Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? Join the mailing list and receive more conversations like this in your inbox.
I first read Betsy Gaines Quammen’s second book, True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, while I was reporting for GETAWAY, a podcast series about rural recreation economies. I admired the nuance and depth of her reporting, from attending MAGA conventions to building relationships with ranchers who disagreed with her on many fronts
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to Quammen about her newest book, This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America, which came out earlier this fall. I started the book while sitting in a hot spring nestled deep in a canyon in northern New Mexico, an auspicious place to dive into the stories of Quammen’s ghosts, from Montana’s mining history to uranium mining near my home in southwest Colorado, to La Llorona. The book was exactly what I want from my nonfiction – well researched, woven together with personal stories, and deeply thought provoking.
This conversation was conducted for a recent episode of Yonder Radio, a weekly hourlong rural radio program. You can hear more wherever you get your podcasts or on over 100 radio stations across the country.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Hi Betsy. It’s so nice to have you here to talk about your book, This Haunted Land. In this book, you explore the ghosts that we face in all aspects of our lives, from ghost towns, to rivers and waterways that have become depleted, to known and unknown figures in history. Can you tell me a little bit about how you chose the people and locations that you focused on?
Betsy Gaines Quammen: So, I love ghost stories, and I have always collected ghost stories, and I love listening to people’s ghost stories. When I started this book, I was focused on spooky tales, but what I started to realize is that these stories revealed patterns across this country of unresolved and unsettled histories. So I had ghost stories about people and individuals, but I also talked about how we are haunted by unsustainable extraction in the West. We’re haunted by the scarcity of water and the decisions that we’ve made in and around water use. We’re haunted by the legacy of Indian boarding schools and cultural erasure and settler colonialism, as well as our period of slavery in this country. There are supernatural tales, but they really do reflect an unsettled history in this nation.
DY: Yeah, definitely. So, as you mentioned, one of the themes that you explore a lot is is extraction, and you’re not only focusing on extractive industries like mining in Butte, Montana, but you also talk a little bit about how tourism can be extractive, and how journalism itself can be extractive in some ways if we’re taking these stories without responsibly representing the people that we are talking to – the people whose stories are shared with us. While you were reporting this book, how did you approach holding that responsibility of the stories of the dead, to avoid any potential extraction or taking advantage of the real people whose stories you are telling in this book?
BGQ: Yeah, I think that that was one of my biggest commitments in writing this book. Part of it is a supernatural road trip, looking at places throughout the United States that have spooky tales associated with them. But I became ever more convinced that I had the responsibility to tell these stories with utmost care. There’s a risk in sort of paranormal investigations and dark tourism where people can be extractive of real tragedies.
One of the people who was incredibly inspirational to me in writing this book was a woman named Tiya Miles. She’s a historian of Black history at Harvard. She’s a MacArthur Genius winner. She’s written several books. She’s absolutely wonderful, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet her. She lives part time in Bozeman, which is where I live, and she wrote about dark tourism in, say, New Orleans, and how you have a boozy ghost tour, and people have their cocktail in hand, and they go hear horrific stories about Black women who had “affairs with plantation owners,” knowing full well that Black women who were enslaved were in no way having consensual affairs with plantation owners.
What responsibility do we have as people who tell ghost stories to make sure that the folks who lived traumatic lives, who lived through real horror, are reflected in the truest way we can tell their stories and uncover their past? It can’t be reduced to an entertainment that somehow softens or dresses up the horrors of slavery. I thought about that over and over again when I was writing the book because I talk about the murder and rape of a little girl, a real little girl, in 1898 in Butte, [Montana]. I talk about the tragedy and trauma of the legacy of Indian boarding schools. I talk about a haunted bed and breakfast on the Underground Railroad route. I tried with each of these stories to really honor the lives of the people who lived them and may have experienced tragic ends or tragic circumstances, to provide history and context to the moments that they lived in.
This Haunted Land from the publisher, Torrey House Press, or wherever books are sold. (Photo courtesy of Betsy Gaines Quammen)
DY: Yeah, I definitely got as I was reading that that was something that was deeply integrated: that feeling of responsibility to the dead and the living and the history of all of our ghosts. A lot of the stories in multiple chapters focus on the ghosts of Indigenous people who were systematically killed by colonizers and the ghosts of the culture that was lost through boarding schools, and that still haunts Native people all over the country today, who are potentially disconnected from their pasts because of those events. Can you talk about why it was important to you to tell the stories of Indigenous ghosts as a main focus throughout the book?
BGQ: Yeah, I think it’s really incumbent upon Americans, especially at this moment, to recognize history that is trying to be erased. The current administration has issued an executive order to take down signs at national parks and national monuments. They’re putting pressure on the Smithsonian. They do not want history to be taught that is “uncomfortable.” When I grew up, I did not know about the legacy of the Indian boarding school. I did not learn enough about the impacts of colonialism, broken treaties, stolen land, and I feel like it’s something that every American not only needs to know but needs to look straight in the face.
As I worked on this book, I bumped into it, and I tried to really look at stories that were acts of defiance in the sort of wake of this legacy. And one of the people that I was able to meet was a graffiti artist named Stephen Grounds who is Navajo, Yuchi, Seminole, and Creek, and he was the accountant for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Concho, Oklahoma. Stephen asked the tribes if he could use the ruins of an Indian boarding school on tribal grounds as a canvas for his murals. So he went through the archives of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people and picked out portraits that he painted on the sides of this derelict building. And he said to me, “I want this to be known for something other than ghosts because it’s famously haunted, and paranormal investigators flock to this place looking for ghosts.” He said “It’s so much more than that. I wanted this to be my act of resistance.” So he painted these murals as a way to both shine a light on this history, but also to talk about acts of resistance. And he said to me, “My grandparents went to an Indian boarding school. They did not speak their language.” I’m paraphrasing here, but he essentially said, “I’m haunted by the fact that I don’t know my mother tongue,” and that stuck with me.
DY: That’s such a powerful statement, and that section did make me want to go see Stephen’s art. Do you know if it’s still up?
BGQ: It is still up. I just talked to the tribal offices right before the book came out. It is still up and I went with my sister to see it. It’s exquisite, and he now has work all over Kansas and Oklahoma. His career is taking off. He’s an accountant, but he’s now able to do more art, which is really cool. And I went to visit his mom at the Haskell Indian Nations University. It’s an old boarding school in Kansas by the University of Kansas, and he has murals there too.
DY: Living here in Southwest Colorado, when I picked up the book for the first time, I just opened it randomly to the middle, and it was the chapter about Uravan [Colorado]. Eurovan is a ghost town that was completely buried after uranium mining went bust, but the community still feels so deeply attached to the nuclear industry, which is something that I’ve been looking into recently as well: the revival of nuclear and specifically in these small towns across the Colorado Plateau. A lot of the stories in this book echo the ghosts of this landscape and the non-human inhabitants as well as the human inhabitants, like this story about Uravan. But you also write about the Columbia River salmon and the ivory-billed woodpecker in the Southeast. Can you talk a little bit about what the term ghost means to you, and what you see as the purpose of a ghost story in today’s society?
BGQ: Ghosts are a way to talk about history. I think that ghost stories build relationships. It’s kind of communal. You get together. It can reflect the continuity of an oral tradition or a culture, and so I think they’re really important. Everybody has a ghost story. You’ve either heard them or something’s happened to you. And this is what I found: you do find deeper histories [within ghost stories], and I think those are maybe more interesting than the smell of perfume, a shadow on the wall, or some sort of sound that you can’t identify. Ghost stories to me were an invitation to really look at America’s history, and sometimes America’s dark history. I try to frame the book in a way that, as we look at this history and as we concede the complicated past that we have as a country, we can begin to heal. I also began to feel like there’s nothing that we can do that’s more patriotic than look history straight in the face. Whitewashing history does not erase the past. We are the country we are, and I think this is especially important for white people who may have ancestors that were involved in some of these darker chapters.
You can find Betsy’s newest book, This Haunted Land from the publisher, Torrey House Press, or wherever books are sold.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Author Betsy Gaines Quammen appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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