(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Q&A: The Myth of the Rural West, with Writer Betsy Gaines Quammen [1] ['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2024-06-21 The American West is Edenic, infinite and free, wild and wide-open space – or at least, this is what our stories tell us about the places west of the 100th meridian. But who controls these stories, and are any of them true? This is the question historian and writer Betsy Gaines Quammen untangles in her newest book True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America. Through careful research and sometimes difficult conversations, she presents a nuanced take on the kinds of rural perspectives that city-dwelling liberals too often dismiss as narrow-minded. Enjoy our conversation, below. Claire Carlson, The Daily Yonder: Myth feels so accurate when describing how the American West is considered by people, especially to people who didn’t grow up here. It can seem like this really mythic place through the traditional western stories we’re told. I loved the chapter about wolves, for example, but there are so many other stories you could have chosen to tell. Why did you write about the ones that you did, and what did you learn from them? Betsy Gaines Quammen: I think that what I tried to do was come up with the most apparent western myths and then build stories around them. The wolf chapter in particular was one that I felt like I really learned a lot about. As somebody who started out working in conservation, I feel very strongly about the importance of wolves on landscape. And I think I, in the past, have been guilty of not considering just how difficult it is for ranchers to accommodate wolves, even for a rancher who is incredibly kind and well-intended. Betsy Gaines Quammen on a panel with sociologist Justin Farrell and novelist Scott Graham in Crested Butte, Colorado (image courtesy of Mountain Words Festival). Conservationists in the past have not been great in considering the lifestyles and the paychecks of people living in rural communities doing anything from ranching to mining to logging. I think that there was this expectation that because it was bad for the environment, folks who depended on these lifestyles or this economy could pivot or just deal with it. Writing this book gave me a lot of compassion for folks in rural communities in the West who have worked traditional practices and economies. When an environmentalist asks them to be, say, “wolf friendly,” we really have to understand what that means. And so that was a lesson for me. DY: You start the book talking about the creationist dinosaur museum in Glendive, Montana, a place I’ve driven by a lot but never stopped at, even though it’s so intriguing to me. Why was that the place you wanted to begin? BGQ: We are a myth-making species. So we have these myths, for better or for worse, that inform us about landscape and culture. I looked at what was appealing to people about the West during Covid-19 and ongoing polarization. The West was looked at as a healthy place, a place of fresh starts. The West was “free land.” I mean, these are myths that you can trace back to Manifest Destiny or land speculators trying to sell the West as a place for people to homestead. It’s like Eden, which got me thinking about biblical literalism and the fact that there’s so much biblical literalism that people have embraced. And I talk about that with the dinosaur museum in Glendive, Montana, but I also talk about the dangers of biblical literalism that we see happening around white Christian nationalism in the Idaho Panhandle. And that moves back and forth between eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, the panhandle in western Montana. So when you’re looking at myths and you’re looking at the idea of dominion, of subduing the land, that humans are created in the image of God therefore they have greater superiority – what does that do in terms of the way people interface with landscape and with culture and with community? And so I started that sort of exploration by going to an actual museum of biblical literalism that humans and dinosaurs somehow shared the planet together. I found that this biblical literalism paves the way for thinking in lockstep, which is a very dangerous way to think. It prevents people from understanding nuance, from questioning ideas, from taking issue or having different perspectives from other people in their communities. It really creates a sort of culture that’s susceptible to authoritarianism and misinformation and disinformation and group-think. DY: What I found particularly compelling about how you chose to talk about all of this is that throughout the book, you sit down with tons of people who are probably on the polar opposite of the ideological spectrum as you, and have face-to-face conversations with them, like with the director of the Glendive dinosaur museum, for example. Why was that important to you, to be in conversation with people who had really different opinions? BGQ: During the pandemic when we were more socially isolated than we generally are, we were getting versions of one another from social media. I was pretty angry, and I feel like a lot of people were really angry. And so there was this increasing rift between people who had different political ideologies. I think that was intentionally done. And not to say that there aren’t real differences in the way people perceive politics, but there were politicians and there were social media networks that were benefiting from our anger. They were benefiting from clicks, like reactionary clicks, or they were maintaining power because people were so mad at each other. And so I really wanted to have a chance to get out and talk to people without getting a version of them on the internet. It was a lot of really good conversations, some challenging conversations, but really, I think I ended the book having more faith in my fellow neighbor than I did at the beginning because I wasn’t getting a fair version of them on social media. DY: In the book you talk about some history of federal harassment in rural communities. You mention Ruby Ridge, which I feel like is one of the most damning examples, but then you also talk about FBI agents coming and raiding poker machines in northern Idaho’s Silver Valley and that leaving a really bad taste in the community’s mouths. You write that that sort of history explains some of the anti-government tendencies of rural communities. I thought it was interesting that there seems to be a history of rural communities being really unfairly targeted by the feds. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on whether rural communities are more vulnerable to a particular brand of anti-government extremism because of this? BGQ: I think I do want to be careful in saying extremism happens everywhere, in rural communities as well as urban communities. But I do think that, and I touched on this a little bit with the wolf chapter, that liberals, and in my case, I was an environmentalist and moved to Montana for graduate school and started working right away in grizzly bear conservation, in large landscape conservation and in fisheries; my field really was not supportive of how grazing on public lands was being managed. True West released in October, 2023. Now, public lands, they’re really important for grazing operations. In many cases, ranchers have federal allotments to go with their private ranches. When you have folks like me come in and not be sympathetic to either ranching concerns, or want to shut down a timber sale where there had been an old sawmill or a mining community, the community can see these outsiders as threats to their jobs. When this happens, regardless of the circumstances behind it, communities that are angry and that don’t have job opportunities can become vulnerable to extremism. And that’s what I was looking at in part when I was writing this book. DY: Later on you mentioned a conversation you had with a friend where you told him you wanted to write this book and talk to rural people, and he said, “why bother?” And that’s something you see so often, which is basically that liberals, or a lot of city-dwelling liberals, think about rural people as a lost cause. I find it so unproductive! BGQ: It’s really infuriating. I mean, one of the conversations that I had with an activist in Montana who is trying to protect LGBTQ communities who is working on the influx of hate and hate speech in Montana, when she was telling me about where she was trying to organize, she had people literally say to her as an activist, “why even think about working in these rural communities?” And I’m thinking, that’s exactly where you should be working! That’s where we need to be focused and build relationships. One of the folks that I talked to for the book who had very different opinions than me told me, “if I hadn’t met you, I would’ve been afraid of you.” And I think that’s what happens when we turn our backs on people. And I think that people living in urban places may have that attitude, but I also have rural people say to me, “Well, we don’t really have an interest in spending time with people in Bozeman.” So it does go both ways. But I think that we need to be more willing to be curious about each other and to understand where folks are coming from. DY: We’re about to enter, I think, kind of a shit-storm of presidential hullabaloo now that we’re halfway through 2024. But you ended the book hopeful about the potential of relationship-building. Why are you hopeful during this moment of national chaos? BGQ: I mean, I have my days. Believe me, I’m not waking up every day and whistling, and I do feel like it is going to get really shitty between now and the election and potentially after. Climate, for example, is a big scary problem, and it’s going to continue to get worse with fires and floods and high temperatures and potential food security issues. And as we move forward, I think we have no choice but to be in relationship with each other in order to create plans on how we can move forward and keep our communities intact, keep our culture intact. I think what I felt hopeful about is that there are opportunities to continue to be in relationship with people in our own communities. I think we still have the ability to build relationships. I think that Covid-19 set us back quite a bit. And by that I mean not only were we sheltering in place, so we were cut off from one another, but we were getting such wildly different information on what was happening, so much so that we all went through the pandemic so differently. And part of that, I believe, had to do with leadership. I think that we could have pulled together so much more as a country if we hadn’t had a leader that delights in polarizing people. But I do feel like we have the ability to move forward in ways where we can address inequities, address climate, and invest in opportunities to make our communities healthy and thriving. And that’s what makes me hopeful. This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Related Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailyyonder.com/qa-the-myth-of-the-rural-west-with-writer-betsy-gaines-quammen/2024/06/21/ Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/