by Kirsten Ewing, Bears Ears Education Center Manager
The Bears Ears Education Center (BEEC) has always been a space where artists and advocates across the Bears Ears region can share their expertise and engage with the community, hosting educational programming, curating exhibits that highlight historical archaeological artifacts and original works created with traditional techniques, sharing Visit With Respect guidelines with visitors, and serving as home-base for Bears Ears Partnership’s operations.
Spring is such an inspiring season. As the desert starts to show off its amazing colors and scents, there is a slight “tease” in the air asking us to engage and create. In April, the BEEC hosted our first-ever Indigenous Artisan Market. This market offered a valuable platform for Indigenous artists to connect with each other and the wider community, and share and sell their intentional creations.
Indigenous artists from across the Bears Ears region set up their works in the BEEC Native Plant Garden, each showing off their unique wares that reflected the expansiveness of this landscape. Earth tone color palettes, carving instruments, herbal grinding, and beaded adornments were just a small selection of the different mediums and techniques used to express connection to the earth through art.
Visitors and locals alike could interact with the artists and admire their works and creations, striking up conversations about their techniques, influences, and experiences living in the region, and purchase items directly from the artists. Each artist could showcase storytelling of their journeys – the “how” they have come to create, as well as the “why”. I was lucky to learn many of the stories behind their work.
One artist’s story I want to share is Ryann Headley’s. Ryann is an artist residing beneath the Carrizo Mountains in Teec Nos Pos, Arizona. Her passions include harvesting, grinding and infusing herbs that grow on the Navajo Nation. Ryann then makes locally sourced herbal skincare products from these collections,drying all of her herbs on a mesh frame system in the sun which she describes as “kind of like a home-made dehydrator.” Next she takes the herbs and grinds them on a grinding slick much like her ancestors would have used in their daily work. The result is a fine ground powder that smells like her homeland; Sage, juniper, yucca root, globemallow, and mint mingle with many other wonderful herbs to create a vibrant palette of ingredients.
Sniffing her powder jars transported me to the middle of the desert, hiking up one of my favorite Cedar Mesa canyons. I could picture the rain blanketing these fine desert plants so desperate for the moisture that intensifies their scent. My shower now smells like a walk in the canyons and my skin hums to the vibration of her grinding stone. It was this personal connection that made the experience of purchasing and supporting Ryann’s art feel like a true gift.
We hosted another market in May, and plan to continue to host this market every spring and fall in years to come. Hosting these incredible artists at our seasonal market and providing the space to share the story of their work is an absolute honor.
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