“As Americans, we need to recognize how much the earth means to all of us. The reality is Bears Ears is for everyone. It is protected to benefit us all regardless of the color of our skin, or who we are. The current administration is not thinking of us as Americans, only of themselves. But how much more will they tear the veins open of our mother earth to extract money? And will they ever be satisfied? These lands are our ancestors, our home, our foods, our medicines, and our places of worship and should be held in trust as a national monument.” - Deena Ute, Executive Director of A’Nuche
“They took the land away from the people, quite honestly,” President Trump said on Monday, July 13, referring to President Obama’s 2016 establishment of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
He uttered that ignorant nonsense right before he virtually eliminated Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by reducing its size from about 1.36 million acres to just 121,096 acres—a massive reduction that leaves only 9% of the monument’s original size intact.
Trump’s shrinkage also involved the reduction in size of nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from roughly 1.87 million acres to approximately 181,500 acres.
This piece, however, is specifically about Bears Ears.
“We’re doing something very dramatic and very important for the people of Utah,” the president said, ignoring—or, rather, probably completely ignorant of—the fact that Utah is home to about 60,000 Native Americans representing more than 50 Tribal Nations.
“We’re terminating certain monuments,” the most anti-conservation president in U.S. history said.
Bears Ears is a unique national monument in the sense that, according to the Grand Canyon Trust, it was “the first time Native American tribes successfully advocated for the protection of their ancestral lands as a national monument.”
It was the result of years of unified advocacy work from five Tribes, who’ve also been actively participating in the monument’s management and care. There is no other national monument like Bears Ears in the United States.
In 2015, leaders of the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.
Although the five Tribes have distinct histories, languages, and governments, they united around a landscape that each regards as their ancestral homeland—a place of historic travel routes, medicines, ceremonies, burials, rock art, cliff dwellings, and villages that remain central to their lives and culture.
Their efforts weren’t limited to simply lobbying the federal government to protect the land itself. They also included the involvement of Tribal nations in the actual management of the land.
President Barack Obama incorporated that idea when he established Bears Ears National Monument in December 2016.
His proclamation created the Bears Ears Commission (BEC), composed of one elected officer from each of the five Tribal nations, to provide federal land managers with guidance and recommendations on monument planning and management.
It was an acknowledgment that the people with the longest relationships to Bears Ears possessed deep knowledge of the land, which could not be replaced by archaeological surveys, visitor-use statistics, or maps drawn in Washington, D.C.
The commission was not given unilateral authority over the federal land, though. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) retained their statutory responsibilities.
But the arrangement offered something historically unique: a formal structure through which Tribal governments could participate collectively and continuously, rather than being consulted only after federal officials had developed a management plan.
That experiment was interrupted almost immediately.
In December 2017—only a year after the national monument was established—President Trump reduced Bears Ears by roughly 85 percent, leaving the Bears Ears Commission with little practical role across most of the landscape that it was meant to help protect. President Joe Biden restored the monument in 2021 and reconstituted the commission, returning Tribal representatives to the center of the planning process.
In June 2022, the BEC, BLM, and USFS signed a cooperative agreement formalizing their partnership. The inter-tribal commission participated in planning meetings, field visits, technical training, document reviews, and public-comment analysis.
Crucially, Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (TIK) was incorporated alongside federal science in discussions of drought, erosion, visitation, cultural-site protection, and ecological restoration.
“The Bears Ears Commission’s mission is to honor, protect, and conserve the Bears Ears landscape through the lens of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and Tribal governance,” explains the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.
The most consequential result was the Bears Ears Resource Management Plan (RMP). The commission developed “Alternative E,” a Tribal-led management alternative that emphasized cultural protection, ecological integrity, and TIK.
Federal agencies selected it as their preferred alternative and incorporated much of it into the final plan completed in January 2025—the culmination of years of work and a national precedent for federal-Tribal collaboration.
It was the first time in U.S. history a national monument resource management plan developed by Native American Tribes was adopted by the federal government.
“This partnership is a powerful demonstration of what can be accomplished when we work together with trust and shared purpose,” said Anthony Sanchez Jr., Head Councilman for the Zuni Tribe and Co-Chair of the Bears Ears Commission, at the time. “The collaborative management partnership sets a new precedent for relationships between Tribal Nations and the federal government, showing how mutual respect and understanding can create lasting solutions for public lands.”
This was echoed by Christopher Tabbee, Vice Chairman of the Ute Indian Tribe Business Committee and Bears Ears Commissioner, who said that the “Resource Management Plan provides an opportunity for all of us to better protect and manage these lands for future generations. Our collaborative work at Bears Ears should be a model for the management of all federal public lands. In a time of increasing drought, wildfires, and other challenges we face, we need to incorporate Tribal knowledge and expertise in federal land management practices.”
With a few jerks of his Sharpie, President Trump dismantled that historic partnership on Monday.
Trump’s July 13 Modifying the Bears Ears National Monument proclamation reduces Bears Ears to approximately 121,096 acres, removing about 1.24 million acres—or 91 percent of the entire national monument.
As Jonathan P. Thompson pointed out in The Land Desk, vast areas of Cedar Mesa, White Canyon, Cottonwood Wash, Valley of the Gods, and Dark Canyon are removed from the original monument. You can see a map of the new monument boundaries here.
In 60 days, those 1.24 million acres of now-unprotected BLM lands will become available for mining claims, mineral and geothermal leasing, infrastructure development, road building, and sale or disposition under applicable public-land laws.
Additionally and importantly, President Trump’s proclamation also eliminated the Bears Ears Commission, which was instrumental in creating the monument’s resource management plan in the first place.
“The BEC is hereby disbanded and terminated, and the Secretaries shall have no obligation to engage, consult, or coordinate with the BEC or a comparable entity,” the proclamation says.
In its place, and unsurprisingly, Trump directs officials toward a much broader multi-interest advisory committee, on which extractive industries will now also be represented.
Although that committee still includes representatives from the five Tribes, it now also—and this is enormously important—includes county and municipal officials, as well as six members handpicked by the Governor of Utah.
Those six members must each represent the following interests: local business owners, conservationists, outdoor recreationists (including, specifically, OHV users), private landowners, archaeologists or historians, and livestock grazing permittees.
While it first glance, it may seem like a good thing that conservationists and historians still have a seat at the table, remember that it’s MAGA Governor Spencer Cox who gets to choose who they are.
“For Diné people, this land shapes our way of life. In Diné communities from Navajo Mountain to Aneth, families continue sacred traditions of prayer, harvest medicine gathering, and ceremony,” said Davina Smith–Idjesa, co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and representative for the Navajo Nation. “Bears Ears (Shash Jaa’) holds our ancestors’ footsteps and our children’s future. This decision dishonors generations of care and weakens the unity we’ve built to safeguard Bears Ears for everyone.”
The new proclamation therefore does much more than shrink boundaries on a map.
It repudiates the central premise on which Bears Ears was founded: that protecting an Indigenous cultural landscape requires significantly more than just preserving scattered ruins and isolated parcels. It requires prioritizing the knowledge of the Tribes whose histories connect those places—and allowing them a meaningful, central role in deciding what happens to them.
“It was ridiculous,” President Trump said, implying that the land was stolen from Utahns by Native Americans. “We’re putting it back, but we’re actually giving more than we did the first time back to the people of Utah.”
For the record: the land does not go to the people or the state of Utah at all. It very much remains owned by the American public and managed by the federal government, albeit without national monument protections.
“As Americans, we need to recognize how much the earth means to all of us. The reality is Bears Ears is for everyone. It is protected to benefit us all regardless of the color of our skin, or who we are. The current administration is not thinking of us as Americans, only of themselves,” said Deena Ute, Executive Director of A’Nuche.
“But how much more will they tear the veins open of our mother earth to extract money? And will they ever be satisfied? These lands are our ancestors, our home, our foods, our medicines, and our places of worship and should be held in trust as a national monument.”
When Deputy Secretary of the Interior Kate MacGregor falsely stated that “President Clinton, President Obama, and President Biden have increased the acreage [of federal land] in the state of Utah and locked those acres up,” the president interjected with the question “For nobody to use, right?”
“You can’t do anything,” Trump, a real estate developer and amateur golfer, claimed. “You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.”
“That’s exactly right, sir,” Deputy Secretary MacGregor said, knowing full well that the monument is open to hunting, fishing, camping, horseback riding, river running, and camping. And yes, walking is allowed there as well.
“You are remedying that today,” MacGregor told Trump, who responded “I remember now. I do remember. I have a great memory.”
Thanks for reading!
See you on our public lands and waters,
Bram
Images: Bears Ears National Monument, credit: Tim Peterson
Enough.
How many times are we going to watch years of conservation work disappear because a new administration takes power?
Bears Ears wasn't just about protecting land. It was about building something remarkable: Tribal nations and federal agencies working together to design the future of a landscape using both Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and science. After years of collaboration, they produced the first Tribal-led national monument resource management plan ever adopted by the federal government. Then, with the stroke of a Sharpie, the commission itself was abolished.
This is exactly why conservation cannot continue depending on Washington to save us.
Yes, fight these decisions in court. Yes, elect leaders who value public lands. But if that's all we do, we'll be right back here after the next election...if there is a next free and fair election!
It's time for the conservation community to organize differently.
We need durable, democratic, regional institutions that cannot simply be erased by executive order—institutions where Tribal nations, communities, landowners, scientists, conservation organizations, businesses, and public agencies work together to design and steward landscapes over generations.
In "Designing Nature's Half", I call these "Ecoregional Cooperatives". They aren't a replacement for government. They're a way for people to build the democratic capacity to lead conservation together, regardless of who occupies the White House.
The lesson of Bears Ears is clear: if our institutions can be dismantled with the stroke of a pen, then we haven't built institutions strong enough.
Stop waiting for Washington.
Start organizing.
Start building the democratic institutions that can protect our landscapes for generations to come.
He is a pliable piece of rotting putty. He may be in charge, but he happily got manipulated into this