ACTION BOX/What You Can Do About It

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Call Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark at 202-514-2701 to tell him your thoughts on using taxpayer money to try to muzzle archaeologists who want to protect Native American sites on our public lands or write him at Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20530-0001.

The Native American Rights Fund can be reached at 202-785-4166.

The Hopi Tribe, other American Indian tribes and environmental organizations sued Trump over eliminating 85% of Bears Ears in Utah, the first national monument designated at the request of Native Americans, and carving Grand Staircase-Escalante, also in Utah, into three smaller monuments.

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Legal scholars Michael Blumm and Olivier Jamin have called reducing national monuments and other attacks on public land by Trump and Republicans “the most substantial rollback in public lands protections in American history.”

Archeologists who aren’t plaintiffs in the lawsuit want to file documents in the case. The American Anthropological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America helped draft the Antiquities Act, giving presidents the authority to create national monuments. Other groups, including 26 U.S. senators and 92 U.S. representatives, also want to weigh in. Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee hearing the lawsuit in federal court Washington. D.C., will decide.

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“This may be their only opportunity to be heard,” wrote attorney Natalie Landrethof the Native American Rights Fund.

The Department of Justice’s own manual says department attorneys “shall nearly always consent” to filing an amicus brief that complies with the rules.

Grand Staircase was “the last place in the continental United States to be mapped.” People have lived in the area since as early as A.D. 700.

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Only 5% to 7% of Grand Staircase has been surveyed. The monument is rich in rock art and petroglyphs and has 3,985 officially recorded archaeological sites. Trump’s proclamation would remove protections from 1,915 of those sites, including ones dating back to the end of the last Ice Age.

The Lampstand, known for Ancestral Puebloan villages, and the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, a historic trail used by Mormon settlers, were both removed from Grand Staircase.

Bears Ears has about 9,000 recorded archaeological sites, including petroglyphs, woven cloth, human remains and ancient roads. Trump removed the Greater Cedar Mesa area, “one of the most significant concentrations of archaeological sites in the nation.”