This month, Boise State marks a major milestone: 50 years of academic and cultural partnership with the Basque Country. From July 29–31, 2025, the university hosts Aste Nagusia, or Basque Week, on campus. The celebration coincides with Jaialdi, the largest Basque festival in the United States, which offers events throughout downtown Boise and at Expo Idaho.
Boise State will welcome a European delegation that includes Joxerramon Bengoetxea, current rector of the University of the Basque Country; Imanol Pradales, president of the Basque government; and other officials and academics. Highlights for the visitors include a celebration at the Idaho State Capitol honoring the first Boise State/Basque Country student exchange program. Researchers from the University of the Basque Country will also meet with Boise State engineering faculty to explore potential collaboration in areas such as materials science, electrical engineering and cybersecurity.
Formal ceremonies will bring together visiting dignitaries, university leaders and Idaho tech and research partners to reaffirm the deep and enduring ties between Boise and the Basque Country.
The week’s events underscore Boise State’s growing role as a hub for transnational collaboration.
Roots and return
At the very heart of Aste Nagusia lies Boise State’s inaugural 1974 study abroad program that brought 80 students (and faculty and staff members), to Oñati, a small town in the province of Gipuzkoa to live and study for a year. This event could not have been more significant for his family, nor for Boise State, said John Bieter, a professor of history.
Bieter is the son of the late Pat Bieter, a professor at the university for 40 years who organized the exchange. Pat Bieter and his wife, Eloise Garmendia Bieter, took their whole family along, including John, who was just 12 years old at the time. The group represented the first American academics to live and study on Basque soil. The experience, John Bieter said, “opened up the whole world,” and determined how he would spend his academic life. A longtime Basque scholar, John Bieter’s recent research has been documenting arborglyphs, or carvings left behind on aspen trees by Basque immigrant sheepherders.
Basque arborglyphs are carvings on aspen tree trunks in the high-elevation forests of Idaho, Nevada, and California made by Basque immigrant sheepherders beginning in the mid-19th century. These vulnerable artifacts offer insight into the lives of immigrants in the American West. John Bieter, pictured here in the hills near Mountain Home, Idaho, is on a mission with other academic researchers to catalog as many carvings as possible before they disappear. Photo by Priscilla Grover
The Oñati exchange, made possible by federal funding through the 1972 National Ethnic Heritage Studies Program Act, triggered a revival of Basque culture and language for the young Basque Americans – the children and grandchildren of immigrants who were ready to embrace their roots. “The exchange had an immense impact on Basque clubs not only in Boise, but across the West, because students came back with a real experience of the Basque Country,” John Bieter said. “And that meant more exchanges back and forth.” The connection was profound. According to an article in the Basque Studies Consortium Journal, the exchange resulted in 35 marriages between visiting students and Oñati natives.
Boise State’s Basque exchange program and a similar program at the University of Nevada, Reno, expanded and, 40 years ago, became the University Study Abroad Consortium, which today offers 50 programs throughout the world.
“The consortium now has global reach beyond the Basques. But its seeds came from our campus,” John Bieter said.
Basque studies at Boise State
In 2004, John Bieter, with Sabine Klahr, director of international programs, Teresa Boucher, chair of modern languages and literatures, Peter Buhler, chair of the history department and Patty Miller, director of the Basque Museum and Cultural Center, submitted a grant proposal to the U.S. Department of Education to establish a Basque studies program at Boise State. They received the grant and, with the late Pete Cenarrusa, former Idaho Secretary of State, secured additional funding from the Basque government. The program launched in 2005. It offers a minor in Basque studies. The Department of World Languages offers three certificates in Basque language and culture. Boise State, along with the University of Nevada, Reno, and the University of California, Bakersfield, are the only universities in the U.S. that offer Basque studies.
Basque identity beyond borders
Aste Nagusia culminates in the Zortziak Bat, the International Symposium on the Basque Diaspora and Cultural Expressions, July 30-31, in the Micron Business and Economics Building, Skaggs Hall of Learning. The symposium, free and open to the public, centers on the idea of the “Eighth Province.” This term refers to the Basque people and their descendants who live outside the seven historical Basque provinces in Spain and France, but who remain connected through their shared heritage.
“This is a symposium with traditional academic papers, but it is so much more,” Bieter said, “music, fashion, sports – the A to Z of Basque culture.” The symposium will even offer a chance to study arborglyphs through the wonders of virtual reality.
Basque Week includes the release of a new book, “More Than An Adventure” by Iñaki Galdos Irazabal, about the Boise Oñati exchange. Like Bieter, Irazabal was a boy when the Americans came to his hometown and was a first-hand witness to its significance. The book will be available for sale at the Oñati celebration at the Capitol, at the symposium and at the Basque Museum and Cultural Center.