montanans as early as the late-1860s. The 2023 event will include dragon dancing, firecrackers, blessings to local businesses, and refreshments at the Mai Wah Museum. Come one, come all (and dress warm!).

Chinese pioneers played a key role in Montana’s development. Navigating life in this new land, Montana’s Chinese residents gained comfort through the continuation of their spiritual and cultural practices. Yet, publicly practicing cultural traditions invited unwanted attention from anti-Chinese forces who sought to expel the Chinese from the region. Mark Johnson will detail how Chinese Montanans achieved cultural continuity and togetherness through these practices while resisting tensions and threats from their detractors.

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. Navigating life in this new land, Montana’s Chinese residents gained comfort through the continuation of their spiritual and cultural practices. Yet, publicly practicing cultural traditions invited unwanted attention from anti-Chinese forces who sought to expel the Chinese from the region. In this lecture, Mark Johnson will detail how Chinese Montanans achieved cultural continuity and togetherness through these practices while resisting tensions and threats from their detractors. Sponsored by the Montana Historical Society—lecture held at the Lewis & Clark Library.