Legal scholars have argued that the reduction is not authorized by law; several federal lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s action. Our people teach us not to think you can own air, water and land – that we serve these resources. We do our best to help from overharvesting, we have our own unwritten management plans that are embedded in principles and embedded in the stories — embedded in our culture, our ceremonies and our dances.
“We’ve got the documents ready to file,” says University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson, who serves as advisor to the coalition of five Indian nations that petitioned for the creation of the Bears Ears monument. Conservation groups have also prepared to file suit to protect Grand Staircase Escalante, and it is likely that the monuments’ fate will be tied up in court for many months to come. This protest at the state capitol in Salt Lake City, Utah, was held on Saturday, December 2nd. It was organized by 15 organizations and led by representatives from the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of five Native American tribes that lobbied for the creation of the Bears Ears monument. A sunrise flight over Valley of the Gods in Bear’s Ears National Monument, Utah, provides a look at the landscape. “Others have tried to silence me and tell me the monument is respecting the sacred. There is nothing sacred about putting a big X on the map for millions of people to visit and intentionally or unintentionally vandalize sacred sites,” Morris said.
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And that does not outline whether that’s a decision maker, an elected leader or just Joe Schmo off the streets. That demonstrates the lack of seriousness that I often spoke to when I was an elected leader, because we want to be taken as any other elected official in the world, because we are sovereign voices for our tribes, our groups, our nations. But we are taken very lightly because of the whole theoretical world of consultation. The Trump administration issued a proclamation Dec. 4, 2017, cutting the size of the federally protected land down to 201,876 acres. The concern is that the Trump administration’s plan would open the land up to development.
At the far southern end of the Bears Ears landscape lies Valley of the Gods, a broad expanse of sandstone monoliths, pinnacles, and other geological features of historic and scientific interest. Towering spires of red sandstone that rise from the valley floor are held sacred by the Navajo people, who view the formations as ancient warriors frozen in stone and places of power in which spirits reside. The austere valley, which is noteworthy in both its geology and ecology, provides habitat for Eucosma navajoensis, an endemic moth that lives nowhere else. The Mars-like landscape also contains evidence of our own planet’s distant past, including early tetrapod trackways, Paleozoic freshwater sharks, ray-finned fishes, lobe-finned fishes, giant primitive amphibians, and multiple unique taxa of mammal-like reptiles. Paleontologists have also uncovered notable plant macrofossils including ancestral conifers, giant horsetail-like plants, ferns the size of trees, and lycopsids .
Features And Management
Not be reallocated for livestock grazing purposes unless the Secretaries specifically find that such reallocation will advance the purposes of this proclamation and Proclamation 9558. Document page views are updated periodically throughout the day and are cumulative counts for this document. The documents posted on this site are XML renditions of published Federal Register documents.
More than 300 uranium mining claims are located inside the original monument boundaries, with the large majority of those claims being located outside the reduced boundaries. Energy Fuels, a U.S. uranium producer, operates the only uranium and vanadium mine mill in the U.S. near the monument’s original boundaries via their subsidiary Energy Fuels Resources. Energy Fuels states that they asked the Trump Administration for only minor boundary adjustments that “would have impacted about 2.5 percent of the total land area of the monument” and that they didn’t ask for the 85% reduction. In addition, the company states that it did not hold any claims in the monument and that media reports claiming they held properties in the monument was based on a clerical error. Energy Fuels soon expects to produce rare earth elements, needed for various clean energy and advanced technologies.
The Hopi Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, represented by the Native American Rights Fund filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in 2017 to protect Bears Ears National Monument, a breathtaking land formation in Utah that holds spiritual and cultural significance to tribes in the region. Native nations have spent decades working to protect the twin buttes shaped like the ears of a bear. The USFS shall manage that portion of the monument within the boundaries of the National Forest System , and the BLM shall manage the remainder of the monument. The lands administered by the USFS shall be managed as part of the Manti-La Sal National Forest.
The Trump administration’s move drew condemnation to Native American groups and some companies, such as outdoor outfitter Patagonia. Further west, South Cottonwood Canyon is home to a unique density of Pueblo I to early Pueblo II village sites that are considered important to both archaeologists and Tribal Nations. One site, a collapsed two-story block masonry structure that appears to be an early version of a great house, was built during a time when the development of this kind of community structure was only beginning in Chaco Canyon. More recently, the South Cottonwood Canyon area proved critical to the survival of the White Mesa Ute during Anglo settlement of southern Utah. Paleontologically, there is high potential fossil yield on both the west side of the area, which contains portions of the Triassic Period Chinle and Moenkopi Formations, and the east side, which is composed of Jurassic Period Glen Canyon Group Kayenta Formation.
These peaks represent the highest elevations in the Bears Ears landscape and provide unbroken views of the entire region. He or she may not diminish or revoke existing monuments—only Congress has that ability. It enacted the Antiquities Act to preserve America’s historic and scientific heritage for the benefit of current and future generations. Congress reserved to itself the authority to revoke or modify those monuments, and granted the President only the power to create them.
In late 2017, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition case filed by NARF, Hopi Tribe v. Trump, became one of three cases filed against President Trump and his administration for the illegal dismantling of a national monument. At the end of January 2018, the courts consolidated the three cases dealing with the Bears Ears monument in to one case and the two cases addressing Grand Staircase-Escalante in to a separate case. The judge gave the government until March 16, 2018, to file a response to the original complaints. However, Tom says that during the time it was briefly a memorial, some measures were taken to deny access to sites, although she says it is unclear whether this activity was linked to the federal government. She also pointed out that other national landmarks in Utah do not allow the gathering of firewood. The initial push for the memorial was supported by the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, including representatives from the sovereign governments of the Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, Uintah and Ouray Ute, and the Navajo nations.
The effort culminated in Hatch suggesting the Trump administration go back further and review monument designations dating back all the way to 1996, when Grand Staircase-Escalante was declared a national monument during the Clinton administration. That resulted in then-Secretary Zinke reviewing about 27 monuments in 2017 and recommending that at least six of the monuments reviewed have their boundaries changed in some fashion, including Bears Ears. It also made recommendations for the establishment of three new monuments, including one in Camp Nelson, Kentucky, where Black soldiers trained during the Civil War. Established in December 2016 during the final days of the Obama administration, Bears Ears was a political hot potato since before Donald Trump was elected president.
Restoring the Bears Ears National Monument honors the special relationship between the Federal Government and Tribal Nations, correcting the exclusion of lands and resources profoundly sacred to Tribal Nations, and ensuring the long-term protection of, and respect for, this remarkable and revered region. The cultural and archaeological resources of Bears Ears National Monument, located in modern-day southeast Utah, include thousands of ancient cliff dwellings, community centers, rock art, and artifacts. They are scattered through deep, twisting canyons, in caves, and perched on narrow ledges high on sheer rock faces. Bears Ears remained undisturbed until the mid-nineteenth century when European settlers began to explore the landscape following the forced removal of its Indigenous residents. The state and federal governments have owned and managed sacred ancestral lands of tribes throughout the twentieth century. Describing as much as 13,000 years of human occupation of the Bears Ears landscape, Proclamation 9558 contextualizes the compelling need to protect one of the most extraordinary cultural landscapes in the United States.
The high desert landscape with its pinnacles of rock is surrounded by miles of deep sandstone canyons, mesas, forested highlands, and the Bears Ears National Monument’s namesake twin buttes. At the top of the mesa overlooking the Valley of the Gods, two elders, Mary Benally and Jonah Yellowman, shared stories with our group of the spiritual significance of the ancestral lands and their cultural importance. One elder pointed out the medicinal and edible value of the shrubs and plants that were abundant on the mesa. I learned that this entire area is one of the most photographed places on earth, and also encompasses Monument Valley, which is considered the 8th wonder of the world by some. The back-and-forth over protection for these areas represents just the latest fray over public lands in Utah, and elsewhere in the West, that are viewed either as natural resource-rich and cultural landscapes to be protected or wastelands to be pilfered for what might lie beneath the surface.
One of the early catalysts for securing monument status for Bears Ears was the June 10, 2009, joint raid called Operation Cerberus Action conducted by FBI and U.S. Bureau of Land Management agents—”the nation’s largest investigation of archaeological and cultural artifact thefts”— in Blanding, a small town on Bears Ears eastern boundary. In 1943, western historian and novelist David Lavender (1910–2003) described the area in his book One Man’s West as “a million and a quarter acres of staggering desolation between the San Juan and Colorado rivers, a vast triangle of land that even today is not completely mapped.” In the early 16th century, Native American ancestral lands, now called Four Corners, was claimed by Spain as part of New Spain. They relied heavily on domesticated corn, beans, and squash and a domesticated breed of turkey .
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