Every rural person and place has a story. Change is part of that story.
“Rural Utah at a Crossroads” is part of the Smithsonian traveling exhibit Crossroads: Change in Rural America, which explores the changing meaning of rural life and identity. Utah Humanities is touring Crossroads to eight rural communities across Utah in 2024. As part of the tour, Utah Humanities and Utah Public Radio are partnering with exhibition hosts to interview local residents about change in their communities.
This interview took place in collaboration with the Utah State University Blanding campus.
Aldean Ketchum: I'm from the community of White Mesa, south of Blanding, from the band of Tamarisk Wash in Allen Canyon, Ave-Kahn area of the Ute people.
We've lived here for thousands of years, and we have shared this land with everyone. Something that we have long known the importance of is this landscape and the energy that it has of helping all of us here.
Up in the drainages of Allen Canyon and Cottonwood Wash is where my people live during the summer month,and we know that you can come out here and basically get lost out in vast openness. Having that knowledge of the history with our people, it is just like going home when I travel up into the canyon.
People from all the world come here now and want to see it, and one of their main questions: "Where are all the Indians?" We're like, "um, back in India."
We are still surviving and still existing here and sharing this land with everyone. And it's something that my grandfather said, how my connection with the environment was being able to understand the nature, the wildlife. So the songs that my grandfather taught me are in a G minor scale, which is a sound of nature, and that scale is unique. I mimic many animals with my music and my flute, and that's a connection I understand and I have with our people.
The flute has been one of the instruments to share our culture. Taking from a few stories of what the flute is used for, was for healing and for courting, of course. There were tribes with that same bottom-line story. Which is unique, because I have enjoyed learning from different tribes of their stories of the flute and how the connection's there, and how we as indigenous people have shared that uniqueness of the music.
But it has taken me many places, even across the pond over to Europe, and there are many other projects I worked with. During the centennial of the state of Utah, I was quite busy. I helped with the soundtrack of a rock art, and it's photographs of rock art from all the state of Utah, called "Sacred Images." And I composed the soundtrack to that exhibit.
That same year, I was asked to do a opera called Dreamkeepers, which was a modern opera, and I actually played in a song called "The Eagle's Cry," and I used the flute to make that sound. So that was one of the projects that was unique in a way of sharing the Ute culture in that unique opera. Later on, I was asked to be a part of the 2002 opening ceremony of Winter Olympics.
And so that's many of the many adventures I've gone through so far and places I thought I'd never venture off to, but music is a part of that connection, and sharing it with everyone is the important part of the enjoyment of this world that we live in.
“Rural Utah at a Crossroads” is a collaboration between Utah Public Radio, Utah Humanities, and the community hosts of Crossroads: Change in Rural America, a Smithsonian Museum on Main Street exhibition made possible in the Beehive State by Utah Humanities.
Support for Museum on Main Street has been provided by the United States Congress.
