Chapter 8
Recorded on December 20, 2068, in Harlem.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, this is O’Brien. I will be having a conversation with Connor Stephens for an oral history project focusing on the history of the New York Commune. It is … December 20, 2068. We are at the Riverside Commune in Harlem, in Connor’s apartment. We are on the twelfth floor of a twenty-three-story building, with a gorgeous view of Riverside Park and the Hudson River. It is night, and we can see the lights from a dance barge docked on the far side of the river.
Stephens: We are at my daughter’s apartment. I live next door. Where did you get that jacket? [Gestures to a brown construction-style jacket O’Brien is wearing.]
O’Brien: My jacket? Um … I believe my sister Nadia gave it to me—I’m not aware of anything special about my jacket. Are you okay, Mr. Stephens? You seem agitated.
Stephens: Your sister? No … no, it’s fine. I’ll be okay.
O’Brien: Alright. Well, we are at Mr. Stephens’ daughter’s apartment. Can you tell me about growing up?
Stephens: I was born January 19, 2025, on the Wind River Reservation. My mother is Northern Arapaho. She grew up in Casper before moving to Wind River. My father is Zapotec, from Oaxaca. I had two sisters and a two-spirit sib. My sisters are Fast River Stephens and June Stephens. My sib’s name is Trib. I attended high school at Arapahoe in Centennial. I then went to community college in Riverton. You’re wearing her jacket.
O’Brien: Whose jacket? … Mr. Stephens? My jacket is like someone else’s jacket? I don’t really understand.
Stephens: That’s Fast River’s jacket.
O’Brien: [Long pause.] I am worried you aren’t entirely with me in the room, at the moment, Mr. Stephens. Are you sure you want to continue the interview?
Stephens: [Pause.] I’ll be fine. Let’s keep going.
O’Brien: How did your parents meet?
Stephens: I think at a show in Casper. My dad was in a speedcore band from DF—Mexico City. My parents never married, and there was a lot of strife in my mom’s family about it. They didn’t really like my dad. So, we have my mom’s family name. My dad went back and forth between Oaxaca, the District, and my mom’s home on the reservation while I was growing up. Some summers we would go stay with him, and once when I was thirteen, I was a roadie with his band. My family was a bit—odd. Like Fast River was into all these kinds of music scenes in Mexico that no one on the rez knew anything about it.…
O’Brien: What was your family like?
Stephens: A lot of … a lot of love. My mother was very political. The groundwater on the reservation was contaminated. People were getting sick. She worked with other people to stop it. They shut down a pipeline. My dad didn’t talk much, but he taught me lots of things, like how to do things with my hands and play guitar and ride a motorcycle and fix a generator. My sisters were older than me. Fast River got in fights all the time. She would beat down anyone who hassled our family. I think I was closest to her. She disappeared.
O’Brien: What happened?
Stephens: I was maybe twelve. We eventually figured out she had joined the [US] Army somehow. She was over in Iran. And I … well, I … I don’t know.…
O’Brien: I encourage you to elaborate on anything you would like, and you don’t have to say anything about anything you don’t want to talk about. This is a chance for you to tell your story on your own terms. The questions I ask are just to encourage you to share what comes to mind for you.
Stephens: Thanks … thanks.
O’Brien: Do you want to say anything about your other siblings?
Stephens: June was quiet. She was really into school. She wrote a lot. She loved books. She was really into fantasy novels. She was writing fan fiction, I think, all in this portal world of books she liked. She was writing all the time.
O’Brien: And … Trib?
Stephens: Trib got into spiritual practices. They got close to granddad, to my mom’s dad, and got him back into powwows after he had a bad period. They also got June into it. Trib would convince granddad to drive them to powwows all over the Great Sioux. I think Trib and granddad really connected over it.… My mother taught me to fight, to be a defender. A warrior. Fast River taught me how to throw a punch and shoot, and then mom taught me about the deeper parts of being a defender.
O’Brien: What is a defender?
Stephens: I don’t want to get into it.… It was—I don’t know how to say it to you. I guess the easiest way to talk about it is the water. Mom cared so much about the water, about fighting for the water, and knew it was a war for the water. Like a war against the land, and we had to be the land’s defender. That’s not all of it, but it’s the piece easiest to talk about … She told me early that we would all be a part of that war. I don’t think you would get it.…
O’Brien: Should I ask a different question?.… Do you want to share more about your childhood?
Stephens: No ma’am.
O’Brien: Michelle, you can call me Michelle—It feels like maybe I need to just ask a lot of questions?
Stephens: If you’d like.
O’Brien: Do you have any feelings about doing this interview?
Stephens: [Pause.] We have an oral history project at Wind River. Not a settler project—I haven’t done an interview there, but I know my mom did, and Trib, and June. There is a lot about my mom’s organizing. I try not to speak for other people too much, particularly when they are so good at speaking for themselves. My whole family has a lot to say. People should listen to those stories. [Long pause.] I helped my mom out with her organizing all through high school.
O’Brien: Like what is an example of what you did?
Stephens: At Arapahoe High School I helped lead a group that joined in the fights against pipelines and drilling. Then I went to Iran.
O’Brien: In the Army?
Stephens: Yeah, I joined the Army and went to Iran. But things were hot in high school.
O’Brien: Okay, let’s separate those a bit. How old were you when you joined the Army?
Stephens: Seventeen.
O’Brien: So before then, when you were in high school, what was happening? Hot around pipeline struggles?
Stephens: When I was growing up those guys were getting much bolder. Taking over Gillette. Then setting up the camp in Thunder Basin.
O’Brien: Those guys? Do you mean fascists, white supremacist groups?
Stephens: Yeah, those guys.
O’Brien: Sorry I am not quite tracking. What groups were active?
Stephens: Wyoming Liberty. New Nation. Christian Freedom. We didn’t let any of them come out our way. Once they tried to do a rally in Riverton and we had a shootout over it.
O’Brien: They had a big camp in Eastern Wyoming for a while, right? They set up a military base in Thunder Basin Grassland?
Stephens: I did some recon out there. A whole fleet of buzzards and stalkers. I felt some envy looking at those.
O’Brien: Buzzards?
Stephens: You could see the buzzards all lined up on the one road, their wings folded in the moonlight. With their mod houses and this fence, it must have been ten meters high. Like the Green Zone.
O’Brien: Buzzards are … drones? Planes?
Stephens: Sure. The crew at Thunder Basin were all a bunch of burnout soldier boys. Guess I was too.
O’Brien: Was that when you were in high school?
Stephens: No, after I came back from Iran.
O’Brien: It was like the Green Zone in Iran? … This is a bit jumbled. How did the Wyoming Liberty Party come to power in the state?
Stephens: The militias shot up the voting stations in 2050. Liberty rolled in and took over Cheyenne.
O’Brien: The state government? Fascists took over the Wyoming state government in 2050 after disrupting the election?
Stephens: Yeah. The National Guard was split and shooting it out with each other for a day or two, but it was over quick. It was a lot of chaos. This all had been building through the forties.
O’Brien: I feel a little confused. I think we keep getting out of order.
Stephens: Everything is out of order.
O’Brien: What caused the fascist insurgency you are describing? Like … where did they get their resources?
Stephens: Mining corps. The pipeline oil guys. A bunch of ranchers. So many guns. A lot of settlers so fucked up from being in Iran. They needed something they could control. The feds were so distracted, and everything was falling apart. All the pieces were there.
O’Brien: How did you—activists at Wind River—respond to the fascist takeover of Cheyenne?
Stephens: We took it as a chance to expand, going northwest. We took over everything within an hour’s drive.
O’Brien: “We” being the tribal government?
Stephens: Not quite. A lot had been shaken up, turned upside down. “We” being the [Wind River] Defense Forces. Some fighting along Highway 191, but mostly it was also quick. People had been having a hard time in the forties. We made sure people got healthcare and food, which was a lot more than anything coming out of Cheyenne or Thunder Basin. That was good enough. So, a lot of settlers stayed and adapted to Wind River being in charge.
O’Brien: You are referring to the white people living in northwest Wyoming when Wind River expanded?
Stephens: Yeah.
O’Brien: West and north. Those were national parks? The Grand Tetons? Yellowstone? You all took over what had been the national parks in northwest Wyoming?
Stephens: Guess so. They had been closed for years.
O’Brien: Were you going to school at this point?
Stephens: No, I was done up by then.
O’Brien: I am sorry. What year were you born?
Stephens: 2026.
O’Brien: I thought you said 2025? … So, you went to Iran in … 2043.
Stephens: Sounds right.
O’Brien: And the fascist insurgency escalated in 2050. So, you were in high school, fascists started organizing, you were fighting pipelines. Then you went to Iran in 2043, fought in the war. When you got back you joined a reservation militia of some sort, and the fascist insurgency escalated, and a civil war started between the feds and Wyoming Liberty. And your militia, the Defense Forces of Wind River? Took the opportunity to expand the reservation to include what had been national parks? Did I get all this right?
Stephens: Sure. I wouldn’t call us a militia.
O’Brien: You were fighting for Wind River? For “the Defense Forces” you called them?
Stephens: Yeah, I was an officer. I liked the chaos of it. Of the fighting. I always got along well with the chaos. We started the Defense Forces as kids started coming back from Iran, and as things were blowing up with those guys and the feds.
O’Brien: How many fighters in the Defense Forces?
Stephens: Maybe two hundred. We had all been in Iran. We all knew a thing or two. I was a munitions specialist in the war.
O’Brien: Maybe we should back up and talk about your time in Iran. You mentioned that briefly.
Stephens: Okay.
O’Brien: What was serving in Iran like?
Stephens: It was such a shitshow.
O’Brien: Can you share more about that?
Stephens: What do you want to know?
O’Brien: Why did you join the Army?
Stephens: I was a warrior.
O’Brien: But why the Army?
Stephens: I wanted to learn how to fight. I knew how to use a gun and all, but I wanted to learn discipline and self-control, and how wars are won. I thought it might be useful to bring those skills back.
O’Brien: This was … before the draft?
Stephens: I was pretty sure the draft was coming, and I wanted to get in before that, to have some control over where I ended up.
O’Brien: Did you have any say on what you ended up doing?
Stephens: Fuck no. Initially, they put me on as an assist for enhanced interrogations. We had this prison camp outside of Mashhad. I would drag prisoners into the room, drag them out.
O’Brien: Sounds bad.
Stephens: I hated it. I felt like my hatred was just eating me up inside all the time, like it all infected my dreams, that place.
O’Brien: The United States was losing at this point?
Stephens: Badly. The US was never not losing. But it had gotten worse. Eventually I got reassigned out of interrogations.
O’Brien: What did you do next?
Stephens: I got assigned in the field to dealing with landmines and drones.… The US fucked that country up bad.
O’Brien: How so? Could you say more about that?
Stephens: That was the year they nuked Tehran and Mashhad.
O’Brien: 2045?
Stephens: I was in the desert … When the Russians pulled out, some of the guys I was fighting with thought it would be an easy win, but at that point it just all collapsed.
O’Brien: What happened?
Stephens: The ’mericans had already poisoned the water in the major cities, defoliated the whole northeast, so it was just these huge caravans of refugees trying to flee. Bomb strikes raining down on them. Watching that fucked me up …
O’Brien: They were bombing refugees? The US Air Force?
Stephens: What that fucking empire did to that country no one should ever forget.
O’Brien: The US defoliated northeast Iran? The area under US control?
Stephens: Yeah, control was the running joke.
O’Brien: Where were you based?
Stephens: My unit was in the desert, Dasht-e Kavir.
O’Brien: Were you close to anyone?
Stephens: I had this friend, Ridge, he was an intel man with my unit. He came from Cali, from the Balagoons, and he was smart as fuck, like Fast River.
O’Brien: It sounds like you liked him.
Stephens: Ridge would talk about how the ’ranians were fighting, the guerilla strategies in the occupied cities, the strike waves, the refugee mutual aid, the local subcontractors teaming up with the insubordinate ’merican units, about how people lived in the desert … I learned more from hearing how the ’ranian guerrillas fought than anything the US did.
O’Brien: I notice you have more to say when talking about—about people you liked. Is there more you can say about Ridge?
Stephens: Ridge loved it, like loved the people we were fighting, the desert we were in, the land. Reminded me of how granddad talked about the land. I learned a lot from Ridge, about thinking strategically, thinking tactically.
O’Brien: What was your job?
Stephens: I was jacked up with auggie bugs and on a bomb squad. I would spot and take apart landmines and ground drones.
O’Brien: You are referring to augmented reality implants.
Stephens: Yeah.
O’Brien: Did all the vets in the Defense Forces have them?
Stephens: Most of us, yeah. Privates got them, no one else generally, ’cause of the mind fragging. Sometimes specialists.
O’Brien: Do you still have them?
Stephens: You can’t take that shit out. And you can’t really turn it off.
O’Brien: Does it still affect you, having the implants?
Stephens: Makes everything all wonky. I’m used to it, have been for a long time. But I forget that other people can’t see what I see, the overlays everywhere I look. Reality is not the same for me.
O’Brien: How do you think the war in Iran shaped the politics you saw around Wyoming?
Stephens: It’s what sent everything past the point of no return. Everyone came back knowing it was rotten. Like the Liberty boys realized they had to start the whole settler show over again if they wanted it to work.
O’Brien: The fascists had become oppositional to the US government?
Stephens: They hated ’merica as much as I did by the end. Losing that war meant there was no way the settlers could hold it together here.
O’Brien: So, back to the fascist takeover of Wyoming.
Stephens: Yeah. Fed boys and Liberty boys were at each other’s throats. We talked to people all over—Great Sioux, Apacheland, Uteland. So we knew a lot about what was going on. Did a lot of recon.
O’Brien: White fascists?
Stephens: You have a lot of questions. Sure.
O’Brien: I’m sorry. I am a bit disoriented, and just trying to piece everything together.
Stephens: The world was upside down …
O’Brien: Okay, yeah. What started the civil war?
Stephens: New Nation took a Minutemen facility north of Fargo.
O’Brien: These were fascists seizing a nuclear weapons facility?
Stephens: Yeah. The feds got all worked up about that. It blew the whole thing wide open.
O’Brien: Blew open—but there wasn’t a nuclear detonation?
Stephens: No, just the civil war.
O’Brien: So, the US Army was fighting fascists? Is that right? I feel myself getting confused.
Stephens: Lots of players in the field. We mostly stayed out of it. Wasicu versus wasicu. The regime out of Cheyenne crumbled pretty fast. They just kept fighting it out. It was messy.
O’Brien: What happened to Cheyenne?
Stephens: Water went out and it was like Zabol all over again, like, these caravans of refugees pouring out of the city, everyone loaded onto pickup trucks and hauling everything in these trailers, and so much fear and exhaustion on their faces. Reminded me of Iran.
O’Brien: Where did they go?
Stephens: Some went north and were detained or drafted by the Thunder Basin boys. Most headed south to Denver. Those who came our way we made sure they got the basics. We were focused elsewhere.
O’Brien: What were you all focused on?
Stephens: Defending the rez, mostly. But we also had a unit that took out all the active oil drilling and pipelines.
O’Brien: The pipelines were still operating?
Stephens: Oil boys were big players. That was a part of the fash’s base, and we knew that, the pipeline companies.
O’Brien: How did you get involved in the [North American Liberation] Front?
Stephens: No Front at that point. Just Fast River talking to people. And a few others like her.
O’Brien: Who was she talking to?
Stephens: The chaps from the prisons out West, the stuff down south.
O’Brien: That is the Balagoons? Like the group Ridge was a part of—they formed around the prison breaks in California? And the New Afrikaan People’s Party in Alabama and Mississippi?
Stephens: Yeah, those groups. But she talked to anyone who was fighting and seemed to care about the land. So, it was a network. Like people talking to each other.
O’Brien: Was Ridge a part of that network?
Stephens: Ridge died in Kavir. But I knew some of his people, and made sure Fast River met them.
O’Brien: It was the beginning of what later would become the North American Liberation Front?
Stephens: That’s right.
O’Brien: What did you think of communization at this point? Of communist and socialist currents?
Stephens: I didn’t know what that meant. Learned later. But we had been arguing about land a lot among the Eastern Shoshone. A lot of Nations were. We knew our time was coming, that landback was happening.
O’Brien: What was landback?
Stephens: Oh, like a slogan and a vision. Land doesn’t belong to the settlers.
O’Brien: And the meaning of that changed with the insurrection?
Stephens: When America was collapsing, a lot of the militants at reservations prepared for landback. But how to relate to the land was the question, like what Fast River called “a fundamental political question.”
O’Brien: Could you say more about that? The debates over land control and sovereignty were a big thing in the sixties, but I think a lot of people in New York don’t know much about it.
Stephens: We couldn’t keep up the settler game, or our impersonation of it that a lot of tribal governments had been running. We had lost our way, and people were waking up to that. So, opening onto a way of relating to the land that was collective, respectful, about the needs of everything and everyone. These were Fast River’s words. She was good with words.
O’Brien: How did Fast River relate to these debates?
Stephens: Yeah, she saw it all. She saw how it all fit together. These new visions of working with the land. And then this communization movement in the cities. She saw how they were connected, how they could be the same thing. I would sit with her when she’d do these long mediations between the Balagoons and the elders. They talked and talked and talked.
O’Brien: Wind River eventually joined the North American Liberation Front [NALF]?
Stephens: Yeah. I was a Second Lieutenant. Served with Fast River.
O’Brien: What year was that?
Stephens: 2061, maybe?
O’Brien: Can you tell us more about Fast River?
Stephens: She lived like her stomach was on fire, like it could explode out of her at any moment. She was all fucked up coming back from Iran—I guess we all were. She didn’t enhance, but everyone thought she did. She didn’t really sleep much. You could see the fire in her when she would talk, like it was coming up through her throat and out her eyes. She would grab eyeballs with anyone, would be totally focused on whatever they were saying.
O’Brien: She sounds amazing.
Stephens: She was one of the first ones I met—that anyone I know met—who thought the early communes and the insurrections and the Native struggles could fit together into something that could remake the world. That’s her jacket. You have her jacket.
O’Brien: She was a military strategist of sorts? Or you both were?
Stephens: The communes would never have had a chance if they had gone up against the Army.
O’Brien: What enabled them—you all—to win?
Stephens: The US was dead. They had lost in Iran. Then all through the fifties they were bogged down in the Rockies and Great Plains and just bleeding dry.
O’Brien: The US Army was fighting the fascist take over? I feel like we just talked about this, but I still don’t quite understand. We are talking in circles.
Stephens: Yeah, we kept a low profile. Just talking with each other, taking land when they were distracted. It wasn’t until the US bled out completely that NALF stepped up to end it.
O’Brien: You are referring to the last three years of the war? 2062 to 2065?
Stephens: Yeah. We had to take out the wasicu for good. In the war all the Nations had taken back most of the region. But they were holding fast in what they called Colorado.
O’Brien: Who was? The fascists? The feds?
Stephens: Oh, yeah, those guys. The feds were pretty much out of the picture at this point.
O’Brien: Were there internal fights within the Front?
Stephens: Definitely. They were big on antinationalism. They couldn’t really wrap their minds around what was happening in the Nations.
O’Brien: Could you explain this a bit more? I think this is really important for everyone to understand.
Stephens: There was this real tension with the settler socialists who couldn’t really get sovereignty and land claims.
O’Brien: And you were a part of the shared land movement within Native politics? That shared some overlap with communization?
Stephens: I was. But we were not going to let any settlers tell us how to manage things.
O’Brien: Do you have any stories about those fights?
Stephens: It came to shots. I had a settler commander from fucking Connecticut, from some socialist cult, and he didn’t make it.… We tried not to let it get out that NALF militants were shooting at each other.
O’Brien: There were major debates about Indigenous sovereignty in assemblies all up and down the Americas.
Stephens: Yeah.
O’Brien: [Long pause.] You were there in Colorado Springs?
Stephens: I was.
O’Brien: Can you tell us about it?
Stephens: [Long pause.] It was—hell. Like a bad dream. [Pause; begins to speak quickly.] The worst fight of the war. Like the last major holdout of the fash. We knew they had nukes, they had the air force base there, they had all their cults. I was in a unit with Fast River. We came down from the mountains, about nine thousand fighters. Fort Carson fell first, and then we followed the mountains down to descend fast and hard on Colorado Springs. We had a sense then that this was it, like when the city fell, we’d be able to sort the rest out. There was a lot of worry they would launch a nuclear response. That’s why we moved fast. We shelled the city hard with artillery through the night and attacked at first light. The forces were fairly evenly matched, and we … a lot of us fell, a lot of casualties. [Long pause.] She was wearing that jacket. She had been shot. I think by a buzzard. They had these fucking buzzards with night vision that fired flechette rounds. They felt like shards of glass when they went into me. Have you ever stepped on glass? It was like that, but all over your body. They tore up my stomach. Something is still wrong with my legs. The jacket was all torn up. Now it’s new, like she made it out. You understood … you understood what needed to happen.
O’Brien: That’s the most you’ve said in one go Mr. Stephens. Is it possible you are having a flooding response? Like the memories are rushing in?
Stephens: I was stuck dying on the concrete in that fucking jacket. It’s like a construction site, rebar and exposed concrete lit up by mortar explosions that are getting closer. The stars looked so close.
O’Brien: Would it be helpful to stop the interview, Mr. Stephens?
Stephens: We couldn’t both stay … I had to go. You understand, right? I had to go. We knew they were going to mortar the building. We knew we couldn’t both make it. I don’t know. Fast River, why did you fucking leave me? But you made it, you are alive. [Crying.] Fuck you! Fuck you. Why did you have to get shot?
O’Brien: Mr. Stephens, you are not breathing. Can you breathe in with me? Yeah, let’s breathe in. Okay, let’s breathe out together. Breathe in, breathe out. Let’s feel the floor under our feet.
[Stephens’ daughter enters room.]
Daughter: Dad, are you okay?
O’Brien: I think Mr. Stephens is having a flashback of some sort. Can you help him?
[Recording is stopped.]
O’Brien: Are you sure you are okay to continue?
Stephens: Yeah, it’s okay. I get freaked out sometimes. I’m sorry about that. My sister was killed in Colorado, and I get confused. I have these intense flashbacks when I try to think about Colorado Springs. I think your jacket reminded me of her, and it messed me up in the head. I am okay now.
O’Brien: It’s quite alright. I should not have pushed you.
Stephens: The past doesn’t go anywhere. It’s with us all the time. It’s in me, in my head, in the ground, in the air. The past is right here.
O’Brien: Hopefully we can learn from it.
Stephens: Yeah, cert. I don’t know what I learned. Sometimes I think I belong to the past now, that something of me died there, or a part of me belongs to those who came before me and there isn’t enough of me left over for this future we are in. That’s what I feel like when I get lost, that I am back in that other place, and not enough of my mind has made it into the present to live here.
O’Brien: You seem more relaxed now. How did you end up in New York?
Stephens: After the war ended I was … destroyed. I had sent my daughter to New York in ’54 when the fighting was getting close to Wind River. Her mom died when she was little. I needed to get away from it all. I moved out here.
O’Brien: Why New York?
Stephens: I thought about Oaxaca, but things were dicey getting there. Ridge’s sister had ended up in Harlem, and she and I had been in touch. We first started talking about how much we missed Ridge, but then familied as we texted. Name’s Emory. Emory promised to take care of my daughter. That’s how we ended up here, Emory is commune coor for Riverside. Emory knew what she was doing, and she knew that New York would make it through. I love the land, like I really miss Wind River, but I needed to be somewhere new, I think. I needed to be in a new place to heal.
O’Brien: Your daughter seems very kind. Can you tell us about her?
Stephens: Oh, she is very special. I named her Little River. She’s twenty-five years old. She is a … therapist, I guess. She is very active in all sorts of things. She works with refugee children. Kids whose families went through horrible things in the war, or in all the storms and bad weather and heat waves and such. She works with this group over in Queens. I guess she was a refugee child herself in a way.
O’Brien: We interviewed Quinn Liu for this book. Do you know her?
Stephens: Yeah, cert. My daughter works with her.
O’Brien: I’m glad you have your daughter.
Stephens: Me too. She’s what keeps me here. In the present.
O’Brien: Would you have any advice for listeners, for people who didn’t live through the revolutionary war?
Stephens: I’m the last person who can give advice … I know elders who have a lot to say, who I have learned from. You should talk to them if you want advice. I can’t give that to you. [Long pause.] But I can say. I don’t know.… I can say—I can say that the war didn’t just start between the fash and the feds one day. Like, they were basically the same, in the end, and their fight was really just about the pipeline boys and the ranchers and their show, and their show falling apart and not working anymore, and them not knowing how to keep it going anymore. The real war had been going on a long, long time, for fucking centuries. It was being waged against the water, against the land, against the ancestors, against the future. The fighting we did, what we did in Thunder Basin or Colorado Springs or Salt Lake City, what people called the revolutionary war—that was bringing the other long war to an end. That was us bringing to an end the long war against the land. That was letting the land be what it was all along.… That’s what I have to say.