“We’ve got to bring back the tradition to help our people,” says Cuch, who dances fiercely in her handmade yellow shawl, with fringe meant to evoke the desert grass. “We need it to heal.”
Some little kids join the dancers, others run around chasing each other or trying to catch the reservation dogs that run wild. The dance is a commemoration of sorts, of what happened here in the past, but it’s also a celebration for the present and the future. The Utes, LaRose says, revered bears and would not hurt them. Some say the people are descendants of the great animal; others believe they become bears when they die. The chief notes that bears used to instruct the Utes on which roots to dig to help with sickness — “that’s when animals could talk with people,” he adds. A little boy nearby lets out an “oooh!”
Ute dance chairman Paul Larose, left, and drum maker Ben Watts, imitate the sound of a bear singing and growling while they strut notched rasps with rubbing rods during a traditional Bear Dance on the Ute Reservation at Whiterocks, Utah, on Thursday, May 23, 2022. The ceremony held around the time bears awaken from hibernation is meant to welcome the new season .
Her daughter, River, is now 5 years old and holds her hand out proudly bearing five fingers. Cuch has taught her daughter the steps to the Bear Dance — just like her great aunt, Rose Jack, taught her — and River has been wearing Cuch’s oldest shawl that she passed down. But the line of dancers with their braided hair and beaded earrings is the same — and so are their smiles. This image of the Bear Dance being held in Whiterocks comes from the early 1900s. The photograph was taken by Robert Lee Marion, who was the operator of the Whiterocks Trading Post at the time.
OnaLisa Ridley went there for a little less than a year, she says, before the school was closed and she was transferred to the public system. Among the white students who became her new classmates, she recalls, some weren’t kind to her, and she often skipped classes, getting off the yellow bus at Todd Elementary and walking miles back to her house.
Tallbird, who grew up in Whiterocks, says she’s walked through the rubble left of the school and seen what she believes to be grave markers from some of the kids who died there. LaRose also thinks children were buried there. The tribe’s chairman hasn’t commented on that possibility.