BOOK

REVIEWS
THE STATE OF THE NATURAL RESOURCES LITERATURE
Connection Lines: Re-Defining Western and U.S. Environmental Policy:
A Review Essay by Peter Lavigne*
The American West as a region has always been iconic and defined
by images of opposites: cowboys and Indians; rogues, ruffians, and heroes.
In the late twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries, a re-definition and
re-thinking of conservation, environmentalism, and the West as a region is
occurring. In contrast to the clearance of the "red man" in the name of
progress so bluntly proclaimed in the 1930s film "The Plow That Broke the
Plains,"1 the re-definition of a complex and more interesting West includes
the re-emergence of native people's power and re-invigorated re-emerging
cultures, as well as a more complicated set of battles over the landscape,
culture, and future of the region.
In an extraordinary set of books published in the last few years,
these new themes are elucidated in a series of connection lines or, as Curt
Meine posits, CorrectionLines,2 the "place[s] where theory and reality meet."
These correction lines are also reflected in the themes of reconnection,
restoration, and abolition in Chip Ward's solution-seeking book Hope's
Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.3 We see these same
themes in Paul VanDevelder's tale Coyote Warrior:One Man, Three Tribes and
the Trial That Forged a Nation. Finally, the connection and correction lines
reach deep into the Southwest with John Sherry's tale of the evolution of
Dines CARE, a Navajo organization dedicated to protecting Navajo culture
and the environment, and the mysterious and still unsolved murder of Dine
activist Leroy Jackson in 1993 in Land, Wind and Hard Words: A Story of
Navajo Activism.4

* Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Colorado Water

Workshop at Western State College of Colorado in Gunnison. Thanks to research assistant
Cindy Ryals for her ideas and always helpful edits and to the extraordinary writers of these

books.
1. PARE LORENTZ, THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS (1936), THE RIVER (1937) (DVD by
Naxos Rights Int'l Ltd. (2007)).

2.

CURT MEINE, CORRECTION LINES: ESSAYS ON LAND, LEOPOLD AND CONSERVATION 1-2

(2004). Meine uses the land surveyor's correction line, the east-west line compensating for the
curvature of the earth in the square grid system used to implement Jefferson's land survey
across North America, as the metaphor for the need to shift one's orientation in the face of new
information, the "place where theory and reality meet."

3.
(2004).
4.

(2002).

CHIP WARD, HOPE'S HORIZON: THREE VISIONS FOR HEALING THE AMERICAN LAND
JOHN W. SHERRY, LAND, WIND, AND HARD WORDS: A STORY OF NAVAJO ACTIVISM

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Correction Lines
In CorrectionLines, Meine uses the land surveyor's correction line,
the east-west line compensating for the curvature of the earth in the square
grid system used to implement Jefferson's land survey across North
America, as the metaphor for the need to shift one's orientation in the face
of new information. Author of the definitive biography of Aldo Leopold, 5
as well as editor of collections on Wallace Stegner 6 and Leopold, 7 Meine has
written a sweeping and insightful three-part analysis of the progression of
ideas in environmental and cultural conservation. Part one, "Conservation's
Usable Past," looks at the early history and development of the idea and
practice of conservation. Meine suggests that we are "struggling to find a
coherent and comprehensive narrative of conservation's past."8
Rather than look at the documentary ephemera of meetings and
legislation from the last two centuries of environmental protection and
conservation efforts, Meine traces the evolution of conservation thinking
and practice by examining what Leopold called the "oldest task in human
history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it."9 Through analysis of
waves of cultural and environmental extirpation, Meine links the nadir of
North American tribes at Wounded Knee, Frederick Jackson Turner's
closing of the frontier, and the loss of the great white pine forests of the East
and Midwest because of "erosion and exhaustion of agricultural soils" to
twentieth century Progressive Era themes of forestry, fishery, water,
wildlife, outdoor recreation, and wilderness management.
Moving on to the beginnings of systemic thinking in conservation
and the ultimate development of the disciplines of ecology and conservation biology, Meine circles back to what he calls "Leopold's Fine Line." 10
Leopold was the prototype for and a master of a still rare species of conservationist. He was a serious scientist and investigator who also became
a master at applying the always unfulfilled scientific quest for certainty to
the inherent uncertainties (and oft irrationalities) of policy and law. More
importantly, in Meine's construction," Leopold spent most of his career
working on the line between utility and preservation, something that Meine
argues is critical to confronting "ultimate conservation questions." 2 Tracing
Leopold's lifelong analysis "of the age old conflict between utility and

5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

CURT MEINE, ALDO LEOPOLD: HIS LIFE AND WORK (1988).

WALLACE STEGNER AND THE CONTINENTAL VISION (Curt Meine ed., 1997).
THE ESSENTIAL ALDO LEOPOLD (Curt Meine & Richard L. Knight eds.,1999).
Id. at3.
Id. at 14.
Id. ch. 4.
Id. at 92.
Id.

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beauty"13 through his voluminous publications, Meine argues that the

modem conservation/environmental movement needs to broaden its focus
on the use-versus-preservation debate and recognizes, as Leopold did and
struggled with, the broader spectrum of issues regarding ecosystem
protection, as well as the many gray areas and interrelationships between
preservation, protection, and restoration.
Correction Lines serves several niches in the pantheon of conservation and environmental writing. First, as discussed above, it uniquely traces
the evolution of the environmental movement in the United States.14
Second, for Leopold readers and admirers, Correction Lines is vital for its
contribution to an in-depth understanding of Leopold's life and work,
especially for the vast majority of readers only acquainted with him through
his most famous and final work, A Sand County Almanac." Leopold's
writings in Sand County Almanac are enriched and expanded by the middle
section of Meine's book, including the essays "Emergence of an Idea"; 6
"Giving Voice to Concern"; 17 "Moving Mountains"; s and, especially, "The
Secret Leopold." 19 In that chapter, Meine notes "the tendencies to divorce
Leopold's publications from his practice"2 and how people tend to hold
him as a mirror to their own environmental responses. 1
Finally, in Part Three of Correction Lines, Meine ties the first two
sections together with two of my all-time favorite essays, "Inherit the
Grid"' and "Home, Land, Security." Struck by the way a grid survey road
through his home territory of Sauk County, Wisconsin cuts crisply in
straight lines through natural and cultural landmarks as if contours or
curves never existed, Meine examines how the grid system gives the forces
of "economic doctrines, land policies, and traditions of faith, philosophy,
commerce and science.. .exceptional opportunity to express themselves " 2'

13. Id. at 114.

14. Meine's analysis here whets the reader's appetite for an as yet unwritten book -a
comprehensive history of the evolution of the environmental/conservation movement. Several
partial biographies of the movement exist. See, e.g., WILLIAM CRONON, ANTHOLOGY
UNCOMMON GROUND (1995) and BENJAMIN KuINEs FIRST ALONG THE RIVER: A BRIEF HISTORY OF
THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT. However, these and others suffer from incompleteness
and/or superficial analysis. In Correction Lines, Meine appears uniquely suited to take on a
comprehensive history of this sort, able to do for the North American history of environmental
NGOs and activists what Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert (1986) did for western water.
15. ALDO LEOPOLD, A SAND COuNTY ALMANAC AND SKETCHES HERE AND THERE (1949).
16. MEINE, supra note 5, at 117.
17. Id. at 132.
18. Id. at 148.
19. Id. at 161.
20. Id. at 179.
21. Id. at 180.
22. Id. at 187.
23. Id. at 202.

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on the environment and environmental, political, and social policy of the

continent. The final chapter, "Home, Land, Security," clearly and carefully
ties the safeguarding of our "land, water, biotic and human communities"24
to the shock of the events of 9/11 and the reactions to them at a September
10-12, 2001 St. Louis, Missouri gathering of luminaries in conservation
biology and wildlife preservation. Meine goes on to link these events to the
present unfulfilled promise of Homeland Security. Meine says, in closing,
that conservation and conservationist must help "to reclaim the future,"'
noting that
[c]onservation, in this changed world, is in crisis, and it is not
something different from the security crisis (or the other
crises) we face. The acute acts of terror we have suffered are
not separate from, or an excuse to ignore, the chronic acts of
deprivation, injustice, impoverishment, and environmental
degradation that conservation must also seek to address....
The crisis was building long before terrorists seized the
world's
attention, foreshortened our view, and enthroned
26
fear.

First They Killed John Wayne

Chip Ward's Hope's Horizon: Three Visionsfor Healing the American

Land27 indirectly takes on this challenge of healing with its themes of reconnection, restoration, and abolition. Like Meine and VanDevelder, Ward
covers a broad mix of material ranging from the ever-growing wildlife
tracking groups around the world, to the landscape-scale ecosystem protection and restoration efforts of the Wildlands Project, and later to the efforts
to decommission the Glen Canyon Dam in a chapter entitled "A Ridiculous
Idea Whose Time Has Come." 8 Modeling its title, Ward's book is hopeful
and oriented toward visionary, yet practical, solutions and action. He
portrays a remarkable collection of individuals, including Sue Morse, Rich
Ingebretsen, Allison Jones and Jim Catlin, Lisa Gue, and others whose ideas
and hard work have inspired legions.
Section one, "Reconnection," tells the story of interconnecting
efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to form the Wildlands Project, a
science-based action effort that would transform land protection activities
throughout North America (and later worldwide) by marrying the new

24.
25.
26.
27.
28.

Id. at 230.
Id. at 246.
Id.
WARD, supra note 3.
Id. at 187.

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science of conservation biology to environmental activism.29 Individuals

involved in these efforts included Doug Tomkins, the entrepreneur and
philanthropist; activist and theorist Dave Foreman; scientists Michael SoUkl,
Reed Noss, and George Wuerthner; activist David Johns; and a handful of
others. These efforts set several clear new goals for continental scale
protection and restoration enumerated in its journal, Wild Earth:
First, protect all native ecosystem types....Second, maintain
viable populations of all species,...Third, maintain ecological
Fourth, design and manage the
and evolutionary processes ....
system to be responsive to both short and long-term environmental change, and to maintain the evolutionary potential of
not just particular species but their various lineages, since
genetic diversity within a particular species can also be
critical to its survival and health in the long run. 3
These principles, though presently widely accepted, represented
radical change from the way major land and river protection groups like the
Nature Conservancy, or American Rivers, approached their efforts in the
1980s. Most land protection work by these and other national or international groups was narrowly focused on individual endangered species or
discrete but important parcels of land or, in the case of river protection,
narrow riparian corridors, dam stopping, and protection of "wild and
scenic" rock-filled wilderness canyons. Implicit in these principles was an
emphasis on keeping or restoring major predator species to ecosystems and
using these efforts on continental scales never before attempted.3 In several
ways, including metaphorically in Dave Foreman's seminal Wild Earth
essay, "The River Wild," 32 The Wildlands Project efforts paralleled the
smaller scale, yet comprehensive, river watershed protection organizations
and projects that started in New England in the 1930s and 1940s and spread
like wildfire throughout the United States and Canada in the 1990s. 33
Section two, "Restoration," focuses on dams, dam removal, and
restoration projects throughout the West. It tells in detail one portion of the
Colorado River story of the Glen Canyon Dam and the forces that led to its
construction, which are now threatening its survival.' Colorado law
professor Charles Wilkinson calls the confluence of people and ideas that

29. See id., ch. 3, "Putting the Wolf at the Door."

30. Id. at 62-63.
31. Id. at 63-65.
32. Dave Foreman, The River Wild, WILD EARTH, Winter 1998-1999, at 1-4.
33. See generally Peter Lavigne, Watershed Councils Eastand West: Advocacy, Consensusand
Environmental Progress,22 UCLA J. ENvTL. L. & POL'Y 301 (2003-2004); Peter M. Lavigne, The
Movement for American Ecosystem Restoration and Interactive Environmental Decisionmaking:
Quagmire, Diversion, or Our Last, Best Hope?, 17 TuL. ENVTL. L.J. 1 (2003-2004).
34. WARD, supranote 3, at 117.

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led to the damming of the West's rivers from the 1930s on to the 1970s "the Big Buildup." 3s The Big Buildup was the plan and action to build the
dams, roads, and power plants conceived to allow the growth of huge
metropolitan areas like Phoenix, Tucson, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and
Denver in what was, until the 1960s, the sparsely populated and highly arid
American West. 36 Built in large part on theft from tribes, deceptive
advertising, and regional political clout in Congress sufficient to continually
raid taxpayer pockets throughout the country,37 the centerpiece project was
the destruction of Glen Canyon by the construction of Glen Canyon Dam
and its resulting 180 mile long reservoir, the artfully named "Lake" Powell.
This section, in an especially accessible way, tells the stories of the epic
battles between Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower and dam
builder Floyd Dominy, the science and exploration of John Wesley Powell,
the experiments of Dave Wegner and the Bureau of Reclamation, and how
they all meshed with the vision of Richard Ingebretsen and others to restore
Glen Canyon by draining Lake Powell. Acknowledging the perception of
many that the very notion is slightly or completely loopy, the chapter titles
are humorous, 8 but the underlying story and efforts are serious and well
told.
In the final section of Hope's Horizon, "Abolition," Ward returns to
territory he mined in his first book, Canaries on the Rim,39 which tells the
story of the downwinders, the peoples of the Southwest who were the
experimental canaries for the advent of the nuclear age. Ward, as a cofounder of several Utah environmental groups including the Healthy
Environment Alliance of Utah (HEAL Utah),4' an alliance of citizens and
organizations working to protect the health of Utahans from nuclear and
toxic waste, brings a personal connection to his topic. Abolition, he notes,4
is not a word to be used lightly.
This section begins with the little known story of the behind-thescenes radioactive tragedy of the 1955 John Wayne movie titled "The
Conqueror," from which Ward tells the story of the ongoing radioactive

35. See generally CHARLES WILKINSON, FIRE ON THE PLATEAU: CONFLICr AND ENDURANCE
INTHE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST (1999).
36. In fact, though now home to tens of millions of people comprising the most highly
urbanized population in the United States, and despite all our rural cowboy advertising,
wishful thinking, dams, and transmountain water basin diversion projects, the West is still a
desert.
37. See, for example, Wilkinson's Fireon the Plateau,supranote 35; Reisner's CadillacDesert,
supra note 14; and Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest (1987), among others.
38. See, e.g., WILKINSON, supra note 35, "A Ridiculous Idea Whose Time Has Come" or
"White Elephants in the Boneyard of Pride."
39. CHIP WARD, CANARIES ON THE RIM: LIVING DOWNWIND IN THE WEST (1999).
40. HEAL Utah, http://www.healutah.org/home (last visited Jan. 10, 2008).
41. WARD, supra note 3, at 317.

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waste legacy of the early nuclear age. As Ward relates, the movie was made
on the sand near St. George, Utah, about 100 miles downwind of the
Nevada Test Site, where a hundred nuclear bombs were set off in experiments to build the United States' nuclear arsenal.42 The tests contaminated
the people and soils downwind, and as Ward says,
The Conqueror would be easily forgettable were it not for the
strange fact that about 80 percent of the cast and crew
eventually succumbed to cancer. By the time of Wayne's
demise in 1979, cancer was as common in America as the
postwar flood of synthetic industrial chemicals that stained
the average citizen's blood cells, as common as the trace
amounts of radiation drifting through our food webs. Even
so, an 80 percent fatal-cancer rate constituted a suspicious
anomaly, and the leading suspect was a monster that glowed
in the dark, a43demon so scary even Hollywood could not have
imagined it.
The brief tales in Hope's Horizon describing the efforts to deal with
the radiation legacy of uranium mining, nuclear bombing, power generation, and radioactive waste disposal in the Southwest end with a carefully
constructed argument that the nuclear industry, in all its forms, should be
phased out and abolished. In the present-day context of a renewed "boom"
in uranium exploration, mining, and processing in the region, Hope's
Horizon is especially helpful in informing the ongoing policy debates and
decisions of the still un-dealt with legacy of wastes requiring careful
stewardship for at least the next 10,000 years. This is a challenge unprecedented in the history of humanity. As Ward states in his concluding
chapter, "Abolition and Precaution," "As a library development consultant
for the state of Utah, I encouraged many local governments to make longrange plans for public library service. Five-year plans were a stretch for
most mayors and commissioners, and ten-year plans were out of the
question. A 10,000 year plan would be laughable.""
Timber, Uranium, and Murder in the Southwest
The last two books in this collection also provide hope, as well as
a sobering look at the continuing challenges and injustices in the West
regarding ongoing cultural and environmental policy toward the West's
original inhabitants, who are the multiplicity of indigenous tribes that first
peopled and still live throughout large areas of the continent. John W.

42.
43.
44.

Id. at 234.
Id.
Id. at 323.

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Sherry's Land, Wind and Hard Words: A Story of Navajo Activism is in part
a murder mystery wrapped in a fascinating history of the cultural and
environmental group Din6 CARE. Land, Wind and Hard Words is also short
and succinct relative to the other books in this collection. Readers who have
enjoyed novelist Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries and cultural depictions
will find Sherry's tale of Navajo professionals and activists Leroy Jackson
and Adella Begaye uplifting, grittier, disturbing, and absorbing.
Sherry is an engaging anthropologists 6well aware of the dangers of
his ilk befriending and reporting upon indigenous peoples. Now working
for a famous technology company investigating the relationships between
people and machines, Sherry spent the early 1990s living and working with
Jackson and Begaye and was present at many of the events and meetings
described in the book. In an unusually sensitive preface to his book,47 Sherry
notes, despite his embarrassment for initiating the relationship with the
people of Din6 CARE as the "subjects" of his dissertation research, that
[t]his has been a humbling and learning experience....Limited
writing skills may be part of the problem, but only part: all
writing, all representations we create, are inevitably doomed
to particular limitations and distortions.
There is some consolation in a couple of facts: First, this
is nothing new for anthropologists. The discipline has
struggled over the past two decades to get beyond the
authoritative descriptions of "this or that culture"....
Second, and more importantly, despite all my misgivings,
the people of Din6 CARE themselves have never stopped
encouraging me to continue. They have read and commented
on drafts, giving me corrections and feedback, and told me a
number of times, "it's OK, keep going.""
Din6 CARE was founded out of outrage at the Navajo Tribe's clearcut forest sales in the Chuska Mountains. Navajo Leroy Jackson, a Vietnam
veteran, former hobo and drug abuser, substance abuse counselor, and
finally engineer and artist became the leading public speaker for the
opposition activists of Din6 CARE. By the summer of 1992, as Din6 CARE
organized "Spiritual Gatherings"4 9 in many areas throughout Navajo lands,
Jackson became the public target for supporters of the timber sales and was
the subject of protests. He was even burned in effigy for his efforts to
persuade and organize the people living in the timber sale areas. Along

45.
46.
47.
48.
49.

JoHN W. SHERRY, LAND, WIND AND HARD WORDS: ASTORYOFNAVAJOACrIVISM (2002).

Interview with John Sherry in Portland, Or. (Nov. 10, 2005).
SHERRY, supra note 45, at vii-ix.
Id. at ix.
Id. at 99-100.

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with Din4 CARE co-founder and later executive director Lori Goodman,
Jackson had a knack for public speaking and also for effective organizing.
On October 1, 1993, Jackson disappeared. On his way to meet his
wife after several days of meetings, he didn't show up at their designated
meeting place. Eight days later, his decaying body was found wrapped
from head to toe in a blanket inside his locked van in a busy highway
parking area. No keys to the van were ever found and the police
investigation was perfunctory at best. Despite national and international
press attention and the efforts of Dine CARE activists, no resolution to his
death has been found.
Sherry's tale of Jackson's life continues with the evolution of Din6
CARE, through its activities to fight the ongoing problems with uranium
wastes, its interactions with a variety of non-Navajo environmental and
other organizations, its continuing struggles with funding, and how it deals
with the hopes and obsessions of other organizations and individuals trying
to pre-empt their efforts for their own needs. One of the more interesting
stories in the book is the development of the stormy relations between the
early iteration of Din6 CARE and the then new group, Forest Guardians.
Uneasy allies, Sherry reports, they continue to work together at times.50
Sherry's reporting is a riveting and cautionary tale of indigenous group
interactions with environmental organizations and the oft-learned lesson
that environmental victories are never permanent.
Coyotes and Dams
1
Paul VanDevelder's Coyote Warrior"
takes a different tack. The book
tells of the many disasters visited upon the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara
tribes by the construction of Garrison Dam and includes a legal and
personal Hollywood ending. VanDevelder's "Coyote Warriors" are the new
generations of Indian leaders who, beginning in the 1980s, started returning
to their reservations as highly trained professional "biologists, hydrologists,
atmospheric chemists, and lawyers" and who began "reconnecting with
their ancestral traditions" to "find new economic and political solutions to
long standing ailments." Coyote Warrioris a masterful, intricate, and broad
history, telling the story of the application of new tools and old rights by the
Coyote Warriors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who
work to remedy the detrimental effects of legal doctrines stretching back to
the laws "created by twelfth century popes to take possession of foreign
lands held by 'heathens and infidels."'' 2

50.

Interview with Paul VanDevelder (Nov. 11, 2005).

51. PAUL VANDEVELDER, COYOTE WARRIOR: ONE MAN, THREE TRIBES, AND THE TRIAL THAT
FORGED A NATION (2004).

52.

Id. at 24.

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In part, this is another personal story of coyote warriors, like that

of Leroy Jackson, Adella Begaye, and the others in Land, Wind, and Hard
Words. Here it is the soft spoken Mandan Hidatsa tribe-member professor
of law at the University of Montana, Raymond Cross. Cross is the son of
tribal chairman Martin Cross, himself the great grandson of the chiefs who
sheltered Lewis and Clark on their journey to the Pacific in the winter of
1804. At the end of World War II, Martin Cross fought a desolate and losing
battle against the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers,
who persuaded Congress to seize tribal lands to build the large and nearly
useless Garrison Dam on the Missouri River in North Dakota. The Garrison
Dam was a highly effective instrument of the Native American Diaspora of
the post war 1950s, putting the fertile, friendly, and productive lands of the
three tribes, lands that had nourished them for thousands of years, under
a six-hundred square-mile reservoir.
This time in history was the Termination Era, when the Indian
policy of the United States was to break up native reservations, forcibly
terminate tribal rights, and scatter and assimilate tribal members into the
wider society. 3 Led by Utah Senator Arthur Watkins and Truman
appointee to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Dillon Myer, the termination
programs were particularly effective with some tribes more than others.
Myer had previously run the Japanese internment camps during World
War Two, and at the end of the war was in charge of the relocation of those
interned. As Martin Cross's grandson Bucky says in the book,
Myer and.. .Arthur Watkins decided the time had come for all
of us Indians to get out and see the world. So Myer launched
a program to round up all the Indians, put us on trains and
buses, and scatter us in the big cities....People we'd known
our whole lives were put on trains in Minot and
vanished .... Years later, in San Francisco, you'd read about
some guy who jumped off the bridge the day before. "Hey, I
know that guy. I was in school with that guy in Elbowoods." s
Raymond Cross was living with his parents and nine siblings in a
dirt floor shack with no plumbing or electricity when the floodwaters rose
behind the dam and they were dispersed to California with their mother.
His father stayed behind in North Dakota and died in April 1964, while his
son, Martin Jr., was visiting from college. The youngest of the ten children,
Raymond lived as a teenager with his elder sister Marilyn and her family
in Santa Clara, California. After graduating from high school, he attended
Stanford University and was profoundly influenced by the emergence of

53. Id. at 28-29.

54. Id. at 28. Elbowoods was the main community of the three tribes flooded by the
Garrison reservoir. The Army Corps, blind to irony, named the reservoir Lake Sakakawea.

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AIM, the American Indian Movement, in the 1960s.5 Professor Cross says
in the book,
What AIM helped people see for the first time was that our
native cultures had been strip-mined by the Euro-American,
Judeo-Christian civilization....This was a big deal. An awful
lot of Indians had been baptized Christians. But by then, the
storm of protests and causes made it clear to us that we were
dealing with a desperate society trapped inside a crumbling
mythology .... Blacks, Indians, Chicanos- we all had to start
finding our own solutions because the white people were out
of answers.5 6
Looking for his own answers, and helped by the Nixon administration's call for reversal of Indian Termination policy, 7 Cross entered Yale
Law School and after graduation went to work for the Native American
Rights Fund in 1977. VanDevelder masterfully weaves Cross's legal odyssey
over the next ten years that led to his landmark Supreme Court argument
and 6-3 winning case in 1986, Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold
Reservation v. Wold Engineering(Wold iI)," establishing the main principles
of tribal sovereignty governing U.S. tribes today. VanDevelder's narration
is a stunning feat of writing and the web he weaves is a tribute both to
Professor Cross's achievements and to the personal resilience of Cross and
his tribal ancestors. Anyone interested in the history of tribal relations in
North America and especially in modem legal history will find this book
the equivalent or superior to other legal thrillers like Simple Justice,A Civil
Action, or Common Ground.Kudos are also due to publisher Little Brown for
the book's extensive resource materials including Appendix A, Indian law:
An Evolutionary Time Line;5 9Appendix B, Elbowoods, North Dakota: Final
Roll Call of Relocation and Dispossession- 1953; 6 Appendix C, the
complete text of the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie (Horse Creek),6 as well as
an extensive bibliography and 27 pages of notes.
Conclusions for the Twenty-First Century West
Meine, Ward, Sherry, and VanDevelder, each in their own way,
write both to explain the past and to forward visions for the future of the
West and the larger society. As in the movie Chinatown,when the character

55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.

Id. at 185-86.
Id.
Id. at 186.
476 U.S. 877 (1986).
VANDEVELDER, supra note 51, at 249.
Id. at 255.
Id. at 263.

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Jake Gittes, an investigative reporter played by Jack Nicholson, asks the

crooked water and real estate developer Noah Cross, 62 "Why are you doing
it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already
afford?," Cross replies right to the point: "The future, Mr. Gittes, the
future!"' These writers and their subjects are blazing a way to a different
kind of future. It is a future based upon transparency, cultural and
environmental integration, and hope. We can all hope that this future
brings a better understanding of multiple goals and achievements than the
single minded constrictions and tragedies of the stories related in these
books.
IRE~VIEWSI
Desert Wetlands. By Lucian Niemeyer, with text by Thomas Lowe
Fleischner. University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Pp. 148. $19.95 cloth.
It is not hard to imagine the initial reaction that many people might
have upon first encountering the title of this book. Lucian Niemeyer
certainly seemed to anticipate this with the very first sentence in the book's
preface: "The term 'desert wetlands' seems like an oxymoron." The title
may indeed elicit some amusement or confusion at first, especially for
readers not familiar with the American Southwest and adjacent parts of
Mexico. Even a cursory examination of this book, however, will quickly
instill in the reader an appreciation for the extent and variety of desert
wetlands, as well as for their ecological value and their sheer beauty.
One reason that only a cursory examination of the book might
achieve this level of appreciation is because of Niemeyer's beautiful
photography. There is hardly a page in the entire book where one's
attention is not first drawn to one or more color photos depicting desert
wetland scenes or the wildlife and plants that can be found in them. The
bulk of the photos are from the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife
Refuge along the Middle Rio Grande River in New Mexico, but there are
also photos from all four major deserts in the American Southwest and from
every other state in the region. Like several other books by Niemeyer -a
well-known professional photographer -Desert Wetlands could easily be
considered a coffee table book, with its beautiful photography on virtually
every page and its 9" x 12" format.
While many buyers of this book may look no further than its
photos, it is my hope that most will also take the time to read the four
accompanying chapters by Niemeyer's collaborator, Thomas Lowe

62. Played by John Huston.

63. CHINATOWN (written by Robert Towne, directed by Roman Polanski, Paramount
Pictures 1974).