Innholdsfortegnelse for October Vol. 56, No. 10 i High Country News

ON THE COVER Latinos active in the 2024 elections. Pictured from left, top row: Elizabeth Rentería, Culinary Union shop steward and guest-room attendant, Las Vegas, Nevada; Jonathan Soto Robles, deputy director of grassroots, The LIBRE Initiative, Phoenix, Arizona; ELLA founder Maria Fernandez, Sunnyside, Washington; Victor Rodriguez, potential voter, Phoenix. Middle row: Ismael Luna, potential voter, Phoenix; Audrey Peral, Chispa Nevada program director, Las Vegas; Maria Barquin, Forge Radio Network program director, Radio Campesina, Phoenix. Bottom row: Alejandra Gomez, executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), Phoenix; Bryan Hurtado, Make the Road Action Nevada volunteer, Las Vegas; Osvaldo Franco, producer and radio host, Radio Campesina, Phoenix; Chelsea Dimas, Washington state representative candidate, Sunnyside, Washington. Roberto (Bear) Guerra / HCN…

IN INDIAN COUNTRY, majorelectionyears bring a deluge of messaging that “voting is sacred,” as then-Congresswoman and current Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said during the 2020 Democratic National Convention. The push to get out the Native vote is strong; it’s sometimes credited for swinging the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Every election cycle, Native communities and individuals grapple with a web of dilemmas: Are polling stations accessible? Are any of the candidates not directly hostile to Indigenous interests? Is voting in American elections compatible with Native cultural value systems? And, ultimately, is it even worth doing? This year marks the centennial of the Indian Citizenship Act, which theoretically gave Native people the right to vote in U.S. elections — though it was several decades before all 50 states actually honored it.…

IN 2020, Tim Lahey became district ranger of the 3.39 million-acre Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. The two reservoirs tucked up in one of its mountain basins provide nearly 60% of Butte, Montana’s water supply, and Lahey knew his new job would not be easy: Those reservoirs were under threat, and had been for decades. In the early 2000s, mountain pine beetles swarmed the basin, munching through and killing thousands of lodgepole pines. Nationwide, the insects have killed trees on nearly 8 million acres. Today, roughly half of the trees around the Basin Creek Reservoir are dead. Some are still standing, just waiting to fall; others are piled on the forest floor in a messy maze. If a fire started in the forested hills surrounding the Basin Creek Reservoir, it would likely…

On a Saturday evening in September, close to 100 people filed into the Blue Sage Center for the Arts in Paonia, Colorado, HCN’s longtime hometown. Our new director of philanthropy, Eric Lane, compared it to a family reunion. With the election looming large in everyone’s mind, longtime Contributing Editor Michelle Nijhuis led a conversation about how Westerners can come together to create conservation solutions able to endure the changing winds of Washington, D.C. The talk grew out of the work that Michelle is currently spearheading in the magazine and on the website, which you can find at hcn.org/conservation-beyond-boundaries. Panelists included Hannah Stevens, executive director of the Western Slope Conservation Center, Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Towaoc, and regenerative cattle rancher Jason Wrich. Wrich recalled his…

TEN YEARS AGO, hundreds of people gathered in a dusty wash underneath a freeway overpass 80 miles east of Las Vegas, near the town of Bunkerville, Nevada. They arrived at the behest of a reedy-voiced 68-year-old man in a cowboy hat — Cliven Bundy, who owned a 160-acre farm there but grazed his cattle illegally on the federal land around it. In April 2014, Bundy urged people to support him in his fight against the federal government. “Now it’s time to get on our boots and I guess make our stand,” Cliven said on a phone call to a right-wing YouTube show. At the time, Bundy, who owed the Bureau of Land Management more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees, had already defied several court orders demanding he remove…

ON A WET SPRING DAY IN JUNE, fog shrouded the Mission Mountains on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. Silver beads of rain clung to blades of grass and purple lupine. On a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake in the southeastern corner of the reservation, the land had been mostly cleared of trees after state-managed logging operations. Some trees remained, mainly firs and pines, spindly things that once grew in close quarters but now looked exposed without their neighbors. Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes. “It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their…

Exploring the intersection of race and family in the interior rural West. “THEY DIE. They not good guys,” my daughter Marigold says solemnly. I nod. “We put them in the soap,” I tell her and her sister, Juniper. Marigold is 2, and at times her speech is hard to decipher. She forgets verbs. When she wants to be picked up, she shouts, “Carry you!” And when I ask her to do anything, she almost always replies with a resounding “WHY?” — as she does now. “They eat our plants, Gogo!” exclaims Juniper, nimbly picking up a shiny beetle and plopping it into her bucket. All summer and into autumn, our evenings had a kind of order. The girls ate dinner, and afterward, we had popsicles on the deck. While they…

THIS NOVEMBER, most of the nation will be transfixed by the presidential contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. But there’s also plenty to see downballot in the West. SHIFTING AFFILIATIONS Arizona has long been home to old-fashioned Barry Goldwater-style conservatives. But MAGA hijacked the state Republican Party, alienating its more moderate members. Republican John Giles, for example, the mayor of Mesa, endorsed Kamala Harris. The shift gives Rep. Ruben Gallego, a progressive-turned-moderate Democrat, an edge over election-denying Trump acolyte Kari Lake, R, in the race to replace Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who veered from left to right politically before finally dropping her “D” in 2022. Democrats might even win control of the state Legislature for the first time in decades. ▪ It’s a long shot, but…

KIMBERLY MORALES JOHNSON (SHE/HER) (GABRIELENO/TONGVA SAN GABRIEL BAND OF MISSION INDIANS) Educator, tribal secretary, co-founder of Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy Los Angeles, California Speaking your truth is difficult. In grad school, my cohort and I were known as the “combative cohort.” Recently, I had a situation where someone mentioned that I responded in a combative way. Sometimes, as Native American women, our passion — our saying “no” — is seen as hostile or combative. Why can’t we view someone saying “no” as a boundary? Why can’t people honor our passion? When I shared my recent experience with a friend who was in my cohort, she quickly replied, “I would rather be combative than complicit.” I believe, as Native women, when we’re wearing earrings or a scarf or regalia, it is…