The Trump administration has once again gutted Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah by stripping away roughly 90% of its acreage and dissolving the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Commission, the governance body that made tribally led management possible in the first place. What is at stake here goes well beyond one monument. If this proclamation is allowed to stand, it not only opens the door to unraveling protections for any national monument in the country, it also threatens centuries of tradition and land management by the tribal peoples who have cared for these lands since time immemorial.
The original 2016 Bears Ears proclamation was the first ever to include Native languages. It reads like a love letter to this land. In contrast, the Trump administration’s recent proclamation seeks to diminish the land’s significance by describing it as unremarkable — a landscape that is so common across the Southwest that it isn’t worth protecting — and it dismisses land protection as merely theft. It’s just more of the same from this administration — fear, gaslighting and disrespect for tradition dressed up as policy. The Antiquities Act of 1906 specifically called out this land as worthy of protection because of its deep history, its archaeology and cultural significance.
We reject the 2026 proclamation, plainly and categorically. We reject it for Bears Ears, and we reject it for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, also a target of the Trump administration — a landscape to which many of our own people and neighboring tribal nations also hold deep connection. No sitting president has the right to disregard the voices, leadership and land-management practices of tribal sovereign nations, including the ones that comprise the Bears Ears Commission, or to sideline the meaningful consultation owed to the tribes who are inextricably tied to these ancestral lands. The United States itself is barely 250 years old; it pales in comparison to the Indigenous presence on this land, which stretches back thousands of years.
This urgency is not abstract. Mining claims have already been filed inside the boundaries of what should still be protected monument land. This administration has made aggressive attempts to forcibly open these lands to industrial development. Every month this order stands brings us a month closer to seeing drill rigs and bulldozers reach places that took generations of care to keep whole. This is not a policy disagreement we can afford to simply wait out. Once the land is disturbed, it can never revert to what it once was.
No sitting president has the right to disregard the voices, leadership and land-management practices of tribal sovereign nations.
What troubles us most about what is happening now is not only the loss of protection for the monument’s unique attributes — its petroglyphs and ancient ancestral sites, etc. — though that loss alone is staggering. It’s also the strategy that monument opponents are using: the fearmongering and the false suggestion that protecting this land means that someone else has to lose something. Uncertainty is deliberately being sewn into the vision of land management that tribes spent a decade building in good faith with the Bureau of Land Management.
Native people will continue to speak up and hold the federal government accountable. We are watching, and we see what is being done to these lands. We do not stand alone — we are part of a strong coalition of groups representing millions of Americans who join us in demanding that these lands remain protected.
This fight is no longer just words on a page: Tribal nations and conservation partners have recently filed litigation challenging President Trump’s proclamations. We are defending Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante the same way we would defend any living, sacred place: by refusing to let it be taken without a fight.
Our legal position is straightforward: Congress, through the Antiquities Act, gives presidents the power to create national monuments, not the power to erase them, and we intend to make that case in court for as long as it takes. We demand the return of Bears Ears National Monument, fully intact, and we will keep doing the hard work the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and the Bears Ears Commission have already begun.
But litigation alone won’t save this place. It will take all Americans to speak out and fight against this administration’s theft of these beloved lands. We can’t let Bears Ears or any of the lands we love disappear quietly, now or ever.
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