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.
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