Culture that impacted our sense of the West

Culture shapes our sense of place as well as our experience of it. Our lives are made larger, our perspectives expanded, by every bit of culture we experience. I can’t stop thinking about a painting by Chumash artist John Khus that I saw at “Indigenous DNA: Decolonized Native Art,” a recent art exhibit he curated in Santa Barbara. The painting altered my sense of place in a profound and irreversible way, and for that I am grateful. Culture comes in many forms, from events, video games and podcasts to books, movies and live performances. Here are some picks from the HCN staff regarding a few of the thought-provoking cultural offerings they experienced this year that also helped to expand their sense of the West. 

Blood Snow and Dark Traffic (poetry)
These two books may not have first appeared in 2024, but I read both of them this year with real fascination. Blood Snow, by Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, and Dark Traffic, by Inupiaq poet Joan Naviuk Kane, are aesthetically different, but each book tackles big questions. How does the extraction of oil track the exploitation of Indigenous culture, so that the disappearance of Inupiaq language and history becomes inextricably bound to our destruction of Alaska? Sometimes these poets’ losses are brutally intimate: In okpik’s book, for example, cross-racial adoption quietly but forcefully erases Native identity, while in Kane’s book, domestic violence echoes and even appears to aid environmental loss. And yet both books remain surprisingly beautiful, too, a celebration of kinship between humans and habitat, where one’s singular identity is a slippery construction of past and present, self and other, words and reality. They aren’t easy books to inhabit or, at times, completely interpret, but both are completely original. –Paisley Rekdal, poetry editor

Hush (podcast)
The first season of Hush, OPB’s latest podcast by Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas (who brought us two seasons of Bundyville), investigates the death row conviction of Black Salem, Oregon, resident Jesse Johnson for a murder he has consistently denied committing. The reporters examine some of the dodgy evidence used in Johnson’s trial and interview key witnesses that the prosecution ignored. One detective from the case sits down to explain that racist policing was not involved, all while casually throwing around the N-word. At a diner — and on the record. The detective explains that looking through photos of white men would simply have taken too long, while a Black suspect was easier to home in on. “That’s not history,” Sottile reminds listeners, “or a case in the ’90s we should all forget because it’s over now. That’s Oregon.” In the words of Johnny Lake, former chairman of the State of Oregon Commission on Black Affairs and a lifelong resident of Salem: “This is a white community. Oregon is a white state. And it’s not skin-color white, it’s attitude white.” These nine episodes of twists and surprises will challenge anyone still clinging to faith in the justice system and shed light on why this corner of the West is the way it is. –B. “Toastie” Oaster, staff writer

Double Exposure (photography)
Photographs are special for how they can change the way you see something, and Timothy O’ Sullivan’s photos are well known for having changed the way Easterners saw the West in the years following the Civil War. His talents as a war photographer were deployed on the so-called frontier, where he chronicled dramatic open space and surveyed rail routes for westward expansion in the early days of industrialization. Which, absent the pomp of Manifest Destiny, can be seen as yet another conquest. In Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O’Sullivan, America’s Most Mysterious War Photographer, Robert Sullivan traces O’Sullivan’s footsteps, reckoning with immense geographies, rapacious natural resource extraction and the ongoing legacies of colonization. This is a tome, in the best sense of the word. A formidable writer looking at historical photographs, finding the sites where they were captured and breathing new life into both old and new visions of the West. –Jennifer Sahn, editor in chief

They often have a dark humor to them, slyly mocking the ways historical markers are gussied up and sanitized for viewing.

Wills Brewer’s art exhibit
One of my favorite art events of the year was at Wills Brewer (Cherokee Nation)’s open studio during his residency at Tinworks, a nonprofit arts space in Bozeman, Montana. I particularly fell for his photographic work — black-and-white layered collages and multiple exposures that reminded me so strongly of the gritty, overstimulated feeling that comes on day seven or eight of a long road trip, when all the places you’ve been and sites you’ve seen start to overlap and merge. Many of the images that went into the works were made driving through the West and stopping at historical sites and bars and more. They often have a dark humor to them, slyly mocking the ways historical markers are gussied up and sanitized for viewing. At Tinworks, Brewer had many of the images bound together in a book that had the air of a scrapbook from a treasured road trip, albeit with far better and more interesting images than any of us would take, and with a unique and powerful perspective. Brewer, who is also a ceramicist, made an enormous block in the Tinworks yard made mostly of adobe brick and full of seeds and compost, called A Repetition of Histories. I’m looking forward to watching it disintegrate and blossom over the next year. –Kate Schimel, news & investigations editor

Gays Eating Garlic Bread in the Park (community event)
In the city of Amazon, it feels like everything costs money. An acquaintance suggests grabbing a drink — that’s $16. Tickets to community theater are often $30 or more, and even street fairs sometimes have an entrance fee. And it’s not just here in Seattle — the number of affordable third spaces is declining across the West as the cost of living skyrockets. It’s rare to find free fun, so when I saw a TikTok about an event dubbed “Gays Eating Garlic Bread in the Park,” I knew I had to go. There was a simple beauty to it: The title alone provided most of the information you needed, and a flier told you the rest: when, which park, and BYOGB (bring your own garlic bread). On the day of the event, the delight was palpable throughout Meridian Park. It was one of the first warm and dry spring days, and giggles regularly ricocheted through the crowd of around 100 or so. People brought not only garlic bread, but picnic blankets, snacks, children, dogs, board games. The hosts graciously provided free drinks, housed in an ice-filled kiddie pool. The QFC down the street reportedly ran out of garlic bread. After scenes from the Seattle get-together went viral online, people in Portland and LA put on their own versions, which then spread beyond the West, as gays in Sioux City, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Lexington, Kentucky enjoyed eating garlic bread together, too. One online commenter wrote: “This needs to be a nationwide movement please.” And herein lies its power: Each of us can organize and mobilize our communities, whether it’s around eating garlic bread in the park or something entirely different. –Jane C. Hu, contributing editor

Sugarcane (film)
In the film Sugarcane, there is a scene where Indigenous children are playing, climbing on a storage crate, while in the background looms the spire of a Catholic church. It reminded me of the times I climbed the monkey bars as a child while attending boarding school in Arizona, and how from the very top, I could see the roof of the Baptist church that blocked the view to my mother’s house. The parallels of the scene and my childhood memory were uncanny, because we often focus on how we as Indigenous people differ, but the truth is we have many shared experiences. The film, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, centers on an investigation into abuse and missing children at a residential school near the Sugarcane Reserve in Canada. It gives an almost tangible sense of the pain that many Indigenous people there were left with. Sugarcane is about a 24-hour drive from my hometown, a place I never visited let alone heard about, yet the experiences, feelings and scenes felt familiar. It was a humble reminder that Indigenous people throughout the West have many commonalities, and that there is still plenty to learn from and about one another in an attempt to collectively heal. –Sunnie Clahchischiligi, Indigenous affairs editor

Feeding Ghosts (memoir)
I discovered Tessa Hulls’ work years ago on Instagram, and I’ve been following her avidly ever since. The topics she covers as a historian and artist — including abortion — take an issue that we’re dealing with in today’s news but cover more ground in one short comic than most in-depth analyses of events do in thousands of words. Her 2021 work Yellow Fever and Yellow Impotence: The Loooooonnnnnggg History of Entwined Racism and Sexism Towards Asians transformed my understanding of the waves of anti-Asian hate in America, especially in the West, where Hollywood so often defines cultural understanding. Similarly, Hulls’ intimate, brave graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, which was published this year, uses deep historical research and illustration to dive into her own experience as a mixed-race Asian American in the West, as well as those of her mother and grandmother, whose experiences in China’s Cultural Revolution have haunted all three generations of women. Hulls’ memoir excavates the ideological connections between mainland China, Hong Kong and the West, from cowboys and foods to language, and her drawings, at once urgent and detailed, pull and push the reader along until we, too, are seeing the ghosts all around us. –McKenna Stayner, features director