Access Utah

“Northern Indigenous Crees were native to Montana and the northern Plains long before the US-Canada border divided the region. But bisected by the line, Crees became asylum-seekers on their own lands 150 years ago. Though some were granted political refugee status, Crees were still denied basic rights. Instead, many were killed, ignored and deported on both sides of the border. … The Chippewa Cree story is little-known outside the tribe, but it echoes the uncertainty in the immigration crises the US faces today.”

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers”—including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens—recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier, for humans and non-humans alike, than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now hard at work restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts. Eager is a powerful story about one of the world’s most influential species, how North America was colonized, how our landscapes have changed over the centuries, and how beavers can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and the ravages of climate cha

Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past.

Today on the final day of UPR’s Spring Pledge Drive, my Access Utah co-host is Craig Jessop, Dean of the USU Caine College of the Arts, and Music Director of the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra. We’ll present a portion of a recent interview with eminent historian Joseph Ellis, author most recently of “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us.” We’ll also hear a segment from an interview with ecologist Jeremy Jackson, co-author of “Breakpoint: Reckoning with America’s Environmental Crises.” And we’ll hear part of Lee Austin’s interview with Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac.

Folklorist and USU Assistant Professor of English Lynne McNeill joins me for this special pledge drive edition of the program. We’ll hear a segment from a recent episode featuring Chef Nephi Craig, founder of the Native American Culinary Association. We’ll also feature a portion of one of our most memorable episodes, an interview (from 2011) with Utah author Lee Cantwell. His novel “Mother George” tries to flesh out an incredible true story for which there is little information: Mother George was a black midwife who practiced her art in a small southeastern Idaho town for 40 years. When she died around 1919, the women dressing her for burial discovered that she was a man. We’ll also hear an episode from our Bread & Butter series.

On this special pledge drive edition of Access Utah. My co-host is Access Utah founding host and former UPR Program Director Lee Austin. We’ll feature new conversations with USU Associate Professor of Journalism Matthew LaPlante and BBC host Dan Damon. We’ll be talking about the media landscape in the U.S. and the U.K. We’ll also talk about all the latest twists and turns in the Brexit saga.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Ken Sanders from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite recent episodes of the program. We’ll hear from Amy Irvine, Regina Whiteskunk Lopez and Kirsten Johanna Allen, talking about themes in Amy Irvine’s book “Desert Cabal,” which is a response to Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire.” Ken Sanders was a friend of Edward Abbey. We’ll also present part of an interview with another of Ken Sanders’ friends, legendary river-runner Ken Sleight, talking about Glen Canyon. We’ll invite you to pledge your support to UPR to ensure that Access Utah continues strong.

On the first day of UPR’s Spring Pledge Drive Tom Williams and co-host USU Communications Studies Assistant Professor Jason Gilmore will present parts of several recent Access Utah interviews: We’ll hear some of our listeners expressing opposing viewpoints. StoryCorps founder David Isay will urge us to try to overcome our differences by truly listening to each other. And we’ll talk about UPR’s upcoming partnership with StoryCorps in their One Small Step initiative, which invites two strangers to share life stories across a political divide. Finally, we'll hear from Richard Saunders on the way contemporary contexts inform our understanding of history.

Today on Access Utah: the music of Gustav Mahler from his Third Symphony. Our guests include USU Music Professor Sergio Bernal, Austrian conductor Christoph Campestrini with Vienna Hofmusikkapelle, and mezzo-soprano and USU Alumna Tamara Mumford of Metropolitan Opera. Immerse yourself in a universe of awakenings, nature, humankind, and eternity envisioned by Mahler, a composer for whom ''a symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.''

Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel is Director of Climate Science for the Climate & Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She will be in Utah later this week for events in Salt Lake City and Ogden. She says we can adapt to and reduce risks from changing weather patterns and other consequences of releasing heat-trapping emissions to the atmosphere, and that we can switch to a lower emissions trajectory. Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel will give us specific examples for Utah on the program today.

Richard Saunders is librarian and professor of history at Southern Utah University. He has written widely on the Mormons and American history topics. He will deliver the 36th annual Juanita Brooks lecture on Thursday, March 28, at 7:00 p.m. in Cox Auditorium on the campus of Dixie State University in St. George.

Michele Anderson says “I am what you might call a ‘homecomer.’ Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer and farmer, uses that word to describe people who have spent some time away, usually to pursue better opportunities in cities, and then choose to return to their rural roots.” Her recent opinion piece in the New York Times is headlined “Go Home to Your ‘Dying’ Hometown.” Michele Anderson says “I did, and it isn’t what I expected. I am more involved in social and racial justice, economic development and feminism than I ever was in a big city.”

Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure focuses on the critical school years when parents must learn to allow their children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life’s inevitable problems so that they can grow up to be successful, resilient, and self-reliant adults.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says “I grew up in Ferguson, Mo. No one ever heard of it, unless you lived elsewhere in St. Louis County. Then my family moved to Palestine – my father’s first home. A friend says, ‘Your parents really picked the garden spots.’ In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.

Here is the unforgettable story of Captain Tom Barnes, whom we first meet as he is leading British troops in Afghanistan. We then meet two young Afghani boys—and the man who trains one of them to fight against the infidel invaders. Finally, there are the family and friends who radiate out from these lives: the people on all sides of a war where virtually everyone is caught up in something unthinkable. But this novel regards them not as they see themselves but as the objects surrounding them do: a helmet, a bag of fertilizer, a beer glass, dog tags—and a horrific improvised explosive device that binds them all together by blowing one of them apart. A work of extraordinary humanity and hope, Anatomy of a Soldier takes its place among the great novels that articulate the lives of soldiers. In the boom of an instant, we see things we’ve never understood so clearly before.

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series―masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.

Native American Culinary Association founder, Chef Nephi Craig, is visiting Utah State University to conduct a series of foods presentations and deliver a lecture on his work with the “Three Sisters” of Native American cuisine—beans, corn and squash—and to teach nutrition and share cultural heritage.

More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease; including 30,000 in Utah who along with their 152,000 family caregivers face the highest rate per capita of the disease in the nation. In 2015, the Utah State Legislature declared Alzheimer’s a public health crisis, directing the Utah Department of Health to coordinate and implement the state’s response to this growing crisis.

Historians and novelists alike have described the vigilantism that took root in the gold-mining communities of Montana in the mid-1860s, but Mark C. Dillon is the first to examine the subject through the prism of American legal history, considering the state of criminal justice and law enforcement in the western territories and also trial procedures, gubernatorial politics, legislative enactments, and constitutional rights.