by Frankie Beesely, Citizen Advocacy Volunteer Coordinator, AmeriCorps
Flagstaff filmmaker Justin Clifton contemplates these questions in his new film Our Canyon Lands. Join the Grand Canyon Trust on August 6th at 6:30pm at the Green Room for the Flagstaff premiere of this new documentary.
Our Canyon Lands is a visually stunning film about the protection of the region around Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah, and more specifically, the tribally-driven effort to permanently protect a 1.9 million acre area known as Bears Ears. Threats lurk across every mesa and within every canyon ˗ and not just threats of oil and gas development, but threats to native cultures and histories as well. The area contains more than 100,000 cultural sites, many of which remain undisturbed. Home to humans for tens of thousands of years, the Bears Ears is still vital to the present-day cultural and ceremonial lives of Native peoples across the Colorado Plateau.
The archaeological sites, the trails, the petroglyphs and pictographs, all of those things are part of the human experience and belong to everyone, and I think everyone should take some responsibility for protecting them.
– Jim Enote
In his new film, Clifton explores these very threats against cultural preservation and protecting public lands.
A native to Flagstaff, Clifton earned a degree in journalism and spent a decade in the film festival circuit, mainly curating advocacy films. For Clifton, the shift to working behind the camera not only had to do with the evolution of journalism, but also with his own personal connection to the landscape.
“This is a story about what’s important to us as Americans, as human beings living on this planet, about what we want our legacy to be. Are we bold enough to stand up and protect more of our treasured landscapes?” Clifton asks.
Our Canyon Lands is a story of our collective equity in public lands, our combined necessity to protect these lands and culturally significant places from unsustainable energy extraction.
We’re talking about landscapes that all Americans own equally, and it really becomes a question of what our priorities are as a nation. Do we want to industrialize the best of our landscapes for 17 days of oil… or do we want to protect these landscapes for future generations, to maintain the integrity of wild spaces for our own human imagination?
–Justin Clifton, The Clymb
A Q&A session with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
Whether you climb the red rocks of the region, hike in the slot canyons, appreciate cultural traditions, or simply wish to protect these spectacular landscapes, we look forward to meeting you at the Flagstaff premiere of Our Canyon Lands.
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