Search Results for: The American Scholar

Won’t You Be My Neighbor: An Anti-Hate Pop Culture Syllabus

Sony Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 | 8 minutes (2,156 words)

The closing fight scene of the 1988 martial arts movie Bloodsport has the Muscles from Brussels (Jean-Claude Van Damme) growling prehistorically, flexing his pecs, and kicking like Nureyev as he beats his Asian opponent while blinded by dust. A bottle blond cheers from the stands at this homoerotic display of outdated, pumped-up white masculinity and, surprisingly, it’s not Donald Trump. This corny alpha-male fantasy, one of the president’s favorite movies, is loosely based on the life of U.S. marine Frank Dux, who — fittingly — made it all up. Trump watched Bloodsport on his private jet because of course he did. Apparently, he fast-forwarded to the action scenes because of course he did. It’s since been spliced into a video game because of course, of course, of course.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace,” said the Bloodsport fan-in-chief after two mass shootings earlier this month. “Cultural change is hard, but each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life.” In case you inadvertently bought that, remember the guy reading those words has based his popularity on denigrating virtually every human life that is not his own. Because Trump appears to continue to reside in the ’80s, it makes sense that he never got (read?) the memo that studies have failed over the past three decades to show that popular culture incites violence. But even a stopped clock is on point twice a day and as much as it pains me to say, Trump is inadvertently semicorrect: We do need a change. Certainly, individual games or movies or shows or songs don’t have the power to pull a trigger, but put all of them together and it’s a slightly different story. Popular culture has been defined predominantly by the white patriarchal society that also formed Trump, and all too often shares his xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny. It established an assumption in which, while it may be frowned upon to shoot a movie theater full of people, it is also a man’s God-given right to bear arms, to dominate, to express himself with violence. So, sure, find comfort in the fact that including two accused rapists in a major international film festival will be unlikely to directly cause another man to behave the same way; perhaps less comforting is the realization that this perpetuates a climate in which it wouldn’t be so bad if he did.

Earlier this year, race scholar Ibram X. Kendi published two antiracist syllabi, one of which included a sprawling list of books “to help America transcend its racist heritage.” He cited titles like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Langston Hughes’s The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, works “that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that ‘I’m not racist’ is a slogan of denial.” (This month sees the publication of Kendi’s third book, How to Be an Antiracist.) His argument is that it is not enough to just claim you are not racist, you have to actively oppose racism. That gave me the idea of a syllabus for pop culture that is anti-hate: that doesn’t merely claim it doesn’t hate, but actively opposes it. These are the works — the movies, television, music — that don’t just offer representations beyond white male dominance but actively foster community and inclusivity, that normalize forms of gender and sexuality that don’t conform to tradition, that make space for anger while providing alternatives to its violent expression against the other. Individual shows or albums can’t kill or save us, but a critical mass either way shapes our cultural foundation.   

* * *

In the wake of last year’s Toronto van attack, I wrote in Hazlitt about how Mister Rogers imbued children’s programming with empathy — initially in the ’60s in Canada — by making feelings “mentionable and manageable.” The underlying mission of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was to encourage a sense of attachment and the idea that not only were the kids who watched cared for, but that they should care for others too. His was a guide to self-actualization within the context of community. As Karen Vander Ven, a psychology professor who went to school with Rogers, explained to me at the time, “When you don’t feel strongly attached then you try to find another way to be significant which is often to take the upper hand.” While there isn’t a strict profile for shooters, this is part of the primordial stew out of which they tend to form their pinhole worldview, which leads to some of them lashing out violently, often against women and people of color.

These men are the fullest expression of a cultural (and political) landscape we created, an extreme form of the everyday violence — from catcalls in the street to racial disparity in executive suites — that owes its normalization to this toxic marinade. The attackers at Dayton and Isla Vista and Toronto were misogynists, while the shooters at Poway, El Paso, Christchurch, Pittsburgh, and Charleston were racists, too. The reigning narrative of our time is the godlike hero, usually white, usually male, the embodiment of antiquated machismo, trouncing his enemies alone according to a combat-and-conquer plot, his personality and his emotions only significant insofar as they feed his weapon-fueled revenge. This is a story of male dominance, of white supremacy, of raging violence, told again and again and again. And this is the story of mass shootings. The hero wins the recognition he has always craved by emulating his chosen gods, men like him who use real guns to kill the real people they take for the fictional enemies inside their heads. Men who come from a place where the number one film of the year (so far) is Avengers: Endgame, which touts toothless representation while failing spectacularly to go beyond standard-issue good and evil. 

The stories we need, the ones that promote inclusivity, have begun to arrive — they’re just less pervasive. Though it made significantly less at the box office, last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the rare anti-hate superhero movie. The electrifying animation revolves around a 13-year-old superhero, Miles Morales, with a black father and a Hispanic mother, who is unsure of how to get a hold of who he is. This is a story that supplants a fictional moralistic binary with a more realistic take on the elasticity of identity. It shows how family and friends — in this case, a bunch of misplaced Spider-Men from parallel universes — form who we are, but also how the strength we pull from them allows us to create our own narratives, making us more valuable to our community and vice versa. “I’m Spider-Man,” Miles says, “and I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot.” Outside the world of genre, the storyline is reminiscent of GLOW, the Netflix series based on a group of real women wrestlers from the ’80s. This motley crew of various races, classes, and sexualities — and in one case, species — establish a loving community nonetheless. The violent torching of a drag show that happens toward the end of the latest season — “Die Fags Die,” reads the graffiti left behind — is a counterpoint to the safe space that the women provide for one another to self-actualize and that the drag community itself offers to Sheila the She-Wolf, who ultimately becomes closer to the group after throwing her disguise into the fire: “It was getting in my way.”

That sort of collective boost is reminiscent of the Tik Tok community that danced their Wranglers off to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” The viral country rap star was rejected by Billboard’s 75-year-old country chart — because it did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music” — only to have his twangy hip-hop tune become the longest running No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single after a bunch of suburban kids turned it into a meme. What must it be like for a fan of country radio to hear a gay black man, side by side with Billy Ray Cyrus, doing it better? Earlier this year fans also assembled online after Netflix canceled One Day at a Time, one of the rare series to explore the complexity of being Latinx, which, considering the administration’s continued dehumanization of Hispanic immigrants, was a definite choice. “There’s so many people that the story resonates with,” cocreator and showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett told Vanity Fair last year, “about just being the ‘other.’” (CBS’s Pop channel eventually picked it up for 2020.) A growing number of black filmmakers has also been laying bare America’s history of white supremacy, from Jordan Peele’s social thrillers about the many ways the black community has been marginalized to Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America on the many ways they fought back. Meanwhile, Donald Glover’s “This Is America” single and his series Atlanta, play on the absurdity of your own home rejecting you. The FX series subverts tropes around black fatherhood, which, despite the main character’s shortcomings, constantly has him striving to provide for his daughter. 

A more fully formed expression of anti-hate masculinity is Shoplifters, one of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s many films about the various configurations a family can take. The husband in a poor household of six provides all the support he can — through shoplifting, but still — without claiming dominance, without being cold or sexist or violent. He chooses instead to be emotionally available, reinforcing the harmony the adults scrounge together, and setting an example for the kids despite also teaching them how to steal. As Kore-eda told the BFI, “Crime is something that we, as a society, own collectively; I think it’s something we need to reclaim and accept as our responsibility, rather than the individual’s.”

* * *

“Don’t send in a man to do a woman’s job” is the kind of cheesy line I would expect to hear in a remake of Bloodsport (which is apparently happening). But it does make sense that if you want pop culture to be anti-hate, that if hate has notoriously been embodied by white men, you go to the women. And it’s true, the women have been kicking ass in a way that Van Damme could only dream of. From Phoebe Waller-Bridge dismantling the power of the self in Fleabag to Janelle Monáe fucking up sex with Dirty Computer so much so that sexism can’t even get a handle on it anymore to Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, cocreators of Pen15, using surrealism to expose the most realistic depiction of racism a coming-of-age show has ever seen to Charlotte Madelon’s The Rose Garden, a zen antidote to first-person shooter video games that softly encourages you to wind down instead of loading up. And then there’s Rebecca Sugar, who rolls all of this anti-hate into one for the children like a latter day Mister Rogers. Steven Universe, the first animated series created by a woman, has been coined the “most empathetic cartoon” ever made. Miss Sugar’s Cartoon Network series dismantles the idea of the lone powerful white male hero before it has the chance to take root, replacing it with an open universe that lets everybody in, including actual aliens. “We need to let children know that they belong in this world,” she told Entertainment Weekly last year. “You can’t wait to tell them that until after they grow up or the damage will be done.”

The Anti-Hate Pop Culture List

Movies
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)
Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, 2016)
Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018)
Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
(Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018)
Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, 2018)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Television
Atlanta (FX)
The Chi (Showtime)
Derry Girls (Netflix)
Fleabag (Amazon)
GLOW (Netflix)
The Good Place (NBC)
One Day at a Time (Pop/CBS)
Pen15 (Hulu)
Pose (FX)
Queer Eye (Netflix)
Russian Doll (Netflix)
Steven Universe (Cartoon Network)

Music
Against Me!, Shape Shift With Me (2016)
Björk, Cornucopia (2019)
Childish Gambino, “This Is America” (2018)
Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (2018)
Kendrick Lamar, Damn (2017)
Lana Del Rey, “Looking for America” (2019)
Lido Pimienta, La Papessa (2016)
Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road” (2018)
Lizzo, Cuz I Love You (2019)
Michael Marshall, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (2019)
A Tribe Called Red, We Are the Halluci Nation (2016)

Games
Celeste
(Linux, Mac OS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One)
Don’t Starve Together (Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox )
My Child Lebensborn (Android, iOS)
Please Knock on My Door (Windows)
The Rose Garden (Google Play)
Stardew Valley (Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox)
Super Mario Party (Switch)

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: ‘The Basket Isn’t a Metaphor, It’s an Example’

Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Colin Dickey | Longreads | August 2019 | 21 minutes (5,681 words)

 

The question of “craft” is central to the new anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. It’s there in the title itself, with its emphasis on shapes and shaping, but beyond that, throughout the anthology there is a recurrent interest in the question of craft and crafting, both in the sense of the writers’ craft and in the relationship between writing and other kinds of crafts.

In early June I reached out to Washuta and Warburton about doing an interview with them about the book. In the conversation that follows, we talked about the form and style of the twenty-seven essays that make up the book, as well as how European and non-Native attitudes towards literature and craft can hamstring an understanding of Native storytelling and writing.

Among other things, we discussed the idea of the basket as a figure for the essay — the book is organized around four sections, each of which takes its name from a term related to basket weaving: “technique” (for craft essays), “coiling” (for essays that “appear seamless”), “plaiting” (for “fragmented essays with a single source”), and, finally, “twining” (for essays that “bring together material from different sources”).

But in Shapes of Native Nonfiction, the basket is not only a metaphor; as Warburton notes below, is also often intimately related to storytelling and genealogy. Throughout our conversation, we returned again and again to a distinction between metaphor and literal meaning. It’s a distinction that in non-Native writing informs a long-standing and durable binary, but is for many of the writers here, a binary that’s not only unproductive but actively reductive.

This is only one of the various binaries that these essays break down or reconfigure. The twenty-two writers featured in Shapes of Native Nonfiction present a wide range of approaches, each one both sui generis and part of a long, interwoven tradition. In what follows, Washuta and Warburton discuss how the book came to be, how they arranged it, and how the various pieces in the anthology connect with one another. Read more…

An Ocean Away From the Sanctuary of Manhattan, Signs of Peaceful Coexistence

Photo by Jon Tyson, Photo Illustration by Homestead

Candy Schulman | Longreads | July 2019 | 10 minutes (2,622 words)

I could practically see Morocco from Frigiliana, where I was feasting on tapas in an Andalusian hill town known as a Pueblo Blanco. I was puzzled by the label on a bottle of La Axarca Malagueña, a locally crafted beer. Aligned in one row was a Jewish star, a Christian cross, and a Muslim crescent.

I asked the owner of this tiny restaurant, an expat from the Netherlands who taught kundalini yoga on a nearby beach, to translate the label’s contents.

“Every August we host the Festival de las Tres Culturas, she explained. “We celebrate the coexistence of all three cultures and traditions.” She boasted that Frigiliana’s population of 3,000 swells to 35,000, with food, music, and dancing.

I wondered if Spanish festivals celebrating peaceful coexistence were rooted in guilt for the past, or hope for the future. As a native New Yorker, I strolled through one of the largest melting pots in the world every time I left my apartment. Three cultures and traditions? That was nothing compared to the range of skin colors and mellifluous languages on just one E train subway car from Manhattan to Queens; one-third of the borough’s residents were born outside of the United States, hailing from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, India, China, Jamaica, Mexico, Italy, and other countries.
Read more…

A Minor Figure

Ada Overton Walker, 1912. (Library of Congress)

Saidiya Hartman | An excerpt adapted from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval | W. W. Norton & Co. | 25 minutes (6,922 words)

The small naked figure reclines on the arabesque sofa. Looking at the photograph, it is easy to mistake her for some other Negress, lump her with all the delinquent girls working Lombard Street and Middle Alley, lose sight of her among the surplus colored women in the city, condemn and pity the child whore. Everyone has a different story to share. Fragments of her life are woven with the stories of girls resembling her and girls nothing like her, stories held together by longing, betrayal, lies, and disappointment. The newspaper article confuses her with another girl, gets her name wrong. Photographs of the tenement where she lives regularly appear in the police briefs and the charity reports, but you can barely see her, peering out of the third-floor window. The caption makes no mention of her, noting only the moral hazard of the one-room kitchenette, the foul condition of the toilets, and the noise of the airshaft. The photograph taken of her in the attic studio is the one that is most familiar; it is how the world still remembers her. Had her name been scribbled on the back of the albumen print, there would be at least one fact I could convey with a measure of certainty, one detail that I would not have to guess, one less obstacle in retracing the girl’s path through the streets of the city. Had the photographer or one of the young men assisting him in the studio recorded her name, I might have been able to find her in the 1900 census, or discover if she ever resided at the Shelter for Colored Orphans, or danced on the stage of the Lafayette Theatre, or if she ended up at the Magdalene House when there was nowhere else to go.

Her friends refused to tell the authorities anything; but even they didn’t know how she arrived at the house on the outskirts of the Seventh Ward, or what happened in the studio that afternoon. The Irish housekeeper thought she was the black cook, Old Margaret’s, niece, and, neglecting her work as they were wont to do had wandered from the kitchen to the studio. Old Margaret, no kin to the girl, believed that Mr. Eakins had lured her to the attic with the promise of a few coins, but never said what she feared. The social worker later assigned to the girl’s case never saw the photograph. She blamed the girl’s mother and the slum for all the terrible things that happened and filled in the blanks on the personal history form, never listening for any other answer. Age of first sexual offense was the only question without certain reply.

From these bits and pieces, it has been difficult to know where to begin or even what to call her. The fiction of a proper name would evade the dilemma, not resolve it. It would only postpone the question: Who is she? I suppose I could call her Mattie or Kit or Ethel or Mabel. Any of these names would do and would be the kind of name common to a young colored woman at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are other names reserved for the dark: Sugar Plum, Peaches, Pretty Baby, and Little Bit — names imposed on girls like her that hint at the pleasures afforded by intimate acts performed in rented rooms and dimly lit hallways. And there are the aliases too, the identities slipped on and discarded — a Mrs. quickly affixed to a lover’s name, or one borrowed from a favorite actress to invent a new life, or the protective cover offered by the surname of a maternal grandmother’s dead cousin — all to elude the law, keep your name out of the police register, hold the past at a safe distance, forget what grown men did to girls behind closed doors. The names and the stories rush together. The singular life of this particular girl becomes interwoven with those of other young women who crossed her path, shared her circumstances, danced with her in the chorus, stayed in the room next door in a Harlem tenement, spent sixty days together at the workhouse, and made an errant path through the city. Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Five: The Remnant

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 45 minutes (9,790 words)

Part 5 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPBCatch up on season one of Bundyville here.

I.

Stella Anne Bulla was born in November 1949 in Asheboro, North Carolina to Dorothy Ann Lemon and Brinford Bulla, a man who served in the Navy and worked for the federal government as a postal employee most of his life. Stella — who, at some point, preferred to be called by her middle name, Anne — was one of five children: brothers, Artis, John and Brad, and a sister, Cara. The children were raised devout Southern Baptists, attending church meetings once during the week, and twice on weekends. Anne wanted to grow up one day and live in a place where she could ride horses. 

By high school, Anne adhered to the “higher the hair, the closer to God” school of thought: Where other girls of Grimsley High School smiled with youthful innocence from photos, Anne grinned knowingly, hair teased high and wide into a flipped bouffant. 

Later, Anne met a man named Barry Byrd, and the two married, had a daughter, and moved to Stevens County, Washington in 1973, after Barry got out of the Air Force. He took a job in a Colville body shop — finally starting his own in the tiny town of Northport. The Byrds started a band called Legacy. Anne’s brother, Brad Bulla, joined them, playing mandolin, lead guitar, and banjo along with the Byrds’ vocals. The group released two records: Sons of the Republic and, in 1984, Judah’s Advance — which were sold via mail order by Christian Identity groups as far away as Australia. “Legacy is unique in that their music is designed with the Israel Identity image, and is an excellent way to introduce the subject to thousands of people,” the Australian group wrote in a newsletter. 

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

The Judah’s Advance cover features a drawing of a ship bearing down on a rocky coastline, where a stone tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments sat amongst a pile of rocks that had fallen from the sky. In the center, an American flag — bearing just 13 stars and the number 76 — whips in the wind.

On Judah’s Advance, Dan Henry, the pastor at The Ark — the Christian Identity church where Byrds worshipped, but that has also helped produce violent acolytes — read a line of scripture, and the band thanked him in the credits. The producer for the album, they said, was YAHWEH. 

The back of the album is even more Christian Identity than the front. Alongside a photograph of the grinning musicians, the band lays out its beliefs: “Our forefathers understood that the establishment of this country was the fulfillment of the prophecy concerning the re-gathering of the nation of Israel,” it explains. The savior, the band writes, was a descendant of the “Judahites”, while “the true children of Israel,” after being freed from captivity, migrated westward, settling in “Scotland, Ireland, Britain and every other Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation in the world today.”

It reads like the liner notes to a Christian Identity concept album, and it made Legacy a popular feature on the Christian Identity and white supremacist conference touring circuit. In 1986, the band played the Northwest Freedom Rally in Richland, Washington alongside a bill of racist speakers. And from 1987 to 1989, the group reportedly traveled yearly to Colorado to play Pete Peters’ Rocky Mountain Bible Camps. Peters had been a guest at The Ark and the Aryan Nations, lecturing on the end of the world, and his hatred for Jews and homosexuals.

But Legacy was more than a band providing musical accompaniment to racists: In 1988, Barry Byrd and his brother-in-law and Legacy bandmate, Brad, were two of just 15 men who deliberated for about a week about their beliefs, and authored a document entitled “Remnant Resolves.” 

The document elaborates that the men felt a “spiritual burden”: “This burden was the need and desire to see Biblical principles of government once again established in our nation,” it reads. The men agreed that if they could not come to a consensus on solving that burden, they would not proceed with writing the document.

What comes next are resolutions to fix society for “the remnant” — the way for the chosen people to live in the fullest realization of liberty. Biblical principles should be put into practice at every level of government. The band maintained that in the home, women should be submissive to their husbands. Locally, the civil government should punish evil and protect the good. And at the federal level, taxes need to stop, since you can’t tax what God created. 

“It is blasphemous to regard antichrists as ‘God’s chosen people’ and to allow them to rule over or hold public office in a Christian Nation,” it reads. “Aborticide is murder. Sodomy is a sin against God and Nature. Inter-racial marriage pollutes the integrity of the family. Pornography destroys the purity of the mind of the individual and defiles the conscience of the Nation.” 

At the end, when it was all down on paper, there they are smiling wide for a picture — as if someone had said “say cheese” when they took it — and all fifteen men signed their names. 

A year after the Remnant Resolves, Legacy (now named Watchman) was back on tour, scheduled to play a Santa Rosa, California church affiliated with Dennis Peacocke, a self-described political activist turned leader in the “shepherding movement” — a religious movement in the 1970s and ’80s that involved congregants turning over all personal decisions to a spiritual leader, and has been criticized as cult-like

The Byrds made more than one trip to Peacocke’s church for Fellowship of Christian Leaders (FCL) conferences. During one visit, they stayed with a church host family: the Johnsons. Rick Johnson would eventually move his family north to Marble in the mid-1990s, and still lives there today.

At the time, Johnson’s son Jesse was just a kid, but he still recalls meeting the Byrds. Something about Anne immediately stuck out to him. “She has these piercing blue eyes,” he recalls. “I remember kind of being off put by that and … just by her presence. Because she didn’t smile very much. She was really intense and when she talked to you it was about what you’re doing to have a better relationship with the Lord. And I was, like, 8.

Within a week of living at Marble, Jesse Johnson says he and one of his brothers “made a pact that we were leaving as soon as we were old enough.” 

But back in 1992, when the Byrds were still working on bringing their vision of a “Christian covenant community” to life, people in Stevens County were nervous, citing concern over the couple’s connection with Pete Peters. People called the group cultish; the Byrds made a brochure that said they weren’t “the least bit cultish or isolationist.” In that same brochure, the couple predicted “cataclysmic events.” At a city council meeting, they claimed to their neighbors that they weren’t racist, and didn’t “condone hatred”— in fact, Barry told the Spokesman-Review that they wanted to create a ministry and a working ranch to “take youngsters” of all races in. The couple claimed they’d severed ties with Peters and that their attendance at the Rocky Mountain Bible Camp was only to play music. They didn’t mention the “Remnant Resolves.” Debate about the Byrds and Peters raged for months in the pages of the Colville Statesman-Examiner. 

In May, a Colville man expressed concern in the paper: “We would love to have our fears allayed,” he wrote of the Byrds. “But the trail back to Pete Peters appears to be pretty warm.” 

The Byrds attempted to shoot down a list of rumors they were asked to address by Northport’s mayor at a May 1992 city council meeting. They said they had no relationship with Peters, never held white supremacist beliefs, and concluded that people with concerns should come to Marble. Barry Byrd “advised that reading newspapers was not a worthwhile way of attaining accurate information,” according to a report on the meeting. 

Meanwhile, in nearby North Idaho, Bo Gritz — a former Green Beret who once ran for President, and who famously served as a liaison between federal agents and Randy Weaver at the end of the Ruby Ridge standoff — attempted to create his own Christian covenant community, called “Almost Heaven.” Some said he modeled it after what the Byrds created at Marble.

Paul Glanville, a doctor, liked the idea, too, when he heard it. He brought his family north to Marble in 1992, several years after meeting the Byrds. He was delivering a presentation on low-cost or free medical care at a Christian seminar when he encountered the couple, who were  giving a talk on establishing covenant communities. “They are very charismatic,” Glanville recalls. “I really was interested in this idea of a Christian community where I could practice medicine in what I considered a very Biblical way.”

Once at Marble, he says he enjoyed the close community, the focus on church and family. It felt like his family had moved to the promised land. People would get to church early, chattering with the company of the other people who lived there, hurrying downstairs to stake a claim for the casserole dishes they’d bring each Sunday for a potluck, before rushing up again for church. 

But over time, cracks emerged in the smooth veneer of the Marble promise. Nothing drastic, just small fissures that, over time, built up. In the spring of 1997 Glanville noticed a strangely competitive drive behind — of all things — Marble’s softball teams. He says he felt there was a need to win, to conquer all of the other church teams from the area, as if to prove Marble’s superiority. Glanville sometimes skipped the adult games to watch his kids play softball. Soon after, the leaders called an emergency meeting to chastise anyone who skipped the adult games. Glanville found the suggestion that he watch the Byrds’ team over his own child’s bizarre. 

After a few years, Glanville started to feel that he hadn’t made a covenant with God so much as with the Byrds. “What they mean by ‘covenant’ is total, absolute obedience to the leadership without questioning, and that the leadership eventually has your permission to question you and scrutinize your life in the most invasive ways that you can possibly imagine,” he says. “They might not start that out from the beginning like that, but they will end up that way.”  

From the pulpit, the couple preached about “slander,” about never questioning their leadership, and turning in anyone who did. The Byrds gave sermons about submission, obedience. The word “individual” was sinful — individuality being a sin of pride. 

The church leaders would encourage the families there to turn against their own blood — parents reporting on children, children reporting parents, neighbors against neighbors — if that meant preserving perfection at Marble. 

Glanville says his own children went to Marble’s leadership and told them that he was skeptical of their intentions and teachings. By the summer of 1994, he says, “My kids and wife had been totally brainwashed.” He continues, “They were turning me in to Marble for negative talk.”

But even he didn’t understand how quickly he’d lost them: When he finally decided to leave, Glanville was shocked that his wife and family refused to come with him. “My wife filed for divorce when I left. And my kids basically all signed the divorce papers,” he says. 

“I could do a lot of things in this church,” Barry Byrd said in one 1994 sermon. “I have the authority. I could misuse it. I could manipulate you and intimidate you, which you know, I’m sure we’ve done some of that. Not meaning to, but that’s just part of the deal.”

The pulpit too, was Barry Byrd’s megaphone for talk of a country ruled by Biblical law, of the sins of the government, about the entire reason Marble was here at all.

“We’re fighting for something that much blood has been shed for, beginning [with] the blood of Jesus,” he said. “If the spirit of the Lord does not reign supreme and this book is not the law that governs all of life and living, then there is no peace and there is no liberty!” He spoke of righteous anger and “holy hatred” for those getting in the way of “the government of God.”

Byrd even glorified martyrdom as a way to achieve the church’s goals: “So you see, I don’t have any problem being martyred if I know it’s what God’s called me to. If I know that my blood is going to water the tree of Liberty and build for future generations, I would gladly give my life today.”

Two decades since he left Marble broken-hearted, alone, Glanville still sometimes hears the Byrds’ words in his head, nagging at him, pulling him back to that time, making him question how he could have fallen under the place’s sway. 

His mind goes back to the moments he still blamed himself for not being perfect. Times when Marble convinced him he was the problem, meetings when Barry Byrd stood over him shaking a fist, making him believe he was lucky they were being so patient with him.

“And you could say ‘well why did you put up with that?’” he tells me this spring. “A lot of people who are trying to leave a cult have magical thinking. That if they just could say the right thing, or do the right thing, the leaders will suddenly see the truth and repent and everything will be alright.”

***

Back in 1988, when the Byrds’ band was on tour, Anne Byrd’s own brothers, too, were positioning themselves as chosen ones. 

The Bullas were a family of prophets. It was as if they believed their ears were calibrated to pick up the unique pitch of the Lord’s voice.

Anne’s eldest brother, Art Bulla, at the time, was living in Utah and had converted away from the family’s Southern Baptist roots to his own racist interpretation of Mormonism. He found himself maligned from the mainstream LDS church in the early 1980s when he called himself “the one mighty and strong,” claiming he was receiving revelations. He also expressed his belief in polygamy, but admitted he’d had trouble recruiting women to marry him. He split from the church when it started ordaining blacks. 

Art Bulla, who I reached by phone at his Baja, Mexico home, says he visited his siblings Anne and Brad Bulla, and his brother-in-law Barry, in the early days of their Marble community. And though he says his sister and Barry were still practicing racist Christian Identity beliefs — which he points out he actually agrees with — he thought the couple seemed to be controlling the people who would form Marble. 

“Barry had a very strong personality, and Anne did too, and so they were able to hornswoggle if you will, the gullible,” he says. “I had suspected that Anne had gone too far with the controlling thing.” 

Art Bulla tells me he’s the only prophet in the family — not Anne and not their brother I found who pastes notes that say “God’s only priest” to cutouts of naked women and posts the pictures to Twitter. Art says he is the chosen one. 

“[Anne] always felt that she had to be in competition with me. And since I’m receiving revelations, then she’s got to receive revelations, too,” he says, “You see what I’m saying?” 

***

By the late 1990s, Paul Glanville, the doctor who had come to Marble hoping to bring God into his medical practice, was hardly the only person questioning Marble’s leadership, and the Byrds’ true intentions for the community. According to letters written during this time, between 1997 and 1998 Anne Byrd excommunicated her brother and Legacy bandmate, Brad, and his family. (Requests for comment by Brad Bulla were not returned.) 

The excommunication drew the attention of Jay Grimstead, an evangelical scholar who had briefly lived in the Marble community and become known for pushing dominionism. Grimstead wrote several letters to the Byrds detailing his concern for what he saw as the community’s increasingly authoritarian structure. 

In one letter to Barry and Peacocke, from September 1997, Grimstead wrote that Marble “is a clear, ‘top down’ monarchy that is governed primarily by a queen, ‘Queen Anne,’” he wrote. “The people at Marble live in great fear of displeasing the Byrds, particularly Anne.” 

Grimstead also excoriated Barry for not publicly condemning Christian Identity, which he referred to as “weird, unbiblical stuff.” He was even being told by Marble members that the ideology was still being discussed in 1997. 

In January of the next year, he wrote to Anne and Barry: “Please respond in some way to the letter of grave concern wherein I told you I was receiving an increasing amount of evidence that Marble, under your leadership, was fast becoming an authoritarian cult,” he wrote.  Read more…

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Four: The Preacher and the Politician

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 27 minutes (7,641 words)

Part 4 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB

I.

To get to the Kingdom of Heaven, drive a long twisting road that dips in and out of wide green fields dotted with hay bales, skim alongside a crooked river and stop at the sign that says Marble Country. A wooden ranch gate — a tall archway of timber and American flags — marks the spot. Keep going past it for 20 more minutes and you’ll leave the country altogether; drive under that gate, and in a way, you’ll leave America, too.

For nearly 30 years, speculation about what goes on beyond the threshold to Marble Country has confused, scared, and angered folks here in Stevens County — a far-flung region of thick forests and dirt roads, cow pastures and low hills deep in the northeastern corner of Washington state.

Before the first barn wall could be raised on the site of a ghost town, people were already whispering. “Religious Group Says Fear Of Cult Unjustified,” a 1992 Associated Press headline read, “Pentecostal Sect Plans To Move Into Ghost Town.”

That religious group, led by a married couple named Barry and Anne Byrd, intended to create its very own Western-themed shining city on the hill: what they termed a “Christian covenant community.” They called it Marble Country, and they built houses and a church — Marble Community Fellowship — and painted “Holy Ghost Town” on an old barn. They raised families, planted crops. It wasn’t just a new town put down in an old place, but an old place resurrected. A brochure said Marble would get into all levels of politics, offer alternative civil courts and an alternative media.

 

Keep the characters of Bundyville: The Remnant straight with this character list.

“We are committed to uniting the generations to labor together to bring the dominion of Christ in every area of life,” the Byrds promised in the brochure.

For most of the time Marble Country has existed, the Byrds have hosted an event each summer called the God and Country Celebration. As the Patriot movement has made more and more headlines — between the standoffs at Bundy Ranch in 2014 and Malheur in 2016, and the subsequent trials — the name Marble kept popping up in my reporting. People who’d once been in the movement told me the festival was a gathering of militia bigwigs, Patriot celebrities, and politicians with extreme beliefs. It sounded like some kind of Patriot Woodstock, but it’s closed to the media, so I couldn’t go see it for myself.

In the summer of 2018, Jeanette Finicum was a “special guest” at the festival, bringing with her the message of her murdered, martyred husband. During the weekend, children in cowboy hats and jeans waved big white flags from the Marble stage bearing her husband’s distinct “LV” cattle brand. 

Finicum chose Marble as one of the first places to screen LaVoy: Dead Man Talking, a multipart film about her husband. There she delivered a speech that differed greatly in tone from the one she gave when I saw her speak in Salem, Oregon, just six months later. Someone sent me a recording of her Marble speech: She wasn’t the diminutive chuck-wagon mom I’d seen in Salem, but a pissed-off activist with a message ready for an audience who cheered her on.

“The media is not in the business of telling the truth,” she spat into the microphone. 

The Marble crowd murmured approval — yes, yes, that’s right, amen.

“Their job, their motive, their mission is to create an illusion in order to blur our reality. I was label-lynched by them as a sovereign citizen, anti-government terrorist. Profiled as a domestic right-wing extremist and judged by the American public for standing with my husband,” she said. She told them she was on a watch list. The feds monitored her home.

She never used that word — lynching — when I saw her speak in Salem, but here, both she and Mark Herr, the film’s producer, spoke it as if it were a word created for them. They have been lynched, they told the crowd, again and again. Lynched

The lynch mob, by their estimation, was the media: inflicting extrajudicial punishment to God-fearing freedom lovers. How dare anyone go after them?

“Your political opponents are using labels and the force of government to lynch you out of existence! What can you do?” Finicum asked. “You can make label-lynching a hate crime.” She told the crowd to lobby state legislators to make Patriots a special class. 

“We should be a protected class,” she yelled. “After all, everyone else is!”

To that, the crowd cheered so loud it was almost hard to hear her anymore. 

***

For decades, Stevens County, where Marble Country is located, has served as somewhat of a wooded, mountainous petri dish for conspiracy theories to grow, flourish, and find new hosts. For most of that time, one daily newspaper reporter was there to document the crimes committed by fringe groups who’ve found haven in the Stevens County’s sparsely populated areas. His name is Bill Morlin, and for decades he worked at the Spokane Daily Chronicle, then The Spokesman-Review. Now in his 70s, I first met him in the federal courtroom during the Bundys’ short-lived trial in Las Vegas. 

In the spring of 2019, I called him up to get a crash course on Stevens County’s right-wing extremist history. Something that may come as a surprise to people who aren’t familiar with the Inland Northwest is that the Northwestern United States isn’t all rain showers and mountains and Nirvana records, coffee shops and weed stores on every corner. 

In fact, Eastern Washington and North Idaho couldn’t be less in line with that image. It’s a deeply conservative area of the West. It’s hot and dry in the summer, cold as hell in the winter. In the past few years, some people have started to call this region the American Redoubt — the nickname survivalists and preppers have given Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, arguing that it’s a safe haven for libertarians. The term was popularized by James Wesley Rawles, who calls the people who migrated there for that reason “the remnant. Libertarians and preppers from around the country have been encouraged to make a home here. There are even “redoubt realtors” who’ll sell you a house, complete with a bomb shelter.

I came to talk to Morlin about Stevens County, but also about this region as a whole. He came prepared for our meeting with three pages, single-spaced, detailing various murders, robberies, kidnappings, and bombings committed by people from the county.

You can’t talk about the violent history of Stevens County without first understanding the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group who had a compound in nearby north Idaho — two hours from Stevens County. It was one of the first violent groups in the Pacific Northwest he recalls writing about. Morlin tells me about a 1983 cross-burning ceremony at the Aryan Nations he covered.

In the late 1970s, Richard Butler, who would become one of the most famous white supremacists in the country, had set up the swastika-emblazoned compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho, attracting racists from every corner of the country to the Idaho Panhandle. Butler allowed Morlin and a photographer to document the event, which the newspaper had been trying to cover, as a way of attempting to understand who, exactly, was gathering at the compound. 

“There was sort of a division, like do we pay these people any attention or do we ignore them?” he recalled of his paper’s coverage of cross burnings. “In fact a columnist at the other newspaper thought we were foolish for writing about the fact that there’d been a cross burning. He was of the school of thought that if you ignore them, they’ll go away, and by writing about them all you’re doing is giving them publicity. 

“I have never to this day signed on to that belief system,” Morlin continued. “Neither do major civil rights organizations. They believe that turning the lights on is the only way you can deal with hate groups.”

The cross burning was called the Blessing of the Weapons and was presided over by former Michigan KKK grand dragon Robert Miles. (In 1973, Miles was convicted of conspiring to bomb ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan.) 

“It was very uncomfortable,” Morlin said. As the group of 40 to 50 people lit three crosses wrapped in diesel-soaked burlap, “each person in the circle would walk up with with his weapon … knives or handguns or long rifles. And each of them would be blessed by the master of ceremonies. The ceremony was to signify that these people were committing to the white cause and the fight for the white race that they envisioned was coming any day.”

That night, Morlin didn’t know who exactly all those men were that had their guns blessed in the name of a white war — but soon, he would. They would become known as the Order. It was an all-white underground domestic terrorist organization established by an anti-government extremist and racist named Bob Mathews, who had been actively recruiting people to create a “White American Bastion” in the Pacific Northwest and was motivated, in part, by an extremist ideology called Christian Identity. 

It’s an ideology that relies on the belief that Jews are descendants of Cain, and people of color are soulless and “beasts of the field,” while whites are the true “House of Israel.” Some Identity adherents believe Jews are the spawn of Eve and Satan. Butler, too, preached Christian Identity from his very own church at the compound. Around the nation, neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan also believed in the radical ideology. 

Nationwide, as violent white supremacist fires flared, Christian Identity — time and time again — was the pitch wood making it burn hot and constant.

The men of the Order met at a cabin on Mathews’s Northeastern Washington property which was located in the county next to Stevens County. They “stood in a circle secretly and pledged a blood oath to each other to jointly fight this race war that they believed was coming,” Morlin told me. 

Morlin believes the men were inspired by a work of racist, apocalyptic fiction, a novel called The Turner Diaries that details a race war, and that, later, compelled Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  

According to Morlin, the men at the ceremony eventually committed “a litany” of violent acts, most notably the 1984 assassination of a Jewish radio host named Alan Berg, who’d mocked a tenet of Christian Identity — that Jews were evil incarnate — on his Denver talk show. They committed a robbery in Spokane, bombed a synagogue in Boise, and robbed armored cars in Seattle. But investigators were baffled, unable to figure out who was responsible for so much violence. 

“This is in an era before the term ‘terrorist’ meant anything to anybody. I mean it’s like ‘Domestic terrorism? What’s that?’” Morlin said.

During a Northern California robbery of several million dollars from an armored car, Mathews left a handgun behind — a mistake that would eventually lead to the downfall of the Order. Mathews died in a shoot-out before the group’s 1985 trial in Seattle, which Morlin covered for the Spokesman-Review.

“A lot of the East Coast networks and newspapers had pretty much ignored the fact that the Order trial had occurred,” he says. “It was really a big deal, but it had happened on the West Coast and it didn’t get the news coverage, in my view, that it would have received if it had been in Florida or New York or Ohio or Pennsylvania.”

In fact, the Order created a new legacy for up-and-coming racists to follow: Today, violent white supremacist groups still cite an adherence to a mission statement called “The 14 Words” — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — which was coined by one of the Order’s members. 

The men of the Order weren’t exactly quiet about the ideas that drove them: Mathews and other members of the group were known to convene at a Colorado Christian Identity church led by an anti-Jewish, anti-homosexual, and racist preacher named Pete Peters. Despite its small population, by the 1990s, Stevens County was home to at least two Christian Identity churches: the Ark, near the Canadian border, and another founded by a former Ark acolyte, the Christian Israel Covenant Church. (The Ark is now called Our Place Fellowship; the Christian Israel Covenant Church disbanded in the early 2000s.)

“Those churches taught that white people are the superior race, that Jews are biologically satanic,” Morlin told me. 

The churches were small — and though the pastor at the Ark, Dan Henry, told The Spokesman-Review in 1992 that he rejected the “hate mongering” of the Aryan Nations, he also acknowledged preaching antisemitic ideas. 

But word had gotten around. People knew who was attending services. So it was common knowledge that the couple trying to start that new Christian covenant community called Marble Country — Barry and Anne Byrd — had attended the Ark for years. 

It was like the county knew what was about to happen — that this tiny bastion of hateful ideas was about to cross the rubicon, producing a number of followers who would spill blood in the name of Identity ideology all around the American West.

***

The racist services at The Ark were attended not only by adults who wanted to hear the sermons of Henry and other extremists, but also often by the children of those people, too. Chevie Kehoe fit the profile of one of those kids. Raised in part in Stevens County, his parents, Kirby and Gloria Kehoe, brought their children to services at the Ark, likely around the same time the Byrds attended. As his children grew older, Kirby Kehoe, an adamant racist, grew increasingly skeptical of the government, pulling his kids out of their Colville, Washington, public school, viewing schools “as a threat,” according to his son. In a 1999 New York Times interview, Chevie said his parents were interested in the notion of a whites-only region preached by the Order’s Mathews, and over time Chevie believed that he himself could bring the plan to fruition in the Northwest. He called the region the Aryan People’s Republic, and began committing robberies and acts of violence in devotion to the concept. 

In the late 1990s, he launched a cross-country trip to recruit people to his white region — a trip that turned into a spree of murders, shootings, and robberies.

In 1996, Chevie Kehoe robbed and murdered a man, his wife, and her 8-year-old daughter in Arkansas, then tossed their bodies into the Illinois Bayou. The next year, when police officers in Ohio pulled over Kehoe and his brother, Cheyne, and in two subsequent shoot-outs, Kehoe fired 33 bullets, seriously injuring a pedestrian before fleeing. Both were arrested after a brief manhunt, and Chevie was later sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. 

Even decades after Chevie Kehoe’s imprisonment, the whites-only nation idea that invigorated him, Mathews, and the Order before him, would keep surfacing in new ways and in new forms.

Kehoe is now incarcerated at the ADX Florence supermax prison in Fremont County, Colorado, alongside McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols and 1996 Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph, who was inspired by Christian Identity to bomb abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

In 2012, serial killer Israel Keyes, who grew up with the Kehoe brothers and who also occasionally attended the Ark as a child, confessed to committing robberies and murders from coast to coast before reportedly dying by suicide in a jail cell. It’s unclear if his crimes were inspired by any sort of ideology, but during the 1990s, his father wrote a letter of support for both the Byrds and Pete Peters that was published in the local paper.

Keyes wrote that it wasn’t illegal to practice Christian Identity: “It is my understanding that the Marble Community Fellowship has very little to do with the Christian Identity Movement, but so what? Haven’t we as Americans a right to exercise a belief in God and celebrate our white heritage and Christian religion? After all, many Jews consider their race to be God’s chosen people. Is this not racism at its zenith?”

Morlin told me that he reported from a meeting of the Stevens County Assembly — an anti-government militia — in 2012, in which neo-Confederate Pastor John Weaver spoke. Weaver gives racist sermons from the pulpit — sometimes in front of a Confederate flag, sometimes wearing a Confederate flag–printed tie — railing against interracial marriage, and advocating for slavery. By the time of the meeting, he was no stranger to Eastern Washington. In the early 1990s, he appeared at a Spokane conference of white supremacists, during which he promoted his book that urged Americans to break laws should the government become occupied by Jews.

In 2015, Weaver was back in Stevens County to give another speech — this time, he was onstage at Marble Country. 

 

II.

Marble’s God and Country Festival wouldn’t be what it is without a speech from a Washington State House Representative from a district two hours away. 

His name is Matt Shea. A clean-cut Army veteran with a law degree, Shea wears thin glasses, dresses in crisply ironed shirts, and smiles tightly. He positions himself as a voice of rural people, but actually represents a district that includes Spokane Valley, a largely suburban city of almost 100,000. 

Rep. Matt Shea at a January 2017 gun-rights rally in Olympia, Washington. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File)

Shea, over the course of six two-year terms, has become a fixture at the far-right edge of what Washingtonians consider Republican. He rarely speaks to reporters — unless they work for publications that have the words “liberty” or “redoubt” in their name. I know more people who’ve done in-person interviews with President Trump than with State Representative Shea, and for years, I worked at newspapers that covered his district. 

In order for Shea’s constituents to get an understanding of his ideas, they need to tune into his podcast. The show always takes the same format: Shea reads off some headlines from right-wing news sites, then interviews a guest, while often piping up in agreement with their outlandish theories. 

Those guests tend to hold views reflected in the bills Shea introduces in the Washington House. They’re unflinching Second Amendment advocates. This spring, a woman on the program preached abstinence-only sex education and an anti-vaccine “researcher” claimed that child immunizations are contaminated with aborted fetuses. 

Mostly, they’re conspiracy theorists and bigots with views Shea parrots. This spring, the legislator hosted a representative from an anti-abortion and homophobic group that has participated in burnings of the Quran. He interviewed a man who spouted talking points from conspiracists who believe in Agenda 21 — a theory that sustainable development is a shady plan hatched by a “New International Economic Order” to control people and take their freedom. Recently, he hosted a conspiracy theorist who believes the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were actually a “controlled demolition.” 

You could say Shea is a lot like Bill Keebler — except he wears a suit and taxpayers pay him a salary. 

Shea, for years, has seemed at home among the creators of fake news and conspiracy theories that turn violent. As early as 2009, he made several appearances on conspiracy king Alex Jones’s InfoWars show, where Jones introduced him with reverence. “Representative,” he says, “good to have you on with us.” In that February 2009 interview, Shea and Jones spoke of their belief that the federal government was setting up camps to imprison Americans. 

It seems as though in Shea’s world, the country is on the verge of collapse. People will have to fight for their lives. And he intends to be prepared: “If you do not have 5,000 rounds of .223, 5,000 rounds of .22 and a thousand rounds of handgun ammo as a minimum, you’re wrong!” he called from an Idaho stage in 2013. 

“We want to prepare for the inevitable collapse that’s gonna happen. And yes, I said that as a politician here onstage. It’s gonna happen! We all know that! The question is, and I think the question should be for all of us, what are we gonna do afterwards? What are we gonna do with that opportunity?”

Apocalypse, government collapse, anarchy — in his world, these are exciting prospects. Opportunities even. A chance at a fresh start, a time to get society back on track. 

In this fantasy apocalypse, perhaps being well-prepared and well-armed will be so necessary that the person you were in the past — in the pre-collapse — won’t matter. Money will be obsolete. Laws won’t be enforced. Maybe a violent past will suddenly be seen as an asset. 

This might have special appeal for Shea. His ex-wife, who filed for divorce in 2007, alleged that Shea grabbed her so hard during two arguments that he left bruises on her arms. In those same divorce filings, she told stories of a controlling man; by her account, he commanded her to always walk on his left side because a soldier needs to be able to draw his sword from the right. (Shea was in the Army and served in combat, but his wife said he did not traditionally carry a sword.)

Shea did not respond to requests for comment, but when asked a decade ago about his divorce by the Spokesman-Review, he denied any violence and said, “I love my wife and, when I married, I intended it to be for life. Unfortunately, my former wife didn’t and decided to pursue her third divorce.”

In 2011, Matt Shea was involved in a road rage incident in Spokane, in which another driver alleged Shea pulled a gun. In a police report, Shea told officers that as an Iraq war veteran he had to use “evasive techniques” to avoid hitting the man’s car (which Shea described as engaging in “Baghdad driving”), and proceeded to follow it. Shea admitted to officers that he had a gun in his car, that he produced it from a glovebox during the incident, and that he had an expired concealed carry permit. The other driver said he saw the handgun and was afraid Shea was going to shoot him. Later, Shea’s attorney made a deal with prosecutors that resulted in the charges being dropped.

Even now, in a time he surmises is the end of civil society, all of this has become standard Shea stuff. None of his past did real damage to his standing with voters. But it didn’t mean the things he said didn’t set people on edge. 

In the spring of 2014, a woman was eating at a Spokane Valley Mexican restaurant when she overheard a conversation between two men at the next table over. Later, she found out those men were Shea and the head of the Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes. 

But sitting there, hearing them, she became so concerned over what they were saying that she took their picture and called the police. According to a police dispatch, the woman overheard “a conversation from a group of males talking about snipers, Clive [sic] Bundy, and public militias.” One of the individuals, she told the police, had “thermal imaging binoculars,” and the group sounded “like they were planning something.”

Still, Shea won the election that year with 57 percent of the vote. 

If he could sit in a diner with one of the biggest militia leaders in this country and openly talk about military tactics, it seemed like Shea could be as extreme as he wanted — and it wouldn’t cost him any support. And even some of the most conservative Republicans in Eastern Washington were baffled by how Shea stayed in office. 

Two of those people are Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and a former Republican state legislator from Stevens County, John Smith. In a three-part podcast on white supremacy in the region, the pair suggested that Shea’s involvement at Marble Country was something voters should worry about. It was a part of a deep history of racism and hate that had found a home in this region going way back.

Smith was raised by his grandparents in southern Idaho — and his grandfather was friends with people in the Aryan Nations and in the Order. Their home often had new people coming through the door. He remembered his grandfather laying maps out in the kitchen nook and drawing up plans for “an armed revolt.” 

Smith realized on his own the ideology he’d been raised around was rotten and that he had to find a way out of it. He took a job as a ranch hand when he was 16 years old, and as a young adult, he attended church at the Ark. He was later married there, though he says he and his wife have since cut their connections with the church. 

But he told me that it’s become something of a mission for him to speak up when he sees ideas rooted in Christian Identity catching on here. Stevens County has a history — he knows it, everyone does, even though racists have always been a fringe minority. And in a podcast with Knezovich, Smith hoped people would hear stories of his childhood as a cautionary tale. 

“I grew up in that environment, and that stuff doesn’t wash off you. I acknowledge that darkness might still be inside me,” he told me. He maintains that he’s constantly trying to make sure he’s free of it, that he root out any part of him that might still carry what he learned as a kid — asking friends who aren’t white, who weren’t raised around neo-Nazis, if he’s changed. 

“I actively go to them and say, ‘Look at me and tell me, is it still in me? Am I still saying the wrong things? Am I still thinking of this in the wrong way?’ I’m trying to not have that be in there anymore. And maybe part of that is standing up and saying this is not OK.” 

Smith, in the video versions of the podcast was small and diminutive next to Knezovich. The latter is a tall, hulking man with a bald head and a sidearm, who shook my hand firmly and didn’t smile once when I interviewed him in a conference room at the Spokane County Sheriff’s office last summer. 

He told me he sees Shea’s increasingly conspiratorial rhetoric and the allegations of aggressive behavior against him through a lens of one reality his department deals with regularly: that racism is alive and well in his county. He talked about getting a call one morning that KKK flyers had appeared plastered all over a suburb called Millwood, and about teenagers spouting white nationalist talking points in the hallways of local high schools. 

He also talked about threats. Since Knezovich — a member of the local Republican party and a man who twice endorsed Shea — started speaking up about Shea, he has received death threats from people associated with the legislator. 

“I’ve got my estate in order. I’ve got my will done. The kids have all been briefed. And don’t take this as me being flippant. Nobody wants to die. I came to grips with death a long, long time ago,” he says. “And there’s been more people than I that have died for this country. And if that’s what it takes for people to wake up to what’s happening around them. All right. I love my nation. And if it takes fighting these people on these terms? Bring it on.”

***

In 2015, Shea was at the God and Country Celebration again, this time next to John Weaver — the neo-Confederate preacher. The next year, many of the legislators from around the West who sympathized with the Bundys in both 2014 and 2016 showed up to Marble, too. 

In some years, Anne Byrd posted photos to Facebook of the people who came to Marble. In the caption of a picture of Val Stevens, a former Washington state rep, Byrd wrote that Marble was “blessed” for legislators to be “standing in the gap” for the people.

By the summer of 2018, in the months before the election when many legislators campaign in their districts, Matt Shea appeared alongside Jeanette Finicum at the God and Country Festival. He talked about an idea he’d been shopping for years in the Washington statehouse: He wanted to secede Eastern Washington and create “a safe haven,” a 51st state called Liberty. 

Shea insisted people east of the Cascades just didn’t agree with the values of “downtown Seattle,” so why even try to get along? “I would submit, here in Eastern Washington, we believe in the right of self defense. We also believe the constitution means what it says,” he told another crowd. Seattle doesn’t because, he says, it is filled with communists. “And communism, real communism, has killed more people as an ideology than any other ideology in this history of the world — atheist communism.” 

All this time Shea spent up here in Stevens County, far from his district, he wasn’t recruiting any new voters. But it did appear he was amassing a following for a political movement, of which he was a leader and visionary. 

I wanted to ask him about that, but last summer he didn’t respond to my email requests for an interview. In his personal security detail (having one is atypical for a state rep), Shea is known to employ a man who lives at Marble, and who once tried to bring an AK-47 onto the grounds of the Spokane federal courthouse, but he has no press liaison. 

So I figured if I really wanted to ask him a question, and get any kind of an answer, I should show up to a gun rally where he was slated to be a featured speaker.

It was a hot August day — a dry heat, as people in Eastern Washington like to say. The rally was to be held at a large, grassy green park on the northside of Spokane — much closer to his district than Stevens County, but still not in it. A place where people play softball and lay out picnics. On this day, a small crowd gathered. For the most part, they wore shirts emblazoned with proclamations of love for guns and freedom, but several wore militia gear and carried militia flags. Several carried AR-15s.

I listened to Shea give a speech,  one that would go on to make headlines around the West, in which he called journalists “dirty, godless, hateful people.” The small crowd — which included leaders and members of the 63rd Lightfoot militia and a local politician who once stomped on the United Nations flag in front of Spokane City Hall — loved it. They cheered Shea on as he yelled, wide-eyed, pumping his fists. 

When he was finished, I trudged across the grass, introduced myself, and said I was hoping to ask him some questions: about this 51st State idea and his affinity for speaking at Marble each year. To my surprise, he agreed to talk. 

Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Mirrors

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | July 2019 | 21 minutes (5,409 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with.

Previously: the grisly sides of perfume, angora, and pearls.

* * *

Eight thousand years ago, a craftsperson sat inside their mud-brick house in Turkey and rubbed a piece of obsidian with their hands, smoothing the surface carefully, polishing the stone until it shone darkly in the hot sun, burning a piece of volcanic rock into something miraculous. In this piece of black stone, they could see their reflection, surrounded by the walls of their dwelling, built on the bones of their ancestors, the painted plaster walls rendered colorless by the obsidian’s deep gloss. But they weren’t done. They took white plaster and applied it to one side of this stone disk in a conical shape. Eventually this stone came to rest in a grave, alongside a woman from the early agricultural society. There it stayed until archeologists found it in the 1960s. It is, as far as we know, one of humankind’s first mirrors.

According to archeologist Ian Hodder, who oversees the hilly, 34-acre archeological site at Çatalhöyük in central Turkey, there have been “five or six” obsidian mirrors found there, all located in the northeast corners of tombs belonging to women. “They are beautiful things,” he says of the Neolithic mirrors. “Nobody really expected there would be things like mirrors in those early days. These are the first sort of settlements after people have been living as hunters and gathers. In many ways, these were quite simple societies, so it is odd.” Yet these early proto-urban people clearly wanted to look at themselves — or at something. It’s possible they were used in rituals by shamans or other religious figures. “One of the most commonly suggested for the time period is that they’re something to do with predicting the future or understanding the spirit world through reading images in the mirrors,” says Hodder. We just don’t know. We’ll probably never know.

With a name taken from the Latin mirare and mirari (“to look at” and “to wonder at, admire,” respectively), a mirror can be any reflective surface created for the purpose of seeing oneself. They can be made of stone, metal, glass, plastic, or even water. Throughout history, we’ve constructed mirrors from all those substances, to a varying degree of efficacy, for various reasons. Some were used as ceremonial items, others were used to repel malevolent spirits, and still others were used for the simple pleasure of examining one’s countenance.

But no matter what they’re made of, mirrors are objects of mystery, obsession, and fear. They’re simple yet complex. They’ve been used for purposes both sacred and profane. We love them, yet we’re loath to admit it. Even their creation has been shrouded in secrecy and aided by willful ignorance and sometimes outright violence; mirror making was once a toxic affair, and its secrets were guarded by laws and punishable by death. Long reserved for the wealthy few, we now walk around with compact mirrors in our pockets, and even if you left yours at home, there’s always a cell phone screen that can function, if you want it to, if the light is right, as a mirror.

Often, when objects become mundane, they lose some of their luster. But mirrors retain their ability to hold our attention, and they retain a certain amount of power over us. We’re still interested in seeing our reflections, and we still want to know what the future holds. Yet we’ve lost the reverence we once had for them. We no longer bury our dead with hand mirrors, and we don’t often speak of the control a mirror can exert over a person. Instead, we allow this force to alter our perceptions, to diminish our happiness, while denying its power. Looking in a mirror is just something you do — just something women do. We’re so used to seeing this impulse as vanity that most of us have forgotten the innate sense of awe that comes with looking. We’ve forgotten how to face our reflections not with judgment or fear, but with a sense of joyful discovery, a sense of hope. We can see our reflections anywhere, yet still face the mirror with a certain amount of suspicion, as though desiring knowledge of how the world sees you is somehow wrong. Read more…

Putin’s Rasputin

St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square; Moscow, Russia. (Rickson Liebano/Getty)

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

 

In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working “in the field of geopolitics.” She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: “This is what will save us from the terrorists.”

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other. Read more…

Two Clocks, Running Down

MirageC / Getty

Colin Dickey | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,573 words)

I remember my first encounter with the work of Félix González-Torres, even though most of the details are fuzzy. I don’t remember which museum we were at, nor which piece, exactly, it was. I don’t remember the year, though it was sometimes in the early 2000s. Sometimes the way memory works is through a very tight precision that exists in a sea of imprecision.

It was one of his many takeaway pieces, one of the stacks of paper — a heavy stack of large, poster-size paper, each printed with the same image — and the public was invited to take a sheet. I remember Nicole explaining to me how the weight of the stack of paper was the same as González-Torres’s lover, and slowly, one by one, the stack would be diminished by visitors taking sheets away one at a time. González-Torres’s lover, who had died of AIDS, as would, eventually, González-Torres himself. The stack would wither and diminish but it could be replenished by the museum’s curators. Nicole took one of the prints — I can’t remember what was on it, which image or block of text — and we moved on.

The weight is the important part — the idea of a body. Félix González-Torres made work about the physical space of a body, and how that body could change and wither by disease, or how it could be reconstituted in different ways. So many of González-Torres’s works involve subtraction. Perhaps most famously were his mountains of candy — often the exact weight of his lover Ross Laycock, or the weight of González-Torres and Laycock together — where viewers would be invited to take a piece of candy and eat it, this small thing that made up the weight of the body of González-Torres’s dead lover becoming part of the bodies of the audience. Read more…

‘Women Created Our Worlds:’ Native Art Reclaims Its Power

Parka, Artic and Subarctic, ca. 1890-1910. Image: John Bigelow Taylor. Collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 |  7 minutes ( 2,039 words)

The final report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is 1,071 pages of 2,380 people — from survivors to their family members to community Knowledge Keepers — outlining how colonialism’s resolve to split First Nations communities from their culture has led to gendered violence that continues to this day. “To put an end to this tragedy, the rightful power and place of women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people must be reinstated, which requires dismantling the structures of colonialism within Canadian society,” one commissioner said. “This is not just a job for governments and politicians. It is incumbent on all Canadians to hold our leaders to account.” That involves voting for those (preferably Indigenous, preferably female) politicians who support this dismantling, not to mention hiring Indigenous women, especially for positions of power. Instead, Canadians quibbled over whether or not the whole thing could be categorized as a genocide. The response was a chef’s kiss, a perfect example for why the inquiry had to be conducted in the first place: Indigenous women, women who originally had as much power as men, who imbued their community’s art with this power, are universally overlooked. Except this time it’s in the public record.

A third of the people cited in the report were allowed to testify in the form of art, which ended up in the National Inquiry’s Legacy Archive, a collection of more than 340 pieces by more than 800 people that serves as a historical record of myriad Indigenous identities. “We characterize these expressions, through art, as the act of ‘calling forth,’” the report explained. “This includes calling forth the legacies of those who no longer walk among us; calling forth awareness that leads to concrete action.” Calling forth also confronts the embarrassing (and persistent) colonial tradition of ignoring Indigenous voices. Of, for instance, starting public events by acknowledging the First Nations land on which they are being held, but without actually providing the First Nations people much of a space for their work. But Indigenous artists, women in particular, are refusing to be shut out; see the recently announced Netflix partnership with three Indigenous Canadian organizations or the first major North American retrospective of Native women’s work, Hearts of Our People, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “It has to be said that none of our communities need an exhibition at a fancy art museum to tell them that their women are important and what their women do is important,” cocurator Teri Greeves tells me. “This exhibition needs to happen in an art museum for the broader audience so, hopefully — my prayer — that they understand what we’ve always known, [which] is that these women created our worlds.”

* * *

A quick Canadian history lesson for those of us who only remember Louis Riel and that book by Tomson Highway: The white settlers, armed with Christian patriarchy and blunderbusses, entered Indigenous communities hundreds of years ago and saw matrilineal societies in which power and money were passed down through women, and they were like, wha? They saw men and women with complementary roles that were equally respected and were like, wait … ? Then they saw women as advisors and policymakers and that was it. Civilization said women were designed to pump out babies and keep house and these Natives were fucking it all up with progress. So in order to convince everyone these people were better off with him, the white man came up with some bullshit about there being two kinds of Native women, the pure Pocahontas types who had the good sense to want to be civilized (read: subservient), and the Squaw, whose off-the-chain libido had to be contained in order to protect the settlers’ fragile morality (guess the ball-busting bitch wasn’t sexy enough to get her own stereotype). As laughably reductive as all of this was, it had staying power. “The myth of the deviant Aboriginal women continues to plague us, reinforced by dominant cases that coalesce prostitution and Aboriginal women into a single entity,” Lubicon Cree scholar Robyn Bourgeois said in 2011. “Contemporary Canadian society dismisses violence against Aboriginal women and girls today on the basis of these perceived deviances.”

The Indian Act officially cut down women by shifting all of their power — political, financial, familial — to men. Until 1985, First Nations women could only really define themselves through a man. Even when women were the breadwinners, their rights and recognition remained limited. Instead they became the target of their men’s resentment, and their wider invisibility made them highly vulnerable to serial killers like Robert Pickton. Convicted of murdering six women in 2007, he admitted to killing 49 in total, having preyed predominantly on sex workers on the east side of Vancouver, a group in which Indigenous women were overrepresented — another reflection of the obstacles faced by the community. For more than a decade, activist groups like the Native Women’s Association of Canada have been unofficially tracking missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. According to the National Inquiry, they are 12 times more likely than other Canadian women to be killed or disappeared. But it wasn’t until 2016, a year after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report advised it, that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the national inquiry. (In the U.S., meanwhile, since 2017 lawmakers have been attempting to pass Savanna’s Act, which would establish a law enforcement database to track disappearances.)

“The borders between the U.S. and Canada weren’t created by indigenous people, but by outside influences,” Jill Ahlberg Yohe, cocurator of Hearts of Our People, told The Guardian earlier this month. “All this work is connected to our history, whether it was made in 1500 or 2019.” Several years ago she asked Kiowa bead artist Teri Greeves to advise on a different exhibit, and out of their conversations came the realization that Native women’s art, as a whole, had never been surveyed. “She was shocked by this,” Greeves tells me. “I was not.” Greeves’s mother had a trading post for more than 25 years where her daughter noticed that the women on their reservation made everything. It turned out the iconic Native American art — beadwork, baskets, ceramics, textiles — was a way for these women to communicate. Greeves’s mother, who her daughter refers to as a “Native fashionista,” looked for literature on these textiles but found nothing. So she conducted her own research and put on educational fashion shows everywhere from museums to the YMCA. But it was more than fashion, just like the ceramics and the baskets were more than housewares. “There are layers of meaning in all this stuff,” says Greeves, “and if that’s what you mean by art with a capital A then, yes, that’s what our ladies are doing, they’re making art.”  

Not that any gentlemen cared. At the turn of the century, concerned that the destruction of Native culture would mean the destruction of Native art, a bunch of institutions sent students to save it. (Apparently the people who made the art were less important — artists were rarely, if ever, identified.) These young men all went to the same places and gathered the same objects, which is why so many of us can only call to mind a few types of Native art — Sioux warrior shirts, for instance — while the real scope is more vast and variable. (Alongside Canada’s 600+ First Nations, there are 577 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.) The collectors also dealt primarily with men, even though the women were making most of the work being sold to the white man. “If they weren’t even seeing their own white women,” says Greeves, “how were they seeing the Native women?” Today, when you walk through Native collections in museums and galleries the (limited range of) objects are often only identified by tribes, but were largely made by women. “It’s just that no one’s said it,” says Greeves.

But over the past few years, Canada’s art institutions have started to. In 2014, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights exhibited Winnipeg-based Métis artist Jaime Black’s REDress Project, an installation made up of donated red dresses that symbolize missing and murdered Indigenous women. First created in 2010, it has since traveled to the Smithsonian and red dresses have become a recognized symbol in Canada of this exploited population. In 2017, the National Gallery of Canada established the Canadian and Indigenous Galleries, which house almost 800 works, while Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario launched a department for Canadian and Indigenous art. Retrospectives of the works of Annie Pootoogook, Rebecca Belmore, and Christi Belcourt followed, and last year a nationwide project, “Resilience,” included 167 billboards exhibiting the work of 50 female artists. Film and television have been slower to adapt — Netflix just announced the cancellation of Chambers, their only original series (and one of my favorites) starring a Native American lead, San Carlos Apache actress Sivan Alyra Rose. In Canada, however, Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) associate director Kerry Swanson says that the Truth and Reconciliation report was “a watershed that shifted the dialogue.” The ISO was formed two years after that and this month — seven days before Chambers got the axe — Netflix unveiled a partnership with the ISO, ImagineNATIVE and Wapikoni Mobile. The deal involves six initiatives for First Nations producers, directors, and screenwriters, which wasn’t necessarily out of the goodness of Netflix’s heart — it was part of their five-year $375 million agreement with the federal government, which includes $19 million to develop Canadian talent.

Twelve Canadians will also be included among the 115 artists making up the millennium-spanning Hearts of Our People retrospective. Asked around five years ago to help curate the collection, Greeves, despite being an artist (not a curator), said yes in order to continue her mother’s legacy. But because she could not speak for other Indigenous groups, and because, not being an elder, she couldn’t even speak for her own, Greeves and Yohe gathered 21 artists and academics, mostly Native, to circumvent the trap of curatorial tokenism: “Museums are colonial institutions, so we’re working within a format that is set up to not listen, and we’re all aware of it because we’ve all been silenced.” With no men present, recreating the gendered spaces they form on their own reservations, the women felt comfortable enough to freely exchange ideas. The result was a show organized into three loose themes: Legacy, Relationships, and Power. The first refers to the knowledge passed down through generations, the second to the relationships that include but also extend beyond the natural world, and the third to the power of Indigenous women, in all areas of life.

* * *

When you think about what art’s supposed to be — how much it should mean — and then you think about Native art and how its meaning transcends not only us, but also space and time, it starts to look like it belongs in galleries and museums more than anything else. Not only was each work of the past sacred, but each existed to be disseminated; Indigenous work was not generally considered the property of any one individual. What it does need, however, are women, because women are the keepers of its history. If they disappear, the art disappears and vice versa. Each work not only serves to preserve Native history, but the voice of the woman who makes it and all the women who came before her. “When I go to make something, I am praying on it,” Greeves tells me. She prays for the animals that gave up their lives for the materials she uses, for the person she is making the work for, for where it goes after that, the same way the women did before her: “When I look at the historic stuff, what I know is that all that stuff was made in prayer.” And when you look at all of that work together, when you acknowledge that you don’t know about the culture that is all around you, that the pieces the women have poured themselves into are teaching you what you thought you knew, the voices of Indigenous women become so loud they’re no longer possible to ignore.  

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.