Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land
By Rebecca Robinson, with Photographs by Stephen E. Strom and Foreword by Patricia Nelson Limerick
The University of Arizona Press
440 pp., 2018
Through word and image, hear and see the people whose lives are intertwined with this special place.
In late 2016, President Barack Obama designated 1.35 million acres of public lands in southeastern Utah as Bears Ears National Monument. On December 4, 2017, President Donald Trump shrank the monument by 85 percent. A land rich in human history and unsurpassed in natural beauty, Bears Ears is at the heart of a national debate over the future of public lands.
Through the stories of twenty individuals, and informed by interviews with more than seventy people, Voices from Bears Ears captures the passions of those who fought to protect Bears Ears and those who opposed the monument as a federal “land grab” that threatened to rob them of their economic future. It gives voice to those who have felt silenced, ignored, or disrespected. It shares stories of those who celebrate a growing movement by Indigenous peoples to protect ancestral lands and culture, and those who speak devotedly about their Mormon heritage. What unites these individuals is a reverence for a homeland that defines their cultural and spiritual identity, and therein lies hope for finding common ground.
Journalist Rebecca Robinson provides context and perspective for understanding the ongoing debate and humanizes the abstract issues at the center of the debate. Interwoven with these stories are photographs of the interviewees and the land they consider sacred by photographer Stephen E. Strom. Through word and image, Robinson and Strom allow us to both hear and see the people whose lives are intertwined with this special place.
PRAISE FOR VOICES FROM BEARS EARS
Here is an important breakthrough book—beautiful to look at and heartening to read. By listening keenly to the people whose roots go deep into the swirling sandstone of Bears Ears country, by looking respectfully into the faces of the high cliffs and the equally expressive faces of the people who love this land, Robinson and Strom give us an impressive example of what it will take to find common ground.
— Kathleen Dean Moore, Author of Great Tide Rising
Protection of Bears Ears as a sacred cultural landscape was an historic step forward, a watershed moment too quickly shattered. This insightful book keeps a deep conversation between land and people alive and provides hope that western culture will continue that dialogue as we learn to honor and respect sacred lands.
— Christopher “Toby” McLeod, Sacred Land Film Project
Rebecca Robinson is a Portland, Oregon–based writer. Her work has been widely published, and she has received numerous awards for her work in print, radio, and online media.
Stephen E. Strom has spent forty-five years as a research astronomer after receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in astronomy from Harvard. He began photographing in 1978, after studying the history of photography and silver and nonsilver photography at the University of Arizona. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections, including the Center for Creative Photography and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His photography complements poems and essays in six books published by the University of Arizona Press: Secrets from the Center of the World, Sonoita Plain, Tseyi / Deep in the Rock, Earth and Mars: A Reflection, Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land, and The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Tradition and Preserving Storied Lands. He has also published Death Valley: Painted Light, Tidal Rhythms, Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land, This Desert Hides Nothing, and Earth Forms.
Patricia Nelson Limerick is the faculty director and board chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a professor of history. She is the author of The Legacy of Conquest, and many of her most notable articles, including “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose,” were collected in 2000 under the title Something in the Soil.
