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 Malheur 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 Dorantes.

From the episode:

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 Malheur 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 Dorantes.

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—that would be very much more like a poet’s book about the desert. It was going to be about time, and the intersections  of messianic time and geologic time, and thinking about how the experience of history and images of history reverberated in the desert, so a pretty esoteric, lyrical book. But then that research led me to, given where I lived, a lot of reading about Native American messianic practices, which there is a long history of across the continent–of different messianic religions that were pan-tribal in nature and had a political function of resistance which popped up across the continent as settlement moved west.

The most famous one is the Ghost Dance, which was the final messianic movement and came out of Nevada. The prophet of it was a man named Wovoka, who was a Northern Paiute shaman who had a vision that had elements of many of these messianic movements. And I was really interested in that, particularly in one of the ones that he seems to have borrowed from—because of the elements of that that spoke to some of the things I was interested in about time and the cruelty of our economic order. This is the Dreamer sect from the Columbia Plateau whose prophet was a man named Smohalla who famously preached that his people were not allowed to work or own land because to do so meant they would not be able to dream. He defined hunting and digging for roots and fishing as not work, but he definitely saw owning land individually was the end of their culture and that this would be punished. If people chose to do it, they would be punished when the earth was overturned and made new again.

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 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 one friend, a journalist friend, about how I thought that maybe I should go up there and he told me well you 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 very quickly they had a press conference saying that they were not going to accept this from [the Bundys]—they made jokes about accepting it, but they said ‘we think that you don’t mean us.’ I called and finally got Charlotte [Roderique], the head of the tribe at that point, 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.