$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
240 pages with 1 color map and 157 color photographs by the author, including 8 foldouts
11.0″ x 9.5″ (horizontal/landscape)
ISBN 978–1–938086–56–4
Published in April 2018
Distributed by The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu
No e-book has been authorized.
Published in association with the American Land Publishing Project.
Events and Exhibitions
Sunday, March 3, 2019
panel discussion at the Tucson Festival of Books
April 27 – December 21, 2018
Exhibition Views from a Sacred Land – Canyon Country and the Bears Ears Region
Discovery Center, Monticello, Utah
November 9, 2018
Book Talk
Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver
November 8, 2018
Book Talk
Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder (watch a video of the book talk)
by Stephen E. Strom
with an introduction by Rebecca M. Robinson and poem by Joy Harjo
“Bears Ears is a beautiful volume that makes it clear why this visually striking and culturally rich landscape needs the protections of the original national monument designation.”
—Etienne Benson, Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife
The region known as Bears Ears in southeastern Utah is a landscape of unsurpassed beauty anywhere on Earth. It is a land filled with more than 100,000 documented Native American archaeological sites, some dating back more than two millennia, that have been revered like mini-Sistine Chapels for the Native people. It is also home territory for Mormon settlers who ventured here from Salt Lake City after the Mormons’ long journey from persecution in Nauvoo, Illinois, during the 1840s.
Sacred land to many, President Barack Obama, on December 28, 2016, issued a presidential proclamation to protect nearly 1.35 million acres as Bears Ears National Monument, seeking compromise between the Indian Nations, who wanted nearly 1.9 million acres, and those in Utah such as Congressman Robert Bishop who sought a monument of 1.3 million acres or who resisted any designation. President Obama also arranged for Indian Nations to work collaboratively, for the first time, with federal agencies to set policies for managing Bears Ears National Monument.
Stephen Strom’s photographs capture the singular beauty of Bears Ears country in all seasons, its textural subtleties portrayed alongside the drama of expansive landscapes and skies, deep canyons, spires, and towering mesas. To his sensitive eyes, a scrub oak on a hillside or a pattern in windswept sand is as essential to capturing the spirit of the landscape as the region’s most iconic vistas. In seeing red-rock country through his lens, viewers can discover the remarkable diversity, seductive power, and disarming complexity of Bears Ears’ sacred lands. Strom’s photographs evince the full spectrum of emotional responses: exhilaration and disorientation, contemplation and serenity, passion and gratitude for the wild places and archeological treasures that now belong to all Americans. Rebecca Robinson’s informative essay provides historical context for how the national monument came to be, and poet Joy Harjo’s original poem serves like a prayer to the book and the land.
Bears Ears: Voices from a Sacred Land is a celebration of the foresight of visionary leaders, from President Teddy Roosevelt, who advanced the idea of national monuments in the Antiquities Act of 1906, to President Barack Obama, who set aside this land known as Bears Ears that is sacred to so many.
About
About the Author
Stephen E. Strom spent 45 years as a distinguished research astronomer at Harvard University, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Massachusetts. At the time of his retirement in 2007, he was Associate Director for Science at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. In 1978, Strom also began to make fine art photographs of the American West. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and is in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. For all of his books, including Bears Ears, Strom has collaborated with distinguished poets, writers, scientists, and curators in his other books of photography: Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea (George F. Thompson, 2016), Death Valley: Painted Light (George F. Thompson, 2016), Earth and Mars: A Reflection (Arizona, 2015), Sand Mirrors (Polytropos, 2012), Earth Forms (Dewi Lewis, 2009), Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grasslands (New Mexico, 2008), Sonoita Plain: Views from a Southwestern Grassland (Arizona, 2005), Tseyi / Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly (Arizona, 2005), and Secrets from the Center of the World (Arizona, 1989).
About the Contributors
Rebecca M. Robinson is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon, who previously worked as a staff writer for Monterey County Weekly and as a radio producer for Oregon Public Broadcasting. She has written for numerous print and online news outlets about crime, education, health care, social entrepreneurship, the criminal justice system,, and homelessness. She is the author of Voices from Bears Ears Country: Seeking Common Ground in a Sacred Land (Arizona, in association with George F. Thompson, 2018), with photographs by Stephen E. Strom.
Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and the author of thirteen books, including seven volumes of poetry such as How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2001 (Norton, 2002), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: Poems (Norton, 1994), and She Had Some Horses (Norton, 1983; 2008), that have won the Griffen Poetry Prize in 2016, the Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams Awards from the Poetry Society of America in 2015 and 2001, American Book Awards in 2013 and 1991, and the PEN Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction in 2013.
My Place
The sandstone was cold on my back, that early October morning. I lay there, opening myself to the Utah sky, imagining the infinite universe beyond, grasping for comfort in its vastness. I had come here to be with close friends and family, to reflect on how Karen, my late wife, companion, muse, and closest friend of 56 years, had touched our lives. She passed suddenly from this world five months earlier, and in my post-dawn reverie I recalled our last moments together.
Why come to remember in this place, an isolated rock promontory on Cedar Mesa, 1,500 feet above the eroded sandstone mesas and pinnacles of Valley of the Gods? We were both academics, citizens of a world of scientists, moving with ease among collaborators in Japan, Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. Connected as we were with colleagues throughout the world and as peripatetic as our lives could be, there was no place, no land that we could call our true home. With one exception: the red rock country of southeastern Utah.
Neither of us were Westerners: I was born in New York City and Karen in eastern Oklahoma. We made our first visits to the Colorado Plateau in our early forties, when we began to explore landscapes of the Navajo Nation. Drawn to both the country and its people, we decided to offer our services to teach a few classes at Navajo Community College (now Diné College) in Tsaile, Arizona, during the summers of 1981 and 1982. We soon developed relationships not only with the land, but with a web of Native writers, poets, sculptors, and painters. Our scientific careers led us eastward to Amherst, Massachusetts, which was our base for 14 years. But throughout those years we were drawn to return to land we thought of as home: camping and hiking in southeastern and south-central Utah, capturing the landscape’s chromatic and sculptural rhythms in photographs and later joining those images with the work of Native poets Joy Harjo and Laura Tohe.
We also invited our children and grandchildren to join us in exploring the slickrock, hogbacks, hoodoos, rivers, and canyon labyrinths of what was slowly becoming “home.” They came, and some learned to love the land as we did. One is the essayist for this book and the author of its companion: Voices from Bears Ears Country: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land. Rebecca: who hiked to White House Ruins in Canyon de Chelly at the age of 4 and on a hot summer day in 1988 immersed her feet in the sands and waters of Chinle Creek—a baptism celebrating her joining the congregation of redrock worshippers.
Today, on Muley Point, she, a quarter-century older, stood nearby me, as we gathered our thoughts in silence—the majesty of the land compels no less. And in that silence she, too, I imagined, felt the power of this place, the sun, the sky, the rock, the San Juan River nearby. This promontory and the Colorado Plateau on which it stands, has borne witness to many changes: to the shift of tectonic plates that carried it on a journey of more than a billion years, starting from near the equator to where it stands today, some 5,000 miles to the north; to the uplift, which raised the Plateau from sea level to more than a mile above the oceans; to the arrival of megafauna and then man; to the rise of agricultural and then urban civilizations; to the coming of the Spanish and Mormons; to a gathering to remember the life of a scientist, mother, grandmother, colleague, mentor, muse, and companion. Such is the wonder and grandeur and solace to be shared in such a place.