Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance by Andrew Gulliford (review)

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• Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance by Andrew Gulliford
• Eytan Pol

Andrew Gulliford, Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2022. 541 pp. Hardcover, $95; paper, $29.95; e-book $24.

In Bears Ears Andrew Gulliford describes the history of the Bears Ears region in San Juan County, from hunter gatherers and Navajo refugees to Mormon settlers and Uranium hunters. Readers familiar with the Four Corners area, specifically southeastern Utah, will recognize and learn the origins of many landmarks, such as Comb Ridge and the Moki Dugway. The number of old images and maps signal the impressive archival work that has gone into the creation of Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance. The book culminates in the current legal, environmental, and cultural battle on the status of the landscape of Bears Ears as a national monument. As Gulliford explains, the monument was established [End Page 398] under the Obama administration, based on the Antiquities Act of 1906, marking the first time this law was used for the creation of a national monument.

What sets Bears Ears apart from similar accounts of national parks or national monuments is Gulliford's personal narrative that he has woven into the history of Bears Ears National Monument. Gulliford quotes Jedediah Rogers's call for more work that blends "personal memoir and environmental history," and sets out to deliver (xiv). When we read the history of the multiple-colored hues of the native corn, he tells us about the red and blue corn seeds an old student of his gave him. When he explains how the Ancient Puebloans had to walk over dangerously exposed ledges, he recounts his own sweaty and scary explorations over these cliffs. And when he explains the damage caused by pothunters, he reveals how he has found plenty of pot shards and arrowheads himself, and left them in place. Gulliford is not a tourist in this area, but he has rather accepted the label of "local outsider": "yes, we're local, and as much as we can be, yes, we're outside" (x). He does not just talk about petroglyphs; he visits them. The reader presumably cares about Bears Ears National Monument enough to pick up such a large tome on the area, and it is clear from the narrative that Gulliford himself deeply cares about Bears Ears too, and therefore, we as the readers care about Gulliford's stories. And because we care, it is easy to permit Gulliford the occasional anecdote on tangentially related topics, such as Everrett Ruess's travels.

Bears Ears is about Bears Ears National Monument, but in the end, the books deals with more than just this sparsely populated, wild and remote region in southeastern Utah. Bears Ears serves as an opportunity to discuss this current battleground on colliding issues and concepts. Bears Ears asks what the relationship and division between public land and private land ought to look like in this country. The book describes how the debate on the national monument positions Indigenous and ecological interests against the interests of local businesses, like ranching, and national industries, such as energy companies. The current political and legislative events regarding Bears Ears National Monument bring these issues into the forefront of the question of land protection in the United [End Page 399] States, and in this sense, Gulliford has described a region that rises above its ever-changing borders in a distant corner of the US West.

Eytan Pol Texas Tech University Copyright © 2024 Western Literature Association ...