On Fort Berthold: Three tribes, a dam, and a diabetes epidemic. | On the Klamath: A settlment to restore rivers and tribes.
Walking in the body of being
In 1656, 23-year-old Baruch Spinoza, a Portuguese Jew in Amsterdam, was excommunicated by his community and formally cursed to the end of his days. The young man’s supposed heresies were likely related to a burgeoning pantheism, which he would later develop more fully — the idea of God as an infinite being who contains everything…
Doctor’s Orders: Undam the Klamath
In recent years, I witnessed the battle over re-licensing of four dams on the Klamath River, which runs from Oregon’s high desert country to the redwood and Doug fir forests of the California coast. This watershed is my home, and it filled me with hope that dam removal could bring salmon to reaches of river…
Three Tribes, a Dam and a Diabetes Epidemic
Herbert Wilson came to North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in 1954, to a tiny town called Elbowoods, tucked above the Missouri River in a bucolic patchwork of riverside willows, cottonwoods and fields. A Vermont-bred 33-year-old, fresh from Harvard and a tour as a WWII bombardier, Wilson was the new, sole doctor for the reservation’s…
Where has Montana’s water gone?
An old compact may not be enough to keep the Tongue River from running dry
Wild lands by any other name
The quarter-billion acres of mostly arid territory overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management have become an unlikely battleground in the war over wilderness. Last December, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered the BLM to identify any “lands with wilderness characteristics,” and, when appropriate, protect them as designated “wild lands.” Salazar’s order in full is…
Thanks, Michael!
I have had the unique opportunity to work under Dr. Michael Ceballos at the Native American Research lab at the University of Montana for three years (HCN, 5/2/11). I am half Puerto Rican and half Native American (enrolled). I grew up very much immersed in both of my cultural backgrounds. Being Native American is more…
The painful beauty of love
In This Light: New and Selected StoriesMelanie Rae Thon256 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2011. Utah author Melanie Rae Thon maintains a seat beside fellow literary powerhouses Annie Proulx and Maile Meloy as she paints a portrait of a West that is at once desolate and tender. Written in fierce and unflinching prose, the stories in…
The year in water
La Niña ruled the West’s weather this winter, and states now sitting on lavish snowpacks couldn’t be happier. Cooler surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are responsible for the high precipitation rates in California, the Northwest and Intermountain West. Those snowpacks are expected to melt at a leisurely rate, buoying streamflows throughout the summer. The…
The Garrison Dam: a history
Author Paul VanDevelder, who penned the book Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation, a history of the three tribes flooded by the Garrison Dam, speaks on the U.S. government’s plan to dam the Missouri River and flood native lands. VanDevelder is also the author of Savages and Scoundrels:…
Viva la independent press!
High Country News was just nominated for two of the 22nd Annual Utne Independent Press awards. Utne, which curates the best of the alternative and independent press in its bimonthly magazine and website, has put us in the running in the General Excellence and Environmental Coverage categories. The awards, notes Utne’s press release, are “designed…
Are you an Indian?
Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation LifeJim Kristofic256 pages, hardcover: $26.95. University of New Mexico Press, 2011. Despite his light-brown curls and pale face, Jim Kristofic gets asked this question all the time, even though he no longer lives on the Navajo Reservation. Now 29 and back in his native Pennsylvania, he teaches and tells stories…
Diabetes isn’t destiny
“I want to tell Native kids that they’re not sentenced to get diabetes. They have a choice,” says Notah Begay III, a Native American professional golfer who was interviewed recently on National Public Radio’s Native America Calling. The statistics are alarming. Diabetes has increased in every segment of American society over the past few decades,…
Get rid of the grass, or else
For years, I owned vacant beachfront property in California. Every February I would receive notice from the local fire department to weed my property and make certain there was no pampas grass (HCN, 4/18/11) on it, else the fire department would do it for me and charge an outrageous fee. I was impressed that the…
Yellowstone bison get more room to roam
Updated 5/13/11 Two extra-wide, ankle-busting, road-blocking cattle-guards; 900 feet of jackleg fencing tied into rock outcroppings and other natural obstacles; a handful of heavy-duty gates: All to ensure that Yellowstone’s renowned wild bison can roam more freely than they have in years. Starting in full next winter, the animals will be permitted on 75,000 acres…
Let’s set the record straight
Never have I ever said the river was dead — sleeping, maybe, resting, but never dead. Neither am I, yet — that’s why you’re getting my rebuttal to Craig Childs’ very fine story, “Unstoppable River” (HCN, 4/18/11). I think Childs must have gotten his notes scrambled and turned his pages to Floyd Dominy instead. He…
Partisan missteps
Sierra Club lobbyist Debbie Sease laments the lack of Theodore Roosevelt-style conservationist Republicans in the current Congress (HCN, 5/2/11). As one cause for that deficiency, she need look no further than her own organization. Protection of the environment is historically a nonpartisan issue. All citizens want to breathe clean air and drink clean water. Unfortunately,…
In praise of prose
Just wanted to send a note of appreciation for Craig Childs’ article “Unstoppable River” (HCN, 4/18/11). Childs’ writing evokes the same feelings I get when reading Thoreau or Abbey, and he is a master of the “show me, don’t tell me” style. Why have I not heard of Childs until now? Must be this rock…
Invasive ignorance
It’s so hard to get the public to take invasive plants seriously and to avoid using and spreading them (HCN, 4/18/11). I’m disappointed with the scarcity of native plants and the availability of invasives at many nurseries. It’s just like grocery stores selling seafood that’s on the Red List of Threatened Species. However, there has…