DOI Emails on Bears Ears Prove Trump Ignored Natives
On December 15, 2016, four members of Utah’s congressional delegation sent a letter to President Barack Obama, who was about to designate Bears Ears National Monument. The legislators—senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, and representatives Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz—told Obama that a monument designation, made under the Antiquities Act, could harm some of their most vulnerable constituents.
“Such a unilateral designation infringes on the rights and the way of life of the Federally Recognized Indian Tribes in the area,” they wrote. “This decision could abruptly and permanently close off a substantial area of land respected and used by generations of local Indian Tribes.”
The letter was part of some 25,000 pages of documents recently made public by the New York Times that related to the Obama administration’s creation of Bears Ears, and President Donald Trump’s downsizing of it last year. The documents suggest that Utah and federal officials were motivated to change the monument boundaries principally to free up potential mineral reserves. Along the way, documents show how these leaders—including that group of four in their December letter—misrepresented or ignored the Native American voices that sparked the monument’s creation.
“It’s in keeping with the incredibly paternalistic view that the Utah delegation has shown to date,” says Ethel Branch, the Navajo Nation’s attorney general who is suing the Trump administration over downsizing the Bears Ears monument. “It’s just a disregard for tribes as governments.”
Bears Ears was a tribal initiative from the start. In 2011, Navajo activist group Utah Diné Bikéyah called for the area to be protected in some fashion. Five years later, the Bears Ears Commission—made up of representatives from the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute, and Zuni tribes—formally requested a national monument designation from Obama. It was the first monument proposal driven by Native Americans, and Obama’s designation gave the commission an integral role in deciding how to manage the monument.
But the Times documents show that the commission, under the Trump administration, was given no such role. In a letter dated March 17, 2017, the Bears Ears Commission told Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Michael Scuse, then the acting secretary of the Department of Agriculture, that the tribes it represents were ready to fulfill their end of the management agreement. Of Zinke and Trump’s reported interest in shrinking or doing away with Bears Ears, they wrote, “We would consider it essential that we are able to have full discussions with you about those possibilities. Of course, from our standpoint, any such actions would be absolute tragedies.”
https://www.outsideonline.com/2289136/utah-politicians-dont-care-about-natives?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WYM-03192018&utm_content=WYM-03192018+CID_f89501f972689620bd61dd4d38231083&utm_source=campaignmonitor%20outsidemagazine&utm_term=Native%20concerns%20and%20input
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