Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff

Shadowlands, by Anthony McCann, chronicles the 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by right-wing protestors. McCann, a poet and MFA instructor, approaches the subject from several angles. The book is a blend of research, reflection, personal reportage, and extended poetic vignettes. While some of the "plot" has gaps and assumes the reader can just research the story, and while some of the poetic snapshots feel overwrought, in total the book is a huge achievement. It's an example of the wide possibilities of nonfiction. (It helps that Maggie Nelson, the genius behind 2015's The Argonauts, helped McCann with the completion of Shadowlands.) This is all fitting, as the story requires multiple approaches. The Malheur occupation only lasted for a few months of the cable news cycle, and it was easy to fit it into a polarized, Trumpian narrative of our divided country. But the reality, as is true with most media narrative, is infinitely more complex. At 400 pages, Shadowlands is a long book because to understand the story, you need to understand things like indigenous history, public land use, the relationship between the 1st and 2nd Amendment, grazing rights, prison reform, online militias, jury nullification, and Manifest Destiny.

I was enraged at the Malheur occupation when it happened. I had been to that refuge. That news story hit me personally--as an Oregonian, as a champion of public lands, as a pacifist. One of the remarkable aspects of Shadowlands is that McCann changed my mind. He has essentially the same politics and temperament that I do. But in the course of the text, he interrogated his own anger, spent countless hours with the characters, and examined the situation honestly. In the closing chapters, my politics remained more or less the same, but I was forced to view the occupation with a deeper empathy. As misguided and silly as the takeover had been, the protesters were right about a lot, and they followed their beliefs with a religious zeal. In fact, spirituality is a major theme of the book. Its questions go beyond policy, biology, and history. Really, the effect of Shadowlands is a greater appreciation of the huge complexities of life as a social organism living in this wonderful land, during this time in our country's history. Like the author wandering through a beautiful public reserve, at the end of the text, the only appropriate response I felt was humility, and wonder.