 Thank you all very much for joining us this evening, this is a tremendous crowd and we're really thrilled. I'm Susan Gregory, I'm the director of the Besman County Library, and I'm still with an aunt, I'm a reference from the construction library at MSU and I'm a member of the Montana Library Association until next week. She's being shy. She was working on it and I've been like she'll create it for years. And she's also working for the NCAA. The partnership we have between the Bowman Public Library and Montana State University's library, we're absolutely proud of that relationship. It gets better all the time. And so we thank all of you for being here this evening and we're delighted to see that this evening is going to be such a success. We've got some wonderful readers here this evening. But before we jump into our first reading, let me, let Sheila explain what one of our managers is. Yes. In addition to being sponsored by the two libraries, tonight's event is also part of MSU's Year of Education leadership. For the next year, MSU is highlighting the many events and activities that the university also developed for leadership skills with students, faculty, staff and faculty. So keep your eye out for some wonderful events all year long as part of that. You can tell by the spot on your program if you're lucky enough to have a program. I hope all of you have programs. Jane, could you get it in there? Jane, thank you very much. She runs the lectures up. If someone needs a program this evening, this is Jane Bezel and she's got some interest. There is an invitation on your program of an intermission. And let me just explain that. We really have a chance for you to email the visitors. That's one prop and cookie to enter a drawing for our door crime. And also, I want to introduce the president of the Bozeman Library of Friends, who has our secretary, not secretary, Sharon Emhoff, who is also on the friends of the Bozeman Library of New York. One of the things we want to do is make sure people understand a little better what our wonderful Bozeman Library of Friends do for us. They're providing a copy this evening. We appreciate that very much. But they're also here because if you'd like the intermission, they would love to climb together at your organization and offer you a friendship. Friend is friendship. A friendship? A friendship, and a membership. Oh, very good. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so that's David, Sharon, the bat. Okay, we'll try, I have the right height on my set. But this is so exciting to see all of you here tonight. After planning, you never know how many people are in show-offs will always be out whereby everyone is blue. So why are we all here tonight? here tonight. What are we celebrating tonight? Tonight is the second night of Banff Books Week, which is an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Book Sellers Association, the National Council Teachers of English, and a number of other lifeline organizations. And this event is in celebration of our freedom to read and support of the freedom to seek an express idea of even those that some consider unorthodox, wrong, and these rights are as you know guaranteed the authority to move them. By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books and book weeks events, broad attention to awareness and censorship, while books have been and continue to be bad, part of that books week celebration is actually the fact that in most cases, those challenges and bans do not take effect most of the time. There are people who are being vigilant and proactive and making sure that those books remain in the libraries and in the school. This happens when you're very involved in us teachers, students in the crowd, and other community members who stand up to the freedom to read. However, just in case you don't think that this kind of thing does go on anymore, I'd like to point out that just last week in North Carolina, the Randall County School Board found Ralph Ellison's invisible man from his library to show us the school curriculum. So these things are definitely having us after a parent complaint. And there's also a challenge currently going on to the access to diaries of part-time Indians by Shrema Lexi in the building of schools, so as we speak it's happening in Montana as well. Unfortunately, these challenges and bans have a long history. Pretty much ever since the written word was fixed in some way, there have been people who have complained about that. In fact, people find all kinds of examples from the griefs where they were arguing that they must teach other about whether something should be available or not. But there's also been those who have thought been proven to be. And to illustrate this, one of our readers tonight, Jack Liederman, found a great quote from John Milton that was written in 1644. I'm actually invited to come up and share it with you. This is from a speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England, November 23rd, 1644. It was very upset that after centuries of the Catholic Church requiring an increment to her, it let this be printed stamp on things to be published. That the Protestant Parliament in England in 1644 passed an order exactly like that. And this was part of his response. First, it is against the recent order by the Protestant Parliament that, quote, no book shall henceforth be printed unless the same be first approved and licensed. And then he said, Milton, the attempt to keep out evil doctrine by licensing is like the, quote, exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his heart gate. And this is the quote. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and ungrieved, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and eat. Assuredly, we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather. That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and those not the utmost that vice promises to her followers and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure. Her whiteness is but an extra mental whiteness, which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Thomas Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Sir P. Young, brings him with his Palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss that he might see and know and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason. And this is the benefit which may be had of both promiscuously real. Thanks so much, Jack, for that great quote. Now for tonight's celebration. We invited leaders from the Bowdoin community to share with us tonight some of their favorite books that have been shown in the school or library. We have a wonderful line of readers and some fabulous books, so we hope you'll enjoy the evening. And we'll pass it over to Susan to give us time. Our very first read of this evening has been other than our relatively new dean of the Montana State University Library, Dean Kenning Arlish. He'll be reading from Snow Calling on Cedars by David Peterson. When Sheila asked me to participate in this, I looked at the list and was surprised to find Snow Calling on Cedars. I read it about 15 years ago and I did a little research and found out that it was banned or challenged for its sexual content. But there wasn't a whole lot of it. This book is essentially a murder mystery. We should someday be more outraged about murder than about sex. But the other problem with the focus on sexual content is that it detracts from another important historical aspect of this book, which was a rather shameful period in our nation's history. So here's my read. By centuries turn, over 300 Japanese had arrived on San Piedro. Most of them schooner ants who jumped ship in Port Jefferson Harbor in order to remain in the United States. Within a week, the ship jumpers possessed no jobs, stacking lumber, sweeping sawdust, hauling slabwood, boiling machines, or 11 cents an hour. Company books preserved in the Island County Historical Archives record that in 1907, 18 Japanese were injured or maimed at the Port Jefferson Mill. Jap number 107, the boat's indicate, lost his hands to a ripping blade on March 12 and received an injury payment of $7.80. Jap number 57 dislocated his right hip on May 29 when a stack of lumber toppled over. In 1921, the mill was dismantled. All of the island's trees had been fed to the saws so that San Piedro resembled a bald stumped desert. The mill owners sold their holdings and left the islands behind. The Japanese cleared strawberry fields. For strawberries grew well in San Piedro's climate require a little starting power. They saved their money in canning jars and rode home to their parents in Japan requesting wives be sent. Some lied and said they'd gotten rich or sent pictures of themselves as younger men. At any rate, wives came across the ocean. They lived in cedar slat huts lit by oil lamps and slept on straw-filled ticks. The wind blew in through the cracks in the walls. At 5 o'clock in the morning, variety grew both to be found in the strawberry fields. Thus, life went forward on San Piedro. By Pearl Harbor Day, there were 843 people of Japanese descent living there, including 12 seniors at Amity Harbor High School who did not graduate that spring. Early on the morning of March 29, 1942, 15 transports of the U.S. War Relocation Authority took all of San Piedro's Japanese-Americans to the ferry terminal in Amity Harbor. They were loaded onto a ship while their white neighbors looked on. People who had risen early to stand in the cold and watched this exercising of the Japanese from their midst. Friends, some of them, but the merely curious mainly, and fishermen who stood on the decks of their boats out in Amity Harbor. Fishermen felt like no-side-owners that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do, and leaned against the cabins of their stern-thickers and bow-thickers with the conviction that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense. There was a war on, and that changed everything.