Peace Through Understanding

During my sophomore year of high school, I participated in the People to People Student Ambassador Program which culminated in a three week trip to Europe. Along with approximately 20 other high school students from across the state of Utah, I traveled wide-eyed through the countries of Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and France. Highlights of the trip included the city of Rome, Italian pizza, learning to ride a bike along the tree-lined streets of Vienna (yes, I was 16 – that’s another story for another post), purchasing illegally recorded techno music at a shop in Switzerland, admiring the Mona Lisa in person, and discovering the Frank Popp Ensemble on MTV France.

A gondola tour of Venice with the People to People Ambassador Program. (I’m the one in blue.)

Prior to the trip, we completed fundraising projects and attended informational meetings aimed at teaching us to be conscientious travelers. Here is the first entry in my journal reflecting on the opportunity to travel: “(1/26/2006) My role as a student ambassador is just what (President) Eisenhower said, to ‘promote peace through understanding.’ Basically, it’s my job to help get rid of the ‘ugly American’ stereotype. Most of the world hates Americans, I can help end this one person at a time. The people I meet or encounter with will begin to see how Americans really are when I show interest in them and their country and lifestyle. … To me, this experience means the world. It will be truly amazing. I love to meet people and to learn about people. It will be so cool to go on this amazing trip and see so many beautiful things while making a difference. … I know I’m a lot more than a simple tourist. I’m making a difference, that’s really important to me.”

Proof of the journal.

Whoa! Talk about being an idealist! And being totally self-centered (“It’s my job …”)! This might warrant a brief explanation. The program was created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, apparently with the romantic goal of counteracting cultural misunderstandings that lead to international conflict. The logic follows what travel writer Rick Steves terms Travel as a Political Act: “Rather than accentuate the difference between “us” and “them,” I believe travel should bring us together.” So we were teenagers being inundated with Eisenhower’s dream of “peace through understanding” (even though we did not yet have a full grasp of world history or our place in the world); I’m going to say that’s why this theme came across so heavily in my writing.

Of course, I was still a teenager – a boy-crazed one at that. Consider another entry from my travel journal: “(7/2/2006) … We also went to Versailles. It was a huge castle (sic). I was really impressed by it. Everything was beautiful. There were hot Asian guys there and they asked to take a picture with me. It was so funny, I laughed a lot and then we got a picture. Today was full of laughter.” My trip to Europe certainly broadened my own horizons – I experienced great art and culture and friendship and I explored the inner boundaries of myself; in that sense, it was the essence of a coming of age adventure. But I had little interaction with the people whose countries we traversed in a giant, gas guzzling bus and apparently had dreams of Taco Bell throughout the trip – it’d be hard to say the experience counteracted damaging stereotypes that lead to international conflict on either side of the isle.

Getting our picture taken with “hot Asians” at the Palace of Versailles. (I’m in pink.)

If my little travel journal had been published it might also epitomize writer Debbie Lisle’s central complaint in her book The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing: “Too many travel writers remain unaware of how their work contributes to and encourages the prevailing discursive hegemonies at work in global politics.” In my journal, 16-year-old me is practically regurgitating the limitting rhetoric Americans are fed by mainstream news and politicians about “the world” hating us for our “freedom.” There’s no awareness of the complexities of global interaction or what role travelers can play. Likewise, I wouldn’t fare too well on David Spurr’s checklist for a discourse of resistance: in his book Rhetoric of Empire he says discourse that resists power imbalance constructively deals with problems of language, representation, interest, and other voices. Is it bad that my travel journal didn’t succeed in this regard? No, I was 16 years old and in Europe for the first time!

But would it be wrong if I continued this presentation now? Yes. As I consider my future as a traveler and travel writer, I don’t necessarily want to abandon my youthful optimism for “peace through understanding;” however, I do want to move far beyond this optimism into a place of true understanding, that’s focused not on teaching those Europeans to love Americans, but on teaching myself to love Europeans (and all “foreign” groups I encounter when traveling). In describing his reason for traveling to Iran, Rick Steves says in this YouTube video “I believe it makes sense to know people before you bomb them.” But as Steves’ goes on to describe potential errors of translation between the United States and Iran, I can’t help but think: if we knew them, maybe we wouldn’t need to “bomb them.” Maybe understanding, does in the long run, promote peace.

Best breakfast in Cody!

Chances are slim that I’ll be returning to Europe (or traveling outside the country at all) any time soon, and that’s okay. Lucky for me, I literally live next to one of the world’s top tourist destinations: Yellowstone National Park. In the summer months, the wait time at local restaurants naturally grows longer. Last summer, to avoid starving to frustration at Our Place (a local breakfast diner), my boyfriend and I agreed to sit with a couple from Denmark. They were traveling the states on a route that had taken them from Las Vegas to Cody, WY. Next stop: Yellowstone. Over several giant plates of pancakes, we experienced real connection (and discussed the importance of purchasing bear spray before entering Yellowstone). It wasn’t me laughing at a tourist in another country, but all of us, speaking in broken bits of language and relying on hand gestures to communicate, laughing together at the observations this couple had made regarding their vastly different American destinations. Experiences like this can be common in Cody, WY, and I try not to shy away from them.

A day at Heart Mountain Interpretive Center

 

View of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. (Courtesy Photo)

Half-way between the sparse 30 mile stretch of Wyoming Veterans Memorial Highway (Highway 14A) that takes travelers to and from the small towns of Cody and Powell, a turn north onto Road 19 leads back in time. Visible from the highway, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center brings to life through photographs, artifacts, and oral histories the experience of the Japanese and Japanese American people who during WWII were interned under the shadow of the looming and singular Heart Mountain. While I’ve gone to the Center many times, on June 3, a need to get out of the house combined with cloudy skies and chances of lightening, sent me again to the Center looking for a quiet moment.

I was lucky/smart enough to plan my visit on the day former internee and 2014 Advisor in Residence Eva Nakamura Kuwata was speaking. A native of California and only child of two parents with Japanese ancestry, she was interned in the relocation camp during her early childhood and says “because I was so young, it was kind of an adventure to be here. … For me, it was just part of my life.” Kuwata went on to recount memories of her first time seeing snow in Wyoming, of making friends in camp and joining Brownies, and of both kind people and discrimination she encountered in neighboring communities. When the war ended, Kuwata said her family returned to California, “but we had nothing really to go back to.”

2014 Heart Mountain Interpretive Center Advisor in Residence Eva Kuwata sits in front of the memorial garden with a view of Heart Mountain in the distance. (photos by Heidi Hansen)

“There is a Japanese saying, ‘Shikata Ga Nai,’ this means ‘can’t be helped.’ That is what my parents told me,” Kuwata said. “And I was an only child. No one told me I should ask more questions. My parents took it in stride that we had to go. There was no bitterness. Well, they might have been bitter, but they didn’t show it to me.”

Later, I asked Kuwata why she wanted to come back to Heart Mountain and tell her story of internment. Her answer was simple: “A lady I worked with had never heard of the camps, she didn’t know this had happened. Then when I told her I had been in the camps, she was telling everyone: ‘Eva was in those camps.’” Today, Kuwata is a retired grandmother of two and cancer survivor who regularly attends Japanese folk dancing classes. She characterized returning to Heart Mountain as a “wonderful experience.”

For those present at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center that day, Kuwata’s memories of camp life provided a unique narrative lens into one of our country’s darker historical periods. However, a visit to the Center on any day will discover a rich and detailed multi-narrative approach to storytelling.

A display inside the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center tells the story of a family interned during WWII.

Upon entering, the first display combines newspaper clippings and photographs about the bombing of Pearl Harbor with historical and personal narratives. As you walk through the museum, you learn to look for side-bars labelled “Through my Eyes” that feature diary entries or retellings of camp life as well as placards that highlight the histories of various families who were interned at the camp. David Spurr in his book The Rhetoric of Empire suggests writers in the post-colonial era often attempt to idealize historically oppressed groups in order to compensate for their own continued guilt. He identifies a pattern where tragedy is trivialized in the face of “transcendent human spirit.” This is not so at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. The multi-narrative approach to storytelling resists any simple idealization of the former internees precisely because space is given to so many different voices, and none are the same. (Take a virtual tour of the museum here.)

              

And through these different voices, I learn that people in the camp continued living: they planted gardens and organized sporting events, they went to school and had jobs, they made life-long friendships, some fell in love and got married. But I also learn the interned Japanese and Japanese American people faced tremendous hardships: they were forcibly removed from their homes – their entire lives, they now lived in tiny barracks behind barb wire under the surveillance of armed guards, their basic human rights were fundamentally violated. These aspects are not downplayed in the museum. In that sense, the museum embodies the vow humanitarian writer Laura Flynn made after witnessing the violence of a military coup in Haiti: “repeat the story, don’t measure worth, set down the words that will not rest.” At the Interpretive Center, all stories matter – all stories are told.

In the TED Talk “The danger of a single story,” writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says “Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Through the power of storytelling at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, operations manager Bethany Hamilton Sandvik said one of their goals is to be a place of healing for former internees. But for outsiders, what can the point be? To be the listeners and allies. I leave with a greater appreciation of the fragility of the “freedom” we cherish so much in the West as well as the importance of continued human rights advocacy supporting minority groups who are oppressed today.

Read my interview with anthropologist and Heart Mountain Interpretive Center board member Aura Newlin here.

Diverging views of Heart Mountain

 “He asked me, ‘When I look at Heart Mountain, I’ve always seen the mountain and the area as something beautiful and happy and it makes me feel calm and at peace. What do you see when you look at the mountain?’”

View of Heart Mountain taken from Cedar Mountain in Cody, WY. (photo by Heidi Hansen)

Driving into Cody, WY, one of our most prominent geographic landmarks – the solitary peak of Heart Mountain on the northern horizon – signals that I’m almost home. Once part of the Absaroka Mountain Range nearly 60 miles away, Heart Mountain is a geographic mystery as well as a popular hiking feat for locals. When I look at the mountain I’m reminded of the unique beauty and variation of the Big Horn Basin east of Yellowstone National Park. But the limestone cap of this mountain once cast its shadow over a Japanese-American Internment Camp established during WWII by executive order. During the war, the camp grew to house over 11,000 internees making it the third largest city in Wyoming at the time (by today’s standards, it would still be a big place in Wyoming!). What do today’s Japanese and Japanese American people see when they look at the mountain?

This is a scene of the internment camp in Heart Mountain, WY, during World War II. Painting by Joshiro Miyauchi (1888 – 1984).

The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which sits on the same land where the camp once stood, aims to answer this question. According to their website, “Through photographs, artifacts, oral histories, and interactive exhibits, guests to the Center experience life at Heart Mountain through the eyes of those Japanese and Japanese Americans that were confined here during WWII.” I talked with board member and Northwest College anthropology teacher Aura Newlin (also my friend and Zumba buddy) about the center’s mission and why it matters to tell more than one story about Heart Mountain. Her story of Heart Mountain is both personal – her great-grandparents were interned in the camp – and professional – she shares the story of Heart Mountain at academic and professional conferences and with her students in the classroom.

Aura Newlin and her husband Michael Gould, taken after they moved to from Cleveland to Cody, WY. Courtesy photo.

Below are the highlights from our interview:

On using multiple perspectives in a museum

Me: “What I always take away from the museum – and why it reminded me of what we are talking about in class – is the way the museum draws on stories from former internees to tell the story.”

Aura: “Yes, the museum was very deliberately crafted to be told through the voices of the internees versus a place like Manzanar (National Historic Site) … which is told from a more separate historic perspective, that’s an outsider perspective, and maybe even a government perspective. The museum was very deliberately designed to tell the story from the point of view of the people who lived there.

“… I think they were really careful to tell all of the different stories in the museum. They didn’t want to portray it as only this ugly thing … There is a nice balance there, to show how awful internment was, but also the positive … of how resilient the people were.”

On the value of multiple perspectives

Me: “My basic question is: what happens to our view of a place or people when we hear more multiple stories?”

Aura: “Well what I try and impart to my students … is the whole practice of looking at something from multiple points of view, like hearing something from multiple voices and multiple stories, doesn’t allow you to stereotype anymore. If you look at a people or a place that way, it gets rid of any notion that all of those people are the same, or this place is only like this.

“In Cody, there is a mindset of some people around town who say we don’t need to be talking about the camp at Heart Mountain. They say, ‘The government did the best they could, maybe it was bad, but we just need to move on from it.’ I always wonder if they knew the stories (of Heart Mountain internees) if they might think of it differently. You know, just the other day … I heard someone use the word “Jap.” I was taken aback – I’d never heard someone actually say the word before and he didn’t know I was a “Jap” too. He was talking about how his dad was in Pearl Harbor when the “Japs” bombed it. And I don’t know if he knew it was a derogatory word. But I started thinking, would he be able to stereotype like that if he knew the other sides of the story?”

On how stories diverge

Aura: “One idea we explore at Heart Mountain (Interpretive Center) relates to how we define patriotism by these different and fascinating ways that the Japanese Americans did – or didn’t – serve in the military.

The Heart Mountain Honor Roll honors the former internees who served in the U.S. Armed Forces. (courtesy photo)

“The first strand is those who volunteered … My grandpa was one of the first to volunteer (he was not interned) and a lot of people interned at Heart Mountain volunteered to serve. They were very overtly saying, ‘I’m going to prove my patriotism. My country might think I’m a threat, but here’s my chance to say, I’ve never know anything but this country, I love this country, and I’m going to lay my life down for this country. …’ The second stand is those who were drafted … Most of those who were drafted went. They said, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t have chosen it, but if you want me to go, I’ll go. I’ll show my patriotism.’ My great uncle Clarence Matsumara was drafted (after obtaining leave to attend college) and he served in the all Japanese infantry Unit 442 that was one of the most decorated units in WWII.

“The third strand is those who resisted, the draft resisters. … There were a few from every camp, but at Heart Mountain there were 63 resisters, it was kind of a movement. They said, ‘I’m just as patriotic as anybody else, I want to serve my country. But you have stripped us of our constitutional rights, and until you restore those rights to me and my family – until you set us free – no, I’m not going to fight for you. It goes against my morals and my sense of patriotism.’ There was a mass trial in Cheyenne for these men … they were all sent to federal prison. …

“It becomes impossible to talk about patriotism, or generalize one notion of patriotism, if we consider these three approaches.”

On whose stories get lost

Me: “What do we miss when we learn about Heart Mountain from one perspective?”

Aura: “One of the narratives that I think gets lost when we talk about internment is, well, we often say 120,000 people were put in these camps and 2/3 were American citizens. The ‘citizens’ part is often what grabs people’s attention. They say, ‘What?! We did this to our own citizens?” So what gets lost in framing it that way – not that it’s always a bad way to frame it – is that it was also terrible for the 1/3 who were immigrants. These were people who, many of them wanted to become citizens but there was no way to do that, people that came here through legal routes.”

On the legacy of Heart Mountain

Me: “How do your students react to learning about Heart Mountain?”

Aura: “Its interesting teaching Heart Mountain to my students, a lot of them have no idea that this even went on. I think it comes down to their history teacher … Some students (from the area) say ‘I knew there was this thing out there, but I never knew what it was.’ And students from other states, other countries are like ‘I had no idea.’ I had one student who was from the area, but didn’t know much about the history until he learned about it in my class. He asked me, ‘When I look at Heart Mountain, I’ve always seen the mountain and the area as something beautiful and happy and it makes me feel calm and at peace. What do you see when you look at the mountain?’

“I told him, ‘It makes me feel happy too.’ It’s that I have a fierce sense of pride now when it comes to this place because I’m able to be really actively telling the story. It makes me sad to know that my grandparents – that’s the closest thing for me – that they were kind of spit on and treated horribly. But I feel so happy that I can be part of this now so I can share the museum with people and tell my students about it. It would be sad if we couldn’t tell the story – if I knew this horrible thing happened right here and I couldn’t say anything about it. So it’s a good feeling … It’s a powerful somber thing, but mostly a positive thing because we are telling the story now.”

Read about my visit to Heart Mountain Interpretive Center here.

 

Exploring a double-narrative of Cody, WY

When the summer sets on a tourist destination like Cody, WY – where a good portion of Yellowstone National Park’s 3.1 million annual visitors either enter or leave the park by way of Cody’s “East Gate” – town springs to life; residents like myself become both observers and the ones being observed. Amongst the crowds at our nightly Gunfighters Show or the Cody Nite Rodeo (yes, every night too), it’s not uncommon to hear foreign accents or languages spoken. We put on a good show for the tourists – the restaurants add new specials to the menu, the downtown shops open up after a long winter, the parking lot at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center becomes crowded with tour buses, we celebrate the Fourth of July for the entire week, we host festivals for music lovers, river lovers, bike lovers, and beer lovers.

The Cody Gunfighters perform nightly all summer long in front of the historic Irma Hotel, at the corner of 12th Street and Sheridan. (photo by Eric Silk)

The town’s founder, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody (yes, of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show fame), would certainly be proud of the way we continue his legacy of showmanship, performing the “Wild West” for our visitors right outside his historic Irma Hotel, sometimes performing in very wild ways (read: Man loses nose in bar fight for an idea). In the essay “DissemiNation” scholar Homi Bhabha suggests narratives, or founding myths, are often constructed through a process of arbitrarily interpreted historical events and repeated signification, or performance, until “the people” emerge as one, as a collective, homogenous and standardized. In Cody, our founding myth of “Buffalo Bill,” as well as our repeated performance of that myth and our resistance to new images of the West, leads many visitors to read Cody as a modern “cowboy” town, despite the true diversity of people who have historically lived in the Big Horn Basin or the people who have the privilege of calling this outdoor playground their home today.

Buffalo Bill’s wild west and congress of rough riders of the world. A company of wild west cowboys 1899. (courtesy photo)

What happens if we explode the narrative of Cody – if we forget about the cowboys for a minute to consider the other people, the ones who lived here long before Buffalo Bill was killing buffalos, the ones who inspired Buffalo Bill’s story of the West. Bhabha suggests when we look for the stories of the people at the borderland of history, language, race, and gender, we can discover a “strange cultural survival.”

Sitting Bull and William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. (courtesy photo)

The Plains Indians once roamed Cody and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem freely; the near extinction of buffalo following white settlement in the region eroded their traditional way of life while the creation of reservations like Crow Indian Reservation in Montana and Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming erased their historic ties to the land I now get to call home. And yet, the culture of the Plains Indian people has adapted and changed and ultimately, survived. In conjunction with the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Plains Indian people return to Cody annually for a two-day powwow and competitive dance competition. Various Plains Indian tribes are represented at the powwow, as are various ceremonial, social, and warrior dance traditions.

Each year, my friends and I love to attend this celebration – the food, the colors, the music, and the movement are inspiring. The rhythmic beat and voice of the drum circles and the steady bounce of the dancers’ feet keeps pace as the day inches on and the sun grows hotter. But inevitably, we grow cognizant of our position in the crowd and we find it hard to keep watching, to ignore the uncomfortable sense of the continued relationship of colonization: as writer David Spurr aptly notes in the introduction to his book The Rhetoric of Empire, “the relations of colonizer to colonized have neither remained the same nor have they disappeared.” We ask ourselves, are we right to be here? Is it right to watch?

The answer is not easily found. But what I continually return to is that this event in particular can be seen as an example of the Plains Indian people creating and displaying their own narrative. The curator of the museum belongs to this vibrant culture, as do many of its advisory board members. On their website, Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow, a tribal historian and board member, refers to the museum as “a living, breathing place where more than just Indian objects are on display.” The dancers of the powwow breathe life into the museum – moving it beyond walls and objects – evidencing the resilience of the Plains Indian people and showcasing their contemporary experience.

By including this nascent, but largely ignored, history of the Plains Indian people in the larger narrative of Cody, we can attempt to move beyond a colonial discourse that erases the “other” from our founding myth. As researcher Sheena lyengar suggested in her TED Talk, “Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written.”

Getting lost in Montana

In high school, I loved my geography class, but had a terrible time with the actual “geography” bit. The part where we learned about other places and cultures was endlessly fascinating; the part where I was supposed to look at a map and understand it or remember where things go on the map was a nightmare. Soon the class ended, and it didn’t seem like a matter of much consequence.

Billboard on the way in to town. (photos by Heidi Hansen)

Flash forward seven years: I’m working as a reporting and photography intern in Malta, MT for the Phillips County News and I have no clue how to get out to the bird refuge for my interview with the new biologist. Pulled over on US Highway 2, which runs adjacent to the railroad track known by locals as “the Hi-Line” because it inches across the northern half of the state, I try to remember which side of the track is supposed to signify north and south. Locals tell me the Hi-Line, which has stops every 30 miles, is the reason this town exists – if homesteaders didn’t get off here, they could get off at the next 30-mile mark. This history might illustrate what geographer Joni Seager states in this reading on maps: “Maps don’t just reflect ‘reality,’ they help to create it.” Legend has it, each town got its name by a Great Northern Railway official who would spin a globe and point: he picked out faraway names like Havre, Malta, Glasgow, Zurich, and Harlem and thus the vast prairie bison habitat became the agricultural communities of Havre, Malta, Glasgow, Zurich, and Harlem.

The “Hi-Line”

While the Little Rockies of Northeastern Montana aren’t too far from Malta, they are invisible along high prairie horizon. This is where Montana (the alleged “land of mountains”) gets its nickname: “Big Sky Country.” The Hi-Line is thus the only landmark in the town of less than 2,000 people and the obvious point for mapping. But it also makes directions difficult to follow here. Did they build the town to the north or the south of the railroad? Or wait, does the railroad split Malta along east and west halves? They told me if I drove south out of town I couldn’t miss the refuge, but I’m late, and wherever it is, I’ve missed it.

A flooded field in Malta visible from the Hi-Line. All sky.

Looking back, I wonder at my foolishness. When teachers asked where I would be interning for the summer, I had absent-mindedly responded: “Some placed called Malta – it’s in Montana, I guess.” I was just going – wherever the hell it was. I said I was going because I needed the writing experience; in reality, I was going because I needed to get away from Northern Utah, from the memory of a traumatic relationship, from the dreaded summer at home after three years away at school, now single, now estranged from old friends. I needed to see myself as something else, somewhere else. I couldn’t say any of this because it wasn’t very reporter-ly of me. David Spurr, in his book, The Rhetoric of Empire, characterizes the problem of “reporting” as: “the privilege of inspecting, or examining, or looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation.” In journalism school they spin this differently: the privilege of inspecting provides the necessary distance from a subject to avoid bias. But the weight of the task was restricting, I didn’t want to stand apart from this new place, I wanted – no, desperately needed – to be transformed by place, and wherever Malta was, would do.

Among other things, my internship became an exercise in mapping, and not just geographically along the Hi-Line. Getting my bearings required leaning into this new world. After the botched bird refuge assignment, I was asked to profile a woman named Annie Jefferson for a series on local characters. Everyone in town knew this fiercely feminine woman with Down’s syndrome. She invited me to tag along on her paper route, and she showed me a secret that echoes the famous words of Herman Melville’s Ishmael in Moby-Dick, “It is not down on any map. True places never are.” From Annie’s perspective, I saw all the “ins” of Malta, details that weren’t on any physical map: which houses had the best garage sales, where “cottontails” liked to hide, what bank had the best free treats, who would invite us in for a chat. Annie became a constant presence in my life, regularly stopping into the newspaper and inviting me out for a walk. With Annie’s help, I began making my own map of Malta, complete with the people I enjoyed talking to and my favorite places to photograph.

Annie Jefferson getting ready for her paper route.

Soon other Malta insiders showed me their own maps. Great Plains Dinosaur Museum Paleontologist Sue Frary taught me about the remarkable fossil discoveries of the Judith River Formation that made up the soil under our feet. The most complete dromaeosaurid raptor found in North America (“Julie the Raptor”) belonged to Phillips County. Sue also showed me the “nightlife” of Malta and invited me to cut loose at the VFW Post 4067 anytime. Some locals would lament: there’s more bars than churches in Malta. One grocery store. One fast food restaurant. One movie theater. My boss had mapped the empty lots where buildings burned down and were never been rebuilt, including his own newspaper press – the printing was now outsourced to another Hi-Line town. Many of these lots had remained empty for 20-30 years as the population subtly declined from a high of 2,367 residents in 1980 to 1,997 in 2010. As long as people moved away, there wasn’t much need to rebuild what was lost.

Outsiders also wanted to show me their maps of Malta. The Denver-based nonprofit group EcoFlight took myself and a group of journalists on a bird’s eye tour of the nearby Bitter Creek Wilderness Study Area where a new land management plan was being considered and stirring controversy. Likewise, the Bozeman-based nonprofit American Prairie Reserve invited me to campout for an overnight “bioblitz” on their nearby private conservation ranch where bison had been reintroduced. The goal was to bring in scientists and interested amateurs together to inventory the biodiversity of plant and animal life on the ranch which was slowly being returned to a more natural prairie state. I stayed up late into the night with a group of giddy biology students looking for bats. They caught two. Locals were leary about what those weird conservations were doing setting up a yurt camp for more outsiders, but the experience broadened my view of what it means to co-exist, not just with each other, but with the environment.

Bird’s eye view of the Milk River heading into the Bitter Creek Wilderness Area.

Kids enjoying the discovery of a rattlesnake on the American Prairie Reserve.

These experiences with local people and organizations showed me there is more than one way to map a place – and once I connected people and animals and habitat preservation with the lines on the map, it was a lot easier to read. In this way, my journey in Malta, MT also became what writer Casey Blanton describes as “the interplay between ‘observer’ and ‘observed.’” My role as a reporter in Malta was sensitive. I wanted to bring these loving people a warm reflection of themselves while treading the line of complex conservation issues and small town agriculture-based life. At the end of three months, I emerged to head home: not totally transformed, but lighter.

 

 

Developing a travel writing persona

My mom wants me to write a book about my family’s (mis)adventures in the event known as summer vacation. Over the course of 35 years of family travel with six children, the material is pretty good: the Suburban breaks down in Palm Springs five years in a row; the discovery that your small child has led his counsins onto a cliff at the beach; that time the boat sank during a storm at Bear Lake; that other time Jake forgot to secure the boat to the trailer and it sailed down the road; the year the top of the tent camper blew away – I think the same year our dog Sissy got sprayed by a skunk several nights in a row and fellow campers donated cans of tomato sauce to the cause; and then there’s the trip to Death Valley – that speaks for itself, right? I tell Mom I’ll write it someday ….

The tent-camper, pre-destruction.

The truth is, I’m not sure what kind of story it would be – a travel book? Or would it be on par with National Lampoon’s Vacation? A kind of real-life counterpart to the Griswold’s?

In my mind, travel writing is this fantasized, yet undefinable thing. Asked to consider what my idea of travel writing is, three categories come to mind first: 1) literature I studied in school such as Hendry David Thoreau’s Walden, 2) the modern travel television series, e.g. Anthony Bordain’s “Parts Unknown,” and 3) guide books and websites. This despite my favorite books in the last year having both been travel memoirs: Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground (about the years she spent sheep herding in Wyoming) and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (about her childhood in Africa).

The problem, I think, is that even when travel writing is discussed as a literary genre, the parameters fall apart and it becomes impossible to contain. Does Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction count as travel writing? Was John Howard Griffin “traveling” when he wrote Black Like Me? In the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Joan Paul Rubies states, “Travel writing, the varied body of writing that takes travel as an essential condition of its production, appears in so many forms that it is best defined in its plurality.” Rubies does however go on to contend that ethnography, or the description of people and culture – though not always present – is often an important part of travel writing. Tracking the history of the genre from commissioned travel reports to the later travel journals and memoirs, Rubies writes: “Significant changes (in travel writing) had less to do with ‘what to describe’ (ethnography) than with emphasis of interpretation and the emergence of newly dominant scientific concepts and ideological paradigms.”

Today anyone, by virtue of a place to go and an internet connection, can become a travel writer. I’ve always kept a travel journal, and in my career as a staff newspaper reporter, even written some “travel” pieces – and yet, I’m hesitant to claim the title for myself. If travel writing is “best defined in its plurality,” one question looms large in my mind: What kind of travel writer do I want to be? And what will my parameters be? Steve Clark, in his Introduction to Travel Writing and Empire, concludes that travel is inherently “one-way” because “Europeans mapped the world rather than the world mapping them.” How will I responsibly navigate such a world? How will I represent place and people without objectifying them?

This blog will be an exercise in understanding the implications of these questions through the practice of travel writing. I won’t promise to share funny family travel stories just yet, but I will promise to share my own stories of travel and how they have – or haven’t – impacted me. Anthropologist James Clifford in his book Routes suggests a metaphor for travel as comparison cultural study of “travelling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-travelling” can help us move closer to transparent writing – in other words, he says it matters to include the conditions of travel as well as the observations. My experience of where I came from, how I got there, and how I will return influence (and even create) my observations – the difference of one place exists by virtue of comparison to another place.

With this as a jumping off point, I’m reminded of Catherine Watson’s essay “Where the Roads Diverged” (included in the 2008 Best American Travel Writing series); through travel she discovers home: “By the time I got to the South Pacific … I’d been looking for home all my life—for the place I really belonged, the place where I should have been born. I felt I’d found it on Easter Island …” Unlike Watson, I’ve always felt my roots were rightly planted in the West. As a child, I explored the West from the window of parent’s minivan (often amidst fights over whose feet were touching me!). As an adult, I explore the West on my own two feet from a base camp of Cody, WY at the east gate to Yellowstone National Park. Therefore, this blog will emphasize an exploration of the character of the West and as well as the potential problems of that characterization, i.e. where does the story diverge? who is marginalized in the West?

Hiking Sheep Mountain on the North Fork on a warm day in January, 2013. (photo by Eric Silk)

“The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.” — Henry David Thoreau