Federal officials Saturday deal signed With five Aboriginal tribes to co-manage the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, fulfilling a promise made by the Obama administration in 2016.
This landmark move will help protect the vast site in southeastern Utah, home to sacred Aboriginal sites and precious petroglyphs and images, from the kind of environmental damage inflicted during the Trump administration.
bear ears It stretches over 1.3 million miles of red rock canyon, cliff dwellings, and pasture land still actively used for grazing cattle. Many members of local indigenous peoples visit periodically to get in touch with their culture.
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The new arrangement was formalized at a Saturday ceremony attended by the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, and representatives from the Navajo tribe, the Hopi tribe, the Ute Mountain Oti, the Pueblo Zuni and the Oti Indian tribe. A new memorial banner bearing the insignia of tribal nations has been unveiled.
Home Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement that the co-management of Bear Lands represented “what a true tribal co-management should look like: sharing decisions and managing plan with federal investments to complement efforts. This is one step in how we respect our relationships between the nation and the tribes.”
Bears ears have been a source of stress for years. In 2015, the five tribal nations formed the Bears Ears Alliance between the tribes in an effort to exercise control over their ancestral homeland.
Then, in 2016, then-President Barack Obama invoked the Antiquities Act, a 1906 status that allows presidents to designate federal lands as protected monuments based on cultural, historical, or scientific grounds, to establish Bears Ears as a national monument. His pledge to transfer stewardship of the land to the tribes was not formalized before the end of his administration.
The memorial became a flashpoint for protests in 2017 after the Trump administration lowered its limits by about 85% to allow resource extraction – an environmentally shocking process that led the World Monuments Fund to list it as an endangered site.
Last October, President Biden Officially restored the borders of the memorial. Republican lawmakers in Utah are currently trying to overturn Biden’s ruling.
Tracy Stone Manning, Director of the Bureau of Land Management, He said in a statement The partnership between the federal government and a coalition of tribes is an “important step as we move forward together to ensure that tribal expertise and traditional viewpoints remain at the forefront of our shared decision-making for Bears National Monument.”
“This kind of true co-management will serve as a model for our work to honor the nation’s relationship in the future,” she added.
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