The US has acknowledged Bears Ears and Grand Staircase as sacred for over a century, but keeps stripping away protections
A view of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near Escalante, Utah. (John Fowler from Placitas, New Mexico, U.S. via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY)
(The Conversation) — President Donald Trump signed proclamations on July 13, 2026, cutting the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90% – meaning nearly 3 million acres will lose monument status and revert to ordinary public lands management in September. The Antiquities Act of 1906 requires presidents to use proclamations to establish or modify national monuments.
The cuts followed a long campaign by Utah’s Republican leadership to remove the designation and reopen the land for mining. Gov. Spencer Cox and members of the state’s congressional delegation stood with Trump at the signing, and Sen. Mike Lee said he had been working toward the reduction for roughly 18 months.
They argue that the original monuments were far larger than the Antiquities Act allows, since the law limits a monument to the “smallest area compatible” with protecting the objects inside it. Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated by Bill Clinton in 1996, and Bears Ears by Barack Obama in 2016. Cutting the monuments’ size opens the excluded land to mining. The Bears Ears proclamation points to the minerals underneath, including copper and uranium, as critical to national security.
The tribal nations that consider these lands sacred say they were not consulted. The Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition condemned what it called a move to “virtually eliminate” the monuments.
As a scholar of Native American and Indigenous Studies I see this decision as part of a pattern that is more than a century old: the United States repeatedly acknowledges that these lands are sacred. Yet, that recognition never comes with lasting protections.
What makes these places sacred
Bears Ears takes its name from twin buttes that resemble the head and ears of a bear rising above the canyon country of southeastern Utah.
The Bears Ears buttes are seen at the junction of Utah State Routes 261 and 95.
Bigbear213 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
The nations that hold the land sacred each know the name Bears Ears in their own languages: Hoon’Naqvut in Hopi, Shash Jaa’ in Navajo, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi in Ute, and Ansh An Lashokdiwe in Zuni.
For the Pueblo nations among them, the Hopi and Zuni, Bears Ears is inseparable from their own origin stories. The Zuni account of their origin holds that people came up into this world from beneath it, arriving in the Grand Canyon, and that the long migration afterward carried them across the plateau and into the Bears Ears country.
The Zuni built villages, shrines and altars in that country, and what they built stayed sacred. “Once those structures were built, they were consecrated,” Jim Enote, a Zuni tribal member and former director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum, told National Geographic in 2018. “Once they’re consecrated they become sacred forever. We never consider them abandoned.” The Zuni still return, making pilgrimages to the region to affirm what their oral history tells them, reading petroglyphs – images carved into the rock by their ancestors – that match those at their present-day home of Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico.
Anthropologists working with the Kaibab Paiute tribe and the monument’s own staff reported that Southern Paiutes understand their traditional lands as a “holy land” where the Creator originally placed them, and that Grand Staircase is part of it. The bond, the tribe believes, was established at Creation and passes to every generation that follows. The federal government funded that research.
The practices continue across Bears Ears. Members of the five nations gather ceremonial plants, minerals and water, and cut herbs, firewood and cedar poles for ceremonies, as they have for generations. A 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that at least 31 culturally significant species, among them the Four Corners potato, grow abundantly at the ancient habitation sites and are rare elsewhere, evidence that the people who lived there planted them. Each summer, runners carry prayers more than 50 miles from the town of Bluff, Utah, to the high country below the buttes, and the White Mesa Ute community beside the monument holds its Bear Dance each year.
Southern Paiutes still travel to ancestral sites across Grand Staircase for ceremonies, prayer and gathering, and they understand the plants and water of the Holy Land as living beings, able to speak to people and willing to give life to them.
Not a point on a map
Both monuments also hold a history of refuge. In the 1860s, the U.S. Army forced the Diné, also known as the Navajo, from the Four Corners country where the borders of present-day Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, marching thousands of people more than 300 miles (480 km) east to Bosque Redondo in what became known as the Long Walk.
The cliffs and rocks of Bear Ears monument.
Bureau of Land Management/Flickr, CC BY
Families who evaded the removal hid in the Bears Ears canyons, where they found deer and roots for food and plants for medicine. The Paiute, whose sacred places include Grand Staircase, sheltered others fleeing the same soldiers. As Davina Smith-Idjesa, who represents the Navajo Nation on the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, has recounted, when the government drove the Navajo from their homelands, “the Paiute Nation fed and clothed and sheltered us.”
These histories of origin, ceremony and refuge point to something U.S. law has never fully grasped: For these nations, the sacred is not a shrine that can be fenced off while the land around it is opened to mining. It is the whole living landscape. Enote puts the distinction plainly: “These are sacred places, not sacred sites. A site to me is a point on a map.”
A boundary can protect a point. It cannot protect a relationship that runs through an entire landscape, which is why lines drawn and redrawn on federal maps keep failing to hold what they are meant to protect.
A century of recognition
The government has recognized this land’s importance longer than almost any place it manages. As early as 1904, advocates told Congress that cultural sites across the Southwest were being destroyed and named Bears Ears one of seven areas needing immediate protection. That campaign helped spur passage of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which made it a federal crime to loot or destroy antiquities on public land.
But the government moved to protect the artifacts, not the living religion that made them meaningful. In those same years the same government was jailing traditional healers under the Religious Crimes Code of 1883, which outlawed Native ceremonies and dances, including the Sun Dance, and punished participants with imprisonment or the withholding of food rations. The ban held for over 50 years.
Congress appeared to correct course with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, declaring it U.S. policy to protect Native peoples’ right to exercise their traditional religions, including access to sacred sites.
Ten years later, however, the U.S. Supreme Court set the national rule allowing a federal road through high country sacred to the Yurok, Karuk and Tolowa peoples of Northern California, even though a government study found that it would devastate religious use of the area. Blackfeet scholar Rosalyn LaPier argues that the tribes lost because the court viewed the 1978 act “as a policy and not a law with legal protections.” The land was recognized as sacred and could be destroyed anyway.
Bears Ears in 2016 looked like the moment that pattern might finally break. For the first time, the tribal nations most tied to a landscape did not just ask the government to respect it. They asked it to be protected as a national monument, with the force of law behind it. The five nations – the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe and the Pueblo of Zuni – petitioned for the monument together, the first ever created at tribal request.
But a monument is not a national park. Congress creates parks, and only Congress can undo them. Presidents create monuments by proclamation, which leaves them far more vulnerable to changes in administration.
Trump cut Bears Ears by 85% in 2017 and halved Grand Staircase. Biden restored both in 2021. Now, Trump has cut them again, far more deeply.
The Native communities’ ceremonies will continue after September, as they continued through the decades when such practices were criminalized. Zuni pilgrims will still read the petroglyphs. The runners will still set out from Bluff, Utah. Southern Paiutes will still hold Grand Staircase as the holy land where the Creator placed them.
For these tribal nations the sacredness of the land does not change. What changes in September is whether the law stands between the ground the tribes consider to be sacred and the mining that lifting these protections might enable.
(Kerri J. Malloy, Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, San José State University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
