Meet our Educators: Joe Pachak

Joe Pachak

Artist & Archeologist

Bluff, UT

10/01/2021-10/08/2021

     “We don’t take this,” says Joe Pachak, holding a pre-historic chisel in his right hand. As an archeologist, Joe recognizes the importance of leaving artifacts in place, their story and context intact. He has been searching the red rock desert for indigenous remnants since he was a young boy roaming Pueblo, CO with his father.  Joe has made home the small town of Bluff, UT working as an artist. With an attentive eye and a kind demeanor, he offers detailed interpretations of rock art pecked into the sandstone panels of Sand Island, along the rim of an oxbow of the San Juan River, Wolf Man, and The Procession. He explains that the petroglyph styles on the panels are Basketmaker, Ute and Glen Canyon Linear. 

Westies hike with Joe over sandstone slabs, stopping to look at flakes, pottery sherds or rusted milk cans. Joe sees charred rocks and determines a pit where a fire burned centuries before. He points to carvings of animals and people desert bighorns playing flutes, snakes, processions on stone – stories from centuries before etched into rock. Every step with Joe is intentional: “we’re walking in the remains of a culture.”

The teachings he has learned from Native American cultures are significant to him. He contributes to documenting panels through drawings and sketches. Each year, Joe constructs wooden sculptures to burn as a symbol of renewal. A pair of 28-foot-tall ravens were burned last winter solstice.To Joe, it is creativity that will “make us actual.” It will help us “find out who we are as individuals and a community.” Placing the chisel back where he found it, he grins, “I say let’s go look at rock art.”

By Neave Fleming

Meet our Educators: Ann Walka

Ann Walka

Poet and author

Bluff, Utah

10/05/2021

            Sheltered from the rain in a sandstone alcove, Ann Walka sits with Westies on the first day of a week-long writing workshop on Comb Ridge, Utah. With an unwaveringly gentle demeanor and warm smile, she instructs students to draw a blind contour of their hand, and then write a list of all the sounds they can hear: exercises to calm the mind. She then sends everyone off to wander, find a spot alone, and use the senses to write boundlessly about the rich desert landscape.

Ann is no stranger to place-based writing. Splitting her time between Bluff, UT and Flagstaff, AZ, Ann writes poetry and stories about the landscape and history of the American West. Using her intimate understanding of the intersection of ecology, geological processes, and human history of places like the Utah desert, Ann inspired Westies to work toward writing a “deep map of place,” a concept inspired by desert writer Ellen Meloy. She encouraged students to draw from their direct experiences, nurture curiosity, notice particularities, use the imagination abundantly, and share work aloud every day. With Ann’s guidance, students wrote weather reports, list poems, origin stories, imaginative pieces about human life in the desert, and personal essays rooted in place. Ann’s welcoming attitude, inventive assignments, and deeply creative spirit allowed Westies to slow down and think deeply about the landscapes around and within them.

By Erika Goodman

Editor’s note: the photo above is from SITW 2018 as we did not take a portrait of Ann on SITW 2021

Meet our Guests: Susie Knezevich

Susie Knezevich

Interior designer and co-owner of Johnson Lakes Canyon property

Kanab, UT

9/30/21

     Recent rains have turned large portions of the road leading to Johnson Lakes Canyon outside of Kanab, UT, into soup, but this doesn’t stop Susie Knezevich from reaching the property that she has worked so hard to restore. Almost 20 years ago Susie and her husband Rick, who both reside in Aspen, CO, were looking for a parcel of land where they could hike and camp. In 2004 they purchased an 800-acre private inholding in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a land dominated by sand, sage, and bluffs. Their land, however, was not in the best condition for hiking. Decades of cattle grazing had destroyed native vegetation and allowed prickly invasive plants such as Russian olive and bull thistle to proliferate.

     “We decided to take the cattle off the land because we noticed the damage and we needed to begin fixing that,” Susie said. The Knezevichs worked with the Grand Canyon Trust, a regional environmental group, to put their land under a conservation easement in 2015 to ensure that it will remain free from the beefy ungulates in perpetuity.

     The Johnson Lakes Canyon property now serves as a reference area for the surrounding National Monument which remains heavily grazed by cattle. Susie and her husband have worked with ecologist and SITW guest educator Mary O’Brien to bring in biologists, students, and volunteers to conduct research and restoration projects with the goal of showing how the land has rebounded since grazing has ceased. Susie excitedly shared that the native oaks, cottonwoods, and willows are reaching heights and numbers not noted for years. “We were unlikely characters to get involved in conservation treatments, but now we are really hooked!” says Susie.

By Ani Pham

Meet our Guests: Norman Benally

Norman Benally

Interpreter, activist, sheep herder, and assembly line worker

Black Mesa, AZ / Navajo Nation

9/25/21

Self-proclaimed “old timer,” Norman Benally meets Westies outside his home in Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. His house adjoins a retired coal processing plant. Peabody Energy moved into the region in 1968, mining coal and pumping water from the Navajo aquifer to power cities off the reservation – Tucson, Flagstaff, Las Vegas. For years, many Diné (Navajo) people depended on the coal plant for work and the aquifer for water, yet their proximity to these resources did little to increase their access.

Today, the plant is shut down. A pipeline borders Norman’s house, but no water runs through his faucet. “The politics are as dirty as the coal plant,” he states—not to mention the drinking water. This summer, 86 of his sheep died after drinking from a nearby spring. He holds up a plastic water bottle, “we never drank out of these [until now].”

Before the backdrop of an arid, industrial landscape – his backyard – Norman expounds on the “struggle to maintain a way of life we were raised in,” when any extra cash goes into feeding his livestock, and the local resources “to keep all those AC units running in the Southwest.” Norman has pushed through this struggle. He resisted removal, fought, and remained. Norman’s activism, working as a translator for Navajo matriarchs to speak out against the coal plant and pass down Diné stories, has brought him to locations such as Standing Rock and the United Nations. His story is what he calls “the hard truth.” He intends to continue resisting.

By Neave Fleming

Meet our Educators: Mary O'Brien

Mary O’Brien

Scientist, activist, stakeholder member of Monroe Mountain Working Group

Castle Valley, UT

9/16/21 - 10/3/21

Mary O’Brien has worn a lot of hats during her more than 30 years of work on environmental causes. She is a Ph.D. botanist and an activist who has been involved with kickstarting regulations for toxic chemicals in Oregon, preserving the Hells Canyon National Recreation area, and, most recently, pushing for responsible management of range areas. In the intermountain West this applies to a vast amount of land given that most public land in this country is open to livestock grazing. Mary has seen and documented the negative impacts cattle have on these places—trampled and incised streams, loss of riparian habitat, and reduced biodiversity in forest—and she believes there need to be fewer cows on public lands.

On Monroe Mountain in south-central Utah, the Forest Service is currently undergoing a restructuring of grazing allotments. They will decide how many cattle will be allowed in what areas, and what environmental standards will be enforced for the foreseeable future. Mary gathers scientific data such as the height of grasses in riparian areas, to hold organizations like the Forest Service accountable to commitments they have made to conserve habitat.

Mary explains that “the interesting thing about numbers and methods that anyone can repeat, is that you can’t deny that . . .if they think we’re making stuff up, they can go to that spot and rerun their own transects.” The Forest Service must take this undeniable proof (i.e. data collected in the National Forest) into account when they make decisions. She sees science as a way of taking the human perspective out of the picture, and letting other species speak through the data. She firmly believes the nonhuman members of the Utah ecosystem deserve a seat at the decision-making table.

     Mary works hard, walks fast, and holds herself and her work to a high standard of accuracy. She pushed the Westies to do what it takes to get accurate and precise data, hiking far over cacti and scrambling through juniper trees to set the tape measure in a straight line for a transect. When it came time to write up reports, she edited the work that 20 students produced almost as fast as it could be written. Multiple drafts later, reports were sent in to the Forest Service to be considered when planning the new grazing rules in Monroe Mountain.

By Reya Fore