And while I believed myself liberated of this perception, after reading Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (2009), I realized I’d better take a step down from my academic pedestal. While the book is enlightening in numerous ways—tracing the wild horse from its evolutionary origins on North America to the eradication campaigns it faces today—as I read, one thought bothered me more than most: This horse, the wild and free mustang, is one of those “invasive species”? One of those destroyers of ecosystems? Parasites of local economies? I heard the term often enough, even grew excited at the mention of new ways to combat them, and never did I question the need for such charged rhetoric. Until I did, in an interview I was fortunate enough to conduct with essayist, playwright, professor, and author of numerous works of literary nonfiction Deanne Stillman.

Sam Risak (SR): In Mustang, you take us through the horses’ history in the United States, opening with Cortes’s use of the animals in his conquering of the New World. Time and time again, we see how America used the horse to invade and win wars—ironic considering the horses’ current label as an invasive species. Did this ‘invasive’ parallel drive the structure of your book? And if so, what do you hope readers take away from it?

Deanne Stillman (DS): Actually, I take the history back further than that. In the chapter called “Dawn of the Mustang: Eohippus to Equus,” I talk about the fact that the horse is indigenous to this continent. It evolved in North America, then headed across the Bering land bridge in Alaska, and then fanned out across the world, evolving as it went. Meanwhile, it went extinct on this continent, and then returned with conquistadors. I say “returned” because there has in fact been a DNA match between the horses of the Ice Age on this continent and the horses that arrived in the New World with Cortes and other conquistadors. These horses became the basis for many of the wild horses that range across the West today, though some mixed with cavalry horses and others over time. So what’s ironic is the fact that the wild horse has, in the course of the last couple of hundred years, become demonized in various quarters as an “other” when it is in fact indigenous, as science has shown. I talk about this demonization in other chapters that explore the history of rodeo, for instance; rodeo was when we first started seeing terms such as “outlaw” and “son of a bitch” used in reference to wild horses. Later, when cattle grazing took over public lands, the term “varmint” was rolled out in reference to mustangs. In other words, they had to go.

So it’s not so much that the “invasive” parallel drives my book, but rather it’s the idea that “it’s come to this.” As I ask in Mustang, “why are we, a cowboy nation, destroying the horse we rode in on?” I am talking about a spiritual sickness in this country that needs to be reconciled. Of course we are seeing this now played out in spades, with coronavirus upon us, a plague that comes out of wild animal markets in China. Nature is now responding to the endless assaults all over the planet, and our wars against what’s wild must now come to a halt. For more, there is this, which I wrote awhile ago about a trip I made to the Little Bighorn battlefield for the annual commemorations. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-battle-of-the-little-bighorn-and-our-war-against-the-wild/

SR: A main argument fueling the often-cruel means of population regulation for mustangs is their lack of purpose when compared to other grazing animals like the cattle our agricultural industry depends on. To what extent do you think capitalism fuels our attacks against the horse? Do you think America has space for both? Or are capitalism and the mustang set in a permanent patriotic clash?

DS: Those are great questions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the time of the horse as our partner had come to an end. The car was here, and before that the railroad. We no longer needed it for transportation and that’s when the mass round-ups began. The mustang came to be viewed as a cash crop, part of the bonanza in the open spaces of the West. Millions were shipped to the slaughterhouse and the railroads offered special “per pound” rates for wild horses. This machine was voracious and yes, capitalism, unchecked capitalism that is, propelled it. Fortunes were made then as the range was cleared and then cleared again, often to make way for cattle. But there were other things afoot as well. Across the West, there are other valuable resources – timber, minerals – and mustang herds were viewed as being in the way. Today, under Trump, grazing fees – meaning the amount that the federal government charges ranchers to graze their cows on public lands – are at their lowest point ever. In the late 1800s, there was a popular book called The Beef Bonanza and it was read widely in England and Scotland, attracting many emigrants to the Great Plains and the West. Today the bonanza continues unchecked.

We have plenty of wide open space in this country; certainly there is room for wild horses and grazing at the same time. It’s already happened WITH heavier regulations. There really isn’t a clash, other than the one that is commercially driven. But again, the horse is indigenous, and the cow is not. The horse is protected by a federal law. The cow has a powerful lobby, as do the other industries that ply public lands. By the way, this is not to demonize cows; it’s not their fault! Part of the problem here is that our great icon, the cowboy, is part and parcel of the wild horse/cattle puzzle, and it’s very hard to imagine American without this most basic part of our identity. But, as I write at the end of Mustang, if we can’t reconcile our schizophrenic nature – our love of freedom versus our urge to dam it up, wall it off, round it up – the one of these days, America is going to walk on down the road, on foot, without a horse.

By the way, even Paul Revere’s horse had wild horse bloodlines, as I recount in Mustang. America was born in hoofsparks, as per Longfellow’s famous poem about Revere’s ride (“The British are coming!”). Yet we seem to have forgotten all about that, and remembered only the guy on the horse. Incidentally, her name was Brown Beauty, and when the British captured Revere after the ride, she collapsed and died. So here we have a horse dying in service of giving birth to this country.

SR: In the pandemic that is COVID-19, reminders of how we contaminate our surroundings are everywhere—from freeway signs flashing social-distancing messages to the taped-off playgrounds. Even in America, the land of individual rights, we are instructed to not only worry about our own well-being, but the well-being of those around us. Do you believe this shift in perspective has the potential to expand beyond the virus to incorporate our responsibilities to the planet and the needs of other species on it like the mustang?

DS: I hope so, as I’ve said in my earlier replies here. We are already seeing signs that nature is on the rebound. Funny how it doesn’t take much. Birds are returning everywhere as cars and people disappear from freeways, parks, and beaches. Other animals are starting to make a comeback. Already some mustang round-ups planned by the government for this summer have been postponed (though that can easily change down the line; wild horses have not had a friend in the White House since Richard Nixon).

But clearly, there is a worldwide shift across the board underway. We are in a moment of great danger and great promise. It’s going to take a long time to right the ship, but there is an opening right now and we can do this. The planet can take care of itself if we treat it with respect. Horses have been on this continent since the Ice Age and having re-established themselves in a land where they seem destined to endure, they are not going anywhere. Now, the task for us is to honor them as our partner and great icon of freedom, not just revere muscle cars called “mustang” or have football teams called “broncos” and so on. No horse, no America, as I often say, and if it goes, our spirit is greatly diminished.

Stillman and Bugz at Wild Horse Spirit in Carson City, NV, where the horse lived after being rescued in the Virginia Range outside Reno following the massacre of her band during the Christmas holiday in 1998. Stillman tells her story in Mustang, and also the story of the Virginia Range horses.

For more on Deanne Stillman and Mustang, see Pam Houston’s review in the LA Times: https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud/mustang-saga-wild-horse-american-west and her conversation with fellow nonfiction author Samantha Dunn at the LAPL for the Aloud series: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-29-bk-stillman29-story.html

Works published in Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy and upcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, Terrain.org, and Crab Orchard Review, Sam Risak is a Florida transplant pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature at Chapman University.

This language of invasion is often employed to rally support, the “us versus them” mentality it conjures encouraging active participation from the listener. If you don’t want to be overrun, you need to act. However, such language does not come without its share of dangers. While there is no plant or animal actively waging a war against human existence, once hit with the label “invasive species,” they might as well sound a battle cry. Regardless of how concerned you may have been with an ecosystem before, when you hear an enemy has appeared on the front, you know you need to defeat it to protect those land and those with the right to live on it.

But how do you decide who has such a right? The “not native” portion of the definition implies time is the determiner; however, one look at America’s history of colonialization and you should know that isn’t always the key factor. Take the wild mustang. A symbol of Americana, the horse has lived on the soil here longer than any white American, and yet, today it has to fight to live, its label as “invasive species” making it the target to some horrific eradication campaigns. Why? “If the horses get to be too numerous,” says rancher Jackie Ingram in an interview with the New York Times, “it affects the sage grouse, the elk, the antelope and us. All of us depend on the grass.” Ingram claims the wild horses leave so little grass to eat on the Bureau of Land Management land that it has caused other wildlife to disappear and forced her family to cut back on their cattle herd.

There is not enough grass to go around.

That fear is not only central to Ingram’s sentiment, but to the American identity. With every update on rates of unemployment or homelessness, you are reminded to keep working, that it will be your labor alone that protects you from economic despair. It seems hard to believe that this world of fear and suffering is one humans created for themselves, certainly no other species made a priority in its construction. Are you, as Ingram suggests, simply the victim of a lack of supply? Not according to Deanne Stillman, author of Mustang: The Saga of the Horse in the American West. “We have plenty of wide open space in this country; certainly there is room for wild horses and grazing at the same time. It’s already happened WITH heavier regulations,” say Stillman, “There really isn’t a clash, other than the one that is commercially driven.”

Commercially-driven—that’s the key. While there may be more than enough land for mustangs and cattle to co-exist, there is not enough land for mustangs and the massive amounts of cattle necessary to feed our industrial agriculture system—a system that has led to the Dead Zone in the ocean and even driven some populations of grizzly bears and wolves (key predators to horse) extinct. Given such extensive destruction, it seems obvious you should target the industry and promote small farms and ranches. But that locally-sourced beef is pricy, and with the current economic instability, can you really risk the added expense? Will it make any difference if you do?

It can be demoralizing to realize how little effect you have, which is why the competition embedded within capitalism can appear so seductive. If you can’t touch those on top, you need someone or something to control and prove you still have power. And whom better than those villainous “invasive species”? While you may not rally behind the “eradication of the mustang,” you can certainly get behind “curbing the spread of an invasive species.”

Unfortunately, such language is not applied to plants and animals alone. In a poem titled “Super-Insensitive Species,” Korean-American poet Ed Bok Lee parallels the portrayal of immigration in the U.S. against that of the Asian carp consuming native ecosystems. Before I moved out to California, I remember seeing evidence of this “Asian-American-as-Invader” narrative in online comments that described cities like Irvine as “nice until Asians overtook the place.” And it is this narrative Donald Trump capitalized on when he referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” While he may not have used the words “invasive species,” he encouraged the same sort of “us versus them mentality” to redirect attentions onto a non-white population and away from his crumbling economy, the ecosystem where he so readily thrived.

In a capitalist society, you are taught to compete, and if you want to win, you need to choose an opponent you can defeat, i.e., someone society has disadvantaged more than you. Should this raise ethical concerns, dominant classes can placate them, writing populations off as “invasive” so you know you are fighting the good fight. More and more, you separate yourself from everyone around you, until you believe you only have you to rely on. Place us in a pandemic, however, and we can see the harms embedded within such a mindset. As people wear face masks and practice social distancing, we can finally see how interdependent we are, a perspective we must not only use to combat COVID-19, but to create a world where more than a few can survive.

—

Works published in Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy and upcoming in Terrain.org and Crab Orchard Review, Sam Risak is a Florida transplant pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature at Chapman University.

“But there is enough food,” I said, “This is scarcity from greed.”

“Not greed, fear,” he said.

I’m not sure they’re so different.

I saw the man rolling away with eggs in different versions everywhere: the toilet paper snatchers, the people clearing out Costco’s pads and tampons. Greed in the sense of gluttony obviously exists—imagine being the richest man on earth and not providing your warehouse employees health benefits or PTO—but it also trickles down into an anxiety felt by people who would otherwise be prosocial. It’s hard to let go of whatever we’re clenching if we believe no one will catch us.

If you have a serious illness, you can spend even generous savings in a week. If you lose your job, you can be evicted or default on your mortgage within a month. I feel this clenching in myself when I see the news, and I don’t immediately write a check to the food bank. Even if you’re fortunate, you’re always looking over your shoulder, seeing how far you can fall. In these circumstances, charity starts to look suspect. It doesn’t make sense to hope for generosity when we haven’t made a pact to catch each other as a nation.

When my grocery store put limits on how much we could buy, I exhaled. I know in a few weeks the milk will be back. I’m relieved and also so ashamed that an inky voice in my gut has been cuffed. The grocery store’s guard rails have spared me the moral exercise of not taking an extra bag of rice, even though I know there are people who will take ten. The social safety net not only catches people in hard times, it puts a ceiling on how much can be hoarded. This anxiety of this pandemic has convinced me that I’m ready to let go. Please raise my taxes. I’m ready to give more if I know we’ll take care of each other.

As I’ve been processing what the future can look like, I had a dream that I was cave diving on SCUBA. We were passing through a rocky tube too narrow to turn around in. I could touch the fins of the person ahead of me, and behind me, there were people who could touch mine. Sediment clouded the beams of our flashlights. Inching through on our hands and knees, it occurred to me how we were limited to the air in our tanks, how there was no turning around if the person in front of me panicked. I could panic and drown thrashing for an exit, and the people behind me would be trapped, too.

So I didn’t. One hand in front of the other, I crawled out for myself and everyone behind me. The cave widened and we swam to the open water. At the surface, we spat out our mouthpieces. We could speak again, and then our masks came down. We helped each other carry our air-tanks off the beach.

When I woke up, the crisis was still unfolding, but a tightness inside me felt loosened. We have the capacity to escape this crisis. I hope we choose to help each other out of the water.

Author and Visual Artist Biography

Paige Welsh is Anastamos’s creative director. She is pursuing an MFA in fiction. Her thesis at UC Santa Cruz won the Chancellor’s Award. You can follow her on Instagram and on Twitter @MarkthatPaige.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
“Oh, you’ve been to Taiwan? I am so jealous. I love Thai food.”
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You see a performance along the beachside. There’s this teenager doing acrobatic tricks before a crowd. When he is done, he brings a hat before people, asking for money. Your partner gives you money and asks you to give it to him. You turn to your partner and ask why he won’t go give it to the boy himself. He shrugs and nods you to go with his five-dollar bill. Confused, you go and drop the money in the hat.
 
“Thank you,” the performing teenager smiles at you. You gesture a nod for him.
 
“Japanese?”                                                                                                        You stop. Blink. Shake your head.
 
“Korean?”                                                                                                           You smile and shake your head.
 
“Vietnamese?”                                                                                                   “No,” you say to be polite.
 
“Filipino?”                                                                                                           “Nope.”
 
He is absolutely lost. “What are you, then?”                                                 American?
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You are with family for the holidays. The table is set and the food is warm. Chatter from all around the house fill the air. A sudden burst of laughter reaches your ears. It is in a language familiar for you to hear.
 
They ask you about school. They ask about your grades. Your internships. Your health. Your sleeping schedule. How much you eat a day. What connections you’ve made. Did you not know that your cousin is doing just fine in that other Ivy League in the east? They ask why you have gained weight. Do you always look this messy? Maybe consider using some skin products. You need to get more sleep. You need to graduate, soon. Are you dating anyone?
 
Oh. You are. Well.
 
Did you meet at school? At your internship? At work? Who are they? What race are they? Who is their family? What do they do in their free time? What sport do they play? What about instruments? What languages do they speak? What kind of—
 
Your partner only knows English? They know nothing of their own culture?
 
Now that you mention it, you could also do with some improvement. You need to know your language. What’s English going to do for you? Everybody speaks English. You’re no different. Do you want to work at some small company with no international communications? How far do you want to go in life? You should think about that.
 
Eventually.
 
Eventually, the conversation changes pace. There is reminiscing of your parent’s hometown. To the home of your grandparents. It captivates you. There are stories of war and survival. Of running along the banks of rivers in bare feet to catch little shrimps. Stories of walking down the street after school to the local candy shop where your mother would pick up her favorite dessert, once a week, with her allowance. You mention you’ve been to that city once, to add to the conversation as your family bite at pieces of pears and apples and dragonfruit after dinner.
 
To your mistake.
 
So what if you’ve been there? What you see is the city that’s been rebuilt and modernized in the last twenty years. You know nothing about when the city was just a town, nothing about when the country was of a different name, nothing about anything that had been, before globalization. You’ve lived in the United States all your life, you’ve been so modernized. You know nothing about what it means to grow up there, in that part of that country, and breathe in that air. Your mind has been so simplified. It knows nothing of war and the struggle for survival. You don’t even know your own language. The traditions of our life and your family will die with you.
 
Your mother calms down your father’s mother.
 
But she is right, your uncle says. He leans back with a hand on his chin and looks at the table as if in heavy philosophical contemplation. Kids these days, the ones from Asia. None of them care about their heritage.
 
The table nods all around you. You make quick eye contact to the siblings and the cousins who share in your struggle, but silently wish you had kept your mouth shut. You turn to the younger ones who do not understand and have yet to learn what lies ahead in their future, in this home.
 
They grow up so ignorant, your uncle continues, shaking his head. You’d be lucky to find any Asian kid born here that’s truly bilingual. That knows what the hell they’re supposed to prepare for the Lunar New Year. I mean, just the other day…
 
You bow your head to excuse yourself and bring your plate to the kitchen sink. You place it in softly and turn on the water to pretend you are rinsing your plate. You are rinsing your thoughts. You tell yourself you belong in your family.
 
You must belong with your family, because even when they see how Americanized you’ve become, it is still not Americanized enough for you to belong in the United States, in a land where the narrative is so black and so white, so black against white, so determined to throw everyone in every shade in between back to their motherlands, back to a land that does not wish to call itself your mother, back to the Eastern lands of this Westernized world, full of mysterious superstitions and strange mouths eating strange food and speaking strange languages, conversing with different looking people and filling their days with unordinary things, as if bound by a different part of space, a different place in time.
 
You turn off the water and rejoin the table.

Author Bio

There’s nothing like that feeling of dread as you hope against hope your car isn’t totaled, when you pull over and get out to take a look and see the flat tire and the cracked light and the warped trunk, when you look up to see who hit you and it’s your best friend’s car sitting on the shoulder with its side mirror missing and the driver’s door so dented it can’t even open.

There’s nothing like realizing you have to call your parents to tell them what happened, the insurance company to send someone to change your tire, and the police to report there’s been an accident. There’s nothing like standing on the side of that two-lane highway with the sun going down, the closest city still an hour away, and the temperature keeps dropping by the minute and you’ve barely got a quarter tank of gas left so you can’t sit in the car with the heater running for too long and you finally get off the phone with insurance to see your phone has nine percent battery left.

There’s nothing like sitting on the side of the road for two hours, waiting and hoping the tow truck and the police can find you when the only directions you can give are based off of a random traffic sign in the distance, while your friend sits in their car and does exactly the same thing. There’s nothing like standing there talking to the police after waiting for so long and it’s pitch black except for the headlights of passing cars and it’s so cold you can see your breath as you talk to the cop and hearing the screech of tires as two cars nearly collide not five feet from you, almost recreating your exact situation.

There’s nothing like finally getting your tire changed and the police report filed and your friend’s car door fixed and getting back in the car to head into the city to fill up on gas and calling your parents again to let them know you can still drive alright. There’s nothing like looking at the GPS and seeing you’ll arrive at your destination three hours later than you were supposed to and you’re physically and mentally and emotionally exhausted from the six – now nine – hour drive and you still have to unpack once you get there, constantly checking your rearview mirror to make sure your friend’s car is still following you but this time at a safer distance.

There’s nothing like finally arriving and getting all your things out of the car and into your room and standing there, staring at your friend, and it finally hits you that had you not swerved when you slammed on the brakes, had you taken even a split second longer to realize the car in front of you was getting too big too fast, it could have ended so much worse. There’s nothing like standing there and realizing you’re still alive, you’re okay. There’s nothing quite like finally feeling your heart slow down, for hours after the accident the feeling of relief that the only thing that was broken was your car, and realizing that while cars can be fixed easily, people can’t.

Aysel Atamdede holds a BA in English and a minor in Studio Art from Santa Clara University, and is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman. As an undergrad at SCU, she established the Imaginarium VR lab, teaching students to design, build, and publish 3d animations and video games. She is a writer and voice director for The Sketch Fellows, a podcast produced by her and her friends in their spare time, and is currently the Podcast Editor at Anastamos.

Featured Image: “2009 02 07 – 1387 – Sandy Hook – US340” by thisisbossi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0