Red Rock Stories: Three Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah's Public Lands

By Torrey House Press

"Essays and poems that run as deep as the canyons of the Colorado River."
—ROBERT REDFORD

Red Rock Stories conveys spiritual and cultural values of Utah's canyon country through essays and poems of writers whose births span seven decades. First delivered to decision makers in Washington as a limited–edition chapbook, this art–as–advocacy book explores the fierce beauty of and the dangers to ecological and archaeological integrity in this politically embattled corner of wild America.

"In the American Southwest, we dwell in one end of the visible spectrum. Passions or furies, we see it all in shades of red." —Amy Irvine

Red Rock Stories features three generations of writers from diverse cultures. Young activists and regional leaders fill the pages with heartfelt testimonies for the red rock wilderness. Notable contributors range from acclaimed writer Terry Tempest Williams and Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation Luci Tapahonso, to Charles Wilkinson of the University of Colorado Law School and Regina Lopez–Whiteskunk of the Ute Mountain Ute Council.

STEPHEN TRIMBLE, editor of Red Rock Stories, has published more than twenty books. He received the Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation and a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellowship at the University of Utah Tanner Humanities Center. In 1995, Trimble co–compiled with Terry Tempest Williams the landmark book of advocacy, Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness—the model for Red Rock Testimony. He teaches writing in the University of Utah Honors College and makes his home in Salt Lake City and in Torrey, Utah.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Torrey House Press
• Release date: Jul 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781937226800

Book preview

First Torrey House Press Edition, April 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Torrey House Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Published by Torrey House Press

Salt Lake City, Utah

www.torreyhouse.org

E-book ISBN: 978-1-937226-80-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943567

RED ROCK TESTIMONY chapbook design by Timothy Ross Lee

RED ROCK STORIES book design by Alisha Anderson

Each piece copyright © 2017 by the individual authors.

All rights reserved.

All royalties from RED ROCK STORIES go to the Utah Wilderness Coalition, to fund grassroots organizing on behalf of Utah’s redrock wilderness.

TO THE NATIVE LEADERS OF THE BEARS EARS INTER-TRIBAL COALITION

With graciousness and tenacity you reminded us all of the meaning of sacred land. In bringing Bears Ears National Monument to the president, you created the healing and reconciliation you sought.

CONTENTS

Preface: Writing into the Whirlwind

STEPHEN TRIMBLE

This is where we began.

LUCI TAPAHONSO

Introduction: Listening to the Old People, the Land, and the Long Future

…the authenticity, passion, and rightness of protecting Bears Ears.

CHARLES WILKINSON

Right of Way

And so you tell stories…

SIMON ORTIZ

The Eyes of the Young

It’s not revolutionary to say my generation needs wildness more than ever.

BROOKE LARSEN

Unthinkable

I’m an oldtimer in a ‘new west.’

SAM RUSHFORTH

The Man with the Heart of Stone

Fremont people were farmers, builders, dreamers, and thinkers.

KEVIN JONES

The Land of No Use

Our external geography informs our internal geography.

JANA RICHMAN

The Freedom of Restraint

The myths of western land are myths of freedom.

DAVID GESSNER

The Only Way Forward

If Bears Ears is to be saved, President Obama must save it.

KAREN SHEPHERD

It’s Time to Heal Bears Ears

…personal healing like nothing else can be.

REGINA LOPEZ-WHITESKUNK

On Compromised Ground

Mutual concession requires that we do more. It requires respect.

LAURET SAVOY

Stone that Leaps

This place. Lifted, cracked and stilled.

CHRISTOPHER COKINOS

What Shall We Give the Children?

Let us give the children wonderment, radical amazement…

KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE

Memory

I want to give it all to my daughter, wrapped in balsamroot leaves.

JEN JACKSON QUINTANO

A Place for Mediation

…indigenous knowledge will be the keystone of collaboration.

JIM ENOTE

Shash Jaa’ Follows Wherever I Go

I never thought I would write about Bears Ears in my Brooklyn apartment…

ALASTAIR BITSOI

The Wildness in Nature Binds Us to the Past and the Future

…a place I come to re-connect with my Hispanic heritage.

JUAN PALMA

The View from the Mesa

…the place that harbored the ancient gods and animal beings.

SHONTO BEGAY

The Ur-Bear

…a gigantic bear embedded in the geography is more than symbolic.

MARY ELLEN HANNIBAL

Bear’s Ears

Meet me in Mexican Hat. I’ve got a surprise for you.

MARY SOJOURNER

Seeing Red

Looking at the horizon was like looking through a telescope at Mars.

AMY IRVINE

The Grace of the Wild

In all my years as a naturalist, I’ve never had an encounter like this.

THOMAS LOWE FLEISCHNER

Prelude

Moses did not go to an oil well derrick to receive the Law…

DAVID LEE

Faith and the Land

Our beliefs might differ, but our values harmonize.

GEORGE HANDLEY

Lease UTU91481

Leasing this land was not part of our plan.

BROOKE WILLIAMS

We Wilderness

Millennials need what this wilderness brings.

ANNE TERASHIMA

It is the Land That Tells the Story

My Navajo grandfather pulled out his wire cutters and cut the fence.

JACQUELINE KEELER

What the Tortoise Taught Me

Locals prefer to speak for themselves.

MICHELLE NIJHUIS

Whole and Holy

We act as if there is no upstream, no downstream.

CHIP WARD

When the Desert Morning Rises

I take my questions, alone, to the redrock canyons.

ANN WHITTAKER

Up Between the Bears Ears

That place triggered my metamorphosis that still informs my life.

GARY PAUL NABHAN

A Gesture of Peace

The tribes are opening the door, inviting us to cross a threshold…

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

It’s Time to Act

The best way to defend the Antiquities Act is for the President to use it.

BRUCE BABBITT

Walking to Water

I am a son of the Colorado Plateau.

MARK UDALL

We Come out Dancing Together

To respond to the wounds in this land, we must first see them.

STEPHEN TRIMBLE

STAND UP FOR THE REDROCK

CONTRIBUTORS

PERMISSIONS & CITATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

RED ROCK HISTORY

Letter to the Utah Congressional Delegation from the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, December 31, 2015

Letter of Invitation Sent to Contributors, April 8, 2016

Letter Sent to Congress with Chapbook, July 5, 2016

Introduction to the Proclamation, by Charles Wilkinson

Proclamation Designating Bears Ears National Monument, December 28, 2016

Map of Bears Ears National Monument

PREFACE: WRITING INTO THE WHIRLWIND

In the utter simplicity of ink on paper, the writers in Red Rock Stories take readers deep into the wildness and restorative power of southern Utah’s canyon country. These women and men have chosen to wield their words on behalf of this land, to counter those who see these canyons and mesas as nothing more than commodities to use and use up. And so when these storytellers evoke rivers running red in flood, when they summon the healing warmth of sun on stone, their words ring with both the solemnity of prayer and the fires of resistance.

In these pages you’ll hear the glissade of a canyon wren’s call breaking the stillness of a summer afternoon. You’ll share in the writers’ delight as they capture in language this place where, in Lauret Savoy’s words, aridity conspires with erosion to expose Earth’s anatomy. You’ll sense the ancient bonds to these mesas and mountains carried by Native peoples.

As readers, we understand how writing can transport us. I’ve sobbed at the endings of novels and memoirs. I’ve gasped and chortled and seethed with spitfire anger as I read strong nonfiction. I’ve melted at the perfectly chosen images in poems. And I’ve learned the language of every landscape I cherish from reading the writers who have made these places their home territories in life and work.

Words that grow from such deep roots can be contemplative and soothing, but Red Rock Stories means to raise the stakes. When politicians campaign to open up irreplaceable wildlands to destructive industry, when the white men in power scorn the traditional knowledge of Native elders and the sacred inheritance of ruins and rock art, when local officials disdain the shared national ownership of public lands, redrock writers move from quiet journaling to passionate advocacy.

We created this book to capture these emotions and deliver them to Washington, D.C.—and now, to you. The contributors write with purpose and urgency, a need even more pressing since the presidential election of 2016. These writers aim to inform you, to call you to action, to change your life, to create the future. They just may have influenced President Barack Obama when he created Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016.

We’ll need their message for years to come. The fossil fuel industry and its supporters in politics and the rural West never cease attacking, never relent in their crusade to wring maximum profit from public lands. We’ll need inspiration as we rally again and again to oppose schemes to develop, fragment, sell, or diminish the redrock wilderness.

Red Rock Stories grew organically from events at the beginning of 2016, when a confluence of hostilities and opportunities surfaced in western wildlands.

The whirlwind of threats ranged from sweeping demands for local control of public lands to Utah Republican congressional representatives Rob Bishop’s and Jason Chaffetz’s Public Lands Initiative. This legislation promised to address the big issues on federal lands in eastern Utah with a grand compromise supported by all. Instead, the PLI bill turned out to be both woefully inadequate as conservation and dangerously precedent-setting in promoting rampant fossil fuel extraction.

In response, the Salt Lake City writing community began to meet, called together by a couple of long-time activists—all of us ready to ally ourselves with the long tradition of writing in support of conservation.

We had one remarkable campaign to support, the unparalleled Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition proposal. Five southwestern Native nations had asked President Obama to proclaim a national monument on 1.9 million acres in southeast Utah, to protect extraordinary sacred lands from archaeological vandalism and destructive energy development. The tribes asked for co-management of the Bears Ears, honoring traditional knowledge along with western science.

We asked, how can we best participate in these conversations and affect these decisions with our essays and poems and stories?

Our concerned group of citizen-writers had a powerful model, a 1995 book created at a similar moment of crisis, Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness.

In the mid-1990s, Congress was considering a bill that would undermine the integrity of the 1964 Wilderness Act and open up millions of acres of Utah’s public lands to devastating development. As colleagues and friends based in Salt Lake City, Terry Tempest Williams and I decided that our best chance to counter this anti-wilderness bill lay in gathering short pieces from twenty writers with deep ties to Utah wildlands. In just two months, we invited submissions, snagged a small grant to pay for printing, and took the compilation of writing to Washington, D.C., where we delivered a copy of our chapbook to every member of Congress. We had no idea if the book would matter. We sent these pieces of writing into the offices of decision makers as an act of faith. But when Senators Bill Bradley (D-NJ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) successfully led the filibuster that defeated the bill, they read essays from Testimony on the floor of the Senate. When President Bill Clinton proclaimed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, he held up a copy of Testimony and said, This made a difference.

"These writers aim to inform you, to call you to action, to change your life, to create the future.

And so, with this 2016 round of attacks on public lands—and the promise of the Bears Ears monument—the Utah writing community once again asked, do we need a Testimony II?

Kirsten Johanna Allen asked that question most forcefully and answered with a resounding yes. She is both an ardent conservationist and advocate as well as publisher of Utah’s nonprofit Torrey House Press. She asked me to edit and made the commitment to publish this trade edition after initial distribution of a chapbook in the circles of power in Washington, D.C. With a bow toward the original Testimony, we called our chapbook of essays and poems Red Rock Testimony. We call this expanded version you hold in your hands Red Rock Stories.

As we began work in April 2016, we invited nearly 60 writers with ties to Utah to contribute, reaching far beyond the concerned people gathered in Salt Lake City. Writers and citizens from every state love the southern Utah canyon country, and we wished to emphasize that universality. Charles Wilkinson, the preeminent Indian law scholar who was volunteering with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, helped us to reach out to Native writers, since the Bears Ears proposal owed so much to the sensibilities, traditions, and vision of the tribes. Charles begins the book with a quick survey of Colorado Plateau conservation that places the events of 2016 in context.

We gave writers little more than a month to deliver their manuscripts—leaving just enough time for printing before we took the book to Washington in mid-June. The invitees responded with extraordinary efforts, nearly all sending original work. Kathleen Dean Moore wrote her piece about the legacy we will leave to our children