Bears Ears National Monument protects 1.36 million acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. President Barack Obama established the National Monument at 1.35 million acres in December 2016, during the final weeks of his presidency, using the powers granted to presidents by the Antiquities Act of 1906. In December 2017, Donald Trump and his corrupt first Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unlawfully reduced Bears Ears by 85% to just over 201,000 acres. In October 2021, President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—the first Native American Secretary of the Interior—restored Bears Ears, retaining an additional 11,000 acres actually added under Trump.
The entire Bears Ears landscape contains some 100,000 sacred sites. In a historic first, Bears Ears National Monument is co-managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the Department of the Interior, the USDA Forest Service, and a coalition of five Native American tribes, the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.
Early afternoon of Thursday, February 16, 2023 found Sean and me gazing out at the heart of Bears Ears—the Bears Ears Buttes themselves—from Natural Bridges National Monument.
Sean and I were on the Bridge View Drive loop road in Natural Bridges, where the pullouts above Tuwa Canyon offered us a sweeping view of the snow-covered landscape of Piñon-Juniper woodland around the Bears Ears Buttes.
The iconic Buttes are sacred to multiple tribes, and they provide a memorable visual representation for the entire landscape.
They are a local landmark, visible from the south and east some sixty miles away, and they are so named because resemble the ears of a Bear poking its head above the horizon. Many tribes have stories and legends in our oral traditions about these Buttes.
Again, we were standing in Natural Bridges National Monument, administered by the National Park Service, part of the Department of the Interior. Natural Bridges is not part of Bears Ears National Monument, but is entirely surrounded by it. The Buttes are in the part of the National Monument located within Manti-La Sal National Forest, administered by the National Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture (you know, because forests are a crop to be harvested?). The land between is administered by the Bureau of Land Management, also part of the Department of the Interior. Bears Ears National Monument encompasses part of Manti-La Sal National Forest and also a lot of BLM land. Part of Bears Ears National Monument in Manti-La Sal National Forest is congressionally designated Federal Wilderness. And there are numerous portions of the BLM part of the Monument that are being studied for potential Wilderness designation. Each of these layers of administration and designation offers a mix of protections and allowable activities and uses.
Confused yet?
At Bears Ears National Monument, everything surrounding public lands management in the West comes together in both a uniquely forward-looking and alarmingly regressive way as a battle rages for the future of this place, which has been sacred since time immemorial.
Before 1996, federal lands designated as National Monuments, National Parks, etc., were transferred from their existing agency (USDA Forest Service, BLM, etc.) to the jurisdiction of the Depart of the Interior’s National Park Service. It was the whole point of having a National Park Service, to administer the units of the National Park System. In 1996, President Bill Clinton used his powers under the Antiquities Act to establish Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, also in Utah, but for political reasons didn’t transfer administration of the land from the BLM to the Park Service. This set a troubling precedent, and now there are forty-seven National Monuments partially or wholly administered by agencies other than the National Park Service, including the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Energy, and even the Department of Defense. While these lands are protected as National Monuments, they are subject to very different administrative approaches and departmental expertise (or lack thereof), generally weakening the meaning of National Monument designation.
The fundamental thing to remember is that all of the 1.36 million acres of Bears Ears National Monument is pre-existing federal land. The Monument involves no state land, private land, or Tribal land. So the battle over the National Monument is about how “we the people” choose to protect or exploit the land and the thousands of cultural sacred sites on it. It is a tension between preservation and protection for the nation as a whole on one side and a desire for unfettered extractive economic activities on the other.
The Bureau of Land Management has a historic legacy (and in many ways an internal culture) of preferencing damaging extractive industries and overgrazing on the lands it manages. The USDA Forest Service also will often preference the harvesting of timber crops over ecological balance. Establishing a National Monument like Bears Ears is a way to say, No. On these lands, extractive industries and activities that damage ecosystems and cultural and sacred sites are banned, no matter which federal agency administers them.
In other words, designating a National Monument on lands managed by agencies that often lean toward the extractive and economic and away from the ecological and environmental is a way to protect these places for generation after generation of both human and non-human life rather than for short-term profit by a small group of owners in this current, short-sighted generation.
What makes Bears Ears National Monument uniquely important is that Tribes have been central to advocating for its protection and are central to its management. This legacy points to a new way forward in the twenty-first century of listening to and ceding management power to Native Americans. The reality is that it’s probably for the best that the Monument not be transferred to the National Park Service, which has had a fairly abysmal legacy in its first century in the Lower 48 of working with Tribes. That is changing, but there is a long way to go.
So if the move to declare National Monuments without transfer to the Park Service ultimately led to Bears Ears National Monument, then that’s a good thing. But the political capital of the National Park Service, that most popular of federal agencies, may have prevented the Monument’s reduction at least to such a dramatic extent.
Tribal and conservation groups have long advocated for the protection of the Bears Ears landscape, particularly its sacred sites. The urgent need for stronger protections became clear in June 2009 when an FBI and BLM sting operation exposed rampant looting of sacred sites for sale on the private market. Literal grave robbing.
Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906, which gives the president broad powers to create National Monuments, specifically to stop the rampant looting of archaeological sites in the Southwest. The 2009 sting swept up prominent Utah families and led to the suicides of two of the defendants who had been stealing from both federal and Tribal land. Establishing a National Monument at Bears Ears to bring additional protection and resources to prevent such desecrations is exactly in line with Congress’ clear intentions with the Antiquities Act.
Some of the federal land, particularly the BLM land, in the Bears Ears region contains significant inholdings of state land, acreage entirely surrounded by federal property. Rather than simply declare the monument and be done with it, the Obama Administration, as it often did, sought a grand bargain: the acre-for-acre trade of federal land elsewhere in Utah for the inholdings at Bears Ears. That way the potential National Monument would be a unified whole rather than littered with islands of state land.
As so often happened during the Obama years, some of the players were negotiating in bad faith. Even while there was significant bipartisan work on the ground in southwest Utah to strike a grand bargain to create the Monument, Republican leaders at the state and federal level, particularly Senator Mike Lee, essentially strung the Obama Administration along for seven years hoping that a change in partisan control of the White House would end the push for a National Monument at Bears Ears. After the 2016 election with the possibility that all the hard work on the ground would come to nothing, Obama acted, establishing the National Monument on December 28, 2016.
Obama’s creation of the Bears Ears Commission as part of the Monument’s designation was unprecedented for its inclusion of Native Americans in decision making on federal public lands.
In recognition of the importance of tribal participation to the care and management of the objects identified above, and to ensure that management decisions affecting the monument reflect tribal expertise and traditional and historical knowledge, a Bears Ears commission is hereby established to provide guidance and recommendations.
– President Barack Obama, Presidential Proclamation — Establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument
Then Trump took office and appointed a self-aggrandizing charlatan as Secretary of the Interior. (Ryan Zinke even had a special flag made that was hoisted on the Interior Department building in Washington, DC whenever he was there at headquarters, as if he were the Queen of England in residence at Buckingham Palace.) Trump tasked Zinke with reviewing the designation of twenty-seven National Monuments established since 1996. Ignoring public input procedures, which overwhelmingly supported leaving the Monuments as they were, in December 2017, Trump reduced two National Monuments in Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears.
Trump’s executive order eviscerated Bears Ears, reducing it by 85% and splitting it into two separate units. While MAGA Republicans lauded the butchering of the National Monument, backlash to Trump’s action was swift. While it was a foregone conclusion that the Tribes and conservation organizations that had advocated for Bears Ears’ protection would sue to stop its destruction, a consortium of Utah mayors and county commissioners also joined the suit to stop Trump’s action. Utah’s public lands tourism economy is a multi-billion-dollar boon to the state, particularly for local communities. Again, preferencing extractive industries on public lands is an often shortsighted economic choice that tends to flow profits to large corporations versus small businesses.
In the wake of Trump’s action, San Juan County (where Bears Ears is located) elected two Navajo commissioners for the first time, thereby shifting county government in favor of retaining Bears Ears’ original designation. Even one of the mining companies that hoped for Bears Ears to be reduced released a statement saying that they had advocated only for a 2.5% reduction and opposed the 85% reduction.
It is also highly likely that Trump’s action in reducing Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase Escalante was simply illegal. The Antiquities Act makes no allowance for a subsequent president to undo the designation of a predecessor. The Act also does not limit the total size in acres of a designation. While opponents of public lands protection often howl about the large size of some National Monuments, the use of the presidential power conferred by the Act to protect huge swaths of federal land dates all the way back to 1908 when Theodore Roosevelt designated Grand Canyon National Monument at over 1.2 million acres. (Roosevelt had to use the Antiquities Act before leaving office because, although legislation to establish a National Park at the Grand Canyon was first introduced in Congress in 1882, Congress wouldn’t actually establish Grand Canyon National Park until 1919. The senators from Arizona beholden to mining interests blocked the legislation, you see, because, well, they wanted to be able to mine the canyon. Just as at Bears Ears in the twenty-first century, it was shortsighted profit for rich mine owners of the robber baron era versus longterm economic and ecological benefit for local communities, the state, Tribes, and the nation as a whole.)
Before the suit challenging Trump’s unprecedented challenge to the Antiquities Act could wend its way through the federal courts, Trump was voted out of office.
On October 8, 2021, President Joe Biden, with the assistance of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, issued an executive order restoring Bears Ears National Monument and restarting the process to establish co-management with the Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission.
(And what of Ryan Zinke? His corruption was too much even for the Trump administration. He was forced from office at the end of 2018.)
It was about 12:30pm, and Sean and I wanted to see a lot more that day. So after a good long look and lots of photos of the Bears Ears Buttes, we continued on Natural Bridges National Monument’s loop road back toward the Visitor Center.
After leaving Natural Bridges, we were back in Bears Ears proper.
I absolutely want to come back and explore Bears Ears in earnest someday.
We exited Bears Ears, stopped for gas in Blanding, and continued back north, eating our extra breakfast burrito from Moab Coffee Roasters for lunch while we drove.
Halfway back north on US-191 toward Moab, we turned off and headed west toward both The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park and a part of Bears Ears National Monument that extends north and hugs the eastern boundary of the National Park, extending its protections to important sacred sites and huge canyon landscapes.
The road turned to the south and then west again as it dropped off the plateau and into the canyons of the Indian Creek section of Bears Ears.
Just after the road turned north again and an hour and a half after leaving Natural Bridges, we pulled into a very snowy, unplowed parking area.
We had arrived at Newspaper Rock, an astonishing Rock Art site accessible by a short, snowy path from the parking area.
A particularly dark portion of desert varnish at the bottom of a cliff above Indian Creek holds dozens of petroglyphs, representing at least 2,000 years of human occupation.
It is called Newspaper Rock because of the layering of the petroglyphs, telling the “news” of each subsequent era, representing Archaic, Hisatsinom, Ancestral Puebloan, and Ute cultures. There are also European inscriptions and graffiti stretching back to at least the eighteenth century.
Some of the Petroglyphs depict recognizable animals or their tracks. In the image above are Bighorn Sheep, Bison, a Northern Flying Squirrel (or some other rodent), sheep tracks, and rabbit tracks. The large footprint could be human or bear.
I was particularly taken with the small and large human footprints. (Note that some of them have six toes. Extra digits on hands and feet are a not-uncommon motif in Ancestral Puebloan Petroglyphs.)
The figures on horseback are Ute Petroglyphs, since they date from after the Spanish colonizers reintroduced horses into the North America and after the Ancestral Puebloans had migrated from this area to the banks of the Rio Grande in what is now New Mexico.
The darker Petroglyphs nearer the bottom tend to be older. They are darker from fading subtly over centuries.
Newspaper Rock is only one of the most easily accessible of some 100,000 sacred sites that Bears Ears National Monument currently protects.
“This place is a part of the history of all the Native peoples in this region. It’s like a book for us, and when many tribes have a chapter in this book, it tells us a lot about why we are the way we are. But it’s also part of the history of the peoples of the United States and the world. I believe that tribal peoples of this region shouldn’t be the only ones to take responsibility for protecting the cultural resources; they belong to everyone, and everyone should take responsibility for protecting them.”
– Jim Enote, Pueblo of Zuni, Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition
The battle over Bears Ears National Monument, which will face new challenges in a second Trump administration that has already threatened to butcher the National Monument once again, is so vitally important. This time reduction of the National Monument will undo four years of a process of public input and the formalizing of agreements between the federal government and the Tribes, as well as the near-complete management plan for the Monument. A complete and intact Bears Ears shows the way forward for cooperation among Tribes and between Tribes and the government. It could be a model for public lands across the country.
This battle is also over the Antiquities Act, a fundamental piece of conservation law for almost one-hundred twenty years. The legal challenges to Trump’s appalling action were left moot and unresolved when Biden took office. Challenges to Biden’s restoring the National Monument are currently working their ways through the courts, likely to become moot with Trump’s anticipated actions.
The battle is also between a petty, selfish, and short-sited resource grab for oligarchs, a raping of the earth for more polluting and climate-destroying minerals and fossil fuels, and a humble vision both into the deep past and far future. This vision encompasses healing, cooperation, sovereignty, and respect. It is also a more economically and ecologically sustainable use of the land, with the economic bounty of recreation versus the boom-and-bust cycle of resource extraction or the simple looting of sacred sites and graves for petty profit.
After gazing upon Newspaper Rock, Sean and I returned to the Jeep to continue the drive into The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.
The remainder of our approach to the boundary of Canyonlands was through the monumental cliffs and canyons of the Indian Creek section of Bears Ears.
It was a hell of a dramatic route down into The Needles and the snowy conclusion of our day’s adventures.
Further Reading
- Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition
- Gulliford, Andrew. Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 2022.
- Robinson, Rebecca, Stephen E. Strom, and Patricia Nelson Limerick. Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2018.