Innholdsfortegnelse for December Vol. 57, No. 12 i High Country News

CALIFORNIA’S first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, swore that the racist campaign he championed would not end “until the Indian race becomes extinct.” His two years in office brought malnutrition, homicide and forced migration, decimating California’s Native populations by nearly 90% between 1848 and 1900. But Burnett died, his campaign ended, and ultimately, California’s Indigenous people survived. Then, in 1905, the United States publicly disclosed the unratified treaties it had made with 18 California tribes. The tribes responded by building a legal and economic framework for tribal sovereignty. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was enacted, and small casinos sprouted on reservations in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Southern California. Similar resorts sprang up across the country, and the economic benefits have helped fuel the struggle for tribal sovereignty. A recent study…

STAN KROENKE DOESN’T NEED FEDERAL HELP TO MAKE A BUSINESS FLOURISH. He is worth an estimated $20 billion, a fortune that has allowed him to become one of America’s largest property owners and afforded him stakes in storied sports franchises, including the Denver Nuggets and England’s Arsenal soccer club. Yet Kroenke, whose wife is an heiress to the Walmart fortune, benefits from one of the federal government’s bedrock subsidy programs. As owner of the Winecup Gamble Ranch, which sprawls across grasslands, streams and a mountain range east of Elko, Nevada, Kroenke is entitled to graze his cattle on public lands for less than 15% of the fees he would pay on private land. The public-lands grazing program, formalized in the 1930s to contain the rampant overgrazing that contributed to the…

High on the volcanic shoulders of Northern California’s Cascade Range, the air is thin enough to sting your lungs. Between the mid-October freeze and November’s first heavy snow, chainsaws echo in short bursts, muffled by dense trees and resin-sweet air. In the morning halflight, a small crew labors rhythmically, harvesting wild red firs for sale in Christmas tree lots across the country. Red firs — Abies magnifica, more commonly known as silvertips for their fine, silver–tinged needles — thrive between 6,500 and 8,000 feet, clinging to rough terrain in California and Oregon that burns hot in summer and freezes hard in winter, a pattern that shapes the trees’ distinctive concentric branching. “You only get a few weeks,” John Wayne Strauch, whom everyone calls Bambi, told me. A wild Christmas tree…

OREGON Business is booming for one Portland costume shop. Or should we say, “blowing up?” Ever since protesters started dressing in inflatable costumes and gathering outside the South Waterfront area’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building to denounce Trump’s “war on the city,” Portland has been living up to its proud reputation as the epicenter of weird. And it’s not all just hot air. Many of the costumes have been purchased at Lippman Co., a 77-year-old party supply store in Portland’s Central Eastside. As far as weaponry goes, the store’s inflatable frog, dinosaur and chicken costumes, retailing for $60 to $70, may not be as pricey as Raytheon cruise missiles or even tear gas and rubber bullets, but they’re still capable of packing a wallop. Worth it, though, if mocking authoritarian-style…

MARIE TOSA KNOWS MORE about the western spotted skunk than almost anyone on Earth. Between 2017 and 2019, as a Ph.D. student at Oregon State University, Tosa trekked all over the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon’s Cascade Range, capturing, collaring and following spotted skunks through dense forests and rolling valleys. In the process, she put 300,000 miles on two research trucks and got sprayed anywhere between 50 and 100 times. But it was worth it, she said: Her research revealed new details of the species’ diet, movements and habitat preferences. Though the western spotted skunk is less common and more elusive than the more familiar striped skunk, it’s doing better than its cousin back East, where populations have declined by at least 90% since the 1950s. Even today, no…

1st HCN Associate Editor Anna V. Smith and Maria Parazo Rose, a reporter and spatial data analyst, won first place for “best coverage of Indigenous communities” for an investigation into state trust lands on reservations. It was part of a larger collaboration with Grist that also won this year’s Richard La Course Award — a high honor. Paul Robert Wolf Wilson’s images of tree sitters in Oregon earned him the Best News Photo prize. Other photography awards included an Indigenous celebration of Hanford, fish camps on the Yukon River, a Native-led native plants movement, and a group that is creating a gathering place for Alaska. 2nd Staff writer B. “Toastie” Oaster won third place in the “Best environmental coverage” category for their reporting on climate and environmental obstacles faced by Indigenous…

ONCE EVERY 10 YEARS, RANCHERS MUST RENEW THE PERMITS THAT ALLOW THEIR cattle, sheep and other livestock to graze on the West’s public domain. These renewals are the government’s best opportunity to address how those livestock are harming the environment. The Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service, which manage the majority of public lands, are required by law to review each permit before deciding whether to place additional conditions on it or — in rare cases — to deny its renewal. But in 2014, Congress mandated that the agencies automatically renew permits for another decade if they are unable to complete the reviews. This exemption has dramatically reduced scrutiny of grazing’s impact on public lands. In 2013, the BLM approved grazing on 47% of its land open to livestock…

FIFTY MILES EAST OF RENO, Nevada, on the edge of Fallon, a small agricultural and military town, John King looked across a noisy highway toward the ranch where a legendary rodeo never took place. Thirty-seven years ago, in October 1988, that year’s Gay Rodeo Finals contestants and organizers were refused entry to the ranch, blocked by then-Churchill County Sheriff Bill Lawry. “It was the first time I’d seen raw, undeniable hate,” King said. A judge’s injunction hung on the ranch gate, and the sheriff, his shotgun and a group of deputies stood between the rodeo contestants, organizers and their horses. King recalled that for several tense hours, the crowd pushed toward the gates but was met with heated threats of violence. Eventually, people were allowed to load their horses and…

THE LAST CASCADES FROG in Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California was well known to amphibian survey crews. Year after year, she turned up near Juniper Lake, full of eggs, seeking a mate. But it was a hopeless search; there were no other frogs left. She appeared one last time in 2007. Cascades frogs were once plentiful in the park; now, researchers believed, there were none. Seeing that final frog inspired ecologist Karen Pope to shift from observational research to studying nature to help restore it. “We’ve gotten to a place where, if we sit back, we’re going to keep watching the last frog,” said Pope, who recently retired from the Forest Service. Now, thanks to a collaboration among timber companies, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the…

WHEN JOSHUA HOOD LOOKS at a Pacific yew tree, he sees more than just the beginnings of a bow. He sees a partnership that spans generations, a meditation on balance, tension and rest — a lifeway linking him to his Klamath-Modoc ancestors. He also sees his namesake: nteyss?odt’a, or “bow worker” in his tribe’s language. For Hood, 35, that name has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Along with constructing custom bows and teaching traditional bow-making and archery courses for majority-BIPOC students in Portland, Oregon, he also runs a nonprofit focused on teaching youth outdoor skills. Every part of Hood’s work revolves around traditional archery in one way or another. People from all walks of life are welcome at Hood’s courses, which he announces through his Instagram account. His work fills a growing…

Already, we’ve done some exciting things. Our sophisticated new tools have enabled us to get our journalism into the hands of the people who need it, and our stories are having real, on-the-ground impact. You’ll read more about this in our Impact Report in the following pages, but here’s a few highlights from this year: ■ Our reporting about how federal spending cuts will impact public media in rural and Indigenous communities made noticeable waves. We were cited several times in the amicus brief that NPR member stations and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed in the lawsuit brought by NPR (and Colorado stations) against the federal government over its unprecedented clawback of federal funding. The New York Times and other news outlets followed our lead. ■…

HCN deepens our impact by offering much of our content for republishing in other media outlets for no cost. Here are just a few newsrooms that shared our reporting in 2025: Buckrail, Truthout, Grist, Undark Magazine, Canary Media, Native News Online, Environmental Health News, Alaska Beacon, Cascade PBS, Mother Jones, Colorado Times Recorder, Sierra Magazine, Vox, National Parks Coalition, WyoFile, the Arizona Mirror, the Navajo-Hopi Observer and many, many more. Unique sources that have syndicated our stories: 94 Number of stories shared: 232…

IN LATE 2019, A PAIR OF MONTANA RANCHERS GOT IN trouble with the Forest Service, which oversees the federal lands where they had a permit to graze their cattle. Agency staff had found their cattle wandering in unauthorized locations four times during September of that year. The agency also found some of their fences in disrepair and their salt licks — which provide cattle with essential minerals — too close to creeks and springs, drawing the animals into those habitats. After repeated calls, texts and letters, the Forest Service sent the ranchers a “notice of noncompliance,” according to documents obtained via public records requests. The agency asserted that the ranchers had engaged in “a willful and intentional violation” of their permit and warned that future violations could lead to its revocation.…

ELIZABETH BLACK AND CHRISTOPHER BROWN Owners of Your Neighborhood Christmas Tree Farm Boulder, Colorado We started our farm wanting to do our part by planting more trees for the environment and also by creating a local source for a holiday tradition. It is actually quite difficult to maintain a Christmas tree farm in Colorado due to the harsh conditions we face, including a short growing season and limited precipitation. Most Christmas trees are trucked in from several states away. We keep our production relatively small — just 1,000 trees on our 1-acre lot — which allows us to put a lot of care and attention into nurturing each seedling. Our farm is sustainable because the trees are grown locally in the community that enjoys them, and we only cut down…