When Rachel Stenta showed up at our roadshow at the Utah State University (USU) campus in Moab, Utah, in October 2022, she was carrying a dress (fig. 1). Made with silk acquired in Vietnam by her father, the dress was something deeply meaningful to her: “I don't think I'll ever part with it,” she said.1 As USU students catalogued and then digitally recorded the beautiful embroidered dress, Stenta agreed to a longer oral history. As she explained, she was “the history keeper in our family. . . . I'm all about preserving things. And so, all of the times that we would move and pack and unpack I would just sort of collect things that people were going to part with and I ended up with it when I moved out of the house.” This dress, she recalled, was not something that her mother had good feelings...

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