Listening to the Old People, the Land, and the Long Future

Why Bears Ears deserves to be declared a national monument

Red Rock Testimony , a collection of essays on Utah’s landscapes and the threats they are facing. The following is an excerpt from, a collection of essays on Utah’s landscapes and the threats they are facing. Charles Wilkinson

A coalition of five Native American tribes has been advocating the designation of a 1.9 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument on culturally significant land in southeast Utah, a proposal that has generated considerable controversy within the state. There is speculation that President Obama will designate the monument under the Antiquities Act before leaving office.

The Canyon Country — in the Four Corners States of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado — can make us shout out in excitement but, even more fundamentally, it is a place that slows us down and inspires our contemplation, reflection, and wonderment.

How do the plants in this rocky, arid landscape make it? How long did it take to make that hole, that arch, across the way? All the other impossible red rock formations, how were they made? Out on the tip of a mesa, how far am I seeing? 80 miles? A hundred? More? Down in the red rock side canyons I find inspiring villages, granaries, kivas, and petroglyphs and pictographs left by the Old People — the Ancestral Puebloans. Those societies were there for thousands of years. How could they have made it for so long in this unforgiving setting?

photograph © Stephen Trimble / www.stephentrimble.net

While more needs to be done, large expanses of the Canyon Country land have been protected. The Canyon Country holds world-renowned national parks, among them Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Monument Valley, Zion, and the Grand Canyon itself — all federal public land, open to all. This is the largest concentration of parks and monuments in the world, mostly a result of the Antiquities Act of 1906, when Congress granted presidents the unilateral right to create national monuments by a stroke of a pen.

The Antiquities Act quickly took root in the Canyon Country. In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt came to the Grand Canyon and declared that 800,000 acres would become the Grand Canyon National Monument. “Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now,” the president exhorted from the South Rim, “You cannot improve on it.” Ever since, the Antiquities Act has remained a foundation stone of American conservation policy.

After World War II, interest in the Canyon Country accelerated. Congress made Canyonlands a national park in 1964. Capitol Reef and Arches, both originally created as national monuments, became national parks in 1971. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area was established in 1972. Several smaller units were named. Disagreements over these measures were mild.

Then Utah political leaders blasted apart the tradition of good civil discourse and made the topic of conservation ugly, toxic. The cause for this? Just a mild initiative in the 1976 Bureau of Land Management Organic Act calling for a study of BLM roadless areas for wilderness study. No wilderness was created. It was just a study.

Southern Utah frothed at the mouth when the study areas were announced in the summer of 1979. In Moab, for example, on July 4th the city fathers fired up bulldozers, draped them with American flags, and bulldozed the barriers at the heads of Negro Bill Canyon and Mill Creek Canyon. They charged on, gashing “roads” deep into the pristine canyons. Illegal conduct and abuse of the land became accepted conduct. No matter how glorious the land in question, “wilderness,” “conservation” and “environmentalism” were fighting words.

The anger and resistance burns today. To be sure, it has leavened somewhat in southern Utah, and broadly so in the state at large, as long-time residents see the benefits of protected lands. New arrivals came for the call of the land and acknowledge that the economy is built on recreation. Hardly a hammer hits a nail in southern Utah for any other economic reason.

Still, for complex reasons of history, habit, and hard-headedness, official Utah — the congressional delegation, the governors, most of the state legislature, and county commissioners — remain bound to the old clenched-fist conviction that all conservation is wrong and that unfettered mining and ranching is right.

So the real imperatives of the present and future have gathered maturity and authority. The conservation community has expanded and deepened. The tribes, kept down for so long, have built an historic revival nationally, west-wide, and in Utah. Three generations ago, they were hanging on, groups with little authority in the outside world. Today, they embody Chief Justice John Marshall’s accurate acknowledgment of them as sovereign nations. They are full-service governments with hundreds of employees or more and charged by a burning determination to be rare societies resting on pillars of both authentic traditionalism and modernism. The millennial-old respect and knowledge of, and union with, the land is undeniable. “We aren’t,” their tribal leaders make clear, “going anywhere.”

All of this plays out at Bears Ears, a distinctive formation of twin buttes rising high above the piñon-juniper forests of Cedar Mesa. If you know Cedar Mesa, you feel the many curvy canyons cutting down each side, red rock canyons so wild and exquisite, and so rich with the work of the Old People, that they leave you with no adequate words. Numerous tribes are deeply connected to this landscape. For them, it is a place for healing.

In 2010, Utah Dine Bikeyah, a nonprofit organization of Navajos, Utes, and other tribes, began documenting the facts necessary to get the greater Bears Ears area protected. They built an extraordinary historical record of the land that the military had force-marched them off in the mid-1800s. They put together oral histories, cultural maps, and multi-layer analyses of sacred sites, archaeological locations of the Old People, gathering areas, wildlife habitats, mineral deposits, creeks, and springs. That led them to identifying boundaries, encompassing 1.9 million acres of federal public land, and a strategy for protecting it — a national monument under the Antiquities Act.

The chances of success received a dramatic boost in 2014, when word came out of Washington DC that President Obama wanted to use this great statute in a way no president had ever done — to honor diversity, that is, the work of minorities, of dispossessed peoples.

From then on, events moved quickly and on July 15, 2015 the pieces fell into place at a memorable meeting in Towaoc, Colorado, the governmental seat of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe. This was a large gathering of tribal governmental leaders, medicine men, tribal professionals, and other Indian people committed to the culture and the land.

A central question involved leadership. Utah Dine Bikeyah had always recognized that, as a nonprofit, they could not carry out the project to protect Bears Ears alone. The sovereign tribal nations had to do that. It was agreed that the five tribes with the deepest connections to Bears Ears — the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni — would lead the effort to obtain a presidential proclamation under the Antiquities Act. By consensus, the group formally established the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. The other tribes of the Southwest soon announced support of the Coalition, as did the National Congress of American Indians.

At the meeting, the tribes also resolved to present President Obama with a comprehensive proposal for a Bears Ears National Monument in just three months, no later than October 15, 2015. They knew that time was short. President Obama would be leaving office in January 2017.

photograph © Stephen Trimble / www.stephentrimble.net

For my part, although I had been working on Native American and federal public land issues for 45 years, this was my first meeting on Bears Ears. Yet the authenticity, passion, and rightness of it hit me in a way that few projects ever have. Late in the meeting, I found myself, unasked, promising to commit as many hours of my services as an unpaid volunteer as would be necessary. Even as I spoke, because I could see how much work lay ahead, I wondered if it would prove to be too much of a commitment. It has not. Leaving aside my family, I’ve never made a better decision.

With the Coalition a welcomed and vibrant force from the beginning, and with people with diverse talents rushing in on a volunteer basis, things moved quickly. The Coalition filed its comprehensive proposal with President Obama, as they had promised, on October 15, 2015.

The historic nature of the proposal is unprecedented. Until now, requests for presidential action under the Antiquities Act have always come from the conservation community. The Bears Ears proposal is the first submitted by Indian tribes. The conservation community broadly supports the Coalition’s proposal.

The Bears Ears proposal, if put into place, would mark the first time that tribes have worked with federal officials to operate a public lands unit under tribal-federal collaborative management. Unquestionably, modern Indian tribes have the capacity to take on the task. Tribal leaders are confident to a certainty that this will lead to more sensitive and holistic protection of the Bears Ears landscape.

The Obama administration, while acknowledging the force of the Coalition proposal, asked the tribes to seek a legislative resolution in Congress before relying on the Antiquities Act. The potential vehicle was the Public Lands Initiative, which two congressmen were developing to resolve Utah conservation issues raging for decades.

The tribes did engage with the PLI effort. Still, the ossified Utah view of public land protection made progress impossible. The PLI was a ruse. Although they never said it, the Utah delegation clearly believed that intensive resource development, especially mining, always trumps land protection. Tribal leaders knew they not being truly listened to or respected. On December 31, 2015, they were forced, as both dreamers and practical people, to withdraw from the PLI and place their hopes with President Obama and the Antiquities Act, where they are optimistic that the best visions of the Old People and the modern-yet-traditional people of today can be realized.

President Obama will leave office on January 20, 2017, so the days are few to make complete a statement that is eternal in that it both reaches farther back into time than we can conceive and will stand for more time into the future than we can imagine.