On a windy midsummer day, the breeze appears to tickle the “ears” atop this towering southeastern Utah mesa as it rustles the trees nestled at their tips. The branches move in unison, leaning into the same wind that gives voice to the soft melodies drifting from White Mesa Ute elder Aldean Ketchum’s flute. The tune carries into the pinyon pines and back out to welcome a group of runners cresting over the last stretch of a 50-mile relay prayer run to reach the campground.
Martina Maryboy, of the Navajo Nation, leads the pack with her prayer sage in hand as they finish the last leg of their journey, following the same roads that Indigenous peoples had run thousands of years before.
People dance and sing while others make the color yellow by simmering sagebrush and cliffrose in pots, creating a strikingly fragrant blend of earth and flowers that fills the air while weavers teach children how to dye wool yarn. A family flips the last stack of blue corn pancakes full of calcium-rich juniper ash over the stove as campers taste blue corn mush and white corn with sumac.
The twin buttes that resemble a bear’s ears stand tall over everything in sight. From the furthest reaches of the dark canyons below, to the pinyon pine trees that dot the mesa tops, to the cliff dwellings, hogans and rock art that shape the story of this land, the more than 8,900-foot high buttes can be seen from Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.
Bears Ears holds cultural and spiritual significance for the Native American tribes and pueblos that have historically inhabited and continue to have ties to this land. Despite the ongoing political tug-of-war over the hallowed ground, it remains sacred to them.
The beginning of a lifelong relationship
This July weekend spent sleeping in tents at the Bears Ears Summer Gathering hearkened to a time hundreds of years ago when activity teemed in these mesas and canyons. Men tended to corn and hunted mule deer and bighorn sheep. Women wove baskets, blankets and bags, and made sandals from yucca fibers. Children helped harvest sumac plants with their bright red berries.
As Dave Mason, a Navajo man from Kirtland, New Mexico, makes an offering of corn pollen to a small pinyon pine tree on the last day of the summer gathering, the bright morning sun washes over the Bears Ears buttes behind him. Mason puts his flute to his lips and points it toward the buttes as he begins to play.
“These mountains have their own personalities,” he told me after the song. “They talk to each other. They’re not just there.”
Bears were among the earliest animals that humans revered as sacred. Small clay bear effigies have been recovered from prehistoric ancestral Puebloan sites, evidence of reverence for the animal.
“The bear is a part of us. We don’t eat him and we respect him,” Ketchum said.
While it’s rare to see a bear in Bears Ears, they are present and, more notably, part of the stories that tie tribes and pueblos to the landscape.
Bears Ears today
A number of tribes and pueblos have a connection to this land. To them, Bears Ears means more than just high desert beauty, or a place where bears roam. It is home to more than 100,000 Native American archaeological and cultural sites.
The area is filled with ancient roads, pueblos, cliff dwellings, ancestral graves, burial sites and petroglyphs, in addition to the ancestral stone tools and pottery from the Hopi Tribe and Pueblo of Zuni, traditional Navajo dwellings and ceremonial structures known as hogans, the Ute tipi rings, and the Navajo, Ute and Paiute rock art.
Bears Ears is a living reminder of their ancestors.
However, not all of those sacred sites remain pristine. In San Juan County, where Bears Ears is located, the illegal removal of artifacts from archaeological sites has been a pervasive problem.
In 2016, despite their differences, five tribal nations with ancestral ties to Bears Ears — Ute Mountain Ute Indian Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray, Hopi Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni — united around the Antiquities Act of 1906 to ask the president of the United States to protect their cultural and spiritual homeland by designating Bears Ears as a national monument.
It was the first successful Native American-led campaign for a national monument in U.S. history. It was also the first time tribal nations would co-manage a national monument with the federal government. Last year’s Bears Ears summer gathering followed the release of the final federal Bears Ears Resource Management Plan in April 2025, outlining how the 1.36 million-acre monument would be managed in the future.
While there are over 30 tribes and pueblos with cultural ties to Bears Ears, many Indigenous peoples with roots in the land live elsewhere today. Many at the summer gathering traveled from neighboring states to reconnect with their ancestors. Unlike others, Ketchum, of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, grew up here.
A healing place
“It’s my backyard,” said Ketchum, who, as a young boy, lived below the Bears Ears buttes in Allen Canyon in the summer and the White Mesa Ute community. Seeking inspiration for new music to fill the hundreds of flutes he has made in his lifetime, he comes to Bears Ears to find new songs.
“I listen to the animals and their songs and combine them with ours to create a healing sound that is universal and helpful for everyone,” he said. “The (flute) is a healing instrument that we have known for thousands of years.”
When he was a boy, Ketchum healed a red-tailed hawk he found with a broken wing in Allen Canyon. As an adult, he honored his old friend by carving a hawk on the end of his healing instrument. “I could call him and summon him like a falconer. He’d hunt for us. He’d go and get a rabbit, or bonus if he got a jack rabbit, and we’d make lunch. I didn’t have to worry about food. I just thought people lived like this.”
For hundreds of generations, Native Americans have relied on Bears Ears’ native plants and wildlife for food, medicine and spiritual healing.
“We are told as a generation that we are from this area. Our hogans are still here. Our sweat lodges are still here. Our sheep corrals are still in this area. We get our firewood in the wintertime from here. We also come here to pray,” said Jean Holiday, a Navajo woman from Train Rock, Utah.
Holiday’s father, John Holiday Sr., was a Navajo Nation medicine man until the day he died at age 100. She said she feels the presence of her father and mother every time she returns to Bears Ears.
Recently, Holiday used the knowledge passed down to her from her parents to collect blue corn pollen, cedar and other herbs from Bears Ears that she used in a ceremony to help heal someone with an illness and wounds.
“There are some holy spots, just like the Mormons having the Salt Lake Temple. This is like that for us. It’s not a temple but it’s still a holy place for us,” Holiday said.
A place of refuge amid persecution
The 19th-century Navajo leader Manuelito, who was born near Bears Ears, used the remote canyons to hide and resist the U.S. Army’s forced removal. He opposed the “Long Walk,” the brutal ethnic cleansing and deportation of the Navajo people from 1864 to 1866 to the Bosque Redondo internment camp in what is now New Mexico. Ultimately, Manuelito became a key negotiator of the 1868 treaty that secured the Navajo Nation’s right to return to their homeland.
“Manuelito is our grandpa on our mom’s side. That’s what we were told when we were youngsters,” Holiday said. “My mom’s side of the family are the ones that hid in this area. It provided them food to survive, like the deer, the roots, the plants … that’s how they survived in this area and that’s why it’s very sacred. If somebody got sick, they already have plants. They don’t run to the hospital or grocery store. They couldn’t do that because of the ‘Long Walk.’ They had everything here.”
“We still do collect herbs. We still do hunt. We want to pass this down to our newer generation and tell them these stories that we are from here,” Holiday said.
Passing down the wisdom of the elders
Roy Kade and his apprentice, Casey Teseny, attended the Bears Ears Summer Gathering last July to do just that: pass down Indigenous knowledge to the youth.
“We look at our Mother Earth as our mother and the Father Sky as our father and we are the children … in that way we are supposed to be stewards to the land. I am turning into a great uncle, and as an uncle I really see that need to learn the culture, learn the traditions, and pass that on to the youth. I would say me being here fits into the role that I needed when I was smaller. I wanted to ask questions, I wanted help,“ said Teseny, a Navajo man from Chinle, Arizona.
Teseny explained to 9-year-old Akaedo Dee, a Navajo boy from Blanding, how sandals were made out of local vegetation. He also shared his knowledge in pottery, weaving and dyeing yarn with children at the gathering, explaining that the arts and crafts aren’t just pretty colors and shapes: They are a reflection of our surroundings.
With every dip into the vegetable dye bath, Dee’s smile grew bigger as he realized sagebrush could give yarn color.
“You’re not only learning about the plants, you’re learning about your home,” Teseny said.
After inspecting the color, the yarn met the sky as Teseny swung it back and forth, like a pendulum. The few water droplets remaining clung to the freshly dyed strand as it hung to dry a few feet above the forest floor.
“I feel all the memories. I feel the stories. Just being here and walking around the trees, they’ve seen a lot. They’ve seen the different people that came through here. They’ve seen families grow. They’ve seen people move. They’ve witnessed a lot. They’re a testament of that presence and that history,” Teseny said.
The Bears Ears Summer Gathering began in 2015 to bring the different tribes and pueblos with connections to Bears Ears together to advocate for the creation of the Bears Ears National Monument. Its status has fluctuated over the past decade.
After President Barack Obama created the monument in late 2016, President Donald Trump reduced its size by 85% in December 2017. In October 2021, President Joe Biden restored its original acreage. Most recently, in May 2025, the Department of Justice released an opinion stating that the president can reduce or revoke national monuments. The document counters almost a century of legal interpretation of the Antiquities Act, calling into question the status of national monuments across the country, including Bears Ears.
Sending the bear to sleep
Regardless of a governmental proclamation, every year when summer fades to fall, the bears must be sent to hibernation. That is Ute tradition.
Four weeks after this year’s summer gathering, the White Mesa Ute community, located directly adjacent to the national monument, sent the bears to sleep for the winter at its annual Labor Day weekend Bear Dance.
The White Mesa Bear Dance is the closing chapter of a season of dances that begins in the spring, when the first Bear Dance of the year is held to wake the bears from their winter sleep.
The Bear Dance is a “woman’s choice” dance, meaning the women pick their partners. The practice originates from a Ute legend about two boys who were in the forest: One of the boys went home and the other boy was found by a mother bear. She sheltered the boy and taught him the ways of the bear, including the bear dance. He brought his knowledge of the dance to the village when he returned.
Today, in the community of White Mesa, Ute tribal members haven’t forgotten mother bear’s wisdom. Women flick their shawl fringe and form lines, holding onto the men they have chosen as their partners as they move backward. They dance back and forth, mimicking a bear scratching against a tree, as the Bear Dance chiefs sing and use growlers, instruments played with sticks to imitate growls and spring thunder, symbolically waking the bears from hibernation.
“The respect is there … when you’re dancing and you’re going backwards your partner is looking out for you because you can’t see what’s behind you. It’s that very concept of you watch my back and I’ll watch yours. You take care of me and I’ll take care of you,” Ketchum, a White Mesa Bear Dance chief, said.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, long lines of shadows moved back and forth, contrasted by the golden light in between each pair of dancers. Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Councilman Malcolm Lehi reflected, “When you dance, you’re dancing for your elders, then you dance for the people that can’t dance, then you dance for the people that need the healing.”
Giving voice to the cedar tree
On a cold November day three months after the bears were put to sleep, Ketchum made his way up to the mesa tops of Bears Ears to look for pinyon nuts and cedar wood. And next year, the cycle will repeat. The bear will wake up, the summer gathering will commence, the bear will be put to sleep, pinyon nuts will grow, deer and elk will be hunted, herbs will be collected, the snow will fall, and the bear will be awakened again.
“It’s a never-ending cycle for years. Everything is renewed every year in springtime and this life goes on,” Ketchum said.
While Bears Ears’ status as a protected monument has fluctuated over the last decade, the Native Americans haven’t ceased their harmonious partnership with the land.
“The cedar tree is giving itself up to bring music. I give it a voice,” Ketchum reflects while collecting cedar wood in Bears Ears to make flutes. With every cut into the wood, a powerful, fresh smell filled the crisp air of Cottonwood Canyon.
Ketchum mimics the sounds of the animals when he plays his flute. Once, while hunting, he used his melodies to bring in a whole herd of elk, he reminisces, after running into his cousin who was heading up the canyon to hunt elk. Due to health complications, it’s been almost a decade since he’s hunted.
Later in the day, as snow began to fall, Ketchum called out to birds using the eagle bone whistle that never leaves his side. We stood inside a tipi he helped set up ahead of the Blanding Luminary Walk holiday festival in December where he played his flute for an audience.
From barbed-wire to running free
In 1923, in the same town Ketchum played his flute in a traditional Ute tipi for the annual holiday festival this year, the state of Utah waged the final war in U.S. history against a tribe. The assault, known as the Posey War, ended on April 29, 1923, with a five-week imprisonment of the Allen Canyon Utes in a makeshift, barbed-wire stockade in the center of town, the loss of access to ancestral lands in the Bears Ears region, the murder of two tribal members, and the forced enrollment of Ute children in boarding school in Colorado, separating them from their families.
Starting in the 1950s, many of the Ute families from Allen Canyon began moving and building homes on tribal land about 11 miles south of Blanding. The settlement eventually grew into the modern-day community of White Mesa.
Ketchum grew up in White Mesa as a descendent of the Allen Canyon Utes 40 years after the Posey War. While the war resulted in the effective end of the Allen Canyon Ute people’s traditional, nomadic way of life in Bears Ears, Ketchum still experienced a piece of that lifestyle during his childhood, spending the summers in the canyon and connecting with the land from which his ancestors had been removed nearly 103 years ago now.
Toward the end of a long drive down the canyon after the Bears Ears Summer Gathering back in July, Ketchum showed me where he spent his summers chasing deer, herding livestock, befriending birds, and learning how to play the flute.
Under that clear summer sky, the unifying and timeless power of Bears Ears was on full display. Children, parents and grandparents of different tribes and pueblos drifted off to sleep next to the ursine buttes, under the same stars that guided their ancestors.
“Now this is the space age, and what more could they do to us now?” Ketchum said, looking out over the land. “We’re invincible.”
