Across the country, we have watched as ICE officers roam the streets like rogue paramilitaries, covering their faces as they arrest suspected “illegal” immigrants, sometimes at gunpoint. The Department of Homeland Security claims that agents must conceal their identities from the public due to the inherent risks of their jobs.

But just how dangerous is ICE’s work?

According to government data, not very. Between 1915 and 2025, 76 immigration enforcement agents died on the job. The last officer to die from a gunshot wound, James Holdman Jr. in 2021, had accidentally discharged his own weapon. Jaime Jorge Zapata died in the line of duty in 2011, but he was gunned down in Mexico while assisting narcotics investigators.

A handful of other officers have died since 2011, but from medical complications unrelated to their work as federal officers. According to the Cato Institute, the likelihood of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being killed at work is “5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered.” In fact, ICE agents are more likely to die from COVID-19 or cancer than from a violent attack at work.

The risks of ICE’s work seem pedestrian when compared to those of other professions—including education. As a professor at Fort Lewis College, I walk into the classroom every day acutely aware of the threats facing me and my colleagues. Sadly, we know that shootings remain a clear risk to all educators, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, violence against teachers is higher than for any other non-policing occupation.

Despite this, teachers across the nation don’t step into classrooms wearing masks, though some politicians have urged them to arm themselves to “level the playing field.” Educators understand that success in the classroom depends on building relationships, fostering trust and helping young people maintain a sense of connection with others.

Can you imagine it any other way? Envision, for example, a college professor lecturing on chemical reactions or best business practices in a ski mask with a loaded 9mm strapped to their hip.

Democracy lives and dies on the hill of transparency. I think we all realize that any public entity that attempts to operate anonymously undermines the community’s trust.

Our system of governance relies on checks and balances that melt away when public servants hide their identities.  Masks make it more difficult to hold individuals accountable for their actions, which increases the likelihood of misconduct. This is particularly concerning in the case of law enforcement officers, as they alone are entrusted with the use of deadly force

When officers can be clearly identified, they are more likely to act with humility and responsibility, as they know that their actions are subject to public scrutiny and the law.

Educators understand the power of visibility like few others. It is not just about being seen, it is about being responsible. In the classroom, we model behavior, build rapport and create safe spaces where students feel valued and heard. This should be a universal standard for all public officials, including ICE officers.

But let’s be honest. ICE officers don’t wear masks because their job is risky. They wear masks to instill fear while shielding themselves from the public they are supposedly protecting. Masks allow agents to cross constitutional lines without their friends and neighbors knowing what they do during the day. Hidden under their masks, ICE agents routinely rough up, and even kill, migrants and protesters while violating constitutional rights such as due process and protection from unlawful searches and seizures.

It’s time to unmask ICE. If teachers across the United States can walk into classrooms unprotected, then surely federal officers—armed with bullet proof vests and deadly weapons—can perform their duties with a name, a face and a badge number.

Benjamin Waddell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Durango, Colorado.

Dave

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More than 100 years ago, the United States gave my great-great grandparents and their children, cousins and friends, around 30 Jewish families, free land in the West under the Homestead Act.

All of the recently arrived immigrants spoke Yiddish; most escaped Russia with their lives but less so their livelihoods. These federal homesteads of 160-acre parcels were theirs to keep if they could turn wild prairie into farmland.

My family told their children that owning land in South Dakota made them feel like real Americans. Coming from Russia where Jews weren’t allowed to own land, their ranch on Jew Flats allowed my ancestors to shake off their suspect immigrant status.

The land also had serious economic impact. Between 1908 and 1970, when my grandmother and her sisters sold the last chunk of Jew Flats, my ancestors took out $1.1 million in mortgages, in today’s value, on their free land. With that money, they were able to start other businesses, buy more land and move away.

Yet this land that paved my family’s pathway to the middle class came at great cost to the Lakota. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, the United States signed treaties with the Lakota Nation reserving tens of thousands of acres in the Dakotas —in perpetuity—for the Lakota Nation.

But when the railroad companies, the largest corporations of their time, wanted to connect a line between California and the East Coast, promises made became promises broken. By 1908, when my ancestors were planting their first crop, Congress had taken or stolen around 98% of the land that an 1851 Treaty said would always be for the Lakota.

To attempt to further eradicate Native American connection to the land, the United States made it illegal for Native Nations like the Lakota to practice their religion, culture and speak their language. Lakota children were taken from their parents, sometimes forcibly or under threat of jail time, to be educated in boarding schools that would convert them to Christianity. These schools taught an “industrial education” training Native children for a trade that didn’t rely on land.

None other than Adolf Hitler was inspired by this American model of dispossession. When crafting laws to diminish the rights of European Jews, Nazi lawyers studied U.S. laws. Hitler not only admired American reservations, which he equated to cages, but he publicly praised the efficiency of America’s attempts to exterminate its Indigenous populations.

“Your people and our people went through the same thing,” Doug White Bull, a Lakota elder and former teacher told me. “But our people had a holocaust that started 400 years ago. Americans condemn Hitler, which you should… but at the same time, they should condemn themselves.”

Unlike Germany, which has grappled (albeit imperfectly) with its genocidal past, the United States has made little efforts to reconcile its thefts from Indigenous people. Yet filling this vacuum of federal leadership are efforts at the local level.

Just recently, the Quaker church paid one Alaska Native community $93,000 in reparations, the amount the federal government had paid the church to forcibly assimilate their ancestors. Throughout the country, other churches have returned land to Native Nations. And in some cities, residents pay voluntary land taxes to the Native Nations that originally lived there.

Following the guidance of Lakota elders, my family has started a fund at the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, a Native-led nonprofit that has spent decades helping Native Nations buy and reclaim their traditional lands. I’ve set our fundraising goal at $1.1 million, the amount we received in mortgages on our free land. Anyone can donate and many people have.

Indigenous elders have taught me that our job in life is to be a good ancestor, to act in a way that doesn’t create a mess for our children or grandchildren to clean up. For me, for my family, attempting to acknowledge and own the damage that was done to the Lakota—at great benefit to us—is a small step towards ending this cycle of harm.

Rebecca Clarren is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. An award-winning journalist about the American West, her latest book is The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota and an American Inheritance (Viking Penguin).

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But lately another topic has crept in—the escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine.

That might seem surprising since my town is more than 7,000 miles from Gaza, where in just a few months more than 29,000 people have been killed and nearly 2 million have been driven from their homes. But what is happening there reverberates here in its own way.

For one thing, much of the funding for Israel’s assault on Gaza comes from U.S. taxpayers. Since Israel was formed 75 years ago by displacing more than 700,000 Palestinians from their communities, the United States has provided the Israeli military with more than $225 billion in today’s dollars.

“A lot of us are questioning why our elected officials sign off on billions for military spending overseas with such ease,” said Rianna Koppel, a solar-energy worker who lives in our community of 6,000.

Koppel is a member of a local group of Jewish residents, affiliated with the national organization called Jewish Voice for Peace. They have organized a series of protests, film showings and Hanukkah events, all aimed at encouraging elected officials to support a change in U.S. policy.

They say their focus is on four goals: “bringing about an immediate and permanent ceasefire, freeing hostages and prisoners held by both Hamas and Israel, getting much needed humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, and ending U.S. military aid to Israel.”

Responding to those concerns, the mayor and city council of Talent sent a letter to our representative in Congress and our state’s two U.S. senators, urging them to support those same four goals.

Jason Clark, the town councilor who drafted the letter, said that he is “deeply saddened and horrified by the loss of all innocent life in this conflict and that it has been allowed to go on for this long.”

He added, “People all over the world want a negotiated solution that provides peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians. More military aid just provokes more resistance and makes a negotiated solution harder to achieve.” One recipient of the letter from our town, Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, joined the call for a ceasefire.

Of course, this issue is highly controversial, and not everyone in the valley where I live agrees that it needs to be open for public discussion. In November, local rabbis organized what they said was a Rally Against Antisemitism. One of them, whose synagogue was fundraising to send military equipment to Israeli soldiers, equated criticism of Israeli government policies with antisemitism and urged residents to “call it out.”

To be sure, antisemitism is present in many rural western communities like ours. A few days after Thanksgiving, law enforcement agencies in four towns within a few miles of my home reported that during the night, antisemitic material had been deposited outside hundreds of local residences. The material directed residents to a video that included laudatory clips of Adolf Hitler.

But local critics of the Israeli assault on Gaza, supposedly to rid it of Hamas, say hateful antisemitic attacks like we have seen here recently make it even more important to speak out for a just peace in Palestine and Israel.

“Incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia are increasing, not just around here, but all over the world as a side effect of this war,” Koppel said.  “We need our elected officials to help find a better way.”

Matt Witt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and photographer in Talent, Oregon.

Paragraph five has been corrected, February 26, to reflect Rianna Koppel, an earlier version had Gianna.

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Yet surprisingly, about 100 people gathered at the Blue Sage Center, almost all of us white, to hear what really happened in the mid-1950s. Chairs kept getting added.

The bare stage didn’t have a chair, just a table with water. Becky Stone, one of the scholar-actors with the Colorado Humanities Black History Tour, quietly entered. Rosa Parks was 42 and all of 5 feet tall in 1955 when she refused an order from a bus driver to give up her seat to a white passenger.

But by some transmutation known only to talented actors, Becky Stone, wearing a cotton dress, sweater and flat shoes, became Rosa Parks, who died in 2005. She seemed a reserved, no-nonsense woman who had all the time in the world to talk.

She wanted to set the record straight, she told us, about why she defied bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama. She said the story that’s come down through the years was dead wrong.

Yes, her feet were tired from working all day as a seamstress at a downtown department store, but that’s not why she wouldn’t sacrifice her seat on the bus. She was “tired of giving in” because of her race.

Every bus was segregated by long tradition, she explained, with whites entitled to the front seats. A middle “colored” section allowed both races but once the bus was crowded, whites had priority and Blacks had to stand or find a seat in the back where Blacks were supposed to sit. Blacks were also expected to board through a back door. Ridership of city buses, she pointed out, was about 75% Black.

There was one insult on the bus she never forgot, she told us. It had happened 12 years earlier, when driver James Blake took her fare but ordered her to get off and board the bus from the back. Just as she got to the door, though, he drove off. From then on, she said, she’d try to avoid riding his bus. On the day of her civil disobedience, however, he was the driver who called the police and got her arrested.

The desire to confront discrimination in Montgomery had been long simmering, she said, and as secretary of the city chapter of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she felt she was a good—as in non-threatening—candidate to make a stand. There had been other women who’d refused to relinquish seats through the years, but they’d acted alone.

Rosa Parks said her resistance had the backing of the local NAACP, a first-ever united Black community, some white allies, and the help of a local, 26-year-old pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He became a friend, she said, and credited him with starting a substitute transportation system of private cars that helped some people get to work who couldn’t walk. That was crucial, she said, because the bus boycott lasted more than a year. It ended when the Supreme Court ruled that Montgomery and Alabama laws requiring segregated buses were unconstitutional.

Her victory made national news and changed the law, but there were consequences. After she lost her job and withstood multiple threats against her family, she and her husband decided to move to Detroit. She got a tailoring job in the city, but her husband, she said, became depressed.

Her activism continued. She gave talks about how important it was to be unified to challenge segregation, and her example resonated. In the 1960s, Blacks would invite white supporters to travel on Freedom Rides to “sit-in” at lunch counters in the South. Their legal cases led to Jim Crow laws getting slapped down in state courts, followed by passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Applause for Rosa Parks just wouldn’t quit after she spoke. She answered questions for another hour, then talked to individuals who gathered around her.

That week, when I met people on the street who’d heard Rosa Parks speak, we agreed: “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world.”

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She was a civil rights activist in the 1960s and lives in Paonia, Colorado.

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After a handful of religious men (and one woman, Amy Coney Barrett) stripped women of the 49-year-old right to decide what to do with their own bodies, it was clear: If you were a woman, your body was no longer your own.

Ironically, in Idaho where I live, the abortion controversy is making it harder for women to have the babies they want. This year the Idaho Legislature defunded research into preventing maternal deaths, and the state also chose not to extend its postpartum Medicaid coverage.

Then in March, the only hospital in the northern Idaho city of Sandpoint announced it would no longer provide obstetrical services. Patients must now drive 46 miles for labor and delivery care. Why? Physicians were leaving the state, the hospital board explained, and recruiting replacements would be “extraordinarily difficult.” 

The board also cited the Idaho Legislature, which had passed bills to criminalize physicians for doing nothing more than providing nationally recognized “standards of care.”

In Idaho, once evidence of a heartbeat is detected in a fetus, abortion is illegal — except in documented instances of rape, incest or to save the mother’s life. A doctor I interviewed told me about a patient in her late second trimester of pregnancy. The fetus was severely malformed and would not survive, she said, and “standard of care” called for aborting this fetus. But Idaho law meant it had to die inside the mother.

Idaho legislators also say that bringing a minor across state lines for an abortion is “trafficking.” The hysteria continues with a new law that allows family members and the father of an aborted fetus to file civil lawsuits against doctors.

There’s also the legal push in courtrooms to bar mifepristone pills that induce safe early abortions. This spring, U.S. Solicitor Gen. Elizabeth Prelogar sent an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to block lower court rulings that had banned the drug.

She noted that the abortion pills have a safety record of more than 20 years, and no federal judge had ever overruled the FDA’s judgment about the safety of a drug. In April, the high court ruled that access to mifepristone may continue while litigants seek to overturn FDA approval.

Another drug used along with mifepristone, misoprostol, has many uses in reproductive health. It’s on the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines. Yet this year, Wyoming banned the use of any medication, including misoprostol, that could be used for abortions.

Days before the law was to take effect, Teton County Judge Melissa Owens blocked it, pending the outcome of a lawsuit. The litigants are also suing to stop Wyoming’s near-total abortion ban, enacted in March. Judge Owens suspended that ban as well and combined the two lawsuits.

Federal law, which requires doctors to treat patients in emergency situations, trumps state law. But a federal investigation reported by the Associated Press, found that two hospitals — Freeman Health System in Joplin, Missouri, and University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City — violated federal law when they refused to provide an emergency abortion to a pregnant woman who was experiencing premature labor.

Doctors said the fetus would not survive and her health was at serious risk, yet they would not abort the fetus because a heartbeat was detected.

But when you look at the ballot box, abortion has fared well, especially in California, Vermont and Michigan, where voters added the right to abortion to their constitutions. A pro-choice judicial candidate won in a landslide in Wisconsin, and the states of Kansas, Kentucky and, most recently, Ohio, saw voters reject measures that could have led to bans.

Then this July 13, the FDA approved Opill, the first daily oral contraceptive available for use in the United States without a prescription. If that option had been available to me as a teen in the 1970s, I would not have had to sneak off for an abortion at age 16.

One thing’s for sure: if men got pregnant, none of this would be happening.

Crista Worthy is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation in the West. She writes in Idaho.

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Fires were also burning by the thousands in Canada, creating a pall of particulate-dense smoke that blotted out views of the Chicago skyline and the Washington Mall. Those fires are expected to burn well into fall.

This hellish aspect lends weight to historian Stephen Pyne’s conclusion that we live now in an age of fire called the “Pyrocene.”

Assembled to combat these blazes is a massive army of wildland firefighters. Some are volunteers, some are prison work crews earning time credited against their sentences. Some are municipal firefighters dispatched to the woods.

Some 11,300 of them are federal firefighters, called “forestry technicians,” who work under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior.

For all of them, it’s exhausting work. Wildland firefighters typically log 16-hour days for weeks at a time, burning 4,000 to 6,000 calories a day while carrying heavy backpacks.

It’s punishing labor and always dangerous. Barely a year has gone by in the last quarter-century that has not seen at least 15 firefighter deaths, the victims not just of flames and smoke but also of heat exhaustion, vehicle accidents, air crashes, falling trees and heart attacks.

Often, they don’t die alone. In June 2013, 19 “Hotshots” burned to death in a horrific Arizona wildfire, the third-greatest loss of wildland firefighters in U.S. history.

Yet despite the hardships and the history, a mandated pay raise in June 2021, spurred by President Joe Biden, brought the minimum wage for federal wildland firefighters up to a mere $15 an hour.

Firefighters of my acquaintance seldom cite money as a motivator for their work. They fight fires in the spirit of public service, while in some rural communities, as a young Apache firefighter told me, “It gives us something to do.”

But firefighters, like everyone else, must shoulder rents and mortgages and groceries, and a paycheck of less than $3,000 a month just doesn’t cut it.

Enter a temporary order from President Biden raising that base pay rate by 50 percent. Put in place in August 2022, and retroactive to the previous October as part of a hotly contested package of infrastructure-funding policies, the pay raise was funded only until September 30, 2023, after which pay for wildland firefighters drops back to 2020 levels.

Wildland firefighters lobbied for Biden’s pay raise to be made permanent but they made few inroads. That was until they finally found an ally in Arizona’s Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Now an independent, Sinema allied with Republican Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Steve Daines of Montana, and Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana to introduce the bipartisan Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act. It would fund permanent pay increases.

By late June of 2023, their bill had passed out of committee by a vote of 10 to 1, the only no vote coming from Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. When it reaches the Senate floor, it will be open to debate and a full vote.

There, however, the politicians are likely to squabble, especially on the House side. Larger issues loom, too, such as the need to revise policy so that forests are better managed to improve the conditions that now foster massive wildfires. Those conditions are the product of a “wise use” regime that saw forests as profitable tree farms and not as living systems The Forest Service also had a decades-long policy of dousing all wildfires as early as possible.

While Washington deliberates, and while a more comprehensive bill compensating wildland firefighters struggles to gain traction, fires continue to burn in the outback. Without a pay raise, federal officials fear, some firefighters will walk away from a risky and insultingly low-paying job.

Wildland firefighters are needed right now, and we need to pay them what they deserve through the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act. They will be needed even more in a future of climbing temperatures and widespread drought causing even more massive wildfires.

We can only hope that we will have the firefighters to confront them.

Gregory McNamee is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is an author and journalist in Tucson.

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The defendant in this criminal case was Robert Paul Keegan, a 50-year-old white man. In November 2020, Keegan was staying at a motel in Ashland, a few miles from my home, because his house had burned down two months earlier in a wildfire.

Keegan, who had complained before about noise at the motel, testified that one night at around 4 a.m. he heard loud music and believed it was coming from the motel parking lot where a Black teenager, Aidan Ellison, was sitting in a parked car.

Ellison, 19, was staying at the motel because he’d also lost his home in the fire. A roommate told police that Ellison had trouble sleeping and had gone outside to sit in her car to avoid keeping her awake.

Keegan admitted that he used profane language in shouting at Ellison, and claimed that Ellison responded in kind.

The motel clerk testified that after Keegan complained, he checked the parking lot, heard no music, and found Ellison to be “very chill” in his car.

Then, while Ellison and the clerk were talking, Keegan entered the parking lot with a gun and confronted Ellison. The clerk, the only eyewitness to these events, testified that he tried to break up their heated argument. The argument only lasted a few minutes because suddenly, Keegan fired, killing Ellison with a single gunshot to the chest.

Keegan at first claimed that Ellison hit him in the face, causing him to fear for his life and to fire in self-defense. But photos taken that night by police showed no evidence of Keegan’s face having been hit, and a medical examiner testified that an autopsy showed no evidence that Ellison had struck anyone.

Killing Ellison was “not a reasonable use of force in this situation,” the prosecutor told the jury.

Faced with overwhelming evidence that a white man had killed a young and unarmed Black man, Keegan’s lawyers crafted their case to appeal to the jury, which was composed only of white people.

Keegan claimed he was frightened by this tall Black person, and his lawyers told the jury that Keegan was being unfairly charged by authorities who felt pressure to be “hyper-vigilant” in a “post-George Floyd world.” The reference was to nationwide protests that followed the police killing of a Black man in Minneapolis in 2020.

After hearing the arguments, the jury found Keegan not guilty of murder — a crime that would have resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years. Instead, the jury found him guilty of manslaughter — a killing that is “committed recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” That crime carries a minimum sentence of 10 years.

The judge in the case applied the minimum sentence plus one additional year each for convictions of unlawful possession of a firearm and reckless endangerment of the motel clerk.

At a community meeting in Ashland last year, Black speakers put the killing of Aidan Ellison in a context they know well. They said that unlike most white people, many people of color live with the constant fear of harassment, discrimination, or even death.

“This is a story we’ve heard again and again, in community after community,” said Nkenge Harmon Johnson, head of the Urban League of Portland. 

“Something that should have been nothing at all turns into a deadly situation, and often it’s for a Black or brown person. They are killed at the hand of someone who thinks they have the right to do it, perhaps very much because of the color of the skin of their victim.”

After Keegan was acquitted of murder, speakers at a protest said that regardless of the trial’s outcome, justice had never been possible for Aidan Ellison, a Black young man who many local residents believe would still be alive today if he’d been white.

“Aidan’s mom will never see her son again,” said Ashland City Councilor Gina DuQuenne. “Aidan will never be a dad. Aidan will never be able to be a grandfather.

“Aidan will never be able to experience life because he is gone, and he’s never coming back.”

Matt Witt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West.He is a writer and photographer in Talent, Oregon.

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They may not know the story of her almost 20-year struggle to win justice for Native Americans from the U.S. government, which for decades botched the management of natural resources owned by individual tribal members.

Yet 13 years ago, Blackfeet Tribal member and banker Elouise Cobell finally won a class-action lawsuit against the government, which settled the case by paying out $3.4 billion to Native American citizens and tribal nations.

The case was one of the largest class-action suits in U.S. history, and the presiding judge issued a blistering judgment against the Department of Interior. He called Interior a “dinosaur” agency that allowed “outright villainy” to persist.

And who was Elouise Cobell, the woman who brought the federal government to its knees? The great-granddaughter of Mountain Chief, a historic leader of the Blackfeet Nation, she was born on November 5, 1945. Her tribal name was Yellow Bird Woman. Seeing a need, she founded the Blackfeet National Bank, the first national bank owned by a tribe on a reservation, and made sure it offered education, ensuring that young people could become financially literate while also encouraging entrepreneurs.

Because she was a banker, she began looking into how the federal government kept failing its trust responsibilities, sending out checks only sporadically and without explanation. She asked basic questions of four different Interior Secretaries — Ken Salazar, Richard Kempthorne, Gale Norton and Bruce Babbitt. She wanted a clear accounting of how much money came into the Federal Government from tribal leases for mining, oil and gas, logging, minerals and grazing.

And what she particularly wanted to know was how royalties were determined for more than 300,000 tribal landowners.

Answers weren’t forthcoming. But she spotted a damning pattern: Native Americans had been systematically cheated for generations. What was worse, she said, was learning that they were still being cheated.

She could not even find any accounts existing before 1972, which led her to call the Interior Department’s management a “forensic mess.” But early on, when she confronted Interior staffers, she said she was told to go away “and learn how to read an account statement.”

Cobell may not have seemed like a firebrand, but she was stubborn. Finally, she told law students at Tufts University in 2010, she became enraged.

“People would come to the bank and tell me, ‘I could do this or that if I could get my money.’” But years passed, “and many people I fought for had passed away.”

At the beginning of what became her long campaign, Cobell said that when she first approached the Federal Government, she assumed she’d certainly “get somebody to listen.”

But writing letters got her nowhere. Traveling to Washington to meet with those in charge also failed, and one Interior Secretary, she said, refused to talk with her at all. After five tribes banded together in an effort to force Senate hearings, they, too, were stymied. Meanwhile, Indigenous people were still being cheated.

It was President Barack Obama and Congress that finally settled her class action suit in 2009, awarding $1.4 billion to the landowners and $1.7 billion to tribal nations, which still uses some of that money to buy back land. The Cobell Scholarship Fund was also created to honor her work as lead plaintiff.

Cobell won many honors before her untimely death at age 65, in 2011, including the Congressional Medal of Honor and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. In the words of Michael Munson, dean of Native American Studies at Montana’s Salish Kootenai College, she was “a warrior woman for American Indian people.”

Besides being a banker, Cobell was also a wife and mother who ran a ranch with her husband, and not least, she was a diehard Elvis fan. In her funeral procession, every car radio was tuned to a station playing Elvis Presley songs.

So, hats off to Elouise Cobell. May she continue to be celebrated as the Native American woman who made the federal government admit its wrongdoing, pay back a portion of what it owed, and finally correct an ongoing injustice.

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. From Montana, Anna Whiting Sorrell contributed to this opinion.

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But now, sadly, Wyoming has agreed to subjugate women. In March, Wyoming’s governor signed a “trigger bill” that would ban abortions in the state five days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which it did June 24.

Around the West, other states including Idaho, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma also passed bills restricting women’s reproductive health soon after the Supreme Court acted. Texas had a tough law that banned virtually all abortions since 2021, although their new law, set to take effect in the next month, introduces even harsher measures — a near-total ban, even after incest and rape.

Fortunately, some Western states recognize the needs of women, and are already being sought out by women seeking abortions who are blocked at home. Colorado passed an act in March giving anyone pregnant the “fundamental right to continue the pregnancy… or to have an abortion.”

Three coastal states, California, Washington and Oregon, said they would be havens for women seeking abortions. In addition, Oregon allotted $15 million to help cover abortion costs even for non-residents.

Corporations are also becoming allies. Apple, Citi, and Yelp adjusted their corporate policies in Texas to include travel for abortions as part of health insurance packages. Lyft and Uber have promised to pay legal fees if their drivers are charged with the crime of “assisting” abortion patients.

Ironically, when Covid-19 was rampant, I often heard Westerners express a common sentiment about getting vaccinated, or not: “It’s my body and my choice.” I almost laughed, as that’s the cry of women who want the choice of becoming a mother, or not.

Before the Supreme Court decision was announced, I began talking to people about their views on access to abortion, and as you would expect, reactions were mixed, though no one I spoke to for this opinion agreed to be quoted by name due to privacy concerns. At a block party, a 22-year-old Jackson man, who self-identified as Hispanic, said he thought of abortion as “one of the worst sins.” Then he surprised me by adding, “But a woman should be able to make that decision.”

At a pizza joint, a fourth-generation Jackson resident I’ve gotten to know, said, “I don’t think the government should have a say about your individual body… The government should be building roads. We don’t believe in big government.”

An Indigenous man in his late 20s said, “Humans should be able to make choices for their own human bodies. Otherwise, we’re going back to slavery.”

Still, I get the sense that many well-intentioned men, trying to be supportive of the women around them, are opting to step back and let women fight this battle. This reticence has started to feel like men are saying, “Not my body, not my problem.” Perhaps our state legislators recognize this reluctance to get involved, thus freeing them to vote against women’s rights.

Sometimes an abortion is unwanted but necessary for a woman’s health. Sometimes an abortion is wanted but will now be illegal. I think whatever a woman decides must be her decision, not a ruling from the out-of-touch Supreme Court or from a male-dominated state legislature.

Five years ago, a friend was forced to travel to a Wyoming clinic to get an abortion after a doctor in Idaho told her that abortion was “wrong.” She was angry, and later when she told her father, he said he was proud of her for “sticking up for herself.”

“It was the best money I’ve ever spent,” my friend told me later. “I wouldn’t be half the person I hope to be without making that decision.”

Men retain control over their bodies, but in too many parts of this country, women no longer can. Deciding whether to bear a child is perhaps the biggest decision in any woman’s life. Controlling and criminalizing a woman’s choice is a tragic mistake.

Rebecca (Bex) Johnson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She works and writes in Jackson, Wyoming.

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A week earlier, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland had ordered her department to remove the derogatory word “squaw” from any place names on federal lands. It means new names are coming for this bay and over 600 other features on public lands across the country.

A year earlier, while working with a local nonprofit, I moderated a Facebook group page about the popular national forest surrounding the bay. The page is a place to trade stories and information. One morning my friend Dave, a local charter boat captain, posted a picture from the bay and commented, “nice place for a name change.” This was before the Biden administration, and Dave was only musing.

Name changes are not uncommon here. In recent years, streets, mountains, and a whole city have adopted Alaska Native names. And in 2015, as he prepared to visit Alaska, then-President Obama issued a famous – and popular – order renaming the state’s highest peak from McKinley to Denali, a nod to the Athabaskan people who have lived here for millennia.

I didn’t think anything of Dave’s comment, but when I checked back later, I saw he’d been dog-piled. Scores of people, mostly men, puffed up their online chests and hurled insults. They cursed, called him a snowflake or far worse, and lamented Alaska’s descent into “wokeness.”

I think I was a weak moderator. I deleted some abusive comments, kicked out a few people, and politely called for civility. But later, when Dave read the comments, he deleted his post and left the group. With that, our page lost a great source of local history and science.

There’s a lot to untangle from this little squall in Alaska’s remote corner of the Internet, including the tenor of today’s culture wars, which normalizes bullying.

Then there’s the word itself. Some commenters schooled Dave on etymology, citing a popular theory that squaw evolved from an Algonquin term meaning “woman.” But it was a selective take. No one mentioned that for centuries the Americanized usage was contemptuous and dehumanizing.

Like any racist slur, the term still causes pain and fuels bias. These things matter, especially when we consider the violence disproportionately inflicted against Indigenous women and girls, an issue still unfamiliar to many. In recent years, tribes, states, and others have identified thousands of unsolved cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls and shown that a mix of bias and jurisdictional issues on tribal lands feeds a disparity in justice.

In response, many Western states, including New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, and Washington have assigned task forces or taken other actions. Congress and both the Biden and Trump administrations have also acted with the 2020 Savannah Act, which improves Justice Department coordination on the issue, and the creation of a new Bureau of Indian Affairs unit for such crimes.

Haaland’s name-change order skips past these specifics and simply states that squaw is a racist term. But she does remind the public of the federal government’s long-standing efforts to wipe racial slurs from place names. In 1962, for instance, efforts began to remove a racist term for African American people. In 1974, the same occurred for a slur against Japanese people that originated in the World War II internment era. And beginning in 1999, state laws in Montana, Oregon, and elsewhere outlawed squaw from place names.

It reveals decades of bipartisan work to remove names that alienate subsets of Americans from their public lands. That long view would have been handy on our Facebook page, where many disparaged Dave’s comment as politically correct faddishness.

Ultimately, a name change won’t solve bigger issues. But at over 600 sites, it will stop a slur and prompt a dialog that’s overdue. That’s true for my local bay too. But even with a new name, it will still be a serene place surrounded by forest and snow-clad mountains, where in late fall you can stand around all day and never see a deer.

Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes from Alaska.

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