Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes (R) pledged to sue the White House on Wednesday after President Barack Obama set aside 1.35 million acres, including sacred tribal lands, for one of two new national monuments.

In a lengthy statement, Reyes accused Obama of “egregious overreach” and claimed the designation, named Bears Ears National Monument, would restrict local Navajo from using the land for traditional purposes. Obama also designated a second, smaller tract, the 300,000-acre Gold Butte National Monument in the Nevada desert.

“The sacred tribal areas in and around Bears Ears should absolutely be protected but in a way that is legally sound and that makes sense,” Reyes said in the statement. “The local Navajo will no longer be able to gather medicine or firewood, graze cattle, hunt, maintain their livelihoods or access the mountain heights for their religious ceremonies.”

At least one advocate is crying foul.

“That is complete bull,” Mathew Gross, a spokesman for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a 35-year-old nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to public lands issues, said Thursday. “It’s just not true.”

“People like the attorney general are reaching back a century for an example to invoke fear among people about what will happen,” he added, noting that Native Americans faced discrimination under national monument designations during much of the last century. “If you read the proclamation, it’s clear that traditional uses will continue and be protected.”

Reyes’ argument seems to question both presidential norms and the words of the leader of the Navajo Nation. Obama designated the Bears Ears National Monument, an area in southern Utah abutting the Colorado River, under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which has been used by nearly every president since Theodore Roosevelt to preserve tribal lands and natural wonders. Only Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush declined to use the law, according to The Wilderness Society.