Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to develop a management plan.Īdaki and other members of the Bears Ears Commission interviewed by The Revelator during a recent joint management meeting with federal officials in Bluff, Utah, said that opposition to the monument and Trump’s review of Bears Ears in particular is rooted in distrust, lack of knowledge, disrespect of tribal governments and, in some instances, racism.ĭespite the monument’s uncertain future, federal officials and the commission engaged in daylong discussion on May 16 on developing a management plan. Established this past March, the commission will work now collaboratively with the U.S. Obama’s proclamation created the Bears Ears Commission, which includes representatives from the five southwest tribes that proposed the monument. “It’s an attack - an attack on tribal nations,” says James Adaki, Navajo Nation Oljato Chapter president and a Bears Ears commissioner. And attempts to roll it back are provoking bitter reactions among tribal leaders who worked most of this decade to research and document the significance of Bears Ears. Largely lost in the debate over Bears Ears and other sites is this: The monument in southeast Utah was the first-ever driven by tribal interests wanting to see this place protected for its deep cultural and ecological significance. “Such action would be illegal, beyond the reach of presidential authority.” “Any attempt to eliminate or reduce the boundaries of this Monument would be wrong on every count,” the Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition said in a statement. But this week Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke confirmed that the Trump administration will follow through on its long-threatened plans to shrink the monument - a move that brought instant condemnation from the coalition of five southwestern tribes that first proposed Bears Ears for protection. It took 110 more years than Devils Tower to put the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears monument in place, but it finally happened this past December with President Obama’s signature. Photo: Tim Peterson, courtesy Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition Newly arrived settlers were looting ruins, ceremonial structures and burial grounds scattered across vast canyons, mesas and washes - including the land that’s now part of the new, and under President Trump hotly contested, Bears Ears National Monument. Roosevelt’s proclamation said that the isolated, dramatic rock outcropping, whose sweeping vertical lines jut 867 feet out of the ground, is “an extraordinary example of the effect of erosion as to be a natural wonder and object of historic and great scientific interest.”ĭevils Tower set the stage for Roosevelt to create Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908, when he set aside 818,000 acres for protection and signaled that large-scale national monuments were part of the president’s prerogative.īut as important as the Grand Canyon is to the nation’s environmental and cultural heritage, historical records reveal that the primary reason the Antiquities Act was passed was to preserve ancient culture - to stop the widespread looting of American Indian ruins scattered across the Four Corners region of the Southwest.įor more than 20 years before the passage of the Antiquities Act, a debate had raged in academia and on Capitol Hill on how to stop the pillage of archeological treasures. BLUFF, Utah- The first national monument approved by President Theodore Roosevelt after the passage of the 1906 Antiquities Act was Wyoming’s Devils Tower - made famous to a generation of 1970s moviegoers by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
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