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 stories 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. "With its empirical groundedness and powerful insights,  Punjabi Rebels  is a groundbreaking contribution to histories of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest as well as the fields of labor history, of U.S. racial formations, and of social movements.” —Janna Haider,  Oregon Historical Quarterly “ Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River  shines a strong light on the history of East Asian immigration to the United States in the early 20th century and on the unlikely gestation of a political insurgency proffered by workingmen living far from their homeland.” —William L. Lang,  Pacific Northwest Quarterly "[ Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River ] is a story that interweaves archival sources with robust story telling of the movements that led to the inception of the Ghadar Party and specifically in Oregon, USA, and serves as a valuable resource to those studying this area scholarship." —Phinder Dulai,  Rungh 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.