I love my purple 4Runner. She’s a 1998 stick-shift with 177,000 miles on the odometer, and her name is Jesse. She’s been all over the West, camping on dirt roads and shuttling for river trips. Once, in the high desert of central Oregon, I hit a patch of ice going fast on a cold, bluebird […]
Communities
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: A visit from the Mary Kay lady
I find it unfortunate that we English speakers have so few words for “mud,” a substance that varies so greatly by location and conditions that it would be handier to have a hundred terms for it, as the indigenous Nordic Sami people do for “snow.” If a useless neologism like “ginormous” can make the Oxford […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
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 […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
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 […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
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 […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
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 […]
Posted inWotr
Three Cups of Tea, the sequel
One of the speakers at last year’s Telluride Mountainfilm Festival in western Colorado was convicted this March of federal felonies. But Tim DeChristopher will be back again this year to talk about his disruption of federal gas leasing at an auction in Utah. Not so Greg Mortenson, the embattled former mountain climber who has been […]
Posted inWotr
Big Sky country, bigger abuse
We seem to have a morbid fascination with news stories and photographs of dead, dying or distressed animals — something Montana has provided plenty of in the past two years. The number of animals involved has been staggering, the evidence of abuse extreme. The first news of abuse on a grand scale came last February, […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Plans foiled
CALIFORNIA Never at a loss for novel ideas, the animal rights folks at PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, want the mayor of San Francisco and other city leaders to change the name of the city’s Tenderloin District to the “Tempeh District.” Tempeh, for those who prefer hamburgers and are unfamiliar with it, […]
Posted inWotr
Disaster traveling is my specialty
People who know me refuse to travel with me. I don’t understand this. I think I am the perfect travel companion — curious, unflappable, knowledgeable, cheerful, seasoned, undemanding, prepared. But friends claim that I don’t go on vacations; I go on disasters. People travel for a lot of reasons — to lounge around and do […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
Bridging American Indian students’ scientific achievement gap
Michael Ceballos’ grandfather dropped out of school at 13 to help support his family. He worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, first laying track, then as a foreman. When he retired, his grandchildren thought he might spend his pension and bonus on a new car. Instead, he enrolled in college. Today, his grandson, a genial […]
Posted inGoat
Fun with (census) numbers
I was over in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley this weekend, drinking a beer and soaking up the spring sunshine, when I noticed a headline — front page, above the fold — blaring from a newspaper box on the sidewalk: HISPANIC POPULATION GROWS. Oh c’mon, I thought, is this really news? No, it isn’t. But then […]
Posted inRange
What’s in a code name?
Although we’ve seen ample news coverage of the American raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, one question persists. Did the code name “Geronimo” refer to the overall operation or just to bin Laden? Discussing the exact meaning of a military code name might seem like an arcane pursuit, but the use of “Geronimo” […]
Posted inRange
Tribes need foreign policies
Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is trying to change the national debate about the deficit, the role of government and the impact of those policies on the day-to-day economy. “There are principled ways of cutting the deficit … putting Americans back to work,” the Columbia University professor recently said in a speech, as quoted in […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
An epic tale of the Northwest: A review of West of Here
West of HereJonathan Evison496 pages, hardcover: $24.95.Algonquin Books, 2011. Once home to the Siwash and Klallam tribes, then to frontiersmen and a Utopian community, the fictional town of Port Bonita, Wash., provides a fertile backdrop for Jonathan Evison’s second novel, West of Here. Alternating between the late 19th century and the year 2006, Evison reveals […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
Good-enough mothers: A review of Wrecker
WreckerSummer Wood304 pages, hardcover: $20.Bloomsbury USA, 2011. In her second novel, Wrecker, New Mexico author Summer Wood draws on her personal experience as a foster parent. Wrecker is a bruiser of a boy who “seemed to need to feel his body collide with the physical world to know he existed.” He’s born and mostly raised […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
“Shoot locally”
In late March, High Country News was one of the sponsors of our hometown’s inaugural Paonia Film Festival. Twenty-two short films by western Colorado filmmakers were presented at the Paradise Theatre, including HCN Online Editor Stephanie Paige Ogburn‘s stop-motion animation about boots in love. The Audience Choice award for “Most Environmentally Conscious” film — a […]
Posted inMay 2, 2011: The Westerner in D.C
What’s in a name?
The West of yore must have been a miserable, filthy place, with lonesome settlers teetering precariously atop a stack of long odds. Or so you might conclude after surfing the U.S. Geological Survey’s database of place and landform names. The region certainly has a corner on Disappointments, with 46 of the nation’s 53 references falling […]
Posted inBlog
EJ activist Ed Abbey?
Spring semester is winding down, and the students in my course Rhetoric of the Environmental Movement are reading Edward Abbey’s 1968 memoir, Desert Solitaire. After having duly investigated news reports, scientific studies, websites, and environmental impact statements, they appreciate Abbey’s lively and eccentric voice and his vivid descriptions of the landscape of Arches National Park. […]