Tanner Humanities Center

The Bear River is many and multiple: the primary tributary to a drying ancient lake, a site of state-sanctioned genocide, boundless molecules who have known many paths and many ends, a symbol for our ursine kin who once lumbered in great numbers along their shores. A river, too, is kin. Their flow not only maintains life, but is, in themselves, alive. Their memory insists on histories, both social and environmental, which offer truth in the mud and muck of mythologies of the American West and climate change denial. Can the river bear us? Can we bear them? This lyric essay considers the multiplicity and more-than-human agency of the Bear River, the work being done to restore ecosystems along their path, and if whiteness grounded in colonial extraction will ever allow for such restorative kinship. If we ask a river about their own restoration, they might respond: of whom, for whom, to when, and why?