When President Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument in December 2016, protection for the region was long overdue. Monument protection for southeast Utah had been considered since the 1930s, but it took the coordination, persistence, and sovereign status of five Native nations for the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to ultimately gain protections for 1.35 million acres of their ancestral homelands.
Less than a year later, President Trump ignored overwhelming public support for Bears Ears and slashed the monument by 85 percent. We’re challenging his reductions in court and are committed to restoring Bears Ears National Monument’s original boundaries.
The Bureau of Land Management has been instructed to forge ahead and create new plans detailing the management of our shrunken monuments. The agency’s draft management plans prioritize off-road vehicle use, cattle grazing, and logging over the protection of cultural and historical resources, wildlife habitat, fossils, and wild lands.
Learn more about the BLM's plans for Bears Ears ›
The original Bears Ears National Monument encompassed some of our country’s finest cultural resources, spanning 12,000 years of human history, as well as fragile historic sites and yet-to-be studied fossil sites. Now fragmented into two units, the shrunken boundaries leave more than a million acres of previously protected land vulnerable to mining, drilling, and irresponsible off-road vehicle use.
What were the real motivations behind shrinking Bears Ears? Mining. Government documents show that oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium deposits were central to the president’s boundary revisions.
The Daneros uranium mine lies three miles from the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument. Its owners are looking to expand the mine to more than 10 times its current size, increase uranium ore production by 400 percent, and extend the life of the mine by 13 years. We’re challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to allow this expansion of the Daneros uranium mine without conducting an in-depth environmental review. More on the case ›
We’re helping to responsibly connect people from all walks of life to this remarkable place. Through facilitating and guiding field tours for journalists, students, and cultural leaders, we’re helping people better understand our shared history at Bears Ears. We’re also producing a book of photographs and essays about Bears Ears to help empower new advocates for restoring protections.
Springs support pockets of life here in the arid Southwest. In Bears Ears, they provide water for plants, animals, and people, and they are central to native cultures on the Colorado Plateau.
Bears Ears is a landscape of stories — they’re etched in stone, sculpted in pottery, and cemented in cliff dwellings. They also live in the hearts of modern indigenous people whose cultural connections have spanned across the region for millennia. We have a lot to learn. It’s time to listen.
In 2015, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition set aside their many differences and united to petition the Obama administration to protect public lands in southeastern Utah as Bears Ears National Monument. Led by the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni nations, and supported by more than 250 tribes across America, the coalition’s successful proposal marks the first Native-driven national monument campaign in history and acknowledges that tribes — and all Americans — have a shared responsibility to preserve this world treasure.
Bears Ears is a different kind of national monument — where Native American traditional knowledge is a value to be protected and a resource to be used in day-to-day land management. President Obama’s proclamation laid out a framework for an intertribal commission to inform how federal agencies manage the monument by incorporating Native American traditional knowledge and Western science. It's the strongest example of federal and intertribal collaborative management in American law. Read more about the historic designation ›
Poll after poll shows that Americans love national monuments. During Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s monument review in 2017, more than 2.8 million people wrote comments in defense of Bears Ears. A sampling of all comments received through the government’s portal found that 98.2 percent of people “expressed support for national monument designations, while less than 2 percent expressed opposition to monument designations.” Bears Ears is so loved because it's a place where everyone has a story to tell. Take a look at one of them ›
Cedar Mesa, Comb Ridge, and the Abajo Mountains offer truly unparalled opportunities to hike into rugged canyons, see archaeological sites, and enjoy solitude. See for yourself why Bears Ears deserves protection ›
by Tim Peterson, Cultural Landscapes Program DirectorThe week of March 11, 2019, was “Sunshine Week,” an initiative of the American Society of News Editors to educate the public about the dangers...
Read More
A new interior secretary, elections in San Juan County, and new bills in Congress all stand to impact Utah's national monuments.
Read More
Two years after designation, we're in court, working to restore the original boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument.
Read More
