In Oregon’s remote high desert, the McDermitt Caldera is a vast landscape shaped by ancient volcanic forces — one that has long sustained ranching families and holds deep cultural significance for the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone people. Beneath its sagebrush lies one of the world’s largest known lithium deposits.
With federal policy pushing to mine critical minerals at home, a mining company prepares to drill thousands of acres of public land. A fourth-generation rancher depends on those grasslands to run his cattle. A Paiute grandmother carries generations of knowledge about the plants and places that have sustained her people, and works to document them before the drilling begins. A tribal member building a telecommunications company sees in the mine the first real economic opening his community has had. A biologist tracks sage grouse whose breeding grounds lie across the proposed mine site.
As competing visions for the future converge, a deeper question emerges: who decides what this landscape is worth, and who bears the cost?
