Anthony McCann on How a Poet Ended Up Writing About the Oregon Standoff
This week, Julia, Rider, and Tod welcome author Anthony McCann, whose new book is called Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff. It’s an in-depth examination of the occupation of the Malour Wildlife Refuge in 2016 and its subsequent trial. In Literary Disco tradition, they also asked Anthony to recommend a book for them to read, and he chose Style by Dolores Derantes.
From the episode:
Tod Goldberg: Here’s the thing that I’m most fascinated by: plenty of people were obsessed with this when this was happening, so . . . here you are, a poet and a professor living in the desert; what made you decide that you’re going to figure this out?
Anthony McCann: At the time I thought I was writing a very different book—one more like a poet’s book—a book about the desert and the intersection of messianic time and geologic time. I was thinking about history and the image of history reverberated in the desert, so a pretty esoteric, lyrical book. However, that research led me to, given where I lived, a lot of reading about Native American messianic practices, which there is a long history across the continent of different messianic religions that were pan-tribal in nature and had a political function of resistance that popped up across the continent as settlements moved west.
The most famous one is the Ghost Dance, which was the final messianic movement and came out of Nevada. The prophet was a man named Wovoka, who was a northern shaman who had a vision that had many of these messianic movements, and I was really interested in that. Particularly, it was one that it seemed he had borrowed from because of some of the elements that that spoke to me about time and the cruelty of our economic order. This is the dreamer sect from the Columbia Plateau who was a man named Smohalla who famously preached that his people were not allowed to work or own land because to do so would mean they would not be able to dream. He defined hunting and digging for roots as not work, but he definitely saw owning land individually would be the end of their culture. If they chose to do so, they would be punished when the earth was overturned and made new again by the white people called Bostons—there were the British and the French, but Americans were Bostons. The Bostons would be driven out and made new again, and the dead and living would be together.
Nothing creates messianic time like an armed standoff situation where you are literally living the final days and talking about God…
I was really interested in all this stuff and writing about it, and then this thing that happened with this other current of American messianism, the Latter-Day Saint version. The rhetoric coming out of it was very clearly that. Nothing creates messianic time like an armed standoff situation where you are literally living the final days and talking about God, and it was happening in this space where all this religion had come out of. I was talking to a friend, and I thought that I should go up there. I was compelled to go, and a friend told me that I should just go. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could do that, and so I did.
By that point, the leadership of the local Paiute tribe or the Wadatika, as they are called, had gotten involved because Ammon Bundy said he was going to return the land to the rightful owners. So they had this press conference saying that they were not going to accept this from [the Bundys]. I called and finally got Charlotte [Rodrique], the head of the tribe, on the phone and said that I wanted to talk to them about it—about all this history and what was happening—and they said come right up.
