Reporting from Indian Country

Leah Brady making willow-bark thread This article appeared in Indian Country magazine in 2017. For more on topics like this, see my book: American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... C ulture means learning from each other and sharing,” Western Shoshone basketmaker Leah Brady tells me. Nowadays, it also means an intimate experience of climate change and pollution, as she weaves natural materials—willow, cedar, reeds and more—into baskets. Brady’s Elko, Nevada, home showcases her award-winning work and that of other artisans—several generations of her family and additional makers from Northern Paiute, Goshute and other area tribes. The items' materials evoke the millennia-old relationship between Native people and their rugged desert and mountain homeland . That world is changing in ways that Brady and other local crafts makers observe first-hand. She shows me how she creates willow-bark thread—biting down on one end of a willow branch to steady it and pulling of

This article was published by  Rural America In These Times in 2017. For more on topics like this, see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle.... Bullets fragmenting in National Park Service test. O nce politicians promised a chicken in every pot. Not anymore. The Trump administration is promising Americans lead poisoning in every bloodstream—human and animal. This is despite the nation long banning lead in paint, water pipes and gasoline. Lead poisoning created tragic damage to human health and a national scandal in Flint, Michigan. How soon we forget. As I recently reported in  Rural America In These Times, on Ryan Zinke’s first day in office as Secretary of the Interior, he  rescinded restrictions on use of lead-based ammunition and fishing-line sinkers on lands managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Though the restriction was limited (phasing out the toxin on just certain federal lands by 2022), the NRA predictably described it as “an attack

Accidental release from 1970 underground test. This article appeared on Rural America In These Times in 2017. For more on topics like this, see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle... K im Jong-un can relax! We’ve already nuked ourselves! A lot! The Nobel Committee’s announcement that the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has received this year’s Peace Prize has thrown a spotlight on U.S. nuclear policy. Nearly 1,000 nuclear devices have been detonated above and below ground at the Nevada Test Site since it was established in 1951. As I recently reported in  Rural America In These Times,  this makes the Western Shoshone, within whose treaty lands the site lies—and by extension, the rest of us—arguably the most bombed nation on earth. And now, the Trump administration wants to ramp up the radioactive poisons in the area. In June, Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry suggested using the test site, now called the Nevada National