STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

It started with a friendship with a Kenyan refugee named Rita.

And photographer and Boise native Angie Smith realized quickly that there was a story that needed to be told. So, she secured a grant and spent a year, photographing many of Boise’s refugees.

Her mission: To show that a refugee is not just a person who takes up space and eats your food but, rather, a person who strives to liberate a whole generation.”

Several of those photographs now hang in Ketchum’s Sun Valley Center for the Arts as part of its BIG IDEA project “This Land is Whose Land?”

And on Tuesday Smith will join three other panelists in a panel discussion focusing on immigration and refugee resettlement in Idaho.

The free discussion will begin at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 13, at Ketchum’s Community Library.

Tom Michael, general manager of Boise State Public Radio, will moderate a discussion that includes Smith, Twin Falls Mayor Shawn Barigar; Zeze Rwasama, director of Twin Falls Refugee Center, and Yasmin Aguilar, immigration specialist with Agency for New Americans and a representative of Refugee Speakers Bureau of Boise.

They will address such questions as: What is our responsibility to refugees? And, how are refugees welcomed and contributing to society? said Katelyn Foley, The Center’s director of education and humanities.

While free, attendees are encouraged to preregister by visiting www.sunvalleycenter.org or by calling 208-726-9491.

Per capita Idaho has a large refugee population and a history of welcoming refugees from Southeast Asia and Africa. They are not coming just to find fame and fortune as did so many immigrants in America’s early years. Many, such as a young woman who was raped at 14 on her way to school in a refugee camp, are fleeing civil war and chaos.

Boise has opened its arms to these people, said Smith.

Smith noted that today’s political environment is dramatically different than when she took the pictures a few years ago. Refugees are struggling more, feeling more stressed as a result of some hostilities directed their way.

In the grand scheme of things that’s nothing new.

One woman who saw the exhibit recalled her father-in-law cautioning her about going to Milwaukee during the mid-1970s.

“There’s Italians there,” he told her.