Rising Region: White Flight, Indigenous Resistance, and the Case of Montana

• In Event: Symptoms of Twenty-First Century U.S. Empire: Region, Affect, and Refusal

Abstract

One hallmark of the current terminal stage of American Empire is the rise of the ideologies and practices of regionalism in the face of the waxing of the contracts of nationalism. In short, no one seems “willing to die for” the limited imaginings of nation (in the terms Benedict Anderson once theorized), while they do seem willing to do so, at least imaginatively, for the fraternity of national sub-regions and exclusivist political practices. Reading demographic shifts in post-pandemic in-migration to Montana, a variety of documents from popular culture such as the execrable television series Yellowstone, and , most importantly, indigenous resistance within a newly mapped “white” settler Montana of this essay will track the rise in region with a focus specifically on the context of the fantasy of a white ethnostate in the state specifically and in the Pacific Northwest more generally. Of equal importance will be the sustained, environmentally and culturally predicated work of the Salish Kootenai nations on the Flathead Reservation reconstructing and reimagining region, as the return of the Trumpeter Swan and the leopard frog to the area demonstrate.

Author

• Katie Kane, The University of Montana