Rural West 2016

Clockwise from top left: hills behind University of Montana campus; Bill Lane Center researcher Nicola Ulibarri; Bill Lane Center co-founder David M. Kennedy; U Montana psychologist Gyda Swaney; audience at keynote lunch; Kenneth Smoker of the Fort Peck Tribes and Indian Health Service; Barbara Creel, University of New Mexico; Hope Eccles, Bill Lane Center advisory council member; keynote speaker Lisa Pruitt, University of California, Davis; panel on housing and homelessness; Montana Gov. Steve Bullock; Center: Panel on Rural West Conference Montana Survey with Bruce E. Cain, Bill Lane Center for the American West; David Brady, Stanford University; Christopher Muste, University of Montana; and Sally Mauk, Montana Public Radio.

The fourth annual Eccles Rural West Conference is in the books, after a day and a half of wide-ranging conversation and debate about the past, present, and future of the rural American West. 

2016's conference theme will be “People and Place in the Rural American West.” The interconnected relationship between people and place is a defining characteristic of the rural American West. The way people experience the American West is closely connected to their sense of the West as a physical place: large coastal cities, small mountain towns, agricultural valleys, and vast stretches of uninhabited terrain. And this relationship continues to shape our understanding of the region’s past, present, and future. Through panels addressing rural public opinion, housing and homelessness, health care and access, tribal law and policy, and public lands and natural resources, the conference seeks to revisit this basic question: how has the relationship between people and place continued to define the rural American West and its communities?

Read the Montana Issues Survey published by the Lane Center in preparation for the 2016 Rural West Conference.