The Modern West

Recently, you may have noticed a lot of big news coming out of Indigenous America, from protests at Standing Rock to the return of wild bison to efforts to bring home ancestral remains and artifacts. But when you talk to the movers and shakers, the conversation often comes back around to a bitter history – the Plains Indian Wars. This season we hear the story from the point of view of the Plains t...

A few seasons back, we had a series called Cowboy Up that dug into the juvenile justice system in Wyoming. If you liked thinking about education in the west, you’re going to love this. We are sharing an episode from the podcast Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, produced by one of our very own, Charles Fournier. This is a narrative podcast series that takes a look at why teachers are leaving education...

For all you Modern West fans who love our last season about ranching and the cowboy mythos in the American West, have we got a treat for you. We’re going to share an episode from our good pals at the podcast Reframing Rural. It’s now in the middle of its third season “Groundwork,” and they’ve been sharing stories about host Megan Torgerson’s family farm as well as the widening wealth gap in Montan...

This time on The Modern West, we join an 1896 hunting expedition to America’s first national park. The journey reveals cracks in our concepts of Yellowstone, a place entangled with violence toward the Indigenous people who long took care of the region.

November is Native American Heritage Month…and in recognition, we thought we’d re-release the first episode of our third season “Shall Furnish Medicine.” In it, we connected the dots between the spread of European diseases among Indigenous communities when Europeans first arrived and we examined what that history of genocide meant when the COVID-19 pandemic struck home in Native communities. This...

It's very important when you introduce a new technology, to make sure early adopters don't fail. And I want virtual fencing to work. It’s a bonus episode! Binge the whole season of the Great Individualist now. Find the Modern West under podcasts at wyomingpublicmedia.org. Sponsored by the Lor Foundation. Listen at themodernwest.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

Some think the cowboy has gone riding off into the sunset, never to return. But in our final episode, we hear stories of resilience and community pride. We return to Antonito, CO to hear how Aaron Abeyta started a school there to teach children that success doesn’t mean fleeing your hometown. It means staying to celebrate the unique heritage of the community.

Wyoming helped develop western water law, including the very idea that public waters belong to all of us. But the state’s reluctance to update its laws has left ranchers scrambling to protect their streams and wells, as drought and water hoarding make water scarcer than ever.

If Out There isn’t already on your radar, it should be. It’s an award-winning show that uses stories about the outdoors to help you make sense of your life and your world. Just like the Modern West, Out There gets up close and personal, but at the same time, each of its episodes invites you to think big, exploring deeper questions that matter to all of us. In this episode, Out There explores somet...

A few years ago, the May family set off on a trailblazing path to protect their land, and the carbon it stores, by selling carbon credits on the global market.  By promising to never plow the land, the Mays store carbon and protect native wildlife. But with diminishing margins and the looming threat of fire, the road hasn’t been easy.

The Rardins are father and son cowboys watching climate change threaten their way of life. They've given up on the old idea of "get big or get out" and joined the regenerative ranching movement. Inspired by how bison improve the land, they raise cattle to protect grasses and reduce emissions. But for many, it's still a financial risk.

We follow the cow's journey from the mountain pasture to the feedlot and eventually the slaughterhouse. Along the way, we hear from animal welfare advocate Temple Grandin and cattle handlers who all want a fairer, more humane market – and one not so monopolized by large corporations.

The Modern West brings you heartfelt stories about poignant issues happening today in the rural west. A lot of these issues are also felt in other rural communities, across the country. Today we take you to the foothills of the lush Appalachian Mountains in East Tennessee. There you’ll meet people who lost their way of life when a federal agency decided to take their land and flood their rich rive...

This time, we head to Wyoming's Red Desert - and hear the history of the 19th-century range wars. They led to laws requiring grazing fees and regular land health check-ups. But over a century later, some say these regulations haven't done enough to protect our wild spaces. Not to mention our climate.

The history of how we brought the pastoral cow to live on the arid lands of the West is a violent one. Jim Elliot grew up in the shadow of that history and his stories are quintessential cowboy, full of guns, death and hard winters. But even Jim recognized the tragedy of the attempted annihilation of Indigenous culture and bison to make way for cows. But now, there's growing hope among tribes as b...

The Abeyta family has been driving sheep down from the mountains of southern Colorado for generations. But it hasn't been easy to keep that tradition alive – they've had to fight for it. Through their eyes, we trace back the beginnings of the cowboy to the Mexican vaquero and find out how those adventurous roots are still very much alive in the American southwest.

For the Elliot family, there isn't just one kind of cowboy. There are guys like Jake who chase the idea of the rodeo star, never sinking roots, a rolling stone. And then there's Jim, the hardworking and intimidating rancher. In this episode, we bust some myths about what it means to be a "real" cowboy and whether ranching ever measures up to our American ideals.

The cowboy roaming horseback across the American West is nearly inextricable from what it means to be American. But in reality, most beef is raised out East where there's more grass, and only a tiny fraction of the economy in the West comes from cattle. Now a new generation of ranchers is working to reinvent this iconic way of life to fit a modern world.

Fifteen-year-old Kate just lost her mom. On top of that, her learning disabilities are making it hard to go to school. She's missed so much that the school says she might get sent away to a residential treatment center hundreds of miles away. But her grandparents are fighting hard for their right to keep her home.

In Rock Springs, Wyoming, we follow the treacherous paths of two young women. Larissa endures one trauma after another and soon finds herself unable to escape a cycle of probation and incarceration. Another kid, Jess, endures racism and bullying and seems headed down the same road. The system fails them both, but Jess's story takes a turn when she lucks out with a new teacher. But Mr. Baker says k...

In 1892, Wyoming hosts its first execution and it's a teenage boy named Kansas Charley. His trial causes a big national debate: is Charley a hardened criminal or a neglected child? It's a question we still haven't answered in the American West, where children are incarcerated in greater numbers than anywhere else. We also hear from a modern-day Kansas Charley who's living out his days in Wyoming's...

Everyone likes to say that there's no better place to grow up than in the Rocky Mountains. Building snow forts, riding your bike everywhere, learning how to find your way out of the woods when you're lost. But for kids having a hard time, no one's handing them a map and compass. In Wyoming, kids are incarcerated and dying of suicide at higher rates than anywhere else. Longtime education reporter T...

When COVID-19 arrives on reservation borders, tribes aren't sure if their newly minted health care programs can hold up against the onslaught. The fear is that this is history happening all over again. But the two tribes on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming decide early to roll up their sleeves–literally–in a fight for the very survival of their tribal identity.

It's the late 1800s. With no government help in sight, Omaha citizen Dr. Susan LaFlesche is determined to bring health care to her tribe. Decades later, the U.S. still hasn't gotten around to fulfilling its treaty promise to furnish medicine. So, tribes find a way to take over their health care system, and a quiet social movement is born.

For Native Americans, the story of pandemics started the moment European colonizers stepped foot off their ships. Savannah Maher' s tribe the Mashpee Wampanoag experienced that first Great Dying. Arapaho and Shoshone descendant Taylar Stagner tells the history of how those diseases came West as a form of biological warfare.