KM prompts support for Bears Ears
For those of you whom are unfamiliar with Bears Ears National Monument, please allow us the opportunity now to tell you a bit about it because ultimately we find ourselves urgently having to call upon YOU to help us all attempt to protect and preserve it.
So, Bears Ears is a United States National Monument located in San Juan County in southeastern Utah, established by President Barack Obama by presidential proclamation on December 28, 2016.The monument is named Bears Ears for a pair of Wingate Sandstone buttes that rise to an elevation of 8,700 feet, more than 2,000 feet above the surrounding Colorado Plateau. The monument protects 1,351,849 acres of public land surrounding the Bears Ears, a pair of mesas. The monument includes the Valley of the Gods, Indian Creek Canyon, the western part of the Manti-La Sal National Forest's Monticello unit, and the Dark Canyon Wilderness. The area within the monument is largely undeveloped and contains a wide array of historic, cultural and natural resources.
The monument borders Canyonlands National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and surrounds Natural Bridges National Monument. The area is approximately 75 minutes south of Moab, an hour northwest of Four Corners Monument and roughly 30 minutes north of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. The western border of Bears Ears, near the Hite Crossing of the Colorado River, is less than an hour south of Hanksville, or 90 minutes from Capitol Reef National Park west of the towns of Blanding, Monticello and Bluff and north of Mexican Hat in southeastern Utah. Proclamation 9558 was declared by then president Barack Obama exercising his authority under section 320301 of title 54, United States Code (the "Antiquities Act"), officially established Bears Ears a National Monument in the State of Utah
Proclamation 9558 identifies a long list of objects of historic or scientific interest. It describes cultural resources such as ancient cliff dwellings (including the Moon House and Doll House Ruins), Moki Steps, Native American ceremonial sites, tools and projectile points, remains of single-family dwellings, granaries, kivas, towers, large villages, rock shelters, caves, and a prehistoric road system, as well as petroglyphs, pictographs, and recent rock art left by the Ute, Navajo, and Paiute peoples. It also identifies other types of historic objects, such as remnants of Native American sheep-herding and farming operations and early engineering by pioneers and settlers, including smoothed sections of rock, dugways, historic cabins, corrals, trails, and inscriptions carved into rock, and the Hole-in-the-Rock and Outlaw Trails. It also describes landscape features such as the Bears Ears, Comb Ridge, Cedar Mesa, the Valley of the Gods, the Abajo Mountains, and the San Juan River, and paleontological resources such as the fossil remains of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, as well as dinosaur trackways and traces of other terrestrial animals. Finally, it identifies several species, including animals like the porcupine, badger, and coyote; birds like the red-tailed hawk, Mexican spotted owl, American kestrel, and turkey vulture; and plants such as the Fremont cottonwood, Abajo daisy, western sandbar willow, and boxelder.
Native American people have long-standing ties to the Bears Ears cultural landscape.Bountiful rock paintings and petroglyphs decorate cliffs and boulders throughout the region and many historic Navajo hogans and sweat lodges, Ute tipi rings, and Navajo and Ute rock art sites are also found in the area. Many Native Americans visit the area on a regular basis for ceremonies and to connect with their ancestors. Many Native people continue to hunt, gather medicinal herbs, and conduct ceremonies in the Bears Ears, as our ancestors have done since time immemorial. Navajo people believe the Bears Ears buttes to be a shrine that protects the Diné (Navajo). Tribal people depend on the Bears Ears region as both their medicine cabinet and their pantry – for food, shelter, and healing, as well as for their spiritual sustenance.
The vast majority of the archaeological and cultural sites in the area have been dated by western archaeologists to at least 700 years old (with some dated as far back as 12,000 B.C.E.), though tribal peoples of the Colorado Plateau trace their connections here back much farther There are more than 100,000 cultural and archaeological sites within Bears Ears . As early as 13,000 years ago, Clovis people, who are considered to be the ancestors of most of the indigenous cultures of the Americas hunted in Cedar Mesa, most of which is now included in the Bears Ears National Monument. Their tools, including the "Clovis points", have been found there. One of the oldest known archaeological sites with Clovis tools in Utah is Lime Ridge Clovis Site proving it!
Protection of all these sacred sites is critically important to Native American people. Ongoing looting, grave robbing, vandalism, and destruction of cultural sites are acts that literally rob Native American people of spiritual connections, as well as a sense of place and history.
The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition represents a historic consortium of sovereign tribal nations - Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni and Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Tribe - united in the effort to conserve the Bears Ears cultural landscape. The five nations are committed to working together with a total of 25 Tribes and Pueblos who have expressed support for protecting the Bear Ears region for future generations of Americans.
The Bureau of Land Management manages 1.06 million acres and the U.S. Forest Service manages 289,000 acres,109,100 acres of land within the boundaries of the monument are owned by the State of Utah, while 12,600 acres are privately owned, meaning that the majority of the land is ultimately declared "Federal land" which as we know all too well means the government feel like they own and control it. So here comes the problem at hand: On June 12, 2017 Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke "proposed significantly scaling back the borders" of Bears Ears, a move unprecedented in the history of U.S. National Monuments. Local farmers and ranchers want a "rollback of the protected areas"; others want to drill for oil. On December 4, 2017, President Donald Trump ordered a major reduction in the monument's boundaries, reducing its size by reducing the size of the monument by about 1.3 million acres (85%) to about 220,000 acres of federally protected land.
The move was by far the largest reduction in the size of a national monuments ever made by a U.S. president and conservationists along with outdoor businesses, angling and hunting groups and TRIBES are Beyond outraged and plan to challenge the legality of this action in federal court! Today 10 groups sued the administration in federal court in Washington D.C. In the suit, they claimed that the reduction of Grand Staircase would leave "remarkable fossil, cultural, scenic, and geologic treasures exposed to immediate and ongoing harm." Obama established a tribal council to oversee and advise the federal government in maintaining the national monument which apparently now is intentionally going unheard by government officials, likely because of Trump's personal issues with Obama say many.Here is a link to the official statement regarding Bears Ears directly from Trump and as the voice of the White House:
"We will not stand by as our ancestral lands are under siege. Our cultures were born upon these lands, our sacred migrations occurred here, and the vitality of our cultures depends on Bears Ears and other places like it where we still return to pray, to gather food and medicine, to perform ceremonies, and to connect our children with our ancestors."
"troves" of unique dinosaur fossils have been discovered according to the paperwork filed, Those areas "will now be open to harmful developments such as coal mining, new roads, off-highway vehicle abuse, and oil and gas drilling," the documents say. "These types of developments will scar the lands, compromise vital parts of the paleontological record, ruin their wild, natural character, and destroy the resources the Monument was created to protect."
Since its creation, nearly every president, including Democrats and Republicans, has used the Antiquities Act to protect new sites of historical interest or natural splendor. The Grand Canyon was famously first protected under the Antiquities Act, as were the Muir Woods, the Petrified Forest, and all of Utah’s “Mighty Five” national parks. President Trump will discover that the act itself works as a kind of one-way chute, allowing him to set land aside for conservation but not to sweep it back in again. In other words, presidents can unilaterally make national monuments, but they can’t unilaterally unmake them.
A statewide public awareness campaign called “Respect and Protect” has been initiated in solidarity with this situation and we as KM highly encourage you to support and echoe it as well because by-gawd we Need to engage the public in the stewardship of our nation’s priceless cultural and natural heritage NOW!
As always, we Thank you for your support, contribution and interest in what we're out here trying to ensure you're aware of. Blessings to all, may we go in good way.
