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