In American Archaeology (fall 2016, first few paragraphs online) Julian Smith writes about the Bears Ears Controversy in an eponymous article, covering in detail a proposal for President Obama to declare part of southeastern Utah a National Monument:
San Juan County covers almost 8,000 square miles of Utah’s southeast corner. It is the largest and the poorest county in the state, and about half of its 15,000 residents are Navajo and Ute Indians. People have occupied its striking landscape of mountains, mesas, and river canyons for thousands of years. The Bears Ears region may have more archaeological sites than any other county in the United States, but many have not been documented and are effectively unprotected. A proposal to set aside a large part of the county as a national monument has set off a lively debate over how the federal government should go about protecting cultural resources on public lands in the West.
Utah’s quarter of the Four Corners region, where it joins Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, centers on a distinctive pair of 9,000-foot buttes called the Bears Ears. Visible for miles, they overlook Natural Bridges National Monument and Cedar Mesa, a broad plateau sliced by sandstone canyons and bounded by the Colorado and San Juan rivers.
Since this is an archaeology magazine, the bulk of the article covers what has been found and may still be found in the area, the enormous damage caused by looters and general recreation activities, as well as the campaign itself. There are several players here, starting with the archaeologists, whose value system is built around the knowledge they hope to extract from the artifacts left behind by ancient peoples. That’s their motivation.
Then there are the Indian Nations, who are also advocating for National Monument status. The Protect Bears Ears Coalition, consisting of the Ute, Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo Nation, collects and dispenses information, from Indian to archaeological to “outdoor industry” support of the National Monument drive.
The UTL’s resolution is the most recent demonstration of overwhelmingly unified support for Bears Ears National Monument among sovereign tribal nations, grassroots Native Americans, and Utah citizens. The UTL resolution joins independent declarations of support from 25 Tribes throughout the Four Corners states and a joint resolution from the National Congress of American Indians with membership of nearly 300 Tribes. The Utah Tribal Leaders association has now formally joined the call for President Barack Obama to exercise his power under the 1906 Antiquities Act to protect Bears Ears National Monument.
As the traditional lands containing artifacts and religious significance, their motivation should be clear. The Grand Canyon Trust’s Advocate Magazine covers it from the inside:
Malcolm Lehi remembers the stories his father told him about the Bears Ears Buttes and the deep cultural ties of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe to the mountainous knolls, canyons, forests, water and wildlife of the Manti-La Sal National Forest and surrounding public lands.
It’s where Lehi, a lawmaker and member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council, harvests chokecherries,knowledge passed down by his father, who taught Lehi where to find them. It’s mid-July and the berries are about the size of a quarter.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is also behind the national monument.
On the other side? Legislators and others who don’t like the idea of the Federal government sucking up more land. The Salt Lake Tribune covers the opposition, which started with an alternative named the Public Lands Initiative:
The Public Lands Initiative (PLI), sponsored by [Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah] and Rep. Rob Bishop, who heads the Natural Resources Committee, would preserve 4.6 million acres of federal land as conservation areas, open more than 1.1 million acres for recreation and mineral development, consolidate more than 300,000 acres of state lands and expand Arches National Park by nearly 20,000 acres.
The proposal, which has earned a strong rebuke from environmental groups and opposition from federal agencies, is aimed at stopping President Barack Obama from using his unilateral power to name a national monument to protect some 1.8 million acres of federal land as some tribal leaders and conservationists have requested.
The Democrats’ objection?
Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., and the top Democrat on the committee, praised the concept of the PLI, bringing groups together to negotiate public land policy, but said the resulting legislation “tilts the scale dramatically” in favor of development and motorized-vehicle access.
So the nominal objections stem from restrictions on private sector activities, although not all of the private sector is against the national monument.
This is not a polite dispute. Quoting from the print-only portion of Julian’s article (so any typos are mine, not Julian’s),
Utah Diné Bikéyah has collected over 1,100 postcards from Native Americans who live nearby advocating for the proposal; this despite someone having distributed flyers with misleading information at gas stations and post offices. One was a fake letter from Sally Jewell, the Secretary of the Interior, saying that four million acres of the Navajo reservation will revert to the federal government if the monument is created. Another flyer stated that Jewell and President Obama would attend a party in July celebrating the national monument designation, but Utah Navajos were not invited.
Sneaky and underhanded. Then there’s a different approach that Julian notes without comment:
There haven’t been any local polls, but opinions are definitely mixed among San Juan County residents, says Phil Lyman, the chairman of the San Juan County Commission and an outspoken critic of the proposal. The national monument is one of the most divisive issues to hit the community in a long time, he says. “I don’t want to see the these decisions made in Washington D.C. It’s treating people like subjects, not citizens. If you’re worried about human impacts, why would you designate it a national monument?”
This is upsetting in two ways. First, Mr. Lyman speaking only for the non-Indians in the county, since the Indians are clearly negatively impacted every time their cultural heritage is destroyed by looters or other activities.
Second, his use of the term ‘subjects’ is a code word designed to rouse the reflexively anti-government elements. It’s not a form of honest rhetoric, it’s a way to call on a group who is unwilling to evaluate a proposal on its own merits, instead simply saying No! because it has the federal government attached to it. It demonizes all the federal government’s proposals, and any groups associated with them as well – and the Indians do not need any more demonization at this juncture. Finally, it can lead to violence from the fringe elements, which should – but won’t – be placed at Mr. Lyman’s feet if it occurs.
So to my eyes, the opposition motivations may putatively be commercial, but underneath is an anti-government, anti-Indian stream.
The Sierra Club has a petition drive going.
