Behind the Bears Ears: Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape

Abstract

R. E. Burrillo's Behind the Bears Ears is a chatty, entertaining ramble through the cultural and natural landscapes of Bears Ears National Monument from the earliest humans to the present. An archaeologist, Burrillo is at his best in the eight chapters devoted to the Native peoples who have inhabited or migrated through southeastern Utah over thousands of years. Along the way, he discusses how archaeology, like any science, changes its narrative of “prehistory” in the light of new evidence.One example is the long-held belief that Paleoindian big game hunters were the first humans in North America at the end of the last ice age. Burrillo notes that while only one confirmed Clovis point has been found in the region, it is extremely difficult to find the material remains of small, mobile groups of people, especially those who did not make pottery. He also discusses the accumulating evidence for the pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas.In the process, Burrillo takes an informative side trip through the history of North American archaeology itself. The New Archaeology we learned as graduate students in the 1970s wanted to be science, not history, “figuring out the nuts and bolts of human behavior” rather than “what happened in the past” (25). This “suturing” of anthropology and history actually began decades earlier, when cultural anthropologists like Robert Lowie and structural-functionalists like Fred Eggan dismissed Native oral traditions as “myth.” Collecting those oral traditions no longer became an important part of the toolkits of Southwestern anthropologists, archaeologists, and some other scholars. That meant a century of knowledge about the past was not systematically recorded as Native elders passed away. “History” was relegated to the written records of Europeans and European Americans, with all their ethnocentric biases and blind spots. The dynamism of history—its contingencies, creativity, and sheer human messiness—was largely eliminated from both archaeological and ethnographic accounts of Native peoples. This ahistorical myopia perpetuated stereotypes about Native peoples, including the widespread misconception that most have disappeared.Burrillo is at his best when he recounts a century of archaeological research in and around Bears Ears. His overview of research at Chaco Canyon, the mammoth Glen Canyon Project, and the Cedar Mesa Project not only captures the evolving nature of Southwestern archaeology but gives it a human face with its parade of very human archaeologists from Richard Weatherhill and Earl Morris to Jesse Jennings and Bill Lipe. And Burrillo himself. The book is as much a chronicle of his own career as a working archaeologist and his explorations of one of the most starkly beautiful environments on earth as it is a cultural history of the region itself. He was lucky enough to work for Rosemary Sucec, who pioneered the consultation of Native elders in the National Park Service. Burrillo doesn't systematically examine the oral traditions about Bears Ears passed down by generations of Hopis, Zunis, Diné, Paiutes, or Utes, but he does acknowledge that they are valid lines of evidence about the past.His coverage about the Europeans and European Americans who came later is more cursory. His chapter on “The Conquerors,” i.e., Spaniards, is adequate but does not incorporate the groundbreaking research of Richard and Shirley Flint on the Coronado expedition or the Hopi oral traditions about a village on Antelope Mesa being destroyed by Coronado's soldiers. The following chapter on “The Wranglers” races through Latter-day Saint settlement of the region but doesn't delve into the deep ties the descendants of those pioneers maintain in southeastern Utah today. Any balanced account of the controversy over Bears Ears National Monument, which, admittedly, is not the primary focus of Burrillo's book until its final chapter, needs to understand and respect those ties.That final chapter focuses on the attempts to preserve Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. Burrillo is an outspoken advocate of increased federal protection, passionately aligning himself with environmentalists, archaeologists, and, most importantly, Native activists. To his credit, however, he does concede that some of those who oppose such protection raise valid points. As archaeologist Winston Hurst points out, “top-down protectionist efforts equate to ‘an end-run around the local populations who are most powerfully positioned to protect the land or abuse it.’” Not all those local people are “pillagers” like poachers.Burrillo frequently mentions his friend, the conservationist Jonathan Bailey. The University of Arizona Press just published a book by Bailey and Stephen Strom entitled The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Traditions and Preserving Storied Lands. In it, Bailey and Strom document a series of success stories in collaborative conservation in Emery County and other Utah counties north of Bears Ears. Those efforts took decades to accomplish, and everyone involved had to compromise. My suspicion is that a similar process will be necessary to reach a stable level of protection for Bears Ears. Without it, federal land agencies will continue to be viewed as colonial presences rather than partners by many local peoples in the region.