The main character and narrator, Lucky, is the daughter of immigrants from India who first moved to Toronto before settling in Casper, Wyoming, a town in which they found no connections to their culture of origin. Even today, Casper’s Indian community is just 0.073 percent of the city’s population. As of 2023, only 2 percent of Casper residents were born anywhere outside of the United States.

Growing up, when people would ask me, “What are you?” I’d mumble Indian, and then not correct them when they assumed I meant Arapahoe or Shoshone. I was just happy they thought I belonged. – Lucky Sen, Character in Cowboys and East Indians

After the Civil War, immigration to the United States rose, and many newcomers found work as laborers during the nation’s westward expansion. European-American backlash resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Indian migration increased as job opportunities in fields and lumberyards of the Pacific Northwest became more abundant. In a repeated pattern of American attitudes toward immigration, that invited influx was followed by backlash: in 1907, Indians were attacked by white laborers, saw their homes set afire, and were forcibly expelled to Canada.

Three years later, some Californians began pushing for an Indian Exclusion Act but were thwarted. When racist labelling failed, geographic limits were imposed, resulting in the Asiatic Barred Zone Act (echoed in 2017 when the Muslim Ban became a ban on specific, Muslim-majority countries). In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled a Punjabi Sikh ineligible for citizenship based on the Naturalization Act of 1906, which the Court determined only applied to Africans and whites. Not until the Nationality Act of 1965 were Indians again freely permitted to emigrate to the United States.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, there were 206,000 Indians in the United States in 1980, the decade of Rajah and Chitra Sen’s arrival in Wyoming. By 2010, that number had increased to nearly 2 million, aided by the H-1B, which allowed for highly skilled non-immigrants to come to the United States to fill jobs, many in the tech sector. That visa is currently a political point of contention for those who feel the visa shuts citizens out of those jobs.

SOURCES:

South Asian American Digital Archive

Indian Immigrants in the United States, by Madeleine Greene and Jeanne Batalova, Migration Policy Institute (migrationpolicy.org), Nov. 8, 2024

Indians in the United States: Movements and Empire, by Sherally K. Munshi, History Now, Issue 65 (Winter 2022), The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History,  gilderlehrman.org

Indian American History, Wikipedia