Progress on Bears Ears National Monument

Important news was announced this week that will build on the future of Bears Ears National Monument.  The BLM and Forest Service have signed an Inter-Governmental Cooperative Agreement with the five Tribes of the Bears Ears Commission to establish a cooperative arrangement to manage the monument.  It is the first time the government has established a formal process for working with Native American Tribes to manage public lands.

Established in 2016 by Presidential Proclamation from President Barack Obama, the monument was the result of lobbying by Native American Tribes and the environmental community as a way to protect a threatened region of important cultural heritage and paleontological resources.  A year later, Donald Trump unilaterally downsized it by 85 percent even without legal authority to do so.  President Joe Biden restored the full extent of the monument (including acreage not included in the original proclamation but added by Trump) in 2021.

Carleton Bowekaty, Lieutenant Governor of Zuni Pueblo, stated, "Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them.  Mark Maryboy of the Utah Dine Bikeyah greeted representatives of the five Tribes as they came together in Bears Ears with a simple message: "Welcome home."

You can read more about this historic agreement here.

Alternative Theory of Pictograph Panels

I received an interesting email today from Wayne Raymond, one of the people who reviewed an early draft of my manuscript for The Slickrock Desert.  Wayne provided excellent feedback that helped make it a better book.  He was particularly interested in my stories about pictographs and petroglyphs, including a photo I had taken of a series of figures of what are known as the Barrier Canyon style of pictographs on a wall in Sego Canyon.

   In my book, I had referred to Polly Schaafsma, an expert on these figures who believes them to be as much as three thousand years old.  I had mentioned that while the meaning of these pictographs is subject to debate, archaeologists generally think the figures with large heads and empty eye sockets may represent the dead, and that they have no arms or legs because they are wrapped in funeral blankets. 

   Wayne sent me a link to a Twitter thread here whose author refers to that same pictograph panel and offers a different explanation.  He believes the figures with the horns draw from bighorn sheep, who are most sexually active during the summer monsoon season, with males banging their heads against each other to prove their prowess.  This is also the time when adequate rainfall is critical to the success of the harvest, and the author believes that the relationship between rutting bighorn sheep and summer rains is woven into the figure's headdress.  He goes on to show how the elongated shapes could represent downpours called microbursts common during the summer monsoons.  The figures would then represent not death but the hope for a bountiful harvest.  It's an interesting theory well worth considering, although it would seem to be a bit of a stretch.  But who knows, it could be accurate.  In any event, here's my photo of the pictographs in question.