Written by: Kayla Bailey


 http://ogp-cdn.aws.onegreenplanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/2017/05/bear-ears.jpg



        In the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt stood at the Grand Canyon proclaiming some of the most memorial words spoken by a president, “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.” These words helped to instill the value of the insurmountable importance of respecting and taking care of nature and our environment, distinguishing this between utilizing the land for its resources and simply reveling in its beauty and ability to provide without exploitation. In tandem with his speech, The Antiquities Act passed during his legislation provided a president the ability to declare huge sums of land as national monuments and he used this power to establish parks such as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. His sentiment in many ways is anomalous to other Western perspectives that would much quicker find ways to capitalize on natural land, but for Native Americans, who have long found sacredness in the natural world around them, these words could be thought to much closer reverberate with them. Moving forward to modern times, at the tail end of the Obama Administration, President Barrack Obama hastily bypassed congress to make Bears Ears a national monument, a feat that would not have been accomplished without the fervent advocacy and detailed collaboration between five Utah tribes, the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Zuni, and the Ute Mountain Ute.
            To give President Obama sole credit for creating the Bears Ears National Monument, would be doing a huge injustice to the extensive work and research executed by the Navajo tribe and other Utah tribes. Beginning with the cultural mapping of the Bears Ears Area, Dine Bikeyah, a Navajo group, identified and collected data on more than 100,000 significant Native American sites. After laying the initial framework of their findings and goal, the Navajo group reached out to the other tribes who are prominent stakeholders of the site. However forming the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition was not without some turbulence given that many of the tribes involved had previous disputes with one another regarding water rights, resource litigation, etc Gessner 3). When the coalition was formed, an establishment was made that any outside politics unrelated to preserving the land were to remain outside meeting discussions to help direct focus to the exclusive and determined goal of maintaining access to the land and to keep the mining and the roads out (Gessner 3). With the Trumps administration’s lack of sensitivities for issues surrounding and pertinent to Native American concerns, such as the disheartening outcome of the Dakota Access Pipe, numerous tribes in various parts of the country are fearful for previous historical injustices to be repeated. In the case of Black Ears National Monument, the indigenous people involved in the preservation of the land and all the advocacy and planning they worked so tireless on was severely undercut when the Trump administration reduced the original size of Bears Ears National Monument to just fifteen percent of what it once was. The establishment of this reduction received major backlash however, and not just from people involved with the tribes, but also from county’s leadership, which is in part due to redistricting which has seen Utah’s first majority Navajo county commission. Additionally, supporters of Bears Ears National monument came from the general population of Utah who expressed overwhelming disapproval for the reduction of the monument.
            To rob multiple groups of people of their sacred and deeply significant land reveals the gross negligence for cultural relativity and perspective on the part of our government and the corporations working to commodify the land. In the case of Bears Ears, numerous tribes in the vicinity of this grandeurs land structure have for generations associated it with their various creation stories. For the Utes, Sinawav, the Creator snapped his fingers and created light, followed by various animals designated by specific traits, and finally humans to which the Ute were given the Rocky, Unita, and Wasatch mountains. For the Navajo, First Man and First Woman, formed from clouds inhabit a dark “first world” until they are led by coyote to the “second world” and finally taken to the “third world” which is where the Navajo reside now. Although each origin story is distinct in its own right, these narratives combine to form the foundations of their religions and remains an active site for rituals among tribe’s people. In the wake of the Notre Dame in France, a historic and sacred site for the Christian religion, Western society has seemed to find a common and deep-rooted disturbance in its fiery demise. Even going so far as to rally almost one billion dollars in less than a week of recovery and conservation donations among the wealthy elite including donations contributed by the United States government. Although a tragic loss of early European history, this same deep-rooted disturbance is felt by Native Americans almost relentlessly for their own culture and history when sites like Bears Ears are continuously disregarded for their significance and demolished.






Sources
Gass, Henry. “Native Americans Press to Keep Bears Ears Land a National Monument.” The Christian Century, no. 12, 2017, p. 17. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsgsr&AN=edsgcl.497796972&site=eds-live.

“Land Grab: Trump’s Campaign Against Bears Ears National Monument.” Sierra, July 2018, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=131995567&site=eds-live

Mims, Bob. “A spiritual reason Utah tribes want to protect Bears Ears: It’s their Eden and plays into their stories of the creation.” Salt Lake Tribune, April 2018. Date accessed 15 April. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2018/04/17/a-spiritual-reason-utah-tribes-want-to-protect-bears-ears-its-their-eden-and-plays-into-their-stories-of-the-creation/

 Worby, Rebecca. “Bears Ears Now Has The Support of its Home County’s Leadership.” Pacific Standard, Feb 2019. Date accessed 14 April 2019. https://psmag.com/news/bears-ears-now-has-the-support-of-its-home-countys-leadership

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