Innholdsfortegnelse for October Vol. 54, No. 10 i High Country News

LAMPREY ARE AMONG THE OLDEST living vertebrates on Earth. Long before the appearance of salmon or sturgeon — or even dinosaurs — lamprey were wiggling through the shallow seas and up the rushing rivers of Pangaea, surviving on the strength of their muscular bodies and formidable, suction-cup mouths. By the time humans began wandering the planet, lamprey had survived no fewer than five mass extinctions. As B. Toastie recounts in this issue, the first peoples of the Columbia River Basin made an agreement with the Pacific lamprey: The people would care for the lamprey, and the lamprey would care for the people. The past century of dam development, river pollution and climate change — perpetrated by those who made no such agreement — has challenged both parties as never before.…

AFTER IMMIGRATING TO Tucson, Arizona, from Culiacán, Sinaloa, in 2012, Cristina Apan struggled to find stable housing. In 2016, after the woman she was staying with kicked her out, she slept in her car. “I thought I was going to die,” she said. “In Mexico, you’d get killed for sleeping out in the open in your car. I couldn’t stop thinking like that.” Finally, she asked a friend, a quiet landscaper named Juan Diego Rodríguez, if she could stay in his manufactured home. The two eventually married. “2016 and 2017, we were friends, but in 2018 we said, ‘You know what, we keep getting closer to one another; let’s get married.’ That’s what fate had in store for us.” But the home was in terrible condition, Apan said — so bad,…

Pearl Payne and Lee Pleasant Driver,two of the few Negroes in Anaconda,a smelter town, found each other. Lee,the protected side of something—sheltered and sheltering—a pleasantplace out of the wind and rain. A pearlgrows from the need to soothe pain—nacre encases irritants to smoothrough edges and results in a lusterwe appreciate, worthy of the necksof our adored if we can afford it.Smelting, extracting the metal from rockor ore, copper in this case (valued becauseit carries a current and connects people)requires heat and care. Lee Pleasant,a former Buffalo Soldier, saw worthin Pearl Payne, and she in him. He, bornat the end of the war, and she, a dozenyears later, who didn’t know slaverybut knew well what it meant to beBlack in a newly reconciled nation,wed in that Western smelter town. WEB EXTRA…

Here are some easy ways you can make a difference: • Put HCN in your will• Name HCN as a beneficiary of an investment• Give a QCD, or IRA rollover or distribution• Give a gift of appreciated stock It can be a difficult topic, but planning – at any age – can help bring you peace of mind, knowing loved ones and organizations you treasure will be cared for. If you haven’t created a will, please use our free tool at hcn.org/mywill. Talk to a live human: 800-905-1155 Or read our planned giving guide: hcn.org/pgguide…

High Country News is dedicated to independent journalism, informed debate and discourse in the public interest. We welcome letters through digital media and the post. Send us a letter, find us on social media, or email us at editor@hcn.org. LANDBACK LOVE “6 questions about the LandBack movement answered” (September 2022) might tempt me to subscribe to your publication. I believe we owe much to the descendants of the survivors of the wipe-out of our Indigenous cultures as well as those whose ancestors were held as slaves or suffered the oppression of the Jim Crow era. We must fix these things. The LandBack movement could be a part of that fixing. AJ WomackGrand Junction, Colorado SUPERB SNARK Thank you so much for the two delightfully snarky pieces: “6 questions about the…

THE HEAT WAS IN THE TRIPLE DIGITS when Lea Bossler and her U.S. Forest Service engine crew reached the blaze unfurling in a canyon outside Nogales, Arizona. As she trekked up a hill with her shovel-like rhino tool, flaming barrel cacti tumbled down the slope, igniting more parched fuels along the way. Despite the heat, a 45-pound pack and little sleep, Bossler felt strong and capable, mopping up the edges of the fire, extinguishing collapsed cactuses that smoldered like burnt rubber. This was her third season as a wildland firefighter, and she was well on her way to fulfilling her goal of becoming an incident commander. After the fire was contained, Bossler and her crew drove home to Missoula, Montana, concluding a two-week roll in the Southwest. It was early…

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THE ROAR OF THE FALLS was an unrelenting thunder of white noise. It was the mid-1950s, and Celilo Falls, on the border between Washington and Oregon — the oldest continuously inhabited spot in North America — had yet to be destroyed. Sparkling headwaters flowed from British Columbia, Montana and Wyoming, streams gathering to form the Columbia River, which surged westward through the high desert and the rainy Cascade Mountains until it yawned into the brackish slurry of the Pacific estuary. Year after year, for countless generations, millions of fish stampeded back upstream, fighting the ocean’s current to gain the forested upper tributaries, whose sheltered, transparent waters and gravel substrate provided perfect spawning grounds. The Great River’s annual rotation of anadromous fish included steelhead trout, sturgeon, coho, chinook and sockeye salmon,…

WHEN DREW* started working for the Newmont Corporation at a large gold mine in northeastern Nevada, it was a relief. At their previous mining job near Elko, a Nevada town heavily reliant on the industry, safety was not a priority. By comparison, Drew said, Newmont supported its workers when they raised serious safety issues. “It was never geared toward the blame game,” they told us. When Drew was injured, there “was no debate on if we should report it.” But, as Drew recounted in multiple interviews this year, that positive safety culture began to unravel after a merger consolidated the region’s gold mines — some of the world’s largest — into a single company: Nevada Gold Mines. “All they care about is the bottom line, pushing ore through,” Drew said…

ON NOV. 9, THE EYES of Indian Country will once again turn toward the nation’s capital, where the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a law passed in 1978 that enshrines tribal governments’ right to oversee foster care placements in cases involving Native children. The bill followed the damage done by the U.S. boarding school system and extractive adoption practices, which stripped Native youth of their culture and removed them from their communities. Since the case first appeared in a Texas district courthouse in 2018, conservative state leaders and think tanks have pushed the case to the highest court. Brackeen v. Haaland will determine whether tribal nations maintain the right to intervene in foster and adoptive cases to ensure Native children are placed with…

BY THE TIME THIS ISSUE hits your mailbox, summer will have ended. The heat may linger where you reside, but all signs point toward fall: The kids are in class, the leaves are changing, the mountain towns are drawing a breath — and High Country News is wrapping up its summer reading program. Thank you to everyone who joined in this inaugural effort, either by sending in your card, submitting your book picks or voting for your favorite titles. The running list of HCN readers’ book picks is still at reading.hcn.org. See what other HCNers are reading and vote for your favorites. The most popular reading prompts submitted via reading.hcn.org will surprise few. Your enjoyment of books that interrogate power — Number 2 on our list — is probably why…