In Settler Stories/Reclaim, visual artist Lydia Moyer and poet John Niekrasz collaborate on a book of photos and text that turns a critical and creative lens on the story of the Jackrabbit homesteads.

Niekrasz presages Moyer’s photos with thirty-six short, written vignettes that depict the Mojave Desert and its hardscrabble settlers with spare but surprising imagery. Niekrasz conducted informal interviews with locals and elaborated on their stories of isolation, subsistence, and absurdity to produce the text. His passages resonate with each other and with Moyer’s photos, which at first appear to be a photographic typology of the small homesteads as they stand now, many in disrepair, and the surrounding landscapes. Upon closer inspection, the photos reveal an attempt to restore the land using digital manipulation.

For some, the Jackrabbit homesteads in California’s Mojave Desert symbolize the last surge of manifest destiny, a tellingly recent example of the state-sanctioned erasure of traditional peoples and ways of life. Settler Stories/Reclaim suggests an unsettling narrative about the futility of living in opposition to the natural world and the subtle despair of rootlessness.