McCann - Shadowlands: fear and freedom at the Oregon standoff: a western tale of America in crisis

Praise for Shadowlands

Anthony McCanns Shadowlands is an extraordinary book. The story it tells is compulsively fascinating, and an excellent microcosm by which we might better understand our difficult national history and distressing political moment. But Shadowlands is much more than a compelling, timely tale. By combining journalism, historical research, and profound intellectual reflection, McCann has created an epic exploration of freedom, care, sovereignty, violence, race, nationalism, punishment, social media, nature, and justice. His magnificent prose, ever-questing intellect, wry humor, and uncommon empathy for human and nonhuman forms of life alike make Shadowlands a truly rare and stunning achievement. Maggie Nelson, author of National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts

With empathy, poetry, and a keen, clear-eyed sense of the weirdness of it all, Anthony McCann goes far beyond the cartoon version of the Malheur occupation that we all watched on the news, peeling through the layers of the past to reveal the many battling ghosts and fictions that together create the thing we call America. If you want to understand the tortured longings that have brought us to this perilous juncture, I cant think of a better primer. Shadowlands is an extraordinary achievement, a powerful reckoning with history and all the Big American Words freedom , democracy , sovereignty that echo through the silence and violence of the American West. Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring

A vivid and exciting account of a telling historic event. Arlie Hochschild, author of National Book Award finalist Strangers in Their Own Land

As cable-news programmers and even congressmen find their profit in driving ordinary Americans and right-wing paramilitaries ever closer to civil war, Anthony McCanns provocative, empathetic, and patriotic Shadowlands is our alarm bell in the night. Woody Holton, author of National Book Award finalist Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution

Shadowlands is an extraordinarily thoughtful exploration of division in this country that treats the Malheur standoff for what it was: a reckoning over what kind of country we should, or shouldnt, be living in. Its a testament to Anthony McCann, and to his reporting, that you might not always find yourself standing where you thought you would. Nick Reding, author of Methland: The Death and Life of a Small American Town

What makes Shadowlands exceptional is not only the way it provides a critically informed look at the Oregon standoff and its aftermath, but how it offers a full articulation of the overlapping notions that have gone into generating a variety of western identities. McCann gives these notions their just due, considers them with compassion and care, but doesnt hesitate to reveal all the unexamined contradictions spidering through them. Shadowlands offers a clear exegesis of the accumulated history that has gone into forming the American West and, by extension, America itself. And by doing so, it begins to pry open a whole lot of words too often left unquestioned (or questioned only sloppily) and on which America is based: freedom, property, land, law. Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses and The Wavering Knife

Anthony McCann knows the western past has not vanished; it has just gotten weirder. Shadowlands takes us down a Western rabbit hole where a delusional settler story staged for the internet on sacred Native ground illuminates the United States we now inhabit. This is a classic American story. Richard White, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Railroaded

to my mother, Karen McCann

for the world shapes, for the shapes of the earth

for teaching me to see

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Thing Music

Moongarden

I Your Fate

Father of Noise

Contents

America never was; and it is only if it is utopia

OCTAVIO PAZ

The Boisterous Sea

This book tells a story about American democracy in the midst of one of its many difficult historical moments. Its also a book about common Americans, out in the shadowlands of the republic, demanding, in their different wayssome twisted, some inspiredthat the Beautiful Democratic Words of their nation come true on their terms. Its about unpowerful people insisting that they have power, and that the American public square be a true and meaningful boisterous sea of libertyto borrow the words of one of the nations more optimistic, and troubling, founders. In its pages you will encounter a wide cast of characters: western ranchers, right-wing militia members, armed religious mystics, environmentalists, Native American tribal leaders, defense lawyers, Black Lives Matter protesters, rural political leaders, and others. All these people will be seen contending, in their own ways, with what it means to be American today. Many of them will be seen actively demanding, or taking, a direct share of the elusive popular sovereignty that the idea of our republic has always seemed to promiseand withhold.

The book traces the dramatic 2016 occupation of Oregons Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a group of well-armed and divinely inspired right-wing protesters. It follows this drama, through moments farcical and tragic, from its beginnings in late 2015 in the high desert of remote southeastern Oregon to the dramatic trials of the occupiers in federal court in downtown Portland in late 2016 and early 2017. It ends with the aftermath of those trials. Along the way, the nation also undergoes the long trauma of the 2016 presidential election and its ongoing aftermathan election that found many Americans asking themselves, and each other, what exactly their country was; what, and who, its great power was for; and where, if anywhere, the nation was headed. This book will not answer those questions, but it will tell the story of different ordinary Americans who have taken up these questions and in doing so found moments of possibility, autonomy, and even, in some cases, religious exhilaration in the American public arena.

This is not a simple, edifying tale about finding hope in American democracy; much of what happens here will be disturbing. This book tells a story of Americans reckoning with America and with themselves in a time of many great reckoningsit gets messy and ugly at moments. Some of the ideas and acts of the denizens of these pages, especially of some of the occupiers and their supporters, will seem contradictory, naive, half-baked, dangerous, or even hateful at times, sometimes because they patently are. Still, the book is the tale of a country where the possibility of a truly dynamic popular democracy has not wholly died a quiet death at the hands of corporate money and power, nor been subsumed in the arena-worship of a post-Nixonian, proto-fascist demagogue. Its a story where a vision of civic life remains at the core of human purpose and being. As such, its a story of people whoin very different and at times conflicting idiomscontinue to believe (perhaps delusionally) that the dream of America as a great incubator of liberty might still, in some sense, finally come true. While some of the people who appear in its pages might do otherwise, this book does not stake a claim for the United States as some kind of indispensable country or last best hope, as our leaders regularly like to effuse. The book does, however, regularly, in fleeting glances, note moments when America, as a place and as an idea, still seems plausible, potentially renewable, and maybe even useful.