100 Years of Silence Special Presentation: "The Aniknuche Incarceration"

Join us at the Bears Ears Education Center for a free, public talk on Thursday, August 28 at 7pm about The Aniknuche Incarceration, presented by the 100 Years of Silence project, which commemorates the hundred-year-plus anniversary of the forcible removal of Ute people from the Bears Ears area.

The exhibit will be on display at the BEEC starting August 28 until October, and is open to the public during the BEEC’s hours (Thursday-Monday 9am-4pm). 

For six weeks in 1923 San Juan County settlers held the Aniknuche people in a makeshift prison camp, and federal officials shipped their children to boarding schools. This moment, formerly known as “the Posey War,” now recognized by the White Mesa Ute community as “the Aniknuche Incarceration,” marked not just the death of William Posey and another Ute man, but the tragic loss of land and freedom for an entire community.

Up until now, the Ute people have not fully told its version of this history. The 100 Years of Silence project commemorates the hundred-year-plus anniversary of the forcible removal of Ute people from the Bears Ears area. Directed by the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and centered in the Tribe’s White Mesa community, the project begins the journey of telling the full story, in search of collective healing. It was funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project, which reconsiders U.S. commemorative landscapes by asking what perspectives and stories are not represented.

Join us as we explore through history and virtual media this powerful, untold chapter of American history—one that forces us to rethink what we know about the so-called “last Indian War” and the resilience of a people who refused to disappear.

About the presenters: 

Angelo Baca (Navajo/Hopi) is a cultural activist, scholar, filmmaker and professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He focused his research on Bears Ears National Monument and teaches Native American media and film. He is Communications Director for the 100 Years of Silence project and local to San Juan County, UT.

 

Jedediah Rogers, an environmental and public historian of modern America, is author of Roads in the Wilderness: Conflict in Canyon Country and coeditor of The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History.