For over a century, federal law has split Native American land holdings into tiny pieces. A settlement unites some of the splinters, but at a steep cost.
Sierra Crane-Murdoch
Posted inApril 27, 2015: Lost frontier
A defender of North Dakota’s badlands wonders if it’s time to leave
Theodore Roosevelt National Park is not immune to effects of the Bakken oil boom.
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Fallon, Nevada’s deadly legacy
In a small town once plagued by childhood cancer, some families still search for answers.
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
O pioneer: A filmmaker explores how we find home in the West
L.A. transplant Vera Brunner-Sung’s first fictional work tackles displacement, transience and belonging in Montana.
Posted inAugust 5, 2013: Mojave Squeeze
The Bakken oilfields: ‘No place for a woman’
One woman’s effort to survive the Great Recession in booming North Dakota.
Posted inJune 10, 2013: Paradise at a Price
Is the Violence Against Women Act a chance for tribes to reinforce their sovereignty?
Victims’ advocates joined legislators at the North Dakota Capitol in Bismarck on March 26, to discuss the recently reauthorized Violence Against Women Act. The meeting began on a celebratory note: The federal law restored to tribal courts the right to prosecute non-Indians for abusing or assaulting Native American women on Indian land — something the […]
Posted inMay 13, 2013: Right-wing Migration
How right-wing emigrants conquered North Idaho
If anyone in Kootenai County could have predicted the Democrats’ downfall, it was Dan English. He had spent most of his life in the Idaho Panhandle and monitored more than 100 local elections in his 15 years as county clerk. The first ballots he counted, in 1996, revealed tight contests between Republicans and Democrats, but […]
Posted inApril 29, 2013: A New Forest Paradigm
The gray area: a conversation with artist Renee Couture
We recommend you use the “View Gallery” option to enjoy these images. A Q&A with Renee Couture follows this introduction. Forestry, as a science, is both tangible and abstract. Behind the flagging and cores and calipers is the weighing of value, the ecological against the material, the measurable against the immeasurable. Such tensions are reflected […]
Posted inFebruary 18, 2013: Farming on the Fringe
Reimaginations
After we buried my grandfather behind the Falls Church and hauled the dress bags out of the attic and stacked his books into traveling trunks, my aunt, in the final throes of our archeological dig, found a sketchbook that had belonged to my great-grandfather, Donn P. Crane. The cover was marbled and brown, held together […]
Posted inDecember 24, 2012: The new Wild, Wild West
Reviving Custer: Re-enactment and revision at the Little Bighorn
Rick Williams always bore an uncanny likeness to George Armstrong Custer. It was the nose, beakish and narrow, and the plush, platinum mustache. This was fortunate for a Civil War re-enactor. One day in 2002, a tailor outfitted Williams in a red tie and Union general’s coat. “It was scary,” he recalls. “Everyone was saying, […]
Posted inGoat
End of an era?
Last Wednesday, to rather muffled fanfare, the Department of the Interior released a new set of rules that will make it easier for tribes and Indian landowners to lease their property for economic development. Native Americans will be able to do the things that private landowners do all the time: apply for a mortgage; establish […]
Posted inApril 16, 2012: The Other Bakken Boom
The Other Bakken Boom: America’s biggest oil rush brings tribal conflict
Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, a lilting swath of prairie in western North Dakota, was once a quiet place. Though thrice the area of Los Angeles, it had only 5,000 residents. Even New Town, a more populous district east of a reservoir called Lake Sakakawea, looked sparse and ephemeral. There was a granary, a fire station, […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
Junk rule pits rural ideals against suburban standards
Last spring, San Juan County in northern New Mexico hired a plane to survey its interior. An aerial tour of the scrubby hills and swales revealed quite a bit about the county: Pump jacks, two generating stations and a refinery are evidence that it runs primarily on coal and oil. And though it has experienced […]
Posted inSeptember 5, 2011: For the love of hummers
A day among junk connoisseurs
San Juan County, N.M., is dry and scrubby, dotted with pump jacks, two coal-fired power plants and an oil refinery. Energy may be the area’s mainstay, but underlying this economy, is another informal one based on the selling and trading of old car parts. The county is a haven for junk cars – and for […]
Posted inGoat
Reclaiming TSCA, One Chemical at a Time
In 1976, when the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) passed Congress and grandfathered-in some 60,000 untested chemicals, any regulatory hold the EPA could have had on manufacturers slipped quickly from their fingers. Simply by the sheer volume of substances already used in the United States, the agency fell far behind on reviewing the chemical inventory […]
Posted inJune 13, 2011: Under the Flight Path
Spring-cleaning the acequia: A photo essay
On an April morning in northern New Mexico’s upper Pecos Valley, before the sun lit the packed dirt streets of El Cerrito, Ricardo Patricio Quintana walked the irrigation ditch. He began above the first compuerta, a scrap-wood gate that lets water into one family’s field. Every six feet, he scuffed a mark in the dry […]
Posted inGoat
New Indian Energy Policy Draft Rewrites Bush-era Law
Several months ago at the State of Indian Nations address in Washington D.C., Jefferson Keel, President of the National Congress of American Indians, implored Congress and the Obama administration to dispose of the hurdles that have kept tribes from tapping their own energy resources. Since then, many more tribal leaders have come before the House […]
Posted inGoat
While Non-Believers Punked the Rapture, the West was Punked
When Christian fundamentalists opened their eyes last Saturday evening, only to find that nothing, (at least there in their living rooms,) had changed, non-believers felt suddenly and gleefully exalted. In an unexpected twist, the sinners had been enraptured — at least metaphorically speaking — while their devout counterparts had kept their feet planted firmly on […]
Posted inMay 16, 2011: Ripple Effects
Where has Montana’s water gone?
An old compact may not be enough to keep the Tongue River from running dry