11/08/2025
Alaska! Why did Alaska secondary school librarians receive this State of New Mexico Amazon KDP book, along with: the 1,000 historian researchers who attended October's WHA Albuquerque Conference, and all 25,000 public schools from Nova Scotia, Maine to Florida and in between? Answer:
Governments own most of the West: 63% of the US and >90% of Canada. Those east of the Rockies decide the West’s future. Who knows? They might someday rewild the West with native plants: ground cover to canopy. Species would escape extinction, and it would assist in eastern climate change. But alas; can many answer these questions:
Which western Territory/State adopted women’s suffrage 1/2 century before 1920’s 19th Amendment?
How does New Mexico and Colorado’s Hispano culture differ from Hispanic and Latino or Latinx?
If Alberta votes to secede from Canada, what geographic feature will still divide it from Montana?
If 300 million acres of western U.S. Forest lands (3x the size of California) are to be opened to commercial logging as recently proposed, how much herbicide (banned in Quebec) will be used and where will it flow?
If western “states” (Alaska and British Columbia) are losing non-indigenous pioneer populations because of declining birth rates, why are First Peoples/Indigenous birth rates up post 1978?
If neither “education” nor “healthcare” are words found in the U.S. Constitution, who is responsible for the future care of the recent flood of immigrants, the majority of whom (as history teaches) will reside in the West?
If Canada uses reserves and the U.S. uses reservations, what does all of Central America use?
For your students with laptops, phones, and soon eyeglasses that “listen” to an instructor's questions, are they teaching knowledge & understanding, or only proving that students know how to use AI chatbots?
Why does California, the 1st state (2021) to mandate a semester of “ethnic studies,” prohibit the teaching of “religious doctrine;” e.g. “saved by faith or faith alone?” i.e., do human deeds matter? (Dietrich’s lament). Can you teach history without knowing the doctrine that drove it?
What are the fence-in states; what are the fence-out states (+1 province)? ... and is a Century of grazing permits has terraformed the West, what % of meat consumed nationally has been produced?
With Hanford’s waste sites bleeding into waters downstream, why is the Columbia River even more polluted upstream? Why is Puget Sound dying?
Why are states like Oregon (CA, CO, “BC,” MN, etc.) dropping/diminishing once mandated semesters of “state history?”
How can your students be Good Stewards of the West, when they know so little about it?
Every future citizen of Canada and the United States should know something about when the "West was the North," including Alaska! If you own property, does not one have a duty of care?
