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Direct Experience in the American West

When news broke that a group of armed militants had seized the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on January 2, 2016, many people around the country grasped for context in order to understand what was happening and why. What they may have found is that the refuge and its surrounding areas of Harney County are spaces in which issues of federal lands, ecosystem conservation, rural economics, libertarian politics, indigenous rights, and human-animal relationships converge in a unique, but not entirely isolated, way in the broader geographic region of the American West. But understanding these convergences at particular sites in more than superficial ways, especially for people not from the rural intermountain west, requires time spent sitting high in the desert mountains or driving down endless dirt roads. It requires listening to locals as they share a sense of place and a careful study of the plants and animals that encode

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