In early September, my Ute Mountain Ute community in White Mesa celebrated our annual Bear Dance — three days of festivities, prayer and traditional Ute songs, which helped put Kwiyagtu, the Bear, to rest for the season.
Now, as the first snows fall over southeast Utah, I’ve been reflecting on those moments. The Bear Dance Corral was surrounded by juniper trees, and people were sitting in folding chairs. I noticed happiness on their faces, a testament to strong community bonds in White Mesa and those who traveled from Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute and Northern Ute and elsewhere to attend the dance. In organizing the Bear Dance, we aimed to serve as an example for the generations to come, just as our ancestors had set the same example for us.
Years ago, as a child attending the Bear Dance, I dressed up in traditional clothing. My friends and I enjoyed snow cones as the sun’s heat pounded down. I recognize now that I was enacting traditions that bind our community together.
Bear Dance holds deep personal significance for me. Over the past five years, my family has suffered the loss of close relatives. This year, I offered prayers to our creator and the revered Holy people for my losses. I also prayed over the losses suffered by my people a century ago.
In 2023, I became the director of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s 100 Years of Silence project, which began on the 100th anniversary of the Aniknuche Incarceration of 1923 (formerly known as the “Posey War”). That time was a dark period for my Aniknuche relatives, the Allen Canyon Utes.
My ancestor William Posey — a respected leader of the Aniknuche band that roamed freely in the Bears Ears region of San Juan County, Utah, prior to 1923 — died in the spring of that year, either from an infected bullet wound or from eating poison-laced flour. According to Jack Cantsee of White Mesa, a Bear Dance Chief, Blanding residents feared Posey because he was a sure shot with a rifle and a talented horse rider, who could disappear into the land and survive for weeks. A young man of the band was also killed that spring by an armed mob of settlers from Blanding, who had been deputized to arrest any Ute in the area after a courthouse altercation.
The Utes who survived also suffered badly. In all, 79 men, women and children were forcibly incarcerated for six weeks in a barbed-wire cage in the streets of Blanding. Children were shipped off to a boarding school in Colorado. The Aniknuche were pressured into giving up claim to their vast ancestral territory by accepting small allotments in Allen Canyon.
As Ute families were still held behind the barbed-wire fence in 1923, The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News published headlines like “Allen Canyon Renegade Indians on War Path,” when in fact we were victims of a war being waged against our way of life.
Over the next century, the story of the “Posey War” was mostly told from a white perspective, which repeated these tropes and tried to present the unprovoked settler violence in a heroic light. Posey’s body was repeatedly dug up by Blanding residents in the weeks following his death, and some of them posed for photographs with his remains.
These horrific stories remain difficult to tell, even in 2024. My team and I have hosted over a dozen community meetings since the project started, where many tears have been shed. But at the same time, people have thanked us for working to tell this history from an Indigenous perspective for the first time. Community members have emphasized that we need to put the events of 1923 into their historical context and connect the Aniknuche Incarceration to what came after: the erosion of culture in boarding schools and the loss of traditional land, both of which remain relevant to this day.
These are stories my relatives know because they lived through them, and Elders have told me that it is necessary to revisit the past in order to heal. Every day of this project, I’ve been reminded that, despite the trauma, the Aniknuche people and other members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe still carry on a remarkable, inspiring legacy of resilience. Seven Ute Mountain Ute artists produced pieces for the 100 Years of Silence project, which are currently on display at the Edge of Cedars Museum in Blanding, in a testament to that legacy.
The support we’ve received from outside the community has also been inspiring. The Utah Tribal Leaders Association passed a resolution encouraging our project, and we’ve received a letter of support from the mayor of Bluff, where Posey often camped prior to 1923.
There is still a long way to go in order to heal from the Aniknuche Incarceration, and we hope that monuments to the awful events of 1923, as well as our ongoing legacy of resilience, will soon be installed in Blanding and near the Posey Trail in Bears Ears National Monument to help the broader public remember the stories of the Aniknuche.
At this year’s Bear Dance, I found myself seated under the Willow Brush Shade House with the Bear Dance Chiefs. They showed genuine interest in this work, and I felt a profound connection to Kwiyagtu. As I listened to the gentle breeze and inhaled the scent of mountain smoke, cedar and willow branches, I observed the Bear Dance Chiefs sharing laughter and jokes as we sang to the beat of the metal rasp against the metal drum.
The dancers, adorned in vibrant, beaded attire from head to toe, approached the Bear Dance Chief podium, while the youth beside me banged the drum to emulate the sound of a bear combined with thunder. The sight of beaded designs and feathers within the circle of juniper trees filled the corral with a sense of peace, reminding us that despite our adversities, we persist. We danced for our elders who could no longer dance and sang for those who were no longer with us, feeling their spiritual presence within the earth.
(Writers on the Range) Shaun Ketchum Jr.
Shaun Ketchum Jr. directs the 100 Years of Silence project and is a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.
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