On the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, Rep. Liz Cheney had a rendezvous with Clio, the muse of history. 

Congress was just about to reconvene to confirm Joe Biden’s victory after being disrupted by a riot that ricocheted round the world. The Wyoming congresswoman strode into Statuary Hall, where officers in tactical gear were leaning against the marble figures of great American men and women, exhausted after hours battling their countrymen.

Above the door, Clio watched over them. She sits atop a clock fashioned by an octogenarian clockmaker from Roxbury, Massachusetts, where 15 of the first Cheneys who came to America are buried. William Cheney arrived in 1640 as part of the wave of Puritans fleeing religious persecution. Two centuries later, Samuel Fletcher Cheney fought to save the Union. And now here stood Elizabeth Lynne Cheney, leader of the House Republican Caucus, on the threshold of an era of division unseen since the Civil War.

It was a solemn moment for the scion of one of America’s most influential Republican families. Perhaps it was no mistake that she had dressed all in black that day. Only a few generations in American history, President John Kennedy once said, have been “granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”

“Today, that role is ours, as we face a threat we have never faced before: a former president attempting to unravel our constitutional republic,” Representative Cheney would later say. “The question for every one of us is, in this time of testing will we do our duty?”

The No. 3 Republican then went back into the House chamber and was among a minority of her party who did not object to the Electoral College count in two swing states. A week later, she was one of only 10 in her party to vote to impeach President Donald Trump, saying he “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame.” Within months, she lost her leadership position.

Now, she is vice chair of a Democratic-led committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, which will hold the first of a series of highly anticipated hearings on Thursday evening. 

To Ms. Cheney, Jan. 6 represents an existential battle for the American republic – one for which she is willing to sacrifice her political career. Supporters herald her as a rare example of courage in an age of partisanship, one of the few Republicans of national stature willing to confront former President Trump and call out her party for enabling his lies. Indeed, it was at the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage ceremony, where she was one of the five honorees, that she shared her reflections on history and duty.

Critics, however, say her myopic focus on Mr. Trump has abetted a politically motivated investigation. It has also undermined her ability to serve her constituents, who decry her lack of help in fighting Biden policies that are hurting Wyoming’s farms, ranches, and oil fields.

As the Jan. 6 committee begins revealing to the public what it has learned so far, Ms. Cheney will be front and center, both documenting – and etching her place in – history. Meanwhile, her Republican primary opponent has logged 23,000 miles crisscrossing Wyoming’s vast plains and mountain ranges to meet with voters. 

Lauren Miller/The Casper Star-Tribune/AP

Former President Donald Trump endorses Harriet Hageman for Wyoming's sole congressional seat during a rally on May 28, 2022, at the Ford Wyoming Center in Casper. He spent much of his hour-and-a-half speech pillorying incumbent Rep. Liz Cheney, arguably his chief critic within the Republican Party.

At a rally in Casper last month, Mr. Trump – who won Wyoming by the largest margin of any state – denounced Ms. Cheney for doing the bidding of “corrupt” Democrats, and urged voters to instead back Harriet Hageman, an attorney who has built a career battling federal bureaucrats. In many ways, this is the biggest test of the former president’s influence over the Republican base. 

“I think this is a watershed election,” says GOP state Sen. Cale Case of Lander, who is supporting Ms. Cheney. “We know that the nation is looking at us.”

The view from Wyoming

Casper has been at a national crossroads before. In the 1800s, settlers streamed over the North Platte River en route to a new life in Oregon or the gold mines of California. Five different routes once converged here, including the Mormon Trail that two of Ms. Cheney’s great-grandmothers trod. As homesteaders hewed cabins from trees, Buffalo Bill Cody transformed the image of cowboys from social outcasts to romantic icons of strength and courage. 

Now, Wyoming is debating who should represent the state in Congress – and how independent the voters will be, especially those who supported Mr. Trump.

Ms. Hageman, a fourth-generation Wyomingite and daughter of a longtime legislator, was raised on a ranch and has developed a reputation for sticking up for the state’s farmers and ranchers.

“I know Wyoming, I love Wyoming, I am Wyoming,” Ms. Hageman told the crowd at the Trump rally. “I know what it means to be loyal to the outfit that hired you.

“As soon as I defeat Liz Cheney ... ” she continued, before deafening cheers drowned out the rest.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/File

Former Vice President Dick Cheney walks with his daughter, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, Jan. 6, 2022. Representative Cheney, who lost her House GOP leadership position over her stance on Jan. 6, is serving as vice chair of the House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The Cheney name looms large in Casper, where a young Dick Cheney would shoot game on the prairie and bring fried rabbit in his lunchbox the next day. A key player in multiple Republican administrations, Mr. Cheney was the youngest White House chief of staff in history, served as Wyoming’s sole congressman for 10 years, and oversaw the Gulf War as secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush. Many still regard him as the most influential vice president ever, for his role in orchestrating the Iraq War during the second Bush administration.

Today the local high school’s field bears his name, as does the federal building downtown, not far from an old-fashioned soda fountain and a movie theater with a vertical neon AMERICA sign. 

But Liz Cheney, his elder daughter, has struggled to convince voters she’s a real Wyomingite. Raised mainly in the Washington, D.C., area, she and her husband bought a house in the state in 2012 before she made a short-lived run for Senate, challenging the popular Republican Mike Enzi in a move some saw as presumptuous. They chose the Jackson Hole area – a wealthy resort town at the base of the Grand Tetons full of multimillion-dollar homes, in contrast with the ranches, bungalows, and rusting trailers that dot the rest of the state. If she and her family have ever lived here full time, it’s a closely kept secret in this close-knit state. 

Since winning election in 2016, however, Ms. Cheney has impressed many of her onetime detractors – including Tim Stubson, a former state legislator who ran against her in the GOP primary that year, and had criticized her as a carpetbagger. 

Her argument was that with her connections in the Republican Party, she could come into Congress on Day One and help Wyoming – and she did, says Mr. Stubson. Within two months of taking office she spearheaded a resolution to nullify an Obama regulation that restricted public land use, a big issue in Wyoming, and stood next to President Trump as he signed it. 

“She has been a super-effective legislator,” he says in an interview in his Casper law office.

Ms. Cheney is also one of the most conservative members of the House GOP caucus, voting with Mr. Trump more than 90% of the time during her first two terms, with their differences mainly related to foreign policy and fiscal discipline. And while she has continued to introduce legislation that could help Wyoming, including a bill challenging the Biden moratorium on oil and gas leasing, some constituents say her focus on Jan. 6 has undermined her advocacy for Wyoming’s interests.

“She lost the ability to fight for Wyoming,” says Jack Mueller, who has known the family for decades, serving as a county co-chair for Dick Cheney’s first congressional campaign in the late 1970s. 

“This whole Jan. 6 thing – she’s been milking that like mad,” says Mr. Mueller, who supported the Laramie County GOP’s censure of her and says he got a call from Ms. Cheney a few days later. “I accused her of forming a cabal with Nancy Pelosi.” 

He says he still doesn’t understand what her motive is. The two haven’t spoken since. 

Andrew Harnik/AP/File

Then-President Donald Trump gives his pen to GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a first-year congresswoman at the time, after signing a land-use bill she sponsored in the House. From left are GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Don Young of Alaska, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke (far right) and his wife, Lolita Hand.

Even as her stance has alienated members of her own party, however, it has won her accolades from the left. 

“I consider her a person of great decency and character,” says Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a constitutional lawyer who has developed a warm working relationship with her on the Jan. 6 committee, despite their policy differences. “She’s resilient and tough as nails.”

“To my mind,” he adds, “Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney and the other Republicans who have stood up against Donald Trump are constitutional patriots.”

Her detractors see things differently. 

If Ms. Cheney is so committed to the Constitution, one Trump rally-goer wondered, why isn’t she fighting for justice for the people who were arrested for, in their view, merely taking selfies in the Capitol on Jan. 6? When the Republican National Committee took the unusual step of censuring Ms. Cheney and Representative Kinzinger, it said that it was “unbefitting” of Republicans to participate in a Democrat-led committee that disregarded minority rights, traditional checks and balances, and due process, among other things.

“‘Hang Mike Pence’ is nothing”

At the heart of these diverging viewpoints is a fundamental disagreement between Ms. Cheney and her critics about what actually happened on Jan. 6 – and how big a threat it posed. 

At his “Save America” rally that day, then-President Trump had called the election “the most corrupt in history” and urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, where Vice President Mike Pence was overseeing Congress’s counting of the Electoral College votes. 

“We’re going to have to fight much harder, and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us,” he told them, urging the vice president to support a Republican challenge to some states’ votes. 

Trump supporters then marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, where Ms. Cheney’s great-great-grandfather had once paraded to celebrate the end of the Civil War. Those leading the charge shattered windows and doors to break into the Capitol, clashing with police officers while rioters in the hallways chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”

Lawmakers and police barricaded the doors with furniture, and at least one shot rang out when a policeman fired on unarmed veteran Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through the smashed glass of a door to the lobby outside the House entrance. Two other protesters also died in connection with the attack. Some 114 Capitol Police officers, as well as several dozen Metro D.C. officers, were injured that day after hours of what a bipartisan Senate report described as ”absolutely brutal” physical abuse. Five have died, including four by suicide. 

Some grant that lawmakers in the building that day may have felt more danger than they feel was apparent to those watching on television. Still, many on the right believe Ms. Cheney is abetting what they see as the left’s exaggeration of Jan. 6 for political purposes. 

Marti Halverson, one of Wyoming’s three electors in 2020, was watching the day’s events unfold on TV and texting with friends who had gone to Washington for Mr. Trump’s rally.

“I think the Capitol Police overreacted,” she says. How could the Capitol be “breached” when it is the people’s House? she wondered. As for threats chanted by the rioters, she says that as a former state legislator she received awful threats in her inbox but sees them as routine for any politician these days. “‘Hang Mike Pence’ is nothing,” says Mrs. Halverson, adding that she doesn’t believe the rioters meant it.

Courage or ambition?

Ms. Cheney’s stance has motivated some Wyoming Democrats – who can change their party affiliation even on voting day – to cast a ballot in the GOP primary. 

“She won a lot of us over because of that,” says Sarah Konrad, who manages a federal grant program supporting scientific research at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and is planning on registering as Republican for the first time to support Ms. Cheney.

It also persuaded some conservatives like Helen Higby, by her own account an erstwhile “loud Trump supporter” who credits Ms. Cheney with changing her outlook after the 2020 election. 

“Having her brave enough and willing to risk her political future and willing to cross swords with him – I admire her for that,” says Ms. Higby, a mountaineer in her youth who respects the congresswoman’s dogged focus. “My ethic is, you don’t just throw up your hands when things get tough.”

But where some see integrity and courage, others see willfulness and ego.  

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Former Rep. Barbara Cubin, the first woman to represent Wyoming in Congress, endorsed Rep. Liz Cheney's primary opponent, Harriet Hageman, a week after she announced. Pictured here in downtown Casper, Ms. Cubin says it was a difficult decision because she's had a fondness for the Cheneys for many years.

“Liz is a very stubborn person. She is never wrong – never,” says former Rep. Barbara Cubin, the first woman to represent Wyoming in Congress, who endorsed Ms. Hageman shortly after she announced – a decision she says was hard, because she has “fond feelings” for the Cheneys.

“I think she has bigger political ambitions,” says Monte Hartman, sitting on a grassy knoll outside the Trump rally in Casper.

But just what those ambitions are is unclear. Many surmise she has her eye on the 2024 presidential race. It’s unlikely she could win either party’s nomination, however, having burned her bridges with the GOP, and still far too conservative for most Democrats. 

“I can’t imagine that there weren’t political calculations, but I really thought she did it out of a sense of principle,” says Dino Wenino, a progressive who is registered as a Republican so he can have some sway in elections here. “She was riding high in the Republican Party and now she’s almost a pariah.”

Whatever her motives, in a state where 7 in 10 voters supported Donald Trump, many feel affronted by her decision to co-lead the committee investigating his role in that day’s events.

“I could give her all the credit in the world for operating in accordance with her highest principles when she cast her vote to impeach,” says Mrs. Halverson, the Wyoming elector, but adds that her congresswoman’s subsequent actions showed “seeming contempt.” In particular, she highlights Ms. Cheney’s decision to skip a GOP gala in Rock Springs earlier this year in favor of attending the Wyoming Press Association’s annual gathering, and her subsequent explanation to The New York Times that she’s “not going to convince the crazies.” 

A Cheney spokesman says that comment referred to the leadership of the state party. A recent exposé of GOP Chair Frank Eathorne, who spearheaded not only the state party’s censure of Ms. Cheney but also the Republican National Committee’s censure resolution, depicts him as pursuing a purist strain of politics that critics say borders on extremist. But some took Ms. Cheney’s “crazies” comment as akin to Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “deplorables.”

“All she has done since Jan. 6 is dig herself deeper and deeper into a hole,” says Mrs. Halverson in her hotel lobby the afternoon before the Trump rally, sporting a Hageman for Wyoming button. “And I’m very disappointed.”

The next day, she took the stage to praise Mr. Trump and rally the crowd for Ms. Hageman. 

“The most important election”

While a handful of other Republicans have spoken out against Mr. Trump, few have the pedigree, national standing, and platform that Liz Cheney has had as daughter of a former vice president and vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee. There’s a lot riding on this race – not just for Ms. Cheney, but also for the party and its relationship with Trump. 

“Wyoming, all of America is counting on you,” Mr. Trump told the crowd of about 8,000 in Casper. “We have a lot of elections coming up. I think this is the most important election that we have, right here.”

Cheney supporters think so, too. 

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Milcey and Pete Scott, ranchers outside of Casper pictured here with their border collie, Griet, support Representative Cheney – but rarely talk about politics with their neighbors. Many ranchers credit the Trump administration as well as Representative Cheney’s opponent, lawyer Harriet Hageman, with removing red tape imposed by federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Park Service.

“If she’s reelected, she’s in a much stronger position to be a counterweight to Trump,” says Pete Scott, a Republican rancher outside Casper who has watched the former president’s “takeover” of the party in disbelief. “If she’s defeated, that does not augur well, because she is just about the only national Republican willing to stand up to Trump.”

Many interviewed here feel the momentum is with Ms. Hageman, but they haven’t counted Ms. Cheney out. A key question is how many Democrats like Ms. Konrad will cross over to vote in the GOP primary – something Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully to persuade the state legislature to limit. 

In 2018, Democrats made an eleventh-hour bid to influence the GOP gubernatorial primary. Of the more than 11,000 newly registered Republicans in 2018, almost 3,000 were previously registered as unaffiliated (independent) and almost 2,400 as Democrats. But some insiders say it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Ms. Cheney will pick up enough to compensate for the Republican voters alienated by her relentless criticism of Mr. Trump.

“There’s a huge part of me that’s like Liz, just stop – I want you to win, and you don’t have to keep poking the bear,” says a Republican strategist in Wyoming. “Now it’s too late.”

Most agree she undoubtedly calculated the risks of coming out against Mr. Trump, and what it would mean for her influence going forward.

“The vast majority of people never reach that point where they’re willing to say, ‘OK, I’m going to jump off this political cliff because of principle,’” says Mr. Stubson, explaining that for many Republicans unenthused about Mr. Trump it’s easy to make the argument that it’s better to stay quiet and exercise what influence they have than to lose it. Even among the 10 House members who took the leap and voted for impeachment, Ms. Cheney stands out. 

“Liz was in the unique position that she couldn’t be pushed to the side, even if she got kicked out of leadership, because of the national voice that she had,” says Mr. Stubson. 

Indeed, whether she wins reelection or not, “she will have an avenue in America,” says Alan Simpson, a longtime former senator who campaigned alongside Ms. Cheney’s father when he was running for Congress in the late 1970s and Liz and her sister would tag along with a straw hat full of buttons.

“She is her father’s daughter – and Dick Cheney is one tough cookie. But he’s a big-hearted man and he loves this country with passion,” adds former Senator Simpson. “She is going to be a spokeswoman to take down the clandestines and the phonies and the fibbers. And the fakers – add them. That’s going to be her mission.”

Daniel Becerril/Reuters

The Los Angeles Convention Center, site of this week's Summit of the Americas that President Joe Biden is hosting, in Los Angeles, June 6, 2022.

After the debacle of last summer’s Afghanistan withdrawal, President Joe Biden and his team surprised many – not least Russia’s Vladimir Putin – with their dogged and effective leadership of international opposition to the war in Ukraine.

More recently, Mr. Biden turned his focus to China and the challenge he sees it posing to the rules-based and values-inspired international order. He hosted a gathering of leaders from Southeast Asian countries, then traveled to rock-solid Asian allies Japan and South Korea and participated in a summit of the Indo-Pacific “Quad” democracies: the United States, Japan, Australia, and India.

The point the White House aimed to demonstrate: that the U.S. retains the capacity and the moral authority to lead the world.

Yet the sense that U.S. global leadership is on a roll is now suffering an embarrassing setback – in America’s own backyard.

This week in Los Angeles, Mr. Biden is hosting the Summit of the Americas, which, since the inaugural summit in Miami in 1994, periodically gathers the Western Hemisphere’s democracies and free-market economies.

But if anything, the weeks leading up to the Los Angeles summit have demonstrated how far the U.S. has fallen as the leader and guide of a region stretching from Canada to Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego.

The recent weeks have illustrated how important requirements of a leader – the abilities to inspire trust with sustained attention and articulate a principled vision and joint purpose – can come into conflict, degrading the leadership and undercutting unity.

Threats of boycotts by some countries and some declared leader no-shows – along with complaints from across the region of poor summit planning, lack of information, and a hazy agenda – have all underscored a wide lack of trust in U.S. intentions.

Lauren Justice/Reuters

Panama's President Laurentino Cortizo and first lady Yazmin Colon arrive at Los Angeles International Airport to attend the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, June 6, 2022.

Mr. Biden’s decision not to invite the hemisphere’s three authoritarian regimes – Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – set off a regional row with leaders who fault the U.S. for slipping back to Uncle Sam’s unilateral, we-know-best ways of yore. But Mr. Biden, who has made the century’s democracy-autocracy clash a central theme of his presidency, could hardly ignore autocracy’s creep in the hemisphere, administration officials say.

Beneath it all is an abiding sense that a three-decade-old summit formula based on U.S. leadership no longer works in an era of diminished U.S. influence in the region – and that when it comes to America’s priorities, Latin America simply does not fall very high on the list.

“It reminds me of the old Paul Simon song ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’ – that describes the U.S.-Latin America relationship today,” says Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.

“The run-up to the summit has revealed a severe credibility gap that has been building, frankly, over the past two decades,” he adds. “The old 1990s rhetoric” the administration has been using “rings hollow given today’s realities.”

Missing ambassadors

Clearly 2022 is not 1994, when then-President Bill Clinton could summon to Miami all 34 hemispheric leaders save Cuba’s communist Fidel Castro to talk democracy and lay the groundwork for a hemisphere-wide free trade area based on open market economies.

Today, instead of the envisioned U.S.-led hemispheric free trade area, China now reigns as many countries’ top trading partner. Chinese companies are dominating the infrastructure and commodities sectors where U.S. companies were once king.

Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters/File

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, a non-invitee to the Americas Summit in Los Angeles, looks on as Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (not pictured) speaks to the media at the Miraflores Palace, in Caracas, Venezuela, April 29, 2022.

Moreover, the region can’t help but question U.S. leadership and interest when more than a half-dozen U.S. embassies operate without an ambassador, some regional experts say. There was high hope that the neglect would change with President Biden, they say – but those hopes have been dashed.

“After Trump there was a lot of expectation of President Biden, but the sense of mostly being ignored did not change from one [president] to the other,” says Dorotea López Giral, director of the University of Chile’s Institute of International Studies. “There are still seven countries without a U.S. ambassador, and Chile hasn’t had an ambassador in six years,” she adds. “What does that say to the region?”

Not all the regional disconnect can be laid at the feet of Washington, some analysts say, noting that few of the sub-hemispheric free trade and cooperation initiatives in Latin America, among them Mercosur, have flourished.

But add to the growing regional disunity the signs of a checked-out hemispheric leader and widespread confusion over summit goals, and it starts to make sense that some leaders might decide the gathering isn’t worth their time.

Noting that a month before the summit Chile’s diplomats still had “no idea what the themes would be,” Dr. López says, “You hear more people questioning, ‘What’s the point?’”

Courting left, and right

Just a few weeks ago, more than a dozen leaders were threatening not to even show up in Los Angeles. They included leaders of several Caribbean nations and the presidents of Brazil, Ecuador, and next-door neighbor Mexico.

The leftists in the group said they’d only come if all countries were invited – including the authoritarian leaders. On the other hand, Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, an admirer of former President Donald Trump, said he hadn’t been convinced of any good reason for the summit and so would not attend.

The growing pile of regrets and prospects of numerous (and embarrassing) empty chairs threw the administration into emergency diplomatic mode – the White House even dispatching first lady Jill Biden to Ecuador and other countries.

The result is that a number of leaders have replaced their regrets with a positive RSVP – including Mr. Bolsonaro, who has now been awarded a one-on-one with Mr. Biden.

Adriano Machado/Reuters/File

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro reacts during a ceremony at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, May 4, 2022. Mr. Bolsonaro will meet personally with President Joe Biden at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles after first saying he would not attend.

But Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador remains a holdout. No Cuba, he insists, no Mexican president.

On a call with reporters last week, senior White House officials said they held out hope that a formula could be found – perhaps inviting a low-level Cuban official – to satisfy Mr. López Obrador and get him to Los Angeles. But when the invitation list was published Tuesday, Mr. López Obrador was not on it.

As White House Latin America adviser Juan Gonzalez said on the call, Mr. Biden “very personally wants the president of Mexico there.”

Some regional officials and analysts say there’s a sense that Washington is “checking a box with the summit,” as one said, setting aside a week for the hemisphere as the administration has focused on Europe in the wake of the Ukraine war and then turned attention to Asia to signal that the China challenge is not forgotten.

Items on the agenda

But administration officials say the president is demonstrating his interest in the region not just by having the summit, but by having it focus on issues that matter to the entire hemisphere. Those include migration, “near-shoring” (bringing manufacturing and related jobs back from Asia to countries closer to the U.S.), corruption, and climate change.

On migration, Mr. Gonzalez says the summit will take a holistic approach to an issue that affects everyone in the region, from countries migrants leave from, the countries they pass through, and the destination countries like the U.S. The aim will be to demonstrate an understanding that “the migration challenge is not one that is at the U.S. border,” Mr. Gonzalez said.

Calling this a “shared approach” to an issue that affects the entire hemisphere, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols said at the briefing that such a vision of migration could open doors for discussing a range of issues including migrant documentation, standards of public services, ethical job recruitment, and creating pathways for legal migration.

But Mr. Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue remains skeptical that a few days in Los Angeles can reverse a decades-long slide in relations.

“The truth is that Latin America hasn’t been on Washington’s priority list for many years, and when Biden came into office emphasizing the Indo-Pacific region and then Ukraine, it was a sign that the big picture hadn’t changed,” Mr. Shifter says.

“There are certainly some very crucial issues the region needs to address together,” he adds. “But it’s hard to see how a summit formula based on unity that existed a couple of decades ago is the answer for tackling those issues when the region is so disappointingly fragmented.”

Colette Davidson

Véronique Dumez, principal and kindergarten teacher at the Chaude Ruelle elementary school in Épernay, France, teaches a lesson on French grammar. Ms. Dumez has had to adapt her classes since welcoming a 7-year-old Ukrainian refugee, one of three in the school of 120 students.

It’s a hot and sticky day in Épernay, France. Amine jumps rope in a shady spot of the Chaude Ruelle elementary school building, laughing with his friends. With his carefree innocence, this 8-year-old appears no different from his classmates. But Amine barely escaped the bombs in March that crisscrossed his family’s hometown of Kharkiv, one of the hardest hit cities in Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Now, Amine is a typical second grader, learning math, science, and French, in an effort to make his temporary exile in France more bearable. He’s already starting to say a few words in his new language and has invited classmates home to play.   

“He likes his teachers and his school. He’s very, very happy,” says Amine’s father, Adam, who was allowed to leave Ukraine as the father of five, soon to be six, children. Like other parents interviewed for this story, Adam asked to use first names only to protect his family. He is Chechen and has already fled his country once before. He says he’s grateful that his kids can enjoy the daily routine of classroom learning. 

“As parents, we’re very glad they can go to school, learn, and make friends. But I hope someday we can go back home.” 

Since the war began in their country on Feb. 24, more than 6 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring countries. Half are estimated to be children, some of whom are dealing with family loss and other trauma. 

Educators across Europe are trying to help them cope. Utilizing government-led initiatives – and sometimes their own personal investments – teachers are working to foster a safe, welcoming space to Ukrainian children to recreate a sense of normal life and a semblance of home.  

“School has the ability to absorb a child’s attention,” says Philip Jaffé, a Geneva-based psychotherapist and external consultant on children’s rights for the United Nations. “They go to class and have to be attentive to the teacher. Just being engaged in the learning process is very therapeutic in this context. Also, being surrounded by other children who scream, play, and fight creates a sense of normalcy that has a huge impact on kids.” 

Joe Giddens/PA/Reuters

Ten-year-old Ukrainian refugee Alikhan Yusupov sits with his teacher during his first day at Caldecote Primary School on April 20, 2022. Alikhan's family members fled their home in Kharkiv and moved to the village of Caldecote in England.

The support can be seen throughout Europe. Poland’s education ministry is working to integrate the more than 700,000 Ukrainian children who have arrived there in recent weeks, for example, and in Lithuania, the capital Vilnius has opened a free online school that can accommodate 80,000 Ukrainian refugee children in Poland, Romania, and Germany, among others. Currently about 1,000 children are enrolled. 

“It’s part of our job”

In France, more than 17,600 Ukrainian children are attending schools across the country. Like other towns in France, Épernay, northeast of Paris, has been transformed into a welcome center for Ukraine’s refugees, with 430 children registered in the city’s school district of Reims.

The French Education Ministry has taken measures to make the transition easier – including, in coordination with the Ukrainian government, allowing students to follow Ukrainian curricula through a dedicated online platform. Schools also have access to a psychologist as well as tutors for learning French as a second language. But day to day, teachers are learning to adapt in their own ways. 

Teachers at Chaude Ruelle use their classroom computers to teach Amine as well as fellow Ukrainians Damien and his sister Katerine things like French vowels and consonants. They’ve placed the students at the front of the classroom, often next to a child most likely to help, and downloaded teaching materials off the internet. When all else fails, teachers use their cell phones to upload translating apps to help with lessons.  

“It creates a bit more work for us. We have to prepare more or translate things, but we’re happy to do this. It’s part of our job,” says Véronique Dumez, the principal of Chaude Ruelle and the kindergarten teacher of 7-year-old Katerine. 

With just three Ukrainian students at her school of 120, Ms. Dumez has organized with fellow teachers in the district to share learning materials and hasn’t yet had to ask city hall for additional funding. 

“There needs to be empathy” 

Elsewhere, teachers in Tenerife, in the Spanish Canary Islands, are also considering the best ways to support their influx of students. There are over 350 Ukrainian children in schools across the eight Canary Islands, and 20 at the César Manrique elementary school in the beach town of Puerto de la Cruz. A neighboring pre-K and elementary school near the town church has 46.  

Government funding for additional materials and educators in Tenerife has not always been easy to come by. Still, one school was recently able to help a student in a small way: It changed the bell that announced the end of class, after one girl would grab her backpack and run every time it went off. It turned out it was the same sound as the bomb shelter siren in Ukraine. 

“Children generally have similar responses [to war] as adults, like symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Cécile Viénot, a child psychologist based in Paris. “Right now, they’re in a phase of relief. They’re safe. Any anxiety they may feel is probably more due to adapting to their new surroundings.” 

That is why it’s so important for teachers to be flexible and give new students ample time to adjust, while remaining faithful to the disciplined structure of a school day, says Ms. Viénot. “There needs to be empathy. The response can’t just be educational.”  

Educators at the César Manrique school have tried to be aware of that balance. They recently held a meeting for Ukrainian parents to assess how they and their children are feeling about their school experience.  

“They’ve all come at different times,” says Pablo Daryanani Medina, the English teacher at César Manrique, who has also acted as the go-between for Ukrainian families and the school, since many parents speak English more often than Spanish. “We never had the chance to ask them, ‘Do you need clothes or books? Are your kids happy?’”

Questions about geography – and war

At César Manrique, teachers have not explicitly explained why Ukrainian children have arrived en masse, preferring to address students’ questions as they come in hopes of “normalizing the situation,” says principal Candelaria Lorenzo Rodríguez. 

For her colleague, Daryanani Medina, having new students who don’t speak Spanish has made his English classes more relatable for students. “It’s really enriching for me as a teacher but also for the kids,” he says. “They used to ask me why they need this information. Now they see it firsthand as a way of communicating.” 

Back in France, teachers at the Chaude Ruelle school chose a more preemptive approach, explaining to students before the Ukrainian children arrived what they had lived through and asking them to be respectful to their new classmates. 

“The kids asked us what happened in a war, where Ukraine was located. They were surprised by how close it was to France,” says Ms. Dumez. “It has allowed them to learn more about what’s happening in the news and has made them more interested in what’s going on around them.” 

Ms. Dumez says the three Ukrainian students in her school have started to say a few words in French – like bonjour, merci, and au revoir – and play easily with the other kids during recess. Teachers aren’t testing them for the moment and say they’ll most likely pass them on to the next grade level next year to avoid the complications that come with holding students back.  

Families are holding out hope that they can return to Ukraine in the next year or so. Every day after school at 4:30, Katerine and Damien sign on to Zoom to attend online classes back in Ukraine. 

“They have to finish the Ukrainian school year, but it’s not necessarily with the idea of going back any time soon,” says Romain, Katerine and Damien’s father, who left Lviv with his wife and four kids at the beginning of March. “Who knows. There’s a strong possibility we’ll stay here. My wife is already saying maybe we should.  

“The longer the kids are here and in school, making friends, the harder it will be to go back. Their grandfather is already telling me, ‘Make sure they don’t forget how to speak Ukrainian.’” 

It might seem a small gesture: two women asking a third how she’s doing. But in Winnipeg’s North End, where a hub of Indigenous activism addresses the many social problems that exist here, such interaction really can mean life or death.

So when Melissa Spence and Rose Fontaine, members of the Bear Clan Patrol, an Indigenous-led community safety group, see a woman stumbling in the street, they run to her. They run like she might slip away if they don’t get there in time.

The questions they ask – Is she hurt? Is someone hurting her? Is someone looking for her? – are the same ones they find themselves asking every night. And it is in this way they help tackle one of Canada’s greatest social problems: the disproportionate number of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG).

The main aim of the Bear Clan, which stands out in its bright neon vests and bear patches, is to shore up a sense of safety and well-being, with community members often leery of a justice system that has so often abused them. The group sees itself as “block parents,” as Ms. Spence puts it. Composed of people who’ve had their share of struggle in life, they say it is driven by the kind of compassion and nurturing that’s so often missing for the urban Indigenous population of the Manitoban capital.

“You approach someone because they’re looked down upon by everybody else in society,” says Ms. Spence. “To be able to go up to them, smile, and treat them as humans, you see the difference in their face.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Rose Fontaine, youth patrol leader, and Kevin Walker, interim executive director of the Bear Clan Patrol, smudge before one of their nightly walks, on May 11, 2022, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

“We love everyone”

This woman this night is OK. Often they aren’t.

According to federal statistics, Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other woman in Canada – and Winnipeg is considered ground zero of the problem. Winnipeg has Canada’s largest urban Indigenous population, with about 92,000 out of a population of 750,000.

It’s led to a flourishing of bright Indigenous culture that’s visible across the city. But Canada’s dark colonial legacy and violent assimilationist policies like residential schooling have also created a host of problems. The rates of Indigenous poverty and children in welfare – which ties directly to violence experienced later in life – are some of the highest in the country.

The Bear Clan Patrol, in its original conception, began in the 1990s, just as the victimization of Indigenous women was coming into broader consciousness in North America. That group petered out. But in 2014, the death of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose tiny body was found in the Red River, sparked a social movement. The girl had interfaced with several service providers before her death, underlining to many that institutional Canada had neither the resources, nor the trust of the community, to protect the most vulnerable Winnipeggers. The Bear Clan revitalized.

Rose Fontaine, who now works for the Bear Clan Patrol after joining as a volunteer, was Tina’s cousin and best friend, the two only four months apart in age. “If Bear Clan had been around in 2014, I think she would have gotten better help,” says Ms. Fontaine, who recalls her cousin’s bravery and their mischievous adventures. Tina had come to Winnipeg from her reserve to reconnect with her mother, but was left disappointed and fell into trouble on the streets of the city. With the main suspect acquitted, the death remains unsolved. “I feel like Bear Clan would have taken care of her. She was just looked at as a statistic, not a human. But Bear Clan comes across everyone as people and community members. We love everyone.”

“I remember my [aunt] said, ‘Tina died so that other youth can get help.’ At first I didn’t understand it. Now I do.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The Memorial Garden, in the North End of Winnipeg, is dedicated to missing and murdered Indigenous women. Some of their names are on handmade tiles affixed to wooden pillars.

“Any hour of the day, no discrimination”

The Bear Clan Patrol suits up on a recent night. They nestle sandwiches, fresh fruit, granola bars, and water bottles into a little black wagon, as well as naloxone kits in case they encounter an opioid overdose. They strap receptacles over their shoulders to pick up syringes – they collected 11,000 between September and December. They perform a smudge ceremony and then head out the door at 6 p.m. sharp.

They’ve expanded their services in the city to three neighborhoods. They also offer a daily food pantry and run a youth patrol on weekends to teach children social responsibility. Other Bear Clans have formed across Canadian cities. Many non-Indigenous city members have joined their patrol. Two on this night have shown up for the first time as part of Reconciliation work they do with their church.

“Community members are more likely to talk to us on issues than engaging with the police,” says interim Executive Director Kevin Walker, who leads patrols five times a week. “Everybody that walks has their own reasons. For me, it’s all about community.”

The reality of MMIWG is never distant. Red dresses hang in several windows: a sign for vulnerable women that they can knock on that door “any hour of the day, no discrimination,” says Mr. Walker.

Tina’s death spurred calls for a national report on MMIWG that came out in 2019. Among its findings was a call to “expand and legitimize community-based security models, such as local peacekeeper officers, or the Bear Clan Patrol program based in Winnipeg.”

The Bear Clan also works directly with the Winnipeg police, receiving notifications about those missing. They will then talk with the families to get more information and carry out poster campaigns to lead them to victims. “They observe everything, especially street people,” says Ms. Fontaine.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A mural of the late teenager Tina Fontaine fills the side of a building in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, on May 11, 2022.

During a recent patrol, the group stops in plazas – at one, a rendering of Tina is painted in a bright purple and blue mural – to hand out food. Children run down the street after them. They head to the rail tracks – historically a center of sex trafficking, where a makeshift memorial to MMIWG is set up – and then a bar-lined main street that is often the diciest of the 6-mile patrol. The group of 10 volunteers is out of food after 90 minutes.

At one point they cross paths with the Mama Bear Clan, another female-led community patrol group. A woman on a bike rides past shouting, “Bear Clan, I love you guys.”

“There was this kind of rising of people responding to this tragedy of Tina Fontaine,” says Cora Morgan, whose job as family advocate at the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs was also created after Tina’s death.

Family and violence

Ms. Morgan testified during the MMIWG inquiry, urging policymakers to include the issue of child welfare as part of the cycle of violence besetting women. In Manitoba, Indigenous children comprise about 90% of children in state care, one of the highest per capita rates in the country. “The most violent act you can commit against a woman is to steal her child,” Ms. Morgan says. A census analysis published last month in Juristat showed 81% of Indigenous women previously in the child welfare system had been physically or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.

Many Bear Clan Patrol members understand the pain on the streets firsthand. Ms. Fontaine, like her cousin, spent a lot of her childhood in state care. Ms. Spence joined the group after her brother killed himself. She found the patrol a source of healing after being in a “dark place,” she says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Red handprints in front of the Manitoba Legislative Building represent missing and murdered indigenous women in Winnipeg, Manitoba, May 15, 2022.

Darryl Contois, who is volunteering with Bear Clan this night, runs his own organization to search for missing persons, called the Evelyn Memorial Search Fund. He often combs the streets at 3 or 4 a.m. for missing persons, he says. “I have a sister; she’s a meth user. I always try to convince her to change her life, but I can’t force her. But I always worry about her, and worry that one day I get that call,” he says.

“That girl who is lost, doesn’t have no one to help her. I said if I could make one difference in one person’s life, then I made a difference.”

Mr. Walker, who struggled with addictions for years, describes their community-building simply: “We meet them where they are at.”

People think they know the work of American artist Winslow Homer. His boisterous paintings of the Atlantic coast and of scenes such as barefoot boys playing a game of Snap the Whip are comfortingly familiar to many art lovers. But Homer (1836-1910) also made paintings that challenged viewers, both in his time and now in ours, to wrestle with the effects of racism and inequality. 

“There’s a different Winslow Homer for every age,” says Sylvia Yount, who, along with Stephanie Herdrich, curated the exhibition “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In an interview, the curators explained that they wanted to introduce Homer to the next generation, which involves tying the preoccupations of his day to those of our own. 

The exhibition presents 88 oils and watercolors as proof of Homer’s sociopolitical concerns, hinting at a more profound dimension to his art. The common traits are tension, ambiguity, and, in his paintings of Black figures – which constitute a small but potent aspect of the exhibition – an insistence upon investing those images with the same realism that he displayed in painting white subjects.

Homer began his career in the 1860s as an illustrator and war correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, and the period he lived through was turbulent. The nation broke apart during the Civil War (1861-65) and tried (and in many ways failed) to find a path forward during Reconstruction (1865-77). Although the artist left scant record of his convictions about race, his paintings of Black people are unlike those of his contemporaries. 

Digital Image ©2021 Museum Associates LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY

Early in his career, Homer traveled to the American South, where he painted “The Cotton Pickers” in 1876. His images of Black people avoided racial stereotypes.

His images were “really bold, really different,” says Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, associate professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania. In an interview, she explains that before Emancipation, artists had elicited sympathy for enslaved people by portraying them on the auction block, for example. But the market for such work evaporated after the mid-1860s, when, she says, “Very few fine art painters continued to paint Black subjects.” Caricatures derived from minstrel shows appeared in paintings, but “it was really unusual for Homer to stake so much on Black subjects connected to Reconstruction,” Professor Shaw says. 

An early work, “Near Andersonville” (1866), is laden with symbolism. An enslaved Black woman stands at the threshold of a shack, emerging from darkness to confront an unknown future. In the background, Confederate soldiers march Union captives off to a notorious prison camp, Andersonville in Georgia, where nearly 13,000 prisoners of war died under horrific conditions. Ten years later, Homer painted “A Visit From the Old Mistress,” an uncomfortable scene in which three Black women receive their former white enslaver with stoic dignity. 

“Dressing for the Carnival” (1877) demonstrates that Homer “is trying to immerse himself in a scene of Black life that seems authentic,” Professor Shaw says, “not a minstrel show onstage, not a saccharine, Currier and Ives scene of happy slaves dancing beside the river.” She adds, “They’re not performing for you. Rather, they’re living their daily lives.”

When Homer visited the Bahamas in 1885, his palette lightened and brightened. It’s difficult to view his dazzling watercolors, full of edenic tropical foliage and sunny reflections on turquoise water, as anything other than benign. But even here, he suggests an undertow of disharmony. 

“A Garden in Nassau” (1885) implies social stratification and exclusion. A Black child stands outside a wall enclosing a private garden, looking at a coconut palm waving in the breeze. “Homer’s edits to ... the composition really give us insight into the meaning of [the] work and shift the tone,” Ms. Herdrich says. Originally Homer included two Black youths who climbed the wall to snatch coconuts. After Homer deleted them, she says, “there’s a completely different sentiment.” The mood is poignant, with a young child isolated outside a lush garden most likely belonging to a white landowner.

Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Art Resource, NY

Homer painted the 1885 “A Garden in Nassau” on a trip to the Bahamas. In it, he depicts a Black child excluded from the garden of a presumably white landowner.

Homer’s watercolors from the Bahamas exult in scenes of strong Black men on boats in their quotidian labor of diving for sponges, coral, and conchs. Yet the sensuality of the scenes doesn’t negate his eyewitness rendering of slavery’s aftermath. “Homer is not looking at the luxury grounds of his hotel as a tourist,” Ms. Herdrich points out. “He’s exploring the Black settlements of Nassau [and] showing in an aestheticized way the harsh realities of a post-slave economy.”

The culmination of Homer’s two visits to the Bahamas was his masterpiece, “The Gulf Stream” (1899, reworked 1906). Professor Shaw sees the painting of an imperiled but resolute Black man, in a dismasted, rudderless boat surrounded by sharks, as the opposite of Homer’s optimistic early work, “Breezing Up: A Fair Wind” (1873-76). In the latter, white children steer a catboat heeling at a rakish angle. Yet they’re in control of their direction and destiny, “enjoying their mastery over nature,” Professor Shaw says.

The composition of “The Gulf Stream” bristles with symbols related to slavery. In the earlier version, depictions of sugar cane on the deck were minor. By giving them prominence in the latter version, Homer suggests the role of the Gulf Stream in the trafficking of enslaved people and the transportation of the product of their labor, sugar.

As an allegory of relentless nature and humans surrounded by insurmountable forces, the meaning of “The Gulf Stream” is unclear: Is Homer signaling fortitude in the face of adversity, or resignation? “His intention was for its meaning to be uncertain,” Ms. Herdrich says, “and to challenge us.”

“The genius of Homer is his ambiguity,” Ms. Yount says. “That’s what makes his art speak to us today.” 

Ms. Herdrich agrees. “The relevance of the questions Homer asks is foundational and fundamental to our country, and [they] really resonate today,” she says. “We’ll be asking different questions in a different moment, and that’s the mark of a truly compelling artist.”

William Cross, author of a new biography, “Winslow Homer: American Passage,” says in an interview that Homer “told truths that are sometimes painful, but he was unflinching in his examination of who we are.” 

Homer himself, in Cross’ examination, was a man of “many images but few words.” In a rare utterance on his work, Homer scoffed at a critic who praised Homer’s technical bravura, insisting to his dealer in 1902 that the picture in question “is not intended to be ‘beautiful.’ There are certain things (unfortunately for critics) that are stern facts but are worth recording as a matter of history.” 

“Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents” continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 31. A smaller version travels to London’s National Gallery as “Winslow Homer: Force of Nature” from Sept. 10, 2022, through Jan. 8, 2023.

AP

Voters cast ballots during a nationwide referendum in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, June 5.

A country that has the longest border with Russia just took a big step to distance itself from its neighbor’s autocratic ways. In a June 5 referendum, voters in Kazakhstan approved changes to more than a third of their constitution. Coming five months after mass protests, the new amendments are aimed at bringing transparency and equality in a virtual one-party state.

One particular change may lead to an explosion of new political parties in the Central Asian nation. Perhaps like Ukraine before it, Kazakhstan could be moving toward a healthy democracy outside Moscow’s orbit of influence.

Until this year, much of the politics in Kazakhstan – the world’s ninth-largest country by area – involved competition among a political elite vying for the nation’s vast resources. That began to change Jan. 2 when thousands of young Kazakhs, angered by a sharp rise in fuel prices, took to the streets to demand more political freedom, greater opportunity in business, and an end to crony corruption. One activist, Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, called the protests an assertion of “natural rights” for each individual.

Pushed to speed up his reform efforts, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said last March: “Those who were used to relying on behind-the-scenes schemes are panicking about losing their privileges and their sources of income.”

Many of the constitutional changes, such as greater judicial independence, don’t go far enough for some activists. Nor has the president done enough to hold to account those responsible for the killing of some 200 protesters in January.

Yet the referendum has formalized popular demand for change. One key reform would push more authority to local government, an important check on centralized power. Just before last Sunday’s referendum, President Tokayev said implementing the changes would depend “on the consciousness and creative participation of all citizens, because democracy is the daily painstaking work of each of us.” He has called on the people to embrace “patience, wisdom and endurance.”

Just as Ukraine’s growth in democracy has come in fits and starts – and now a Russian invasion – Kazakhstan has set its own path toward fully representative government. Its neighbors, in both China and Russia, might well be watching.