A free weekly out of Salida, Colo., called Base Camp posts an unusual mission statement for a publication touting the outdoors and all the fun you can have skiing, biking and hiking. Editor Jim Williams says, “It’s easy to think we need this or that expensive, high-tech apparati to just go have fun.” But often, […]
Communities
Posted inGoat
The “Bennett Thaw”, at last
Last week, President Obama signed legislation putting an end to a time warp in Indian land. For more than 40 years, Navajos and Hopi living near Tuba City, Ariz., had been prohibited from building new roads or new homes. Nor could they improve existing homes, or even install electricity and running water when those services […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
Open season on white males?
In many ways, the perspective piece “Last Rites and Forgotten Landscapes” by Laura Paskus was profoundly moving. She mourns the deaths of these women and justifiably decries investigators for labeling them as prostitutes even before the bodies were identified (HCN, 4/13/09). However, Paskus goes too far when she pointedly casts men as the perpetrators of […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
New urbanists
Regarding your recent story “The Growth Machine is Broken”: The real estate bust is the best thing to happen to the Sonoran Desert, although fears that the bulldozers will be on the crawl again in a few years are legitimate (HCN, 4/27/09). Yet I believe important changes are taking place that were not mentioned in […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
The rest of the story
Terray Sylvester’s Uncommon Westerner profile of the legendary Harold Klieforth alludes only obliquely to Dr. Klieforth’s contributions to the meteorology of mountain lee waves, and the awe-inspiring Sierra wave in particular (HCN, 4/27/09). Dr. Klieforth’s knowledge of the airflow over the Sierra Nevada is unequalled, both from a lifetime of research and from personal experience […]
Posted inGoat
John Sutter’s paramour was named Manuiki
Native American sovereignty, trans-Pacific tribal ties, an intriguing new twist to the Gold Rush and centuries-old gossip about John Sutter’s love life: all that in a surprising article that recently ran in the Sacramento Bee. It’s a must-read for anyone who gets a kick out of learning that western history is more complicated than most […]
Posted inMay 18, 2009: The Rise of the Minotaur
The Rise of the Minotaur
Bull riding explodes from its Western roots into a modern spectacle
Posted inGoat
Dancing to the Tohono O’odham polka
“Waila” is taken from “baila,” which means dance in Spanish. Blending polka, waltz, tejano, cumbia and Norteno, Waila’s roots go back as far as the late 1700s, when European immigrants brought their accordions with them to work on the railroads. When electricity came to the reservations in the 1950s and ’60s, the Joaquin Brothers amped […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Drop-dead bargains
Bargain hunters found an unusual offer recently in the Mountain Valley News of western Colorado. For a limited time — until Memorial Day, May 25 — Mesa View Cemetery in Delta breathlessly announced, “If you purchase one grave space at our regular price in the Garden of Peace, our upright headstone section, you will receive […]
Posted inGoat
Gratuitous displays of ignorance
Yesterday morning I got sucked into a vortex of reader comments on several articles about Native American issues. One story by NPR echoed our January feature story by Andrea Appleton, “Blood Quantum,” describing the controversy over what percentage of Indian blood is required to enroll in a tribe. The second, from the Great Falls Tribune, described the Little Shell […]
Posted inWotr
Call me a local and forget about my grandpappy
I live in Lemhi County, Idaho, but nobody else in my family ever did, and recently, that’s become a problem. I love the boiled-down democracy of city council meetings, the frank discussions of local school boards, the drama of planning and zoning hearings – and no, I’m not kidding. I find local politics fascinating, and […]
Posted inGoat
Western Imagery
When we look out our windows, do we always see the real West out there, or do we often perceive what photographers have taught us to to see? The question comes up with an exhibit of 120 photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Called “Into the Sunset, Photography’s […]
Posted inWotr
Following your passion
The bones of the young artist Everett Ruess, identified last month through DNA analysis, have at last been found in Utah. They were 100 miles from where he was last seen 75 years ago, and from where his mules were found bya search party in early 1935. So ends the legends surrounding Ruess’s disappearance and […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
From grass to grains
An Oregon local foods movement finds opportunity in the economic crisis
Posted inHeard Around the West
Yes, you might
The honchos at Arizona State University sure know how to get people fired up. First, they invited President Barack Obama to be the commencement speaker May 13, and then they decided not to award him an honorary degree, as is customary at these ceremonies. The rationale? “His body of work is yet to come,” reports […]
Posted inGoat
The cost of progress
The Environmental Working Group just released a two-year study focusing on the toxins found in five minority women at the forefront of environmental justice battles. Within each community, these women work tirelessly to protect citizens from various forms of pollution. And within each of these women, scientists found significantly higher amounts of toxins than other […]
Posted inRay
Some Mormons baptized Obama’s dead mother
This is an amazing intrusion by one religion into a White House family. Or add your own description of its significance. The Salt Lake Tribune reports: President Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995, was baptized posthumously into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints last year during her son’s campaign, […]
Posted inMay 4, 2009: Salmon Salvation
The West dissected
Oil and gas companies — despite the efforts of “obstructionist” environmentalists — managed to drill at least 117,339 new wells in 12 Western states (including South Dakota) in the last eight years alone. That drilling rush often skirted regulations and caused significant air and water pollution. That’s according to the Environmental Working Group, which recently […]