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For much of American history, a president who ignored Native American protests wouldn't have been newsworthy. But many tribal leaders believed Obama was different. "On the campaign trail, he made it clear that he was going to take tribes and tribal sovereignty very seriously," says Brian Cladoosby, chairman of the Swinomish Indian Senate and president of the bipartisan National Congress of American Indians. "His actions have spoken even louder than his words."
Obama began working to repair broken relationships with tribal governments almost immediately. In 2009, he invited leaders from 564 federally recognized tribes to the White House Tribal Nations Conference, an event that became an annual tradition. Each fall, Native Americans came to Washington to be heard by high-ranking officials, and officials — like Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who oversees 55 million acres of Indian Country — came face-to-face with people affected by their decisions. "We got one meeting with Clinton and zero with George W. Bush," says Cladoosby. "Eight meetings in eight years is unprecedented."
Cladoosby also points to the 2010 Indian Health Care Improvement Act, which addresses health-care disparities in Indian Country, and the 2013 Violence Against Women Act, which allows tribes to prosecute non-Natives who commit certain crimes on reservations, including domestic violence. Obama also restored more than 542,000 acres of land to tribal control, compared to 233,000 acres under Bush, and granted Alaska Natives the right to put land into a trust, which can give tribes greater control over their fish, wildlife and law enforcement. Additionally, the administration settled hundreds of outstanding lawsuits.
"The deck is cleared," says Kevin Washburn, who served as assistant secretary for Indian Affairs from 2012 to 2015. "The government-to-government relationship is no longer characterized by serial litigation. That alone will make cooperation much easier."
Yet not everyone has noticed the supposed progress. Disparities in income, health and education continue to plague many reservations, and Republican state Rep. Sharon Clahchischilliage of New Mexico says Obama's policies have hurt — not helped — the Navajo Nation. Poverty has worsened over the last eight years, she says: "We've lost 6,000 jobs in my county. The majority are oil and gas jobs."
Another Navajo Republican (and former Democrat), Arizona state Sen. Carlyle Begay, has come to see Democratic policies toward tribes as paternalistic, based on federal handouts rather than economic development. Yet even he thinks Obama's commitment to Native American issues is unparalleled.
As Obama's presidency neared its end, though, it appeared that his reputation in Indian Country would be shadowed by the events at Standing Rock. Then, on Dec. 4, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline to be built beneath Lake Oahe — the section that most concerned the Standing Rock Sioux because of its possible impact on their drinking water. It's unclear how much Obama influenced the decision, but many activists applauded the president.
Yet Monte Mills, an Indian law professor at the University of Montana, says the decision may be less monumental than a quiet announcement made in September. In response to the Standing Rock protests, the Department of Justice, the Army and the Department of the Interior announced they'd meet with tribes in an effort to change federal policy so that Native Americans would have greater involvement in future infrastructure development. If the agencies indeed adopt new rules mandating tribal consultations, it could affect much more than a single pipeline: Tribes would have more say over every future pipeline, transmission line, port, rail and transit proposal that's considered "tribally significant." They would have a stronger voice.
Again and again, the Native Americans I spoke to reiterated this single point: Obama gave them a seat at the table. He listened when previous presidents had not. So perhaps it's no coincidence that the Obama years coincided with some of the biggest Native American uprisings in recent memory — not just the dozens of tribes who united at Standing Rock, but others who fought for their voting rights, sought greater control over fisheries, opposed coal terminals, even burst into mainstream music. Perhaps it's also no coincidence that an unprecedented number of Native Americans ran for state and federal office in 2016 — eight for Congress, up from two in 2014, and over 90 for state legislatures.
Under Donald Trump, policies can be reversed, decisions undone. But the platform Native Americans gained will have lasting effects. As Standing Rock Sioux chairman Dave Archambault II said on Democracy Now!, "It feels like, finally, for the first time in history, over centuries, somebody is listening to us."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent with High Country News. Follow @cestmoilanglois]]>
Videos show police spraying the activists with frigid water and firing rubber bullets. Twenty-six people were hospitalized, including 21-year-old Sophia Wilansky, who says her arm was nearly blown off by a concussion grenade thrown by police. The Morton County Sheriff denies using such grenades.
As the protests at Standing Rock become increasingly dangerous, calls for President Barack Obama to intervene are growing louder. An emotional video showing a 23-year-old member of the Standing Rock Sioux pleading for Obama to help his people has been viewed 1.5 million times. Standing Rock chairman Dave Archambault II repeated requests he made in October for Obama to "stop this pipeline." And most damningly, prominent climate activist Tim DeChristopher wrote on Facebook that Wilansky's blood is now on Obama's hands.
But what, exactly, can President Obama do to protect the activists, and/or stop the $3.8 billion pipeline? According to three tribal law experts, the short answer is: not much.
"His ability to stop the pipeline itself is fairly limited at this point," says Monte Mills, co-director of the Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the University of Montana. "As is…his ability to stop (the actions of) local law enforcement."
Had Obama known sooner about concerns that the pipeline would threaten drinking water, he could have moved to stop it, as he did with Keystone XL, says Kevin Washburn, a professor of Indian law at the University of New Mexico and Obama's Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs from 2012 to 2015. When Washburn and Obama traveled to Standing Rock in 2014, though, "no one mentioned this to us."
"It's heartbreaking," Washburn adds.
Now that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers process for permitting the pipeline is nearly complete, both experts think it's too late for Obama to intervene. By law, the decision falls to the Army Corps — not the White House— and short of firing the head of that agency, any action by Obama would require considerable overreach, and could be easily overturned by the next president. Not only that, it could send the message that it's ok for Donald Trump or other presidents to force the hand of independent agencies.
"The reason these statutory and regulatory procedures are in place is to avoid arbitrary and unconsidered decisions by an executive," Mills wrote to me in a follow-up email. "If such authority were allowable, you could imagine a President, perhaps for political or economic reasons, deciding to approve a pipeline without following the tribal consultation process at all."
Sarah Krakoff, an Indian law professor at the University of Colorado, agrees — with one caveat. If the Army Corps' permitting process was faulty, a president has more grounds for stepping in than if he simply disagrees with the outcome, Krakoff says.
Which raises the all-important question: Did the Army Corps adequately involve the Standing Rock Sioux when it approved the Dakota Access Pipeline? Obama hasn't officially weighed in, but he has used his authority to better ensure that tribes are consulted on future pipelines. At the White House Tribal Nations Conference in September, the president told tribal leaders that the standoff at Standing Rock "highlights why it's so important that we redouble our efforts to make sure that every federal agency truly consults and listens and works with you." That same month, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Army and the Department of the Interior issued an unprecedented joint statement asking the pipeline company to voluntarily delay construction, and requesting consultations with all 567 federally-recognized tribes. The consultations, which began in November, are meant to change the law so that tribes have a greater voice in infrastructure permitting in the future.
Read more of HCN's coverage of sovereignty and other tribal issues here.
"Those efforts set the stage for ensuring that tribes are going to have a different and more meaningful role in the consultation and permitting process going forward," Mills says. "In the long term, that's a much more positive and groundbreaking outcome — no pun intended — than anything that would specifically come out of (stopping) the Dakota Access pipeline itself."
"But," Mills adds, "I think it's hard to see that right now, given the amount of heat surrounding Standing Rock."
This doesn't mean hope is lost for Standing Rock Sioux supporters. Independently — or perhaps with the president's prompting — the Army Corps could re-route the pipeline around the contested Lake Oahe, which is what outgoing Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and others are advocating for.
As for intervening in police actions against Standing Rock activists, the decision would have to come from U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who could request that the Department of Justice review local law enforcement's actions to see if they violate federal laws. President Obama himself could send in the National Guard, but that's historically been reserved for times when state or local law enforcement ignores federal law or court orders.
Yet despite the limited scope of Obama's authority, it's easy to see why activists have reached out to him. Many Native American leaders I've spoken with think Obama has been more receptive to tribal issues than any president in history, and his strong track record gives activists hope. As tribal chairman David Archambault II told Democracy Now! in October, "he did so much for Indian country that (his legacy) is resting on this."
Note: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that the Army Corps is a part of the executive branch.
Krista Langlois is a correspondent with High Country News.]]>
Engineered to carry crude from the roadless North Slope to ports on the southern coast, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline brought jobs and revenue to the 49th state, transforming it from roughshod frontier to global energy powerhouse and lifting Walker and others from poverty along the way. Walker used his earnings to put himself through college, then law school. At 27, he became the youngest mayor of Valdez. He founded a law firm specializing in oil and gas issues. And in 2014, the lifelong Republican ran as an Independent to become Alaska's 11th -governor.
Yet Walker's tenure coincided with a financial crisis. Oil prices have plummeted, thousands of Alaskans have lost their jobs and the state faces a $3 billion budget deficit. Meanwhile, many North Slope oil wells are slowly drying up. The pipeline now carries just a quarter of the crude it once did, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that if production continues to drop, it could be decommissioned as early as 2026.
That's a devastating prospect for Alaskans, who depend on oil pumping through the pipeline for nearly 90 percent of state revenue. Even if oil prices bounce back, the state's financial future remains hitched to a declining, volatile commodity. But Bill Walker believes there's an obvious path to prosperity: Build another pipeline, this time to transport the 34 trillion cubic feet of natural gas stranded -beneath the -frozen North Slope.
The proposed gasline and accompanying liquified natural gas (LNG) plant could bring 15,000 jobs and a flood of revenue, which Walker hopes could be used to develop other industries, such as mining, reducing the state's dependence on oil. But given the current fiscal emergency, a growing number of skeptics wonder if the new pipeline will be a boost — or a -blunder.
The idea of moving natural gas from the North Slope to a plant where it can be liquified and shipped overseas was first proposed in the 1970s. But because re-injecting gas into oil wells to bring up greater quantities of crude proved more profitable than shipping it to market, the gasline never materialized. Instead, the project hovered like a mirage — tantalizing, but just beyond reach.
For years, Walker worked behind the scenes to convince oil producers of the plan's merits. "I watched all these other LNG projects be developed around the world," he says. "But ours was like milk with no expiration date — it never got to the front of the shelf." Finally, he became convinced that the best way to get the pipeline built was for the state to take over, and the best way for that to happen was to spearhead it himself. So in 2014, he ran for the governor's office on a pro-pipeline platform — and won.
By this point, Alaska already had a state-owned gasline corporation partnering with several oil companies. Walker's administration kicked it into high gear. Shortly after his election, the state paid $65 million for TransCanada's 25 percent stake in the project. The corporation hired a new CEO with a $550,000 salary, and a state agency estimated that extracting North Slope natural gas could soon be more profitable than injecting it to stimulate oil wells. Things looked promising.
That changed in August. Cheap natural gas had flooded the global market, and the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie concluded that the Alaska LNG Project's $45 billion price tag made it one of the least competitive proposals of its kind worldwide. ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and BP abruptly backed out.
Industry analysts predicted that without the oil companies' backing, the project was dead. But Walker saw this as an opportunity for the state to assume full control of it. Walker believes that by the mid-2020s, as the global oversupply diminishes, Asian countries will be again hungry for gas. He's hoping to find outside investors, such as Asian utility companies, to fund the gasline.
Yet many Alaskans and analysts remain skeptical. "I think investors will be very reluctant," says Larry Persily, who has worked on Alaska oil and gas policy for 20 years. He points out that the state has barely begun the regulatory process, creating uncertainties that may dissuade investors. "You don't know how much the project is going to cost or when they'd make first deliveries," he says.
Plus, lawmakers are concerned about the cost of state involvement: Every dollar spent on the pipeline is a dollar that doesn't go toward schools, law enforcement or other services. "The budget is strapped," says state Sen. Cathy Geissel. "Alaskans are very concerned about going this alone." If three major oil companies consider the project a financial gamble, she adds, why would it be any different for the state?
Still, Persily and Geissel believe that though the timing isn't yet right, the gasline will one day be built, and they're prepared to be patient. But as a mid-term governor forced to make unpopular cuts to education, transportation and social services, Walker doesn't have time to wait for a market shift. "Politically," Persily notes, "I'm not surprised that the governor has said this is the right time."
Correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado, and frequently covers Alaska. Follow @cestmoiLanglois]]>
Unlike Coachella, Bonnaroo or other big festivals that unfold on private property, Burning Man takes place entirely within a 800,000-acre National Conservation Area managed by the BLM, a federal agency best known for overseeing mineral leasing, petroleum drilling and grazing. That means the whole event — from the private planes dropping off techies from San Francisco to the trucks trundling across the playa to the 40-foot-tall burning effigy that gives the festival its name — is governed by federal officials and required to abide by strict environmental laws.
Figuring out how to safely get 70,000 people in and out of one of the harshest places on the planet without harming the environment is a full-time job — literally. In 2014, the BLM created a "Burning Man project manager" position to handle the increasingly heavy workload. Freiberg, then a outdoor recreation planner in Idaho, applied.
He was hired. For the past three years, Freiberg's working life has revolved around Burning Man. Mack — his boss, who manages the Black Rock BLM office — has a slew of other responsibilities, but he, too, juggles Burning Man year round, and coordinates law enforcement and emergency services during the event, among other tasks.
High Country News spoke with Mack and Freiberg about what it's like to be the federal government's leading experts on Burning Man. And a couple of notes: all costs associated with Burning Man — including the project manager position — are covered by event organizers and do not come from taxpayer money. Also, the following interview was conducted by phone and email, and was edited for clarity and conciseness.
HCN: Why is managing Burning Man a full-time, year-round job?
Mack: I only have 13 staff members in my office, and they have a full gantlet of work. The Black Rock Playa attracts a lot of people — a lot of films and commercials are shot out there. If my outdoor recreation planners have to deal with all that, there's no way they can deal with Burning Man on top of it. It's key to have someone who can focus specifically on this event, because there's a lot of coordination that goes on. My phone never stops ringing with some issue or another dealing with Burning Man. It's part of our lives all year long.
HCN: What kind of issues?
Mack: It's not one specific thing. It's the highway department dealing with traffic or an issue the tribes might identify. But to give you one example, this year, Black Rock City decided they wanted to implement their own commercial airline. That took a lot of coordination.
HCN: Had either of you been to Burning Man before?
Mack: Before I came to Nevada I worked for BLM Wyoming for 18 years, and I had never heard of Burning Man. I had no idea it existed. I was kind of taken aback… I've been involved in a lot of things in public lands in my career, but nothing like this.
Freiberg: I've been with the BLM for 15 years, and as an outdoor recreation planner, I jumped at the chance to do this. It's the biggest, most visible, most complicated special recreation permit in the country. It's a real career opportunity.
HCN: The event just ended. Are you already working on next year?
Freiberg: Yeah, the review process begins immediately. BLM, Black Rock City, the sheriff's office — all the cooperating agencies start reviewing the 2016 event and making recommendations for next year. And then there's the famous post-use site inspection, which is a geospatial exercise to determine how much MOOP — matter out of place — is left out there. Burning Man is held to a standard of no more than one square foot of MOOP per acre. Usually they pass by a wide margin.
HCN: So does that mean Burning Man's impact on the playa is fairly low?
Mack: I wouldn't say that. The National Environmental Policy Act document for Burning Man identifies areas of significant impact that Black Rock City agrees to mitigate. Part of it is trash cleanup, part of it is moving the location periodically so it's not in the same place on the playa each year. But with 70,000 people and numerous vehicles and airplanes, there are impacts. To our knowledge, though, there hasn't been enough impact to say the playa is forever damaged.
Freiberg: The Black Rock Desert Playa is unique in that it's an unvegetated, flat expanse of alkali lake-bed, and while the Burning Man event certainly has impacts on the ecosystem, an event of this size and scale may not be appropriate for a different landscape, such as sage-steppe grassland like you might find in Idaho. Impacts like vegetation trampling, human-caused wildfire and wildlife displacement aren't as likely on the playa.
In most cases, though, large events like this are not well suited to undeveloped natural areas on public lands. Over the past few years I've received inquiries from other potential applicants for similar or related events, but usually these folks eventually opt for a private property location due to the difficulty and complexity of finding an appropriate site on BLM land.
HCN: What are some of the unique challenges to planning Burning Man?
Freiberg: The BLM is responsible for managing public lands for all the American people — which includes the participants. We never overlook that primary responsibility. But there are also impacts that BLM has little or no control over: impacts to nearby communities, highways, Native American tribes and other public land users. Burning Man affects a very diverse group of people, and it's challenging to find a way to foster communication among those different folks.
Mack: We have everyone from multi-billionaire business moguls to celebrities to crown princes of countries coming to the playa. It takes a lot to prepare for such a clientele to come to such a remote area. We have one large group of people that support and adore this event, and another that doesn't. At the end of the day, building relationships between those groups is key to making this happen. The political aspect is huge.
Krista Langlois is a correspondent with High Country News.]]>
If passed, the legislation would require the tribe to pay $65 million (likely by taking out a loan) to build roads and lay power lines for the development, as well lease 420 acres of land to Confluence Partners LLC, a private company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. The bill's sponsor, Benjamin Bennett, couldn't be reached for comment, but his legislation cites an "overwhelming" need for employment and economic development in the region, and claims that the Escalade project would bring in about 3,500 jobs. Navajo Nation would also receive 8 to 18 percent of Escalade's gross revenue.
The legislation was a gut-punch to environmental groups and tribal advocates, who oppose the development. They believed they'd caught a break last year, when Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye was elected. Begaye's predecessor Ben Shelly had been a strong proponent of Escalade, but Begaye opposed it from the start. His election offered hope for Renae Yellowhorse and other members of Save the Confluence, a tribal coalition working to protect the area from development. Although no president has the power to halt the project outright, Yellowhorse hoped Begaye's four-year term would buy enough time to convince the divided Navajo Nation Council that Escalade was shortsighted.
But she didn't let her guard down. Unless the confluence receives permanent protection, "there's always going to be a threat," she told me in April 2015. She'd hoped that Begaye's administration would work with the Park Service — which also opposed the development — to protect the area.
That has failed to happen. In the last 18 months, the emergence of a longstanding sexual harassment problem has thrown Grand Canyon's management into turmoil and thrust conservation issues like stopping Escalade farther from the public's attention. Meanwhile, Escalade proponents doubled down on their efforts to greenlight the project. Now, Bennett's legislation proposal has moved the development another step forward.
If the bill reaches Begaye's desk, the president seems likely to veto it. He wrote in an email to High Country News that he remains strongly opposed to Escalade. But if Bennett can garner more than two-thirds of the Council's support — 16 of 24 votes — the Council can override a presidential veto.
Whether or not Bennett has that support is unclear. Based on prior votes and personal contacts, environmental groups and Save the Confluence members believe that roughly eight council members support Escalade, eight oppose it, and the remaining seven or eight are undecided. Save the Confluence and the environmental group American Rivers are mobilizing constituents to sign petitions and submit comments within the Council's five-day window, which ends Saturday, to try to sway the undecided legislators. After the comment period ends, the measure will go before several council committees and could be voted on by late October.
If Navajo Nation does proceed with the project, there may still be a way to stop it. The Hopi tribe could sue in federal court, since the development might violate the terms of a 2009 agreement requiring each tribe to honor the other's sacred sites. Escalade would desecrate sacred places "not only for Navajo but for the Hopi, the Hualapai and the Pueblo," Yellowhorse told me this week. It would also impact river runners, hikers and naturalists. "You don't have to have a religious experience at the Grand Canyon," she adds. "You can have a nature experience and that can be violated too. Everyone in the world has a say in this."
Yellowhorse also thinks the $65 million investment could be better spent — say, by building shops and gas stations on an existing highway that runs through the western part of Navajo Nation, and uniting the people who live near the confluence, rather than dividing them. The arid, sweeping landscape is the kind of place where you see a pickup truck five miles distant and know exactly to whom it belongs, Yellowhorse says. "To survive in such a harsh environment, you have to know you can go to them in times of trouble. We have to be able to work together."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent for High Country News.]]>
Habitat destruction, pesticides and non-native species all play a role, but the toads' biggest killer is a fungus called chytrid, or Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Chytrid has had a devastating impact on biodiversity worldwide: It's responsible for the collapse or extinction of some 200 species of amphibians. "Amphibians are one of five classes of vertebrates on the planet," explains University of Colorado conservation biologist Valerie McKenzie. "What if there was a single virus affecting squirrels and whales and people and pandas and coyotes across the board? We'd be freaking out. That's what people in the amphibian world are feeling."
Efforts to save amphibians range from scouring ponds with chemicals to creating an "amphibian ark" to petitioning the federal government to list species as endangered, as the Center for Biological Diversity did for the southern Rocky Mountain population of the boreal toad in 2011. But the feds have until 2017 to issue a decision, and in the meantime, chytrid is creeping deeper into the mountains. In 2014, it was discovered in the streams and wetlands of the Collegiate Peaks, long a refuge for boreal toads. Toads there are now in critical danger of going extinct.
Yet even if the toads gain federal protections, the government can't save them from an insidious fungus that spreads by uncertain mechanisms. Valerie McKenzie, however, thinks she can.
About a decade ago, McKenzie read a paper identifying a type of bacteria called Janthinobacterium lividum, which lives on red-backed salamanders' skin and seems to inhibit the effects of chytrid. She wondered whether boreal toads had similar bacteria in their microbiome, and whether it could be somehow manipulated to ward off the fungal disease.
Twelve hundred miles away, biologist Vance Vredenburg of San Francisco State University was asking similar questions about the microbiomes of mountain yellow-legged frogs. Independently, both scientists began conducting experiments. In California, Vredenburg found that frogs with J. lividum on their skin survived chytrid infections, while those without it died. In her lab in Boulder, McKenzie noted the same results with boreal toads.
But neither scientist was comfortable releasing J. lividum into the wild, because they worried about "inadvertently spawning a new biological threat," as HCN reported in 2014. That threat would be eased if scientists could find a hyper-local strain of the microbe to grow in a lab and release in local populations, but that process could take years.
Finally, last summer, one of McKenzie's students isolated a native strain of J.lividum from the skin of boreal toads in the Collegiate Peaks. Soon, McKenzie was growing the bacteria in her lab — bright, violet-colored cultures that streaked and blobbed across her petri dishes. She began calling the project Operation Purple Rain.
Now, armed with plastic totes, spray bottles filled with bacteria, and a boom box playing Prince on repeat, McKenzie and her team are preparing to unleash Operation Purple Rain into Browns Creek. In August, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is releasing thousands of tadpoles into the Collegiate Peaks, and McKenzie and her team will be close behind to collect the baby toads, spray them with J.lividum and release them back to the wetlands with a small, neon-colored spot on their feet. Later, she will return to the mountains to see whether toads that were treated have a higher rate of survival than those that weren't.
Vance Vredenburg doesn't work with McKenzie, but he believes her research could help save amphibians, in the Rocky Mountains and beyond. He tried a similar experiment with mountain yellow-legged frogs in a Sierra Nevada pond, and preliminary monitoring showed that adult frogs treated with the bacteria were better able to survive chytrid infections. "My interpretation is that the J.lividum bought them time to mount their own defense," he says. "We may have slowed down the dynamics of the pathogen." Vredenburg hopes to publish a paper on his research soon, but the work is currently halted: The year after he dosed the frogs, California's drought caused the pond to dry up entirely, killing off the local population.
For now, Vredenburg has re-focused on lab work. He's studying the Wyoming toad, which has been extinct in the wild since 1994. Biologists have repeatedly re-introduced captive-bred toads to Wyoming's ranches and wild areas, but the animals have never survived. Vredenburg suspects chytrid is to blame. He's trying to determine whether toads that are infected with the fungus in his lab and artificially "saved" with a small dose of an anti-fungal chemical are then able to form their own natural defenses against chytrid. If they are, Vredenburg hopes to inoculate Wyoming toads with the disease and release the newly adapted creatures into the wild next summer.
Though both scientists' work could indeed have unintended consequences, McKenzie believes the risk is low. After all, the strain of J.lividum she's introducing to Browns Creek is already native to the ecosystem — she and her team are simply manipulating it to help the boreal toads make it through their most vulnerable life stage. "As they change from tadpoles to toads, they're passing through the eye of the needle," McKenzie says. "We're just going to temporarily boost bacteria that's already native to this system, to get the toads past that critical stage."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent with High Country News.]]>
Lately, as African-American communities have grieved for the families of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, who were killed by police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana this month, Outdoor Afro's purpose has expanded. "It's not just about having community and getting outdoors," Mapp says. "I'm finding it more and more to be a balm for some of the societal ills that African American communities face." High Country News spoke with Mapp about those ills, and how connecting with the natural world can ease them.
High Country News: Can you describe how you came up with the idea of "healing hikes"?
Rue Mapp: Right now our country is so fractured around race and identity. I live in Oakland, and after what happened with Ferguson and Freddie Gray, Oakland was just bubbling over with tension. People were taking to the streets. The city was bracing for protests. There were 'copters overhead. I was leaving my office, thinking, 'What does Outdoor Afro's response need to be? What's my personal response?' And the answer came to me: It was nature. Nature is what I do.
So I got on the phone and contacted Outdoor Afro leaders around the country and called to action these healing hikes as an alternative to violent protest, or to protests that could produce violent outcomes. The point is to hold space that's safe in response to black bodies being killed; to find a way to come to grips with that, while also creating an opportunity for a new reality in the outdoors for black people.
So far, we've hosted about 50 healing hikes, with anywhere from 10 to 30 people attending each one. In the past few weeks we've probably held a dozen around the country. We also activated them after the Orlando shootings, and after other injustices. And we introduced the concept into other communities. The Sierra Club, for example, has led healing hikes in Colorado.
HCN: What exactly is a healing hike?
Mapp: For the first hike I coordinated two years ago, we had about 30 people who met in the Oakland hills. We started with some yoga and mindfulness and worked our way down into a redwood bowl, down, down, down, and then we stopped and began to share. I remember we'd positioned ourselves along a stream. In my consciousness — or even at a cellular level — I knew that we were doing what African-Americans had always known to do. We were laying our burdens down by the riverside. I don't believe that in any other space could we have shared with the amount of compassion, focus and clarity as in that redwood forest. We removed ourselves from a place where there were choppers overhead and police in riot gear, and in the quiet of nature we could really absorb what we had to share.
Even though I already knew nature was a generous teacher, it was that moment that I realized nature was also a healer. We need it now more than ever before. As we came out of the forest, we talked about the new commitments we'd make in our families, in our workplaces and in our larger community to enact change. It was really powerful. I wish I could say we wrapped it up in a bow and moved on, but the reality is those wounds have continued to be… activated. And therefore we've had to continue to activate healing hikes. Especially in these last few weeks, in the midst of so much pain, in the midst of uncertainty so thick there's no one not affected by it, having this work to dive into is so important. We've got Outdoor Afro leaders who are taking healing hikes to a new level of creativity and adapting them to their local communities. They're making time for people to create art, to journal, to give ourselves a break from our screens and have a platform to speak.
HCN: You said that going to nature to heal is something that African-Americans have always known to do. I've also heard that the historical relationship between the wilderness and African-Americans, particularly in the South, has been based on fear or danger. Can you unpack that a little bit?
Mapp: We can hold both of those realities. It's not binary. It depends a lot on where you're coming from, what your historical reference point is, where you are generationally. I grew up in a family that loved and appreciated getting out into nature, but the way they chose to do that was as a family or community experience, not solo backpacking in the High Sierra. They felt more comfortable and more safe doing it as part of a community.
The issue when it comes to fear isn't about the wilderness itself — it's about who's in the wilderness. Last year, in California, an African-American family that had been camping for decades were literally ran out of their camp by a man with a shovel in the middle of the night. It's horrible. Those types of experiences continue to drive people away, and they trace back to the experiences people had with the Klu Klux Klan.
But it's easy to talk about worst case scenarios. What we're trying to do is shine a big bright light on how people are also transformed by the outdoors. We're getting images out there that tell a different story.
If you're interested in getting involved in Outdoor Afro, leadership team applications are now open on a rolling basis, or you can find activities near you at outdoorafro.com.
Krista Langlois is a correspondent at High Country News.]]>
June, Williams tells me as we rumble down the dirt road, is fish-camp season. The smokehouses should be bustling, the town nearly empty as families scatter to their traditional camps to catch, dry and smoke the chinook salmon just beginning to surge past.
But the smokehouses are empty. People mill impatiently on the roads, waiting for the government to allow them to set nets. They mutter about distant bureaucrats managing a fishery they don't understand. Old women speak of cutting salmon like it's a physical longing, an ache in their muscles that can only be eased by the repetitive motion of slicing through piles of bloody fish. "We've always lived here," Williams says, gesturing at the delta. "The land was always here and it was always ours. No matter when, how or where, it was available to us."
Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is in charge of the land outside the village, and the migratory salmon that pass through are governed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, with some federal oversight. Tribal governments like Akiak's have fought to be involved in decision-making, with little success until recently.
For years, it didn't matter: There were enough salmon to go around. But since 2010, the number of chinook, or king salmon, returning to the Kuskokwim River has fallen by half, from an average of 260,000 each year to 123,000. Scientists don't fully understand the reasons for the drop, but for subsistence fishermen, one factor stands out: commercial bycatch. In 2007, fishermen in the Bering Sea tossed out 130,000 dead chinooks they accidentally caught in their nets.
Not all of those would have returned to the Kuskokwim, and biologists emphasize that bycatch represents a fraction of the total fish mortality. But the numbers still chafe: In 2015, when commercial fishermen threw 125,000 chinooks overboard, fishermen on the Kuskokwim were allotted 15,000. That's roughly four fish per household; families say they need 50 to get through the winter.
Mike Williams has five children, 11 grandchildren, one great-grandchild and 50 sled dogs. He finds it unfathomable that commercial operations waste salmon while he scrambles to put food on the table. The closest real grocery store is 400 miles away in Anchorage. Lately, the Williamses have had to supplement their diet with species they usually feed to their dogs.
But the balance of power may be shifting for Alaska Natives. In 2013, a federal district judge set in motion the biggest change to Alaska land management in decades by granting Alaska tribes the right to put land into a trust overseen by the federal government — a right already granted to all tribes in the Lower 48. Ceding land to the feds might sound like a cession of authority, but for the people of Akiak, it's the opposite. It means that this summer, as the rule stemming from the decision goes into effect, they could gain the power to manage their own fish and wildlife, as tribes in the rest of the country can.
For the Williamses and other families, that can't come soon enough. Across Alaska, a changing climate and other pressures are stressing migrations of caribou, salmon, walrus and other wildlife. And many Alaska Natives believe that their own knowledge –– honed over generations –– can sustain these animals and protect Indigenous interests better than state or federal managers alone. "We want the fish to survive," says Ivan Martin Ivan, chief of Akiak. "Just like the trees, the grass, the people. We've managed these resources for many thousands of years, and we want to do so again."
Mike Williams was 7 in 1959, when the Territory of Alaska became a state. The federal government required that Alaska Natives get a formal education, but Akiak had no high school. So, like many Yup'ik, Williams attended Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools hundreds of miles south. Teachers confiscated his traditional clothes, cut his hair and forced him to speak English. "I felt violated," he says.
But efforts to strip away Williams' Yup'ik-ness only strengthened it. It was 1971, and the Red Power Movement was in full swing: Native Americans were fighting for stolen lands in court, marching on Washington, D.C., and occupying Alcatraz, California, which they saw as a symbol of their oppression. As student body president of Oregon's Chemawa Indian School, Williams met tribal leaders from across the West. Everyone was talking about land rights.
One of the loudest voices belonged to Billy Frank Jr., a Nisqually leader who staged a series of "fish-ins" in Washington state to protest regulations that kept tribes from their traditional fishing grounds. The clashes became known as the Fish Wars. Frank was a hero that Williams could relate to: a Native American fighting the cultural subjugation Williams had already experienced through the boarding school system. The two became friends, and Frank a mentor.
Meanwhile, back home, Frank's activism would also prove important: It helped demonstrate that being corralled into federally managed reservations had stripped Lower 48 tribes of their power. As the Alaska Federation of Natives, the state and the federal government negotiated the division of Alaska's land and natural resources, they sought an alternative. Eventually, they agreed that Alaska Natives would assume land ownership themselves, and adopt a Western business model to manage it.
The federal Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, or ANCSA, deeded 44 million acres to Alaska Natives, divided among 13 regional corporations and 229 village corporations — one for each tribe. Corporations could profit by developing the minerals, timber or oil on their land. Each tribe also formed its own government, and many would come to own land transferred to them from village corporations or through other means. Village corporation profits went to tribal governments, while those from regional corporations went to individual tribal members, under a shareholder system.
This worked well for some tribes, particularly those in regions with rich oil and natural gas deposits, like the North Slope. But many in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta felt shortchanged. Their wealth wasn't in oil or minerals, but in fish, birds and other animals. And while ANCSA deeded land to Native corporations, that land remained under state control. Just as private businesses and property owners must adhere to rules and regulations set by their state governments, so, too, must Alaska tribes and corporations accede to state law enforcement, hunting seasons, bag limits and more. (On reservations, federal and tribal law supersede state law.)
As the 1970s unfolded, several laws and court decisions laid ANCSA's limitations painfully bare. First was the historic 1974 Boldt Decision, spurred by Billy Frank's activism. It gave Northwest tribes that had signed 1850s-era treaties the right to 50 percent of the region's total salmon catch, and laid the groundwork for other tribes that wanted greater authority in managing fish and wildlife, both on- and off-reservation.
The Boldt Decision was also a "thunderbolt" that set off a new era of tribal sovereignty, says legal expert and historian Charles Wilkinson, who's writing a book on the decision. In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which provided federal funds for tribes to run their own schools, courts and natural resource departments. Soon after, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes created the nation's first federally designated tribal wilderness, secured in-stream flows for fish, and began negotiating for control of a nearby dam.
In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that hunting and fishing regulations set by tribes on reservation land trump those set by the state. New Mexico's Mescalero Apache Tribe responded by creating hunting rules that differed from the state's and charging non-Natives to hunt the reservation's impressive elk herd, bolstering economic development. Tribes can also operate their own police forces and prosecute certain crimes on reservations, even those committed by non-Natives. Though socioeconomic problems continue to plague many reservations, Sarah Krakoff, an Indian law expert at the University of Colorado Boulder, says these changes represent undeniable progress toward self-governance.
Yet because they apply only to "Indian Country" — a legal term for the land that the federal government holds in trust for Native Americans, including all reservations in the Lower 48 — Alaska Natives have been largely excluded. Alaska tribes technically possess the same sovereignty as Lower 48 tribes, but without land on which to exercise that sovereignty, it's of limited use. And Alaskan officials remain stubbornly opposed to recognizing tribal sovereignty, Krakoff says. "It's kind of mysterious. In a state like Alaska that's so far-flung, you'd think they'd embrace (tribes taking control)."
This affects more than natural resources. The state also retains authority over regulating alcohol and prosecuting and punishing perpetrators of sexual and domestic abuse, even in remote villages located hundreds of miles from the nearest court, jail or state trooper, says Troy Eid, chair of the bipartisan Indian Law and Order Commission. The commission's 2014 report found that this has contributed to major public safety problems: Alaska Native villages have some of the nation's highest rates of sexual violence, domestic abuse and suicide — higher than most reservations in the Lower 48.
"Instead of respecting (tribal) sovereignty and self-government as other states routinely do, Alaska tries to police and judge Native citizens from afar using too few people and resources," Eid wrote in a 2014 editorial for Alaska Dispatch News. He calls the system "colonialism on the cheap." And it's not just outdated, he says — it's dangerous.
Mike Williams knows this from experience. He was serving in the army in Korea when ANCSA became law, and when he returned home in 1973, he fell into the same black hole that would ultimately claim his six brothers.
"They were famous drunks," remembers one friend. Like other bush villages at the time, says Williams, Akiak had no police officers, no judicial system and no social services. In the course of a single generation, the Yup'ik had been transformed from a semi-nomadic people, traveling with the seasons and living off the land, to shareholders in a corporation and permanent residents of an impoverished village. Most had few opportunities for employment.
In 1974, the Williams brothers started dying. Sitting in his living room after a meal of whitefish, tundra greens and akutaq (lard or seal oil with berries and sugar), Mike ticks them off for me. Ted was the first: "He'd just returned from Vietnam and was not well. He had nightmares. He started drinking heavily, and one night he over-drank alcohol and didn't wake up. So that was Ted." Williams holds up one stubby finger. "The second one, Frankie, he went to Bethel with his snow machine and bought booze. On the way back, he drank so much that he fell into an open hole in the ice and drowned. And that's Frankie." He holds up two fingers. Then a third for Timmy, a fourth for Gerald, and a fifth for Bucko, who shot himself in the head after drinking homebrew.
Williams gazes at the ceiling with pouched brown eyes and raises a final finger for Walter, who passed out and died of smoke inhalation from a pot left on the stove. "That was pretty hard on me, losing all of them and being the only one standing," he says. "That's why I'm causing trouble like this land-into-trust issue. Because I'm trying to make life here better for people."
Williams has been sober for 28 years and is now a substance abuse counselor. He's mushed the Iditarod 15 times to raise awareness about sobriety. If Akiak and other dry villages were Indian Country, he says, they could go after bootleggers without waiting for state authorities, and perhaps address the problem with restorative, community-based justice rather than jail time. State troopers would be required to enforce decisions made by tribal police or courts, which they aren't currently. Alaska tribes with Indian Country would also be able to set hunting and fishing regulations on land held in trust for them and negotiate with state and federal agencies on a government-to-government basis to manage fish and wildlife on surrounding land.
Troy Eid, of the Law and Order Commission, notes that creating Indian Country isn't the only way for Alaskan tribes to gain such authority. The state could voluntarily work with tribes.
But it has routinely chosen not to, Eid says. Seven independent commissions have concluded that putting law enforcement in the hands of Native villages would make them safer, but the state maintains a centralized judicial system. As a result, dozens of Alaska Native communities have no law enforcement whatsoever. In all of rural Alaska, there is only one women's shelter. And when it comes to fish and wildlife management, tribes have only an advisory role, with little actual power. Some tribal members, for instance, would like to receive hunting and fishing priority when wildlife populations are low. But although village residents have priority on federal lands, the state Constitution requires that an Anglo lawyer in Anchorage receive the same access to fish and game as a Native hunter who lives in the bush with little access to other food sources.
So in 2006, Williams and some friends coordinated with the Native American Rights Fund to sue the Department of the Interior on behalf of four Native villages — including Akiachak, just downriver from Akiak — to remove the Interior Department's "Alaska exemption," which prevents Alaska tribes from putting land into trust. After Alaska Natives prevailed, Interior finalized a rule striking the exemption. "We believe that deleting the Alaska exemption is consistent with law and consistent with the Obama administration's strong intention to restore tribal homelands," Kevin Washburn, then-assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, said in a 2014 speech in Anchorage.
The momentum toward putting land into trust stalled while the state appealed the decision, but on July 1, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Alaska Natives' victory. Unless there's a further appeal to the Supreme Court or a request for a second opinion from the Court of Appeals, which both seem unlikely, any of Alaska's 229 tribal governments will soon be able to apply to have its land taken into trust.
It's not clear how many tribes would opt in, but the impact could be sweeping: Forty-three wrote to the Interior Department in favor of the rule, and several have already begun the application process. Akiak isn't far behind, Williams says.
But there are still critics who argue that Indian Country would add additional layers of federal bureaucracy to Alaska's already-complex land management. Tribal corporations sitting on oil or gas deposits are unlikely to transfer their land, since federal oversight could make it harder to develop those resources. And some fear that if Native villages put land into trust, it could impact development, too, because regional corporations often own the subsurface mineral rights below villages. Scholars writing in the American Indian Law Journal concluded that corporations' mineral rights wouldn't be impacted, but uncertainties over the rule's implications remain.
Given that, regional corporations should be able to weigh in on, or even veto, tribes' applications for trust land, says Aaron Schutt, president and CEO of the regional Doyon corporation — one of the largest landowners in the United States, with more than 12 million acres. "We generally support the concept of trust land in Alaska," Schutt says. "But I think the benefits are overstated. … When you go on other reservations in the U.S., you can see that it doesn't solve all their issues."
Other critics, including several Alaska lawmakers, oppose the rule more sharply. Alaska officials declined to comment for this story, but the former attorney general wrote in the state's appeal that having pockets of Indian Country scattered across Alaska's patchwork of state, federal and private land would create "widespread uncertainty about governmental jurisdiction." The state could lose its ability to impose "land use restrictions, natural resource management requirements, and certain environmental regulations." And most significantly, in a place already wary of federal oversight, "trust land in Alaska would diminish the state's authority."
That, say many opponents, is an outcome that must be avoided.
In June 2012, Akiak fishermen were so desperate for salmon that they staged an act of civil disobedience, modeled after Billy Frank's fish wars. Salmon runs were, at the time, the lowest ever recorded, and state and federal wildlife managers denied Yup'ik advisors' recommendation for a brief fishing window. So Akiak elders instructed people to fish anyway. As subsistence gillnetters illegally pulled chinooks from the river, officers swarmed the river. Twenty-three fishermen were arrested and fined, and thousand-dollar nets were confiscated. At subsequent court hearings, grown men wept as they described the impact of the salmon decline on their families and culture.
Each year since then, dozens more fishermen have quietly broken the rules. Each year, officials catch some and haul them to court. And each time, the fishermen's resolve strengthens.
Their anger was palpable at a meeting at Akiachak's village offices last June, where uniformed U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials explained the restrictions placed on subsistence users' 2015 salmon harvest. Subsistence fishermen crowded the table where the officers sat, spilling out of the room, craning their necks to hear. There were strict limits on everything from how many salmon each family could take to the size of the nets and the dates that fishing was allowed. Fishermen had to fish within the legal window, regardless of the weather. If they had the wrong-sized net, they'd have to travel to the town of Bethel –– an all-day trip –– to buy the right one. And because only a handful of "designated fishermen" were allowed to set nets, residents feared that skills and cultural traditions would no longer be passed down to the next generation.
Listening to the rules with wide eyes, the Akiachak fishermen grew agitated. "Seems to me this system is tough on us," one elder said. He spoke for a few minutes in Yup'ik, his tone rising. Then, in English again, he burst out: "Next year, if you come around, don't tell us what to do! I don't go into your country and tell you what to do! It's not right."
Unfortunately, there's no easy fix — no dam to remove that will cause the fish to come swarming home. And there are so many culprits to blame –– climate change, overfishing, changes to the marine environment, commercial bycatch. Putting land into trust might help, but it won't give individual tribes autonomy over a fishery that stretches hundreds of miles and is already governed by a tangle of state and federal laws.
Mike Williams knows this. He's made it his mission to learn everything he can about salmon. He reads scientific papers and government rulings and translates them into Yup'ik at village meetings. He tells the other fishermen that they have to make sacrifices now so their grandchildren will know what it's like to haul a massive chinook from the depths of the Kuskokwim. But Williams also believes in action, so instead of waiting for resolution of the Indian Country fight, in the spring of 2015 he helped form the Kuskokwim Intertribal Fish Commission, modeled after the Washington-based Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. The Kuskokwim commission seeks to give tribes more sway in managing the fishery, and Williams serves as its chair.
Now, a year later, it's making headway. As long as chinook runs remain low, tribes can petition the federal government to take over management from the state, which they did again this year, to ensure tribal members get priority for the subsistence harvest. Then, in May, the Intertribal Fish Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signed a memorandum of understanding giving tribes more power during those times when management is under federal control. The memorandum mandates weekly meetings between commission members and federal officials, and requires Fish and Wildlife officials to provide a written explanation for any decision they make that goes against the commission's recommendations. Lew Coggins, a federal fisheries biologist at Yukon Delta, says that the real-time data collected by tribal members and organized by the Intertribal Fish Commission has helped fisheries managers double the 2016 subsistence allotment over last year's. Chinook runs are still far below historic numbers, but they're steadily inching upward.
The state of Alaska isn't formally part of this collaboration, but John Linderman, regional supervisor for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says he and his agency "acknowledge and respect" the Intertribal Fish Commission and are open to engaging with them. Like many officials, Linderman is genuinely concerned for both the salmon and the tribes' survival. But when it comes to the kind of unified management that the Intertribal Fish Commission wants, his hands are somewhat tied. He and other state wildlife managers are obligated to comply with the state constitution, which gives all residents equal access to fish. "That's something that none of us have any control over," Linderman says. "It's not our place to make law. It's our place to implement law."
Mid-June, fish camp season is underway. Mike Williams' wife, Maggie, bustles around the house, filling a cooler with Ziploc bags of caribou and goose meat and packing a duffel with clothes. Several grandchildren toddle underfoot, chasing a miniature poodle that Maggie's daughter ordered off the internet from Montana. Relatives stop by to grab lunch from a simmering pot of moose stew.
Eventually, we load up Williams' fishing boat — five adults, one teenager, a 5-year-old, a 2-year-old and a dozen dead fish. We push into the current. The outboard motor churns through the river like a blender cutting through a chocolate shake. When we reach a nameless slough walled in by high grassy banks, Williams cuts the motor.
On a cold gray day after a winter of disuse, the fish camp isn't much to look at. It consists of a plywood shack with a rusty woodstove, peeling linoleum and 30 years' worth of accumulated mosquito corpses. Outside are cottonwood drying racks, a smokehouse and two plywood tables.
Still, our arrival feels like a homecoming. Soon after we climb ashore, Williams' daughter, Sheila, who's five months pregnant, hauls a 30-pound salmon onto one of the plywood tables. With an uluq, a moon-shaped knife, she slices off the head, to save for fish-head soup. She makes an incision the length of the salmon's white underbelly and pulls out a fistful of guts. Carefully, she hands the stomach to her 15-year-old sister, Christine, who will flatten it into jerky. The rest goes into a bucket. She scrapes dark blood from inside the salmon's ribs.
The fish then goes to Maggie, who's ready at the second table to do the more intricate work of filleting it to dry. Depending on the fish, she'll process it in any number of ways — into long, thin strips, perhaps, or meaty steaks. Maggie Williams has been putting up salmon for as long as she can recall. Like Christine, she began with the guts and took on greater responsibility with each passing year. "I remember when my mom first taught me to do this," she says, deftly nicking a strip of meat. "I made such a mess! She said, 'It's OK. It'll still dry.' "
Cutting the fish is essential to its proper drying. So is the weather: Too early, and it might be too damp. Too late, and flies will lay eggs inside the flesh. These are the kinds of decisions the people of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta want to make: when to fish, how to fish. They want to be able to carry on their traditions without armed outsiders confiscating their gear. They dream of a time when the knowledge they've collected over generations is considered as valid as science gathered in a few seasons.
While the women cut fish, Williams rests in a duct-taped chair, explaining the year's fishing rules in Yup'ik for perhaps the sixth time that day on his cellphone. Hanging up, he pushes his glasses up his forehead and rubs his eyes. Juggling all these court hearings, testimonies, meetings and negotiations is exhausting. He sometimes thinks about giving up. But then he looks out the window and sees his two young granddaughters, watching seriously as their auntie and grandmother butcher the salmon, and he takes a deep breath and starts over. Akiak and other tribes will continue to advocate for a greater voice in managing their fishery, Williams tells me. And maybe someday soon, the state will have no choice but to listen.
Correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado, and frequently covers Alaska.
Follow @cestmoilanglois
This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.]]>
Today, the 30-year-old Democratic nominee for United States Senate has won both her mother's approval and that of a majority of Utah Democrats. (She beat conservative Democrat Jonathan Swinton in the June primary, 59 to 41 percent.) In fact, her difficult path may have even helped: she knows what it's like to fight for people's acceptance, and she hopes to put that skill to use on the campaign trail against incumbent Republican Sen. Mike Lee in November.
Though Snow's chances of victory are slim — Utah voters haven't sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1970 — her candidacy may reflect a changing attitude toward LGBT rights in Utah and other conservative strongholds. Salt Lake City elected its first openly gay mayor in 2015, while another transgender candidate, Misty Plowright, won the Democratic primary in Colorado Springs, one of Colorado's reddest districts. And after the Orlando shootings, Utah's Republican lieutenant governor Spencer Cox implored constituents to "love someone that is different than us … starting with someone who is gay."
High Country News spoke with Snow to learn more about her candidacy.
High Country News: Can you tell me about your decision to run for U.S. Senate?
Misty Snow: I decided in February. I was really kind of turned off by the other Democrat who was running. I felt like he was wrong on a lot of issues I cared about, and I didn't want him to get the nomination without being challenged. I was also motivated by the fact that Bernie Sanders had just won a big victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary.
I've never run for office before, and I didn't know anyone who had. I didn't have much money. But I kind of had this feeling that I've got to do this. Even though it seems crazy, I just decided to run. And now I've won the primary and am the Democratic nominee.
HCN: Do you see an analogy between your personal journey and what's happening around the country with the gradual mainstream acceptance of LGBT people?
Snow: The fact that there's more acceptance for the LGBT community probably helped me win the primary. Twenty years ago, I don't think I would've been able to do it. But today, Utah has more millennials per capita than any other state; the average age is 30 years old. The demographics of Utah are changing. Wherever you look, millennials are generally more liberal than older generations, and that's true of Utah millennials, too.
HCN: Does it ever feel like your identity as a transgender woman has overshadowed the political platform you're standing on?
Snow: Yes and no. A lot of local newscasters care more about policy, but on the national news they want to talk more about me being transgender. But that's fine: if I wasn't transgender I probably wouldn't be on the national news, and the fact that I've made national news has been good for fundraising. Most of my donations are small, around $30, and are actually coming outside the state of Utah.
I think a lot of people around the country are realizing that a senator from Utah has the same impact on their lives as a senator from Vermont, or a senator from anywhere else, and the more progressives we can elect the better. It's kind of that Bernie Sanders donation network happening, which is good because I need those resources to win.
HCN: Speaking of your political platform, what are three things you'd fight for as a United States Senator from Utah?
Snow: I've been talking a lot about raising the minimum wage. It's actually a popular position, because a lot of people, 51 percent, make $30,000 or less a year. They're barely scraping by. I think we could probably raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next two years.
Another issue is clean energy. We need to invest in clean energy like solar and wind. Utah cities have some of the worst air quality in the country, and there's really a desire to clean it up. People may not believe in climate change here, but they do believe in cleaner air.
The other issue I talk about is improved access to health care and the need for paid maternity leave. Utah has the nation's highest birthrate — that's why we're such a young state — and a lot of voters really care about their families and children. So that resonates with people.
HCN: You've said that even if you lose, you'll have made a difference. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Snow: People are really inspired by my run. I've had people say that they want to run because I am, like a trans woman who wants to run for the House of Representatives in 2018. I'm a voice that's currently unrepresented in Congress, and I'm hoping to change that.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Krista Langlois is a correspondent at High Country News.]]>
Jumbo Glacier, or Qat'muk, is the wild heart of southeast British Columbia's Purcell Mountains. It's also the site of a decades-old fight over a proposed ski resort, and that fight is the subject of Nick Waggoner's new film, Jumbo Wild. But though Jumbo Wild has no shortage of wilderness advocates criticizing development, it may be as captivating for adrenaline junkies as for environmental advocates — and it may represent the future of the outdoor film industry.
Waggoner, a 2008 graduate of Colorado College, got his start in a genre jokingly dubbed "ski porn" — gorgeous videos of skiers dropping off cliffs, surfing slow-motion through glittery powder and slicing down mountainsides. Much like surf, climbing and kayaking porn, its cousins, ski porn is a visual feast, and it's what some of the biggest outdoor film festivals, like Telluride Mountainfilm, were built around.
But in an age when anyone with a GoPro can record their epic adventures, audiences are losing interest, says David Holbrooke, Mountainfilm's festival director. To get featured in a competitive festival, you need something more. Something with meaning. "Can you tell a story?" Holbrooke asks. "That's the most challenging part. We want people who can tell real stories."
Waggoner was one of the first filmmakers to incorporate storytelling into outdoor sports cinematography; in 2013, Outside magazine called his approach "exceedingly rare." Today, it's standard fare. From Telluride to Banff, festival-goers are realizing that adventure is more compelling when there's something on the line besides an athlete's sponsorship money. Other recent festival favorites include Almost Sunrise, which follows two Iraqi War veterans as they walk across America, and Unbranded, in which four college graduates ride wild mustangs from Mexico to Canada. The former raises awareness of mental health and suicide among U.S. military veterans, while the latter tackles wild horses and public-land connectivity.
Conservationists like Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, founder of the nonprofit Conservacion Patagonica, hope that merging advocacy and adventure on the big screen will help bridge the divide between outdoor athletes and the places they play. "If you're going to travel someplace, (you should) begin to take responsibility for helping protect it," Tompkins says. "You can't sit back any more and imagine that someone else is going to fight for the places everyone takes for granted."
Film may be the most effective medium for turning recreationists into conservationists. The clothing company Patagonia, which helped fund both Jumbo Wild and last year's DamNation, which documents the impacts of dams on rivers, sees outdoor films as integral to its mission to advance environmental causes. Nonprofit advocacy groups are increasingly aware of this, too. "There's a recognition, especially in the environmental world, that throwing around facts and figures doesn't hold water anymore," says Hanson Hosein, a media expert at the University of Washington. "People have to be hit in the gut."
Case in point: When American Rivers wanted to raise awareness about the river it deemed "most endangered" in 2013, it partnered with filmmaker Pete McBride to create the three-minute film I Am Red — a first-person story of the Colorado River told from the river's perspective. The following year, the nonprofit fell back on an old standard: To spread the word about the perils facing the San Joaquin River, it produced a film that showed a guy standing in front of the waterway, talking about diversions and imploring people to write their Senator. To date, I Am Red has gotten nearly 158,000 more views on YouTube. Amy Kober, American Rivers' communication director, says the extra views led to a noticeable increase in the number of people who signed petitions, joined American Rivers or wrote to Congress.
Yet the line between advocacy and entertainment is delicate, says Holbrooke — if you try too hard, audiences will balk. That's where Jumbo Wild gets it right. After Waggoner spends time interviewing wildlife biologists, developers, tribal leaders and other stakeholders, he shows outdoor film audiences exactly why they should care about protecting the mountain. It's the moment when Jumbo Wild spans genres, when it leaps from documentary footage to pro athletes carving big lines, and convinces skiers that even North America's deepest, wildest backcountry won't remain unspoiled unless someone fights for it. Without the backstory of what's at stake on Jumbo, these scenes would be nothing more than powder porn. But when you know why they matter, they become the film's most emotionally powerful moments.
Correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado, and frequently covers Alaska. Follow @cestmoiLanglois]]>
Masayesva and two other Adventures for Hopi guides are gearing up for summer by taking a wilderness medicine course in Durango, Colorado, a town where 5-year-olds cruise around on $400 mountain bikes and kayaking is as integral to the local culture as wine is to Napa. But Masayesva, a 2014 graduate of Durango's Fort Lewis College, says that he and other Native Americans have felt largely left out of such activities.
Though there aren't formal statistics on Native American participation in outdoor recreation, anecdotal evidence suggests it's low. When Masayesva surveyed 40 Native American students in ultra-outdoorsy Durango, for example, he discovered that 36 had never been camping. And according to Navajo river guide Nikki Cooley, fewer than 3 percent of San Juan and Colorado river guides are Native American, even though those two rivers, both regarded as sacred, flow through several reservations.
Part of the reason, Masayesva explains, is that outdoor sports are marketed to white people: You rarely see a Native American dude hanging off a boulder in a Patagonia catalog. "And there's obviously a socio-economic barrier, too," he adds. "You've gotta have this nice jacket, you've gotta have these $60 trekking poles. … It's marketed as you've gotta have money to do this."
Masayesva grew up herding sheep near the village of Bacavi, on Arizona's Hopi Reservation. He loved being outside and had no shortage of backcountry skills, but the first time he went backpacking, as a college student with an Arizona conservation corps, he was humiliated: Everyone else had fancy packs and was eating quinoa; he showed up with an old backpack stuffed with ramen noodles. But he wasn't deterred. "The Ancestral Puebloans were amazing climbers," he says. "Native Alaskans made some of the first kayaks. It's not that we can't do this."
The backpacking trip inspired Masayesva to switch his major from environmental biology to adventure education, and with the help of an Anglo mentor named Jason Hotchkiss, he started a Native American Outdoors Club. The first few outings were full of mishaps — once they were forced to rappel into a Utah canyon in the dark during a snowstorm— but everyone survived. "I didn't have the experience to be leading those trips," Masayesva says with a grin. "But I did it anyway."
After graduating, Masayesva returned to the reservation to start a nonprofit to get more Hopi kids outside and to train Hopi guides to take them out. Hotchkiss says providing Native American role models who can introduce Native American kids to the daunting, white-dominated world of adventure sports fills a huge need. In fact, he was in the midst of starting something similar when his wife, who was Southern Ute, died in 2009, indefinitely grounding the project. With the exception of a Southwest Conservation Corps group called Ancestral Lands, which combines recreation with environmental service projects, there are few, if any, remaining projects in the Southwest that connect Native Americans with outdoor sports. Nikki Cooley ran a Native American River Guide Training, which certified some 50 raft guides to lead river trips through landscapes to which they have cultural ties, but that program fizzled out after she had children.
Masayesva is picking up the reins. In September 2014, he launched Adventures for Hopi. In 2015, it won a $10,000 grant from Keen footwear, which he used to buy gear and train a few guides. But the first year was a flop. He tried to entice kids with pictures of himself and other Hopi rappelling off cliffs. "And parents were like, 'You're going to do what with my kids?' "
This year, he promoted more approachable activities and is excited about the interest they've received. He's running outdoor summer school programs, facilitating parent-child climbing days, and leading a weeklong kayaking trip on Lake Powell. Students can participate for free in exchange for community service on the reservation. And after two years, Masayesva is finally writing himself his first paycheck, though his guides have been paid all along.
Masayesva's programs also include cultural components, biology lessons and job skills training. His goals are lofty: not to just get kids outside, but to incorporate outdoor recreation into reservation culture, sparking economic development. Adventures for Hopi is "just the seed for a much bigger vision that Marshall has," says Hotchkiss. "I'm pretty sure he's a superhero."
Correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado, and frequently covers Alaska. Follow @cestmoiLanglois]]>
To understand why Wilfred Jones wanted an ambulance, you have to understand where he lives. San Juan County, in southeastern Utah, is nearly as big as New Jersey but is home to fewer than 15,000 people. The lower third is part of the Navajo Nation and is almost entirely Ute and Navajo. The upper two-thirds are white and predominantly Mormon.
Jones, a 61-year-old grandfather with jet-black hair and a diamond stud in each ear, lives in the lower third, five miles south of the blink-and-you-miss-it town of Montezuma Creek. It's rough, rocky country, where bullet holes riddle the road signs and lonely pumpjacks ply oil from the earth. The nearest services are in Blanding, some 40 miles north.
Sixteen years ago, when Jones joined the board of the Utah Navajo Health System, he realized his neighbors were dying because the closest ambulances — the county's, in Blanding, and the tribe's, in Kayenta, Arizona — were an hour away "on a good day." So Jones asked the county commission if one of San Juan's ambulances could be housed in a garage in Montezuma Creek. From there, it would take half the time to rush an elder suffering a heart attack to medical care.
But the county wasn't interested. Over the next decade, Jones says, he and other health advocates repeatedly tried to get the commission to improve ambulance service on the reservation. But while the sole Navajo commissioner was supportive, the two white commissioners were usually not. (Former Navajo Commissioner Mark Maryboy and others corroborate Jones' account, though no official votes appear in county records.)
Eventually, Jones gave up: The Utah Navajo Health System trained its own EMS volunteers, built a garage and bought ambulances with tribal and federal funds. It stung, but wasn't surprising. Though Native Americans on the reservation don't pay property taxes, they indirectly contribute millions of dollars in oil revenue and federal funds to the county each year, which is supposed to be returned in services like education and health care. But many Navajo requests — from building schools to implementing bicultural education to improving roads — have been denied by Anglo residents, who have always held a majority in elected offices despite comprising less than half of the county's population.
Now, Native Americans could gain control of county government for the first time. Earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Shelby ruled that San Juan County violated both the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution by relying on race to draw the boundaries of its voting districts. By engaging in "racial gerrymandering," San Juan County systematically diluted the strength of the Native vote, keeping Natives out of power and skewing the makeup of the county commission and the school board. The system, perpetuated for decades, "offends basic democratic principles," Shelby wrote.
In 1957, Utah became one of the last states in the nation to grant Native Americans the right to vote, doing so only after being forced by a federal judge. Still, it took another three decades for the first Native Americans to be elected in San Juan County. It wasn't for lack of trying — county clerks kept Native candidates off the ballot, refused to register Native voters, and held written elections in English, disenfranchising those who were illiterate or didn't speak the language.
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. Department of Justice sued San Juan County for violating the Voting Rights Act, which protects minority voters by banning discriminatory voting practices. The county admitted fault, and agreed to implement bilingual voting and create three voting districts, one for each county commissioner seat. San Juan County was subsequently divided into three chunks. Districts 1 and 2 were in Anglo territory. District 3, on Navajo land, became known as the Indian District. In 1986, it elected Mark Maryboy as the county's first-ever Navajo commissioner.
But though no one noticed at the time, the way the county drew its lines still violated the Voting Rights Act, because it packed minority voters into a single district while spreading the white vote over multiple districts. That meant Native voters could only elect one representative of their choice while white voters got two, even as the Native population surpassed the white population, 52 to 46 percent.
Sure enough, Navajos remained in the minority on every governing board. Maryboy was frequently outvoted. So were Navajos on the school board; three out of five of its voting districts are also on Anglo-dominated land.
Current County Commissioner Bruce Adams, who was elected in 2004, says allegations he and other elected officials ignored Native Americans' needs are "100 percent false." Yet as recently as 1995, the county denied that it was responsible for educating Navajo children; it built a high school in the town of Navajo Mountain only after yet another judge ordered it to do so. A U.S. Department of Justice official who later reviewed disparities in course offerings between the county's white and Native schools said in 1997 that he "hadn't seen anything so bad since the '60s in the South." Court-ordered injunctions to provide Navajo language and cultural education were abandoned. And as of 2011, Indian students, who comprised 48 percent of the county's student population, received 80 percent of all disciplinary actions. Donna Deyhle, a professor of educational anthropology at the University of Utah, says that together these injustices lead to lower test scores, higher dropout rates and fewer college degrees, which in turn results in lower civic participation.
The inequality doesn't stop at the classroom. Requests to bring running water or electricity to the Navajo community of Westwater were denied in 2007, because, one county commissioner argued, residents were too poor to pay for utilities anyway. Tribal members have never been appointed to judicial offices, and aren't represented on cultural or historical boards. And many residents still erroneously believe that because Native Americans don't pay property taxes, the county isn't obligated to provide for them. According to court documents, Bruce Adams supporters boasted in a 2012 campaign ad that he "has been very successful in preventing the expenditure of San Juan County tax money on reservation projects for which the county has no responsibility."
Like most Navajos and Utes living in San Juan County, Wilfred Jones was unaware of the degree to which this was happening. He'd experienced racism in his own life — from police officers who threw his father's sacred medicine pouch onto the highway, and from white kids who taunted his son and his grandson with racial slurs when they faced off at sporting events — but he wouldn't have called it "institutionalized." "We thought it was normal procedure," Jones says, of voting in the county. "We went with the flow."
Until, that is, Jones met Leonard Gorman. Gorman, who's also Navajo, with a trim goatee and rectangular glasses, is executive director of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission. In 2011, Gorman began visiting oft-ignored corners of Navajo Nation to learn about residents' concerns. The stories he heard from Jones and others near Montezuma Creek seemed at first like another example of the disparities faced by Native Americans everywhere. But the more Gorman learned, the more he realized that this wasn't just a lingering effect of generations of discrimination — it was discrimination in action.
"The struggles, the racism we all read about in history books … I'd like to believe that the overtness of what happened then isn't happening today," he says. "But in some places, it is."
The most far-reaching example is also the least visible — which is perhaps why it escaped notice for so long. Under both the Voting Rights Act and Utah state law, counties must redraw voting districts at least every 10 years to ensure that the population is spread evenly across districts. But San Juan County hadn't redrawn its voting districts since 1986. Gorman offered multiple times to help the county redraw its boundaries so that Tribal voters were more evenly distributed over two districts, rather than packed into one, but was turned away. County officials said they believed the Indian District wasn't just legal — it was required.
When he heard this, Jones was outraged. If there had been two Navajos on the county commission, his pleas to get an ambulance might have been answered, and people could have suffered less. "That was what finally gave me backbone," he says. So in 2012, Gorman sued twice — once to redraw the county commission districts and once for the school board's. Jones was a plaintiff in both suits.
In December 2015 and February 2016, Judge Shelby ruled unequivocally in the Navajos' favor. He ordered the county to remap both its school board and county commission voting districts. Commissioner Adams says the county is complying.
And while there's no guarantee that having the Native American population spread over two voting districts will lead to two Navajo commissioners, it's likely that, given a fair opportunity, a Navajo majority will elect Navajo candidates. If that happens, Native Americans could control the financial, law enforcement, education and transportation needs of one of the nation's largest counties for the first time.
But given the county's history, many Navajo remain skeptical that the new maps will adhere to the law. "We still have a long way to go," says former Commissioner Maryboy. "But those recent court decisions look very positive for us. I think it's inevitable that county officials are going to have to accept the fact that we're part of the government."
Correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado. Follow @cestmoiLanglois]]>
Equally important was fire, which led to spikes in plant productivity, and wolves, which controlled bison and elk populations. Eisenberg calls bison, wolves and fire the "keystone forces of nature" — the three legs of a stool that prop up a vast array of plants and animals in grassland ecosystems. Of course, she adds ruefully, European settlers found all three of these important forces "terribly inconvenient" and spent centuries trying to wipe them from the landscape.
Now, we've come full circle: Land managers in many protected places — from Yellowstone to Rocky Mountain National Park to Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, just over the Canadian border from Glacier — are trying to rectify decades of misguided policy by reintroducing one or more of the stool's three legs. Eisenberg has just one question for them: "Is this even working?"
In other words, is it possible to rewild a place without all three legs in place? To answer that question, Eisenberg is conducting research in both Waterton Lakes, where there are wolves and controlled fire but no free-ranging bison, and on land owned by the Blackfeet Nation just outside the park, where the tribe is interested in bringing bison back. By collecting baseline data and comparing restoration efforts in both places, Eisenberg hopes to answer basic questions about shortgrass prairies — How often did they burn? How many bison are enough? — that could guide land managers elsewhere in the West struggling return grasslands to a more natural condition.
"We're trying to re-wild North America with mixed success," says Eisenberg, who raised her family on 20 acres in northwest Montana and now works primarily as a research scientist. "It's like trying to fix a watch and you're missing one of the critical pieces. It might work for a while, but it'll keep breaking and you'll keep having to fix it."
In Waterton Lakes, for instance, aspens are encroaching onto the shortgrass prairie. Only 3 percent of Canada's shortgrass prairie remains, so park managers are particularly keen to conserve what's left. The obvious solution seemed to be controlled burns — studies in Rocky Mountain National Park and elsewhere have shown that elk browse aspen shoots so heavily after a fire that they knock back aspen, making room for grasses to grow.
But that hasn't happened in Waterton. Eisenberg suspects it has to do with the presence of wolves, which were absent from the previous study sites. "Instead of browsing the aspen sprouts, the elk are avoiding them, because there's all this stuff on the ground that makes it hard for them to run away if a wolf is chasing them," she hypothesizes.
A more holistic solution, Eisenberg thinks, would be to bring back free-roaming bison, which suppress woody regrowth by trampling and digging it up with their horns. But that's controversial with local ranchers. So Eisenberg is working with the Blackfoot on nearby tribal land to conduct mirror-image studies to those inside the park. The joint studies are funded through 2020 by EarthWatch, the Blackfoot and Parks Canada. Her work is still in its relatively early stages, but eventually, when bison return to tribal lands, she hopes to have all the pieces in place to track their effect on biodiversity, plant productivity and other measures of ecosystem renewal. "None of these things is a silver bullet alone," she says. "In order to fix the ecological problems we've created, you don't just put back something you took out without understanding how it's going to affect everything else."
I asked Eisenberg if it makes sense, in today's world, to attempt to restore environments to some idealized pre-contact state. She thinks it does. Any one of the stool's legs increases biodiversity wherever it occurs, she said. "And when they occur together, it's unbelievable what happens in terms of species diversity." In the face of climate change, that increased biodiversity may be the best form of insurance against extinction.
Krista Langlois is a correspondent for High Country News. Follow @cestmoiLanglois]]>
Minutes later, 25-year-old Kate Lacey — a senior firefighter with the Sandia Helitack Crew — walked through what appeared to be a herd of giant orange and green caterpillars. The caterpillars were fire shelters. This was a training exercise and there was no blaze in sight, but for the women facedown in the dirt, sweating and panting, the heat –– and the pressure –– were real. All were part of an all-female version of wildland firefighter training for the U.S. Forest Service. And all dreamt of becoming like Lacey, on track to get a coveted permanent position on a helicopter crew.
Lacey shook the shelters to confirm they were set up properly. "How's everyone doing?" she asked. A few muffled voices replied: "Hot!" Then Lacey gave the all-clear and the women emerged, strands of hair matted to their dirt-smudged cheeks. "It was kind of scary," admitted 24-year-old Tatiana Espinoza. "It's hard to think fast. You can't see anything under there."
The simulation was the first of many trials the recruits were to face. Like all Forest Service firefighters, bootcamp participants must undergo five days of training and pass a written exam and fitness test. But women who want to make a career in the overwhelmingly male-dominated world of wildland firefighting also face unique challenges, longer odds and sometimes outright hostility.
That's why former firefighter Bequi Livingston started these Women in Wildland Fire bootcamps in 2012: to give women a supportive place to get started. Her own first day of training, on Sept. 1, 1979, was far less welcoming: She was a 102-pound Texas track star in a roomful of burly men, and the office manager kept giving her funny looks. "Who are you, honey?" she asked.
Livingston replied, "I'm Bequi!"
"She looked on her sheet and back at me and said, 'Oh my gosh, we've made a terrible mistake.' "
The manager had thought "Bequi" was a man's name and tried to give Livingston an office job — women didn't work fire in those days. But Livingston refused. She went on to become an elite firefighter called a hotshot, an engine operator, and the Forest Service's Southwest fire operations health and safety specialist, her current job. Among her friends, she counts members of Apache 8, an all-female Native American crew, and Margarita Phillips, a now-retired smoke-jumping grandmother from Montana.
The path these women carved looks like unqualified progress. They battled discrimination, ascended to leadership positions and obliterated barriers. Women today hold some of the industry's top jobs and have proven themselves on the West's biggest fires. "We stand on the shoulders of women who came before us," one told me. "They had it harder than we do for sure."
But firefighting is still a men's club, and for many women in the trenches, little has changed. Women make up 39 percent of the Forest Service's workforce, but hold just 11 percent of permanent wildfire jobs. In other agencies that fight fire — the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — the figure is as low as 6 percent. Even the U.S. military has done a better job of recruiting and retaining women.
The reasons are multiple. Women tend to be primary caregivers, so having kids can derail a career — most jobs don't require you to find childcare for weeks on end while you're dispatched all over the country. And many women firefighters find themselves in places where they're the only females for miles. Even with a supportive crew, the macho culture can make it hard to stick around long enough to ascend the ladder — becoming a type 1 incident commander, a position equivalent to a one-star general, for example, takes longer than becoming a doctor.
For many women, these are stumbling blocks. But for some, the problems manifest in much darker ways.
In 2009, 26-year-old Alicia Dabney was supporting three kids and an injured husband on the Tule River Indian Reservation when she landed her dream job as a wildland firefighter. She was the only woman on her crew, but figured as long as she kept her head down and did her job, she'd be fine.
Still, she felt isolated and uncomfortable. One coworker posted fliers around the barracks that said "Alicia Dabney The Whore." She says her supervisor insisted that she tell him when she was menstruating. Other coworkers left lewd voicemails on her cell, which she saved as evidence. Once, she tells me, a man sat on her head and "rode me like a horse" when she squatted to grab her pack. But because she needed the job, she stayed. "I didn't know you could tell anybody," she says. "I didn't know who to tell."
Then, about a year later, she alleges that a superior flung her onto a bed at a training session and put her in a chokehold. "He tried to rape me," Dabney says. "I had to beg and plead and fight."
Eventually, she says, the attacker backed off. (Her alleged assailant still works for the Forest Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which says it cannot respond to specific allegations because of privacy concerns or because cases are still pending.)
Soon after, Dabney broke down in the office of a female fire officer, who introduced her to Lesa Donnelly, vice president of a civil rights group called the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees. Donnelly helped Dabney file a complaint with the USDA Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., and brought her to a police station to give a statement to a USDA special agent. Over the next year, Dabney filed eight additional complaints with the Civil Rights Office. (Like many assaulted women, though, she never followed up with the police.)
Donnelly also helped Dabney realize that her experience was part of a pattern. In 18 years as a Forest Service administrator, Donnelly had heard dozens of similar stories. She connected Dabney with six other female firefighters who had recently experienced sexual harassment or discrimination on the job, and together they took the first steps toward filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all the female firefighters in the Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Region, which covers California and the Pacific islands. Forty-eight percent of Forest Service firefighters work there.
The class-action complaint alleges pervasive sexual misconduct, discrimination and retaliation in the Pacific Southwest. Heidi Turpen, who joined the complaint later, says she was left alone in the wilderness without a radio or GPS after she reported harassment by a supervisor who had already been cited for workplace violence, including banging his head against a wall and making verbal threats. Another firefighter, Denice Rice, says that a division chief followed her into the bathroom, asked to watch her pee and repeatedly groped her. Worried that she'd be ostracized, she stayed quiet for three years. "Once you become that person (who files a complaint), you're that person forever," she says. But in 2011, after he poked her breasts with a letter opener, she came forward.
[High Country News is conducting an ongoing investigation into the long history of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender discrimination in public land agencies and how agency officials handle these complaints. Want to share your own experience? Send us a tip.]
The region isn't unique. Aili Johnston, who is not part of the complaint, says that when she worked as a firefighter in Oregon between 2008 and 2013, two women on her crew were raped by male colleagues, and another escaped an attempted rape. Bequi Livingston is aware of rapes in Arizona and New Mexico that went unreported because the victims were either too humiliated or didn't believe that the Forest Service would support them. And an ongoing High Country News investigation has found that sexual misconduct against women is rife in other public-lands agencies, too. Sexual harassment was common in Grand Canyon National Park's recently abolished river unit, and though the Park Service had been aware of similar issues since at least 2000 –– when half of female Park Service rangers surveyed said they'd been harassed on the job –– the agency failed to act until recently. "It's everything from benign neglect to outright abuse," Donnelly says. "It's systemic and it's institutional."
The latest complaint is on its way to becoming the third gender-based class-action lawsuit against the Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Region in 30 years.
The first was resolved in 1981 with a "consent decree" — a settlement in which neither party admits fault. The decree required the region to put women in 43 percent of positions within five years, to match the percentage in the civilian workforce. But many firefighters say it backfired: Qualified men were denied promotions, while unqualified women were thrust into positions that set them up for failure. By some accounts, hostility toward women increased.
So in the 1990s, Donnelly helped lead another class-action suit. A number of fixes resulted, including mandatory sexual harassment training and a special council that monitored the region's response to harassment and discrimination claims. Complaints were resolved more effectively, and conditions improved.
But after the agreement expired in 2006, the process regressed. Today, civil rights training for most crews consists of an hourlong lecture that several employees say is inadequate and sometimes treated as a joke. Anyone who is assaulted is supposed to inform a supervisor or regional civil rights officer, who should then inform law enforcement. But that's not always realistic in the field. "We're pretty isolated," says Johnston, the former firefighter. "Cellphones don't work, we don't have internet, and that's not at a fire — that's at government housing." When a colleague first confided that she'd been raped, Johnston says, "I didn't know how to help them or who to tell. There's just no protocol."
If a situation involves harassment or discrimination rather than outright assault, the process is even more convoluted. An employee (or her supervisor) must file a complaint with the USDA Civil Rights Office in Washington, where the law requires it to be processed, investigated and resolved within 180 days.
But that didn't happen for Alicia Dabney. After she reported her experiences to the Civil Rights Office, she says, she waited. And waited.
A May 2015 report by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel shows that Dabney wasn't waiting alone. Between 2010 and 2013, the Civil Rights Office failed to investigate roughly half of equal opportunity complaints on time. According to the USDA's own data, the average number of days needed to investigate a complaint (not including resolving it or taking action) was 333 in 2010. It dropped to 212 days by 2014 — an improvement, but for women forced to keep working with someone who belittles, harasses or undermines them, still a disturbingly long time. Worse, the Civil Rights Office itself had an "unusually high number of complaints filed against its own leadership," the Office of Special Counsel found. It "has been seriously mismanaged, thereby compromising the civil rights of USDA employees."
Some women get so frustrated they quit before the process is complete; others, uncertain of their rights or afraid of being blackballed, don't file at all. And when transgressions are reported, the agency's course of action varies. A Forest Service spokesperson told me sexual harassment charges can lead to the perpetrator being fired, but multiple employees say that men accused of harassment are sometimes just shifted to another forest or agency. (Privacy rules make this impossible to verify.)
In June 2015, the Pacific Southwest Region again took steps to improve its policy. Supervisors must now report sexual harassment to a superior and a civil rights officer within 24 hours, and a "sexual harassment intake inquiry coordinator" ensures that "assertive" safety measures — such as notifying police or separating employees — happen immediately. The region also recently distributed an anonymous survey to firefighters to learn more about patterns of discrimination. And there's a sexual harassment hotline. "The Forest Service maintains a zero tolerance policy for harassment of any kind," spokesman Michael Illenberg wrote in an email.
Yet as with the measures implemented after previous lawsuits, many women have lost faith that these steps will lead to lasting change. "There's got to be a bigger solution than women filing complaints and them trying to pay us to settle and shut up," says Dabney, who settled her individual complaints for an undisclosed amount in court in 2013 after she lost her job. "You file a complaint and nothing gets done. That's unbelievable to me. On the 181st day, there needs to be a task force that says, 'This is one day out of compliance. Let's figure it out immediately.' "
Jenay Naranjo was having trouble with her helmet. The 19-year-old from Española, New Mexico, was one of the 18 women taking part in the Women in Wildland Fire bootcamp. As they hauled shovels and pickaxes up the side of a scratchy hillside, Naranjo stepped out of line. "Ugh," she said, fiddling with her too-big helmet. "This is, like, pissing me off."
Kate Lacey tightened Naranjo's chinstrap and tugged the yellow helmet. It stayed put. "There," she said. "You got this."
Naranjo fell back in line behind 27-year-old Ericka Alcaraz, a former whitewater guide with a dark braid who has wanted to be a firefighter since childhood. In front of them was 41-year-old Anella Russo, a volunteer structural firefighter and recently divorced mother determined to prove she could do something besides sit home and feel sorry for herself. "If I can raise seven kids by myself in the middle of nowhere, I can do this," she told me. "Even if I trip over every root."
Russo and the others spent the day hiking, digging fire line and doing pushups. They paused in the shade of a juniper to practice using signal mirrors and learn radio protocol. They peppered Lacey — who graduated from the first Women in Wildland Fire camp in 2012 — with questions: How'd you make sure a crew picked you up? Am I doing this right? No one seemed intimidated by working in a male-dominated field. The future looked bright.
Indeed, most women firefighters don't experience the kind of abuse that Dabney endured. Altogether, an average of just five individual Forest Service employees per year submitted sexual harassment complaints to the Civil Rights Office between 2011 and 2015, though, again, many cases aren't reported. Still, given that 46,000 people work for the Forest Service, the numbers suggest most employees don't feel harassed or abused. Among the dozens of female firefighters I talked to for this story, most had positive experiences.
Yet because so few women make a career of fighting wildfire, even those who love their jobs say they face more subtle discrimination. One told me she worked with men who ignored her orders but readily followed orders from other men. Jessica Hilfers, who was the first woman ever to work on her engine when she arrived in New Mexico's Jemez District in 2011, says men literally took tools from her hands. And as a Colorado state fire employee bluntly put it: "There was a lot of sexism. You have to be able to trust the person you're with, and I think a lot of guys just had it in their head that the girls were dead weight."
Attitudes differ widely from crew to crew. Robert Moreno, captain of a California hotshot crew, says it boils down to who's in charge and what kind of a culture is permitted. For his part, Moreno makes a point of nipping inappropriate behavior in the bud. "It starts out small," he says. "But if people think they can get away with things, it tends to escalate."
Other patterns, however, are harder to spot: captains who sign off on their male buddy's training but are less likely to do the same for a woman, for example. One claimant in the latest class-action complaint, Candice Kutrosky, worked on nine hotshot crews in three Forest Service regions and was an assistant supervisor in eight. Her annual performance reviews consistently rated her leadership, safety skills and physical ability as excellent. Yet she was passed up for dozens of promotions in favor of less experienced men.
After submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, Kutrosky learned that at least two male supervisors had given negative references contradicting her written performance reviews. One wrote that she "demonstrates an extensive lack of neither (sic) physical ability nor a desire to improve."
Given the already-challenging work conditions, this kind of treatment is enough to drive women away. "It's death by a thousand cuts," says Brenda Dale, a Forest Service fire management officer. "So many things tip the scale for someone in wildland fire to decide to leave."
Dale is now collecting data on women in fire for the Forest Service to help the agency track problems and adjust its response accordingly. But she's already found major gaps: Because firefighters get lumped in with all Forest Service timber positions, the only way to determine who works in fire is to count those with permanent positions, who fall into a special early retirement category. Yet most firefighters — roughly 63 percent — are seasonal. That means Dale can't get an accurate tally of the total number of women, which means it's impossible to tell whether recruitment and retention efforts are working.
Still, permanent employee numbers are a start, and Dale's project is just one of many aimed at making firefighting safer and more welcoming to women. In recent years, several Forest Service offices have started nonprofit daycare centers to help those with kids keep their jobs. One in Missoula, Montana, offers late evening and weekend care during fire emergencies. In the Intermountain Region — southern Idaho, Nevada, Utah and western Wyoming — employees of any gender can take a yearlong break from the field if they have serious family issues. They're often given a 40-hour-a-week office job instead, which makes it easier to care for aging parents or sick kids. Sue Stewart, who's behind that effort, says it stems from her own struggle to balance her firefighting career with raising two sons. "The Forest Service is interested in retaining great employees," she says. "And the fact that we lose people who can't find that balance is troublesome."
In the Pacific Northwest, Aili Johnston started her own company, Willamette Public Health Consulting, and conducts four-hour sexual misconduct trainings for Forest Service employees. She teaches recruits about consensual sex and rape statistics, and familiarizes them with the byzantine Forest Service bureaucracy. She informs them of their responsibilities as federal employees and explains what resources are available if they're harassed or assaulted. And though she has only reached about 1,000 employees so far, she hopes to expand by teaching Forest Service employees to offer the same trainings.
Then there are Bequi Livingston's bootcamps.
On the surface, their impact seems minimal: Only a handful of the 129 women who have completed trainings in New Mexico and Arizona have gone on to work in fire. (Neither Livingston nor the agency have exact numbers.) Yet the model has spread to Utah and California, and by Livingston's measure, it's been a success. That's because her purpose isn't just to recruit qualified women — it's to give women a place to share stories and build a support network.
At the bootcamp, each recruit is paired with an experienced female firefighter with whom she can stay in touch. Then, if she finds herself alone in the field, she'll know at least one other person who can relate to her situation –– someone she can call up and ask: "Is this normal? What should I do?"
Perhaps the most sweeping change, though, is that the men who have run wildfire for decades are stepping down, making room for more women in leadership positions. On the first morning of the bootcamp, as Russo, Naranjo and the others milled around the dirt parking lot, Sandia District Ranger Cid Morgan climbed into the bed of a pickup. The women gathered in a half-circle, looking up to her. The sun was just peeking over the hills.
"When I started in '78, they still wouldn't let 'girls' go on fires," Morgan began. "The supervisor never said, 'No, you can't go out,' but there was always something way more important for me to do in the office."
Now, she added, with a smile, "I'm in charge."
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Correspondent Krista Langlois lives in Durango, Colorado. Follow @cestmoiLanglois
This story was funded in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation.
Though wolverines' dependence on snow isn't fully understood, researchers in 2010 concluded that the animals only reproduce where there's deep, long-lasting snow. The following year, scientists found that habitat with that kind of snow cover is expected to shrink by 31 percent in the next three decades. So in 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed adding the 300 or so wolverines in the Northern Rockies to the endangered species list. They would've been the first species in the Lower 48 declared legally endangered because of climate change.
But then regional director Noreen Walsh abruptly changed course. Fish and Wildlife director Dan Ashe backed up her decision not to list wolverines, citing too many uncertainties in the scientific literature. So some 20 environmental groups, including the Western Environmental Law Center, sued.
Now, a federal court has ruled in their favor. On April 4, U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen declared that Fish and Wildlife's refusal to list wolverines as threatened or endangered was "arbitrary and capricious," and is forcing the agency to reassess. That means that the elusive, ferocious Gulo gulo is once again poised to become the first animal in the contiguous states to receive federal protections because of climate change.
The decision is significant, says Western Environmental Law Center staff attorney Matthew Bishop, because it suggests that climate change's impact doesn't have to be cut-and-dry to prompt protection. When polar bears became the first species thrust onto the endangered species list because of a warming planet in 2008, there was an obvious smoking gun — bears drowning and dying from starvation because thin sea ice limited their ability to hunt seals.
Wolverine researchers may never be able to produce that kind of clear evidence — the animals are notoriously reclusive and hard to study, and the effects of diminished snowpack will probably be less dramatic. Plus, since scientists don't agree on exactly why wolverines require snow for reproduction, predicting the precise impact of its loss is difficult. But Christensen says this doesn't matter. "If ever there was a species for which conservation depends on foregoing absolute certainty, it is the wolverine," he wrote in his 85-page order.
The decision could open the door to listing for other animals that are predicted to be impacted by climate change but aren't yet experiencing its effects. Pikas, for instance. Corals. Bishop thinks there are hundreds of candidates. As for wolverines, he believes the decision will lead to a threatened listing, though the timeframe is still unclear. (Threatened species aren't yet endangered but are likely to become so. They still receive protections under the Endangered Species Act.)
But given that the Endangered Species Act can't limit global greenhouse gas emissions, how can it protect the wolverine from climate change?
One solution could be to reintroduce the animal to places where it's been extirpated, like the Sierra Nevada or Colorado Rockies. Parts of those high-altitude mountain ranges are expected to be spared the worst effects of a warming planet, so restoring wolverine populations there could help the species as a whole survive. Such reintroductions were part of Fish and Wildlife's 2013 proposal, and could well be part of a future recovery plan. Other solutions include limiting trapping, snowmobiling and other winter recreation in denning habitat.
But Wyoming, Montana and Idaho oppose listing the wolverine for precisely those reasons. Like many Western states, they see an ESA listing — even for an animal that lives mostly above 8,000 feet — as detrimental to economic development.
Yet by law, endangered species decisions are supposed to be about science, not politics or economics. Christensen suspects politics prompted Noreen Walsh's perplexing 180-degree reversal. "Why did the Service make the decision [to not list the wolverine]?" he asked. "Based on the record, the Court suspects that a possible answer to this question can be found in the immense political pressure that was brought to bear on this issue, particularly by a handful of Western states."
Bishop has been working in endangered species law for 17 years, and agrees that political influence has increasingly overshadowed science of late. Other animals, like Sonoran desert tortoises have been denied protection despite scientific evidence suggesting it's warranted. Bishop can only guess politics are at play — which is why he thinks Christensen's decision was a win for not just wolverines, but for other species living on the brink, too.
Krista Langlois is a correspondent at High Country News. Follow @kristalanglois2]]>