Innholdsfortegnelse for May Vol. 56, No. 05 i High Country News

ON THE FIRST SATURDAY OF SPRING, members of the Salt Lake Valley’s queer community gathered at the Moonstead, the Mobile Moon Co-op’s half-acre urban farm, to celebrate the changing seasons and the Persian New Year, Nowruz. Strong winds caught at the plastic covering the greenhouse and toppled pistachios on the haft seen —a ceremonial table holding seven items that start with the Persian letter sin. Despite the wind, Camlyn Giddins and Yasi Shaker, Mobile Moon’s event coordinators, opened with a calm garden meditation. “Invite what the mycelium might be gifting you this spring,” Giddins said. Guests circled around the chakra garden, and Giddins and Shaker pointed out the herbs that were planted for each of the body’s energy centers, such as the abundant sage green leaves of lavender at the crown…

THE KLAMATH TRIBES in southern Oregon have not seen salmon, much less been able to fish for them, for over a century now, ever since seven dams in the Klamath Basin were erected as part of PacifiCorp’s Klamath Hydroelectric Project. The dams, which were built between 1911 and 1962, reshaped the way the river flows, preventing fish passage and denying the Native nations access to an essential resource. Now, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation project is overseeing the decommissioning of the four lower dams on the river. Copco No. 2 was fully removed in October 2023, and the process for draining the reservoirs above the other three dams — Copco No. 1, John C. Boyle and Iron Gate — was completed in February, with those remaining three dams scheduled for…

IN AN EPISODE of Showtime’s new black comedy The Curse, Indigenous artist Cara Durand hosts a performance art piece during which she invites participants, one by one, into a tipi. There, she uses a meat slicer to shave pieces off a hunk of turkey and distributes the slices to participants. “As a Native person, that’s basically what you’re doing every day — just fucking slicing off pieces of yourself. And it’s exhausting,” Durand later explains. The Curse is a series by Nathan Fielder, whose shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal have defined the cringe comedy genre, and Benny Safdie, best known for his work in the critically acclaimed film Uncut Gems. With two non-Native showrunners, The Curse might seem an unlikely contender for raising the bar on Indigenous representation.…

119 Grand Avenue PO Box 1090 Paonia, CO 81428 U.S. $5 | Canada$6 MOLLY BULLSHOE Blackfeet Nation matriarch, teacher, elder Heart Butte, Montana This July, I will turn 100 years old. I was born in 1924 in one of the last encampments and raised in Blacktail. When we were young girls, my sister, who was 10 at the time, and I, just 8 years old, attended a mission school for a year and a half. While in school we lived in the dorms, where the boys lived separately from the girls. I remember thinking it was so far from home and my parents, but later realized I wasn’t that far away. We rarely ever returned home, not for even Christmas. I would get very lonesome, but having cousins at school…

DESIREE TULLOS and Will Nuckoles clambered down a steep slope high above what used to be Iron Gate Reservoir in Northern California one mid-February morning. As they wound through buckbrush, trying not to slip on the gravelly soil, Tullos, an Oregon State University professor, lagged behind her graduate student, hampered by the boot cast on her broken right ankle. “I’m not supposed to put any weight on it,” said Tullos. “But I didn’t want to miss anything.” As they neared a trail camera mounted on a metal stake, the view emerged: Sheer chocolate-colored cliffs slanted down to the bottom of the canyon, where the muddy brown Klamath River meandered through a raw and reborn landscape. Iron Gate and two other reservoirs were drained earlier this year — a major step…

“THAT NOISE YOU HEAR? It’s power,” Christine Lewis told me above the faint buzz emanating from the Cowlitz electrical substation in western Washington. Lewis, the senior manager for transmission and distribution at Tacoma Public Utilities, was explaining how this substation — a sprawling city block’s worth of asphalt and scaffolding — regulated the entire region’s power. As we stood outside, the October sky threatened rain. Everything around us was the same color: the clouds overhead; the metal boxes, drums and coils and the tangle of wires connecting them; the barbed wiretopped chain-link fence that surrounded the whole compound — even the gravel-covered ground. There are scientists who study how to design waste sites so that they can communicate, without words, the dangers they’ll pose to people thousands of years from now.…

An exploration of living in direct relationship with the land, water, plants and animals in and around Uŋalaqłiq (Unalakleet), on the west coast of what’s now called Alaska. I HEARD DAD yell something to me from the shore. “What?” I hollered back. “Pull the back anchor!” he yelled again. “Oh, shit. Right,” I said under my breath. I’d forgotten the simplest of boating duties. Rookie, I thought as I pulled up the anchor, hand over hand. I heard the splash of the cold water of the Norton Sound below and felt the slime of the green algae on the rope. Then I turned the key, the motor of the 16-foot aluminum vessel tut-tut-tuttering to a smooth hum, and we backed up. “One of you go to the front to look…

THE NORTH CASCADES ELK herd is a cluster of some 1,600 animals whose domain, like so many habitats, is riven by a highway. From 2012 to 2019, Washington state records show, at least 229 elk were killed by cars along a stretch of State Route 20 in the Skagit Valley. The situation imperils humans, too: In 2023, a motorist died after swerving around an elk into a telephone pole. “My own nephew had an elk collision, and I’ve nearly had collisions myself over the years,” said Scott Schuyler, a member of the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, who is also the tribe’s natural resources and cultural policy representative. “We have an obligation to protect our neighbors and ourselves and these animals.” To many observers, the solution has long been clear: a…

IN THE MID-TO-LATE 1800s, wellfinanced livestock operations drove tens of thousands of cattle onto the “public domain” — i.e., onto the lands stolen from Indigenous people in the Interior West, where the grass grew as high as a pony’s belly and appeared to be free for the taking. The livestock industry, along with mining, soon dominated the region’s colonialsettler culture, economy and politics. By the end of the century, however, the big cattle drives were becoming a thing of the past. In the ensuing decades, ranches gave way to energy fields and suburban sprawl, and the industry’s economic power faded. And yet, the West is still Cattle Country: The cowboy myth endures, fueling tourism. Ranching wields an outsized influence over state and federal politics. And the cattle themselves are still here,…

BY THE EARLY 1960S, Washington state had almost extinguished tribal fishing rights. State officers regularly conducted raids, arresting Native fishers and confiscating their canoes, gear and catches. “It was nearly a daily event to get hassled by those guys,” Billy Frank Jr. recalled. “It was a good day if you didn’t get arrested.” Now, some 60 years later, Indian treaty fishing rights stand solidly protected, and tribes play a central role in managing Washington’s fisheries. How did this momentous shift come about? This is the question the late Charles Wilkinson tackles in his latest, and posthumous, book, Treaty Justice: The Northwest Tribes, the Boldt Decision, and the Recognition of Fishing Rights, the first comprehensive, book-length account of all that led up to the landmark 1974 case, United States v. Washington,…