Meet our Guests: Jon Christensen

Jon Christensen

Environmental Historian (UCLA), Journalist

Sand to Snow National Monument, CA

11/12/2021

As a long-time journalist covering the West, Jon Christensen has long reported on and taught about the West’s most archetypal quality: conflict. Whether it’s early settler conflicts, public lands extremism, the rural-urban divide, water wars, or recent megafires, the West has long appeared in media as the American region of crisis.

To challenge the historical conflict-mythos, Jon strives to forefront stories that upend it. To provide the Westies with an example, Jon played his feature-length documentary “Politics and the Environment of the New West,” a depiction of former Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s career. Harry Reid legislated numerous, often collaborative conservation decisions in Nevada, satisfying many, but not all, ranchers, hunters, environmentalists, farmers, and corporations. Portraying Senator Reid as a champion of grassroots representation and bipartisanship, Jon highlighted a rarely heard-of occurrence in today’s politically polarizing climate. He then encouraged Westies to do the same: dig into their collection of field experiences and help create a new, inspiring narrative of the West.

By Fielding Schaefer

Meet our Guests: Antonia Morales

Antonia Morales

Grassroots Activist

El Paso, Texas

11/3/21

Under an eminent domain claim, the city of El Paso has plans to raze a neighborhood and build a sports stadium. The neighborhood, Durangito, is the oldest in the city. The apartment of Antonia Morales, affectionately known as Toñita, is one such building.

      When 92-year-old Toñita moved into her Durangito apartment in 1967, the neighborhood was in a state of economic collapse. Prostitution, robbery, and drugs were the avenues of survival for many of its denizens, until Toñita stepped in as what historian David Romo calls “the real leader of the struggle to save Durangito.” Toñita worked tirelessly to help bring economic security to the neighborhood. Now stadium development is undoing the efforts of her struggle.

While the developers claim the stadium will bring in revenue, Toñita knows better. The same was said of the baseball stadium across town, yet hardly any of its revenue returned to serve the surrounding community.

When in 2016 developers began buying out residents of Durangito en masse, Toñita refused. They threatened to cut her water and power if she didn’t accept their offer of $14,000, she told them to go ahead, she wasn’t leaving.

Recently, Toñita’s act of resistance was documented and circulated on media outlets. With widespread support and visibility, the city cannot make her go quietly. And go she won’t. “I’ve never stopped fighting,” Toñita says. “My life has always been about struggle and fight. And that’s why I’m struggling to save this community.”

By Nicki Caddell

Meet our Guests: Adriana Lopez

Adriana Lopez

Musician and Educator

El Paso, TX

11/3/21

     Adri Lopez’s powerful voice resounds throughout the city of El Paso. A musician and educator, Adri uses her vocal talent to fight for what she believes in: protecting culture and history in El Paso while spreading el cariño—a word with no direct English translation that refers to a special kind of love with tenderness, something that Adri feels is unique to El Paso and Juárez, its sister city directly across the Mexico border.

     Adri was born and raised in El Paso and has made her way back home after a decade away. In her time away from her home city she heard many narratives about El Paso that weren’t true to her experience. Wanting to correct these false conceptions, she gained an understanding and appreciation for the rich stories and history of El Paso. This experience brought her home—to the place where she feels el cariño.

     Led by her passion for writing, poetry, and especially music, Adri uses her talents to fight. Duranguito, El Paso’s oldest neighborhood is under threat by developers and the city council to be demolished to make space for a new stadium. Adri sees the importance of this place, for its historical value as the oldest part of the city, but also for the diversity of culture that it holds as a place of border and a first stop for many different groups entering the U.S. In the fight to protect Duranguito, Adri, along with historian David Romo, produces music with messages of revolution. Adri and David’s pieces vary in style, but all fall into the musical traditions of past residents of Duranguito, a nod to the diversity of culture that this place holds and that Adri hopes to preserve.

By Katie Wallace

Video credit: Haley Post

Meet our Guests: David Romo

David Romo

Historian, musician, and author

El Paso, Texas

11/3/21

The streets of El Paso, Texas come alive through the songs and stories of David Romo. Donning black leather and an acoustic-electric guitar, David leads Semester in the West students along grided sidewalks, past colorful murals and beside brick buildings. He tells tales of El Paso’s historic inhabitants—indigenous Mansos and Mexican revolutionaries, Pachuco anarchists and Spanish spies—through the form of narrative melody. For David, music is a force for rebellion. It is a way to impart the unspoken and often repressed stories of those who have shaped what is now U.S.-Mexico borderland.

David grew up traversing the illusive boundary between El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua. He considers himself a fronterizo: a person who moves fluidly between the U.S.-Mexico border. “But,” he laments, “I spent a large part of my life trying to get as far away from both of these cities as possible.” It took four years at Stanford, two-and-a-half in Jerusalem, and five in France before he realized the cultural richness he had been seeking was in his hometown all along. After moving back to El Paso, David began chronicling the Texas city and its Mexican counterpart by blending genres of history, ethnography, and music. His most recent publication, Ringside Seat to a Revolution, uses a method called “psychogeographic” mapping to tell the untold tales of the Mexican Revolution. Today, David uses his voice to fight the industrial development of El Paso’s historic neighborhood, Duranguito. Through art, activism, and history, David reinvigorates old narratives to inspire new passions for the cities of the border. 

By Kate Joss

Meet our Guests: Morgan Moomaw

Morgan Moomaw

Methow Valley Interpretive Center

Twisp, WA

8/27/2021

On a sunny afternoon in the Methow Valley, Morgan Moomaw stands beside a pit house, the traditional dwelling of the Okanagan people, and explains the tribe’s connection to this valley. Morgan is a member of the Okanagan Tribe and works at the Methow Valley Interpretive Center and the accompanying Native Garden, a facility dedicated to reconnecting the tribes of the Methow Valley to their homelands. After helping develop regenerative agriculture projects in Native Hawaiian communities, Morgan was inspired to bring these experiences back home and work to bridge the gap between present day members of the Okanagan Tribe and their ancestral knowledge of plants and the Colville-Okanagan language. In addition to working at the Methow Valley Interpretive Center, Morgan teaches in schools on the Colville Reservation about the language and traditional foods. Educating about the dying language is so important for the Okanagan Tribe because as Morgan describes it, it is “the water to all of our roots.”

Morgan shared about some of the traditional plants used by the Okanagan people, from ts’kwikw (elderberry) used for immune system support, to łexwłáxw (chokecherry) which is mashed into a paste and eaten. She talked about the idea of breaking the word “restoration” into the words “re” and “story:” a reflection of the way she and many other community members are working to return the Tribe’s story to the Methow Valley. She implores all who visit the Methow to feel a connection to the land, walk lightly, and carry an awareness of the people who have been living here since time immemorial.

By Morgan Sharp

Meet our Guests: Rich Wandschneider

Rich Wandschneider

Library Director, Josephy Center for Arts and Culture

Joseph, OR

8/25/2

     In the small town of Joseph Oregon, so named for the famous Nimiipuu (also known as the Nez Perce) leader Chief Joseph, there lives a storyteller. Rich Wandschneider is an animated local historian and Library Director at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture. Rich tells the stories of the Nez Perce tribes who inhabited and still inhabit the West: stories of cultural annihilation, land expropriated from the tribe by white settlers, and promises unkept. These stories aren’t his own, but he explains that when white settlers came to the West, they kept written notes detailing of all their journeys and conquests. With these stories, outreach and extensive research, Rich put together the Nez Perce Treaties and Reservations Exhibit at the Josephy Center. The exhibit includes detailed maps, historic drawings and paintings all to illustrate the impact treaties have had and still have on the Nez Perce tribe. Rich is a steward of Native American history in the West working to share the stories of the Nimiipuu with his community of Joseph, Oregon and all of its visitors.

By Jade Strapart

Meet Our Guests: Gwen Trice

Gwen Trice

Founder and Executive Director, Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center

Joseph, Oregon

8/23/21

     Gwen Trice’s father never told her about being one of the first Black people to live or work in the state of Oregon. During a time when the state’s constitution barred Black people from the entire state, he worked as a logger in Maxville, a small company town in Wallowa County, Oregon. After spending time away from Wallowa County, a hostile environment for Gwen growing up, she learned of her family history and decided to return to save space for people of color, both culturally and literally.

     Gwen is the founder and Executive Director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, a local nonprofit located in Joseph, Oregon, that is dedicated to telling the story of her family and the other families that made up the town of Maxville. The museum showcases artifacts and stories from the residents, but Gwen did not stop there. She channels her seemingly boundless creativity into multiple storytelling ventures including a musical about Maxville performed around Oregon, and multiple documentaries interviewing residents of the town and their decedents.

    Gwen is currently working to rebuild the original administrative building from Maxville to use as an interpretive space to celebrate and share her family’s history while educating visitors about the history of this often-overlooked Black community. Gwen believes in telling these forgotten and erased stories because she wants to give everyone a story, including the people who didn’t know about their histories and those whose voices were lost when Maxville became a ghost town.

By Haley Post