Written by: Kayla Bailey
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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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