“They took the land from the people,” President Donald Trump said Monday as he signed proclamations shrinking Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. “We’re giving it back.”
No. He isn’t giving anything back.
He is reopening roughly 3 million acres to mining claims, mineral leasing and disposal. Americans were never locked out – hunting, fishing, camping and off-road riding were already permitted. Grazing continued, existing mining claims stood; only new mining and drilling was barred. What changes is not who can visit these taxpayer-funded and operated public lands, but who gets to carve them up.
This is a presidency that mistakes demolition for leadership. The East Wing knocked down for a ballroom. The Rose Garden paved over. The Reflecting Pool “fixed” into a multimillion-dollar mess of peeling paint and algae. Those wrecks we can all see. The one in Utah’s canyon country is far more consequential.
Bears Ears shrinks from 1.36 million acres to about 121,000; Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.87 million to roughly 181,500 – cuts of 91% and 90%. But the acreage is only the second-worst part.
Bears Ears was the first national monument created at the request of a coalition of sovereign Tribal Nations – the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and Pueblo of Zuni – protecting nearly 100,000 archaeological and cultural sites. This didn’t happen somewhere else. It happened next door.
“The Bears Ears region is our homeland,” said Gwen Cantsee, vice chairwoman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, our neighbors, on Tuesday. “The Ute Mountain Ute people were forcefully removed from these lands, but our connection to this sacred place cannot be erased.”
For more than a century, federal Indian policy followed a familiar pattern: remove Tribes from their homelands, break treaties, suppress Native religions, then make decisions about Native lands without Native people. Bears Ears was a rare departure. Rather than consulting Tribes after the fact, it recognized them as partners in caring for a landscape their ancestors have stewarded for millennia.
That is what Trump destroyed. His proclamation abolished the Bears Ears Commission, the government-to-government body through which the five Tribal Nations shared stewardship of their ancestral homeland – this after Trump’s own Interior Department last year promised, in writing, to consult the Commission before any changes. What remains is a Federal Advisory Committee Act board – recommendations federal officials are free to ignore. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox appoints six of its members, alongside local governments and the five Tribal representatives. The Tribes become advisers rather than partners in the lands they fought to protect. Their authority has been stripped.
A political class that spent years condemning Bears Ears as federal overreach just imposed its own solution from Washington, sweeping aside local collaboration among Tribes, counties, ranchers and recreationists because it didn’t like the outcome.
For what? Headwaters Economics finds monument designation didn’t harm jobs or growth; recreation flourished while mining stayed a sliver of the regional economy. La Plata County Commissioner Marsha Porter-Norton calls monuments and public lands “integral to our way of life” in the Four Corners. What arrives instead is uncertainty for the outfitters and gateway businesses that built livelihoods on protected land.
This is more than a fight over public lands. It is a politics of destruction: dismantling institutions, agreements and partnerships simply because someone else built them.
Rep. Jeff Hurd deserves credit for backing the Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection Act, born of years of collaboration among counties, ranchers, recreationists, conservationists and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. If collaboration is worth defending in the Gunnison Basin, it is worth defending at Bears Ears. Hurd should say so publicly and call on the White House to reverse course.
As former House Speaker Sam Rayburn observed, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
Bears Ears wasn’t built by one president. It took decades of organizing by Tribal Nations, years of negotiation, thousands of public comments and a rare federal willingness to share authority instead of hoarding it. Trump and Utah’s political allies wrecked much of that in an afternoon.
