00:16:13.440I mean, Great Falls lacks that immediate surrounding.
00:16:17.300There's a beauty there, but I don't know that it's as accessible to most people as, like, Bozeman, where every direction you look, there's mountains.
00:16:25.120And Yellowstone is just, you know, a short drive away, and it's just a beautiful valley.
00:17:30.220now it's just a seething cesspool of right-wing ignorant rhetoric and and it's it's challenging to0.92
00:17:38.480to go there and kind of immerse in that environment yeah there i mean trump did a0.94
00:17:45.260rally in great falls i covered it um that was when he was just so mad at john tester and was
00:17:50.260like i'm gonna come to the state as many times as possible just to piss you off and john tester
00:17:55.180still won that election for what it's worth but yeah i think that like a lot of these towns
00:18:03.840like a lot of places in the united states like they have these roots in whatever industry used
00:18:10.860to be their guiding force and now at least in montana there's this real tension between tourism
00:18:19.200them becoming the animating force or just like being a place where retirees move like the flathead
00:18:25.920well we saw that during covid when so many people came and just kind of hid out so all of the
00:18:33.560campgrounds were full and even that the the access points to the various reservoirs and lakes up on
00:18:39.320the reservation you know they had to close those and and put you know people out there you know
00:18:45.360checking tribal ids and they only made them available to people who were enrolled with the
00:18:48.940tribe they had to because their own people couldn't access these places because of all the people and
00:18:54.900and you know even reservation land was being bought you know land on the reservation that
00:19:00.940was lost due to homesteading and due to the allotment era and which is a whole nother
00:19:04.700conversation but a lot of that property was getting bought up sight unseen and drove prices
00:19:09.480up all there so even great falls you know a community at chodo where i'm i'm going this
00:19:14.340weekend for a Métis celebration is 40 miles outside of Great Falls. But it used to be one
00:19:21.340of those little communities that I thought, you know, if all else fails, I'll buy an acre in0.98
00:19:25.360Shoto and just be a hermit for the rest of my life. But that's, that's unaccessible because
00:19:30.000even out there, the land prices have been driven up so much, the housing costs, you know, so Butte
00:19:35.420is kind of the last place that still hasn't totally been just overrun with big money. And
00:19:42.940And there are a lot of artists and stuff from Missoula who have relocated to Butte because that's kind of the last holdout.
00:19:50.320And people who work in Bozeman, you know, which is a little more than an hour away from Butte, are living in Butte and commuting because they don't want to live in an RV, you know, off the side of a road here with gainful employment, you know.
00:20:23.880My dad's family is from Montana and going back to visit over the past 30 years has shown some real tensions between the white people who have lived there for generations and the newcomers, especially after the pandemic population boom.
00:20:37.940At times, it feels like the whole state is simultaneously gentrifying while trying to
00:20:42.580hold on to its iconoclastic, rugged, individualistic identity.
00:20:46.920Is there a sense that there's a loss of an authentic Montana identity going on right
00:20:52.040And is that even a thing that can exist in the context of white settler colonialism?
00:20:56.640See, Chris, I told you we could talk about anything you want here.
00:21:00.000We're going to explicitly evoke white settler colonialism here.
00:21:04.340Um, I love this question because I think that a lot of Montanans have this idea of like authentic Montana culture. And to me, it's always evoked most vividly in the like people who run for office in Montana who say like, I'm fourth generation Montanan or I'm fifth generation Montanan, which is as far back as the white settlers can kind of go.
00:21:26.800and then I just loved when um Denise Juno ran for office and was like I don't know she said like
00:21:35.120250th generation Montana right just to like put a little underline under what it actually means
00:21:42.520to be from a place for a really long time and who who has been in these places for a longer time
00:21:46.720yeah what does this what does this make you think about well it's multi-layered so first I have to
00:21:52.680say you know the people in montana and i have empathy and compassion for them who can't afford
00:21:58.640to live here who have lived here for however many generations that they want to brag about
00:22:03.000you know and and now they're being forced out and it's like you know welcome to the last 5000.65
00:22:07.600fucking years for the for us you know when all of a sudden you have a class of people moving into
00:22:14.480your place in 100 back by the wealth and power of the mightiest nation on the planet which has0.99
00:22:21.460always been the case and and it sucks and you didn't care about it until it came knocking on
00:22:27.420your door and so there's that yeah but also you know the kind of the montana culture you know
00:22:36.140has nothing to do with the yellowstone tv show that i think a lot of people try and attach
00:22:40.300themselves to you know to me the montana culture that i grew up in is you know there's a story i
00:22:46.920tell about a neighbor i used to have across the street who had like trump stickers on the back
00:22:50.760of his truck and all that stuff and I'd see him hauling his guns in and out of the house to go
00:22:55.240target shooting in the range up in the hills on the other side of the river and all of that stuff
00:22:59.480but as far as a neighbor goes he was a great neighbor you know he was friendly I knew if I
00:23:04.860was gone he was going to be looking out um one time we had another neighbor kind of kitty corner
00:23:10.720from my house and across the road from his house and she clearly had some situations going on and
00:23:16.680And, you know, one Friday afternoon, she came home and her power had been turned off and she wasn't going to be able to get in and pay for it until Monday.
00:23:23.620And the Trump guy's wife came over and was saying, do you have any long extension cords?
00:23:27.720And between our two houses, we ran extension cords across the road so that she had power over the weekend.
00:23:33.900To me, that is what Montana culture is, is neighbors looking out for neighbors, people with different ideas getting along anyway.
00:23:41.500and and that's that's what's kind of gone by the wayside is is people you know like an example
00:23:49.020just like yesterday I heard about it you know Gianforte you know there's you can't fly a pride
00:23:56.180flag in public buildings and I might get this a little bit off but like like teachers can't have
00:24:02.240pride flags in their classrooms and things like that so the Missoula City Council but you can0.98
00:24:07.680have one of those stupid gadston flags you know they don't tread on me thing0.99
00:24:11.400and and so so this missoula city council and this recommendation or whatever they call it was0.99
00:24:20.060written by my friend jen savage who i'm going to email and thank wholeheartedly and tell her how
00:24:24.380prouder of her i am they moved at the city council level to make it a municipal flag because if it's
00:24:31.100a municipal flag then you can fly it in places like schools and stuff and now g and forte is
00:24:36.300all in a tizzy about it and all these other people are all in a tizzy about it but you know that
00:24:41.140that's Missoula too you know you the cowboy might shake his head at the punk rocker or whatever all
00:24:47.880the different ways that we present ourselves to the world but but you know we generally got along
00:24:54.480with each other despite our differences and that is what has changed yeah and and that's what
00:25:01.340troubles me about it i think that to me it's exemplified by the shift from split ticket voting
00:25:07.880which was something that montana was renowned for a lot of states idaho same thing there were a lot
00:25:14.920of voters who would vote for one candidate with one political party on the national level or for
00:25:22.260their representatives on the national level and then for a very different party on the local level
00:25:27.040and if you talk to people about this which i did a lot of talking to split ticket voters
00:25:31.260people who had split ticket voted historically they would say it's all about the person yeah and
00:25:37.820it's all about advocacy and a lot of this has to do with the fact that the parties used to be a lot
00:25:42.080closer together so that shift between voting for say tester and trump wasn't as massive as we now
00:25:51.040think it is right but the other thing was just like less of a desire to understand oneself purely
00:25:58.740through politics right and understand one's identity and orientation to either well yeah
00:26:03.780i think there are a lot of people voting for republican just because that's part of their
00:26:07.360identity without even connecting to what that really means anymore and what kind of policies
00:26:12.640they're advocating for with that vote you know tester's loss to me is the most like glaring
00:26:19.720indication of how montana has changed because tester tester is like the perfect montanan you
00:26:26.080You know, he kind of straddled both sides of ideological values in Montana.
00:26:33.260You know, in a lot of ways, he was just Republican light.
00:26:35.900In a lot of ways, he was progressive as a kind of a liberal person.0.97
00:26:39.920And he did a lot for the state, you know, and he lost to a guy who's an absolute ignoramus,0.98
00:26:45.760you know, who just is a jaw and a haircut.0.90
00:26:49.520And people just voted for him because he's Republican.
00:26:52.300You know, and Tester, you know, I didn't agree with everything and I don't feel like I should agree with everything that a politician does. I found his position on Gaza repugnant. And if I think about how long he was in the Senate, you know, if I think there should be term limits, and I do, he was probably due to be gone anyway because he'd been there a long time.
00:27:12.900But just what it says about our electorate here in Montana and the fact that he lost
00:27:17.240and really lost pretty badly, that that is an example of like where we are now and just
00:27:23.500how not any way like what we traditionally consider Montana values.
00:30:18.720So I wonder if part of it is just that we don't have anything else to kind of, you know, I almost said hang our hat on, but kind of express that regional pride.
00:30:31.940Because sports teams largely are a regional pride thing.
00:30:37.220I hate the Red Sox and I hate the Yankees too.