An internecine battle rages over tribal membership and identity.
Arts & Culture
Posted inArticles
No, national parks are not America’s ‘best idea’
There’s potential to alienate people who value ideas more pertinent to them than the parks.
Posted inApril 4, 2016: A Land Divided
A photographer turns his lens on small-town bliss
A new exhibit in Denver, Colorado, looks at happiness in the rural West, focusing on Bliss, Idaho.
Posted inArticles
Podcast: The last Nevada showgirl revue came to a close this year
Preserving showgirl culture, amidst lasting discomfort around the tradition.
Posted inMarch 21, 2016: Making Sense of Malheur
Crime and grit: A retrospective collection from the don of Chicano noir
An uneven but often rewarding collection from one of the West’s masterful storytellers.
Posted inMarch 7, 2016: The Parks You Don't Know
Whiteness reigns in a new film celebrating national parks
The new film National Parks Adventure aims to inspire its viewers, as producer Shaun MacGillivray puts it, “to get off their couches and get outdoors.” Its destination of choice is our national parks, which are celebrating 100 years of management by the National Park Service in 2016. MacGillivray and his crew used every IMAX 3-D […]
Posted inFebruary 22, 2016: Fractured
The time of painful impossibilities
A reading by U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.
Posted inArticles
Dispatch from Nevada’s cowboy poets confab
An older generation of artists looks for a younger set to take over the tradition.
Posted inFebruary 2, 2016: Sagebrush Insurgency
In ‘Gold Fame Citrus,’ the nascent genre of cli-fi looks to California
A new climate change novel predicts a dystopian West of sand and refugees.
Posted inJanuary 25, 2016: The Forever War
A tale of two BLM mascots
Johnny Horizon and Seymour Antelope show the agency’s changing focus.
Posted inArticles
The obscure music where wild animals sing from the heart
In a small corner of popular music, there are songs that have been written and sung in the haunting voices of animals, and the Canadian singer-songwriters Gordon Lightfoot and Ian Tyson have written what I think are the best of them. In Lightfoot’s “Whispers of the North,” a loon speaks: whispers of the northsoon I […]
Posted inNovember 23, 2015: Water Hustle
You are on Indian Land: A provocative look at contemporary art
A multimedia exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona
Posted inNovember 9, 2015: The Campaign Against Coal
A tour of vibrant skies of the north
A review of ‘The Northern Lights: Celestial Performances of the Aurora Borealis,’ by Daryl Pederson and Calvin Hall.
Posted inNovember 9, 2015: The Campaign Against Coal
Knock-out punch
A review of ‘Contenders,’ by Erika Krouse.
Posted inNovember 9, 2015: The Campaign Against Coal
The Greatest Generation at its worst
A review of ‘Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II,’ by Richard Reeves.
Posted inArticles
Two oil-boom soap operas, then and now
How ‘Blood & Oil’ in today’s Bakken and ‘Dynasty’ in a 1980s Colorado match up.
Posted inArticles
Can studying morality help Yellowstone’s wolves and bison?
Sociologist Justin Farrell plumbs the spiritual depths of environmental struggle.
Posted inArticles
I have seen the future, and it looks like Mad Max
How a post-apocalyptic action movie can help us ward off ecological disaster.
Posted inMay 25, 2015: Monument Man
A film documents two friends on the Sierra trek
Review of “Only the Essential: A Hike from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail” by Colin Arisman.
Posted inApril 27, 2015: Lost frontier
Photos and recordings of Pacific Northwest and Southeast Alaska
Review of “Wilderness” by Debra Bloomfield.