Three presidents have signed Bears Ears proclamations. Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, but supporters were devastated when Donald Trump eviscerated the monument the following year, reducing its area by 85%. In 2021, President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries and then some.

What’s clear is that Bears Ears remains reviled by Republican officials and cherished by Indigenous tribes and conservationists.

The monument, 1.36 million acres in southeast Utah, lies within San Juan County. The Navajo Nation covers 25% of the county, and Native people account for more than half of the 14,200-person population. Just 8% of the county is private land while another 5% is state trust land.

The rest — 62% of the county — is federal land owned by the people of the United States and administered by the Departments of Agriculture and Interior. This immense commons testifies to the sublime difficulty of the place — beautiful enough to warrant preservation as national parks, monuments and forests. But it’s also arid enough to attract only a few 19th-century settlers to what had been Indigenous homeland for millennia.

I think it’s fair to say that San Juan County’s white residents never envisioned challenges to their political power. But in 2009, the feds came down hard on generations of casual pothunting by local white families. Then, after a century of oppressing their Indigenous neighbors, lawsuits strengthened Native voting rights. The county commission became majority Navajo from 2018 to 2022.

Native influence keeps expanding. The five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition first envisioned a national monument and became co-stewards for these 1.36 million acres. They have a champion in Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, but such historic changes make the dominant culture uneasy.

In February, Utah Governor Spencer Cox dramatically withdrew from a Bears Ears land exchange poised for completion. This swap of state trust lands for Bureau of Land Management lands would hugely benefit the state. Details were already negotiated; each side compromised; the stakeholders were largely content.

But in 2024, Utah politics are stark, compounded by distrust and disinformation.

At statehood in 1896, Utah received four sections per township to support public schools and universities. The Utah Trust Lands Administration manages these scattered lands — blue squares on ownership maps — but blocking up these blue squares into manageable parcels means trading land with federal agencies.

Such trades aren’t rare and can be grand in scale. A 1998 negotiation between Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Utah Governor Mike Leavitt traded Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument’s 176,000 acres of school sections for BLM land elsewhere — along with a hefty $50 million payment to Utah from the U.S. Treasury. Utah Trust Lands still brags about the deal on its website.

But the old guard is up in arms about the draft Bears Ears Resource Management Plan released for public comment on March 8. The BLM’s preferred alternative emphasizes traditional Indigenous knowledge and land health.

Any such gestures toward conservation elicit local outrage about the feds “destroying” the pioneer way of life. The subtext: the people long in charge don’t want to lose power.

Denouncing federal overreach is always a sure win for Utah politicians. In this year’s Republican primary, San Juan County-based legislator Phil Lyman is challenging the incumbent governor with fierce anti-public lands rhetoric. Governor Cox will need to protect his right flank.

Meanwhile, school trust lands within Bears Ears remain at risk. The second tallest structure in Utah, a 460-foot telecom tower with blinking red lights, could rise on state land in the heart of the monument. It’s been approved by county planners, and the Trust Lands Administration could add poison pills on other lands proposed for exchange.

The elected leaders of Utah have decided that the monument’s integrity and the needs of the state’s children matter less than political gamesmanship.

The five tribes of Bears Ears know better: “It is our obligation to our ancestors…and to the American people, to protect Bears Ears.” Their big hearts will win in the end.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Utah and will publish the 35th anniversary edition of his book The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin next winter.

Corrections: The 4th paragraph has been changed to reflect the monument is 1.36 million acres. Previously it read 5 million acres. The 7th paragraph read 1.3 million acres and that has been updated as well to 1.36 million acres. Paragraph 15 is changed to reflect the proposed telecom tower would become the second-tallest structure in Utah. Not the tallest.

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The grey wolf in the metal crate tenses as the door unexpectedly opens. Through the bright threshold, he sees a field of winter grasses laced with snow and a line of juniper trees. After a moment, he bolts for the trees, disappearing into their shadows. And he keeps running.

Only after his captors are far behind does the wolf come to a stop. Panting with exhaustion, his heart pounding, he sniffs at the breeze and looks about. His pack—his family—is nowhere to be seen.

He throws back his head and unleashes a plaintive howl. The tone rises and falls and rolls across the landscape. Its meaning could not be clearer: “I am here. Where are you?” But there is no answer.

The wolf explores, nose to the ground. He ignores a scolding raven. Of far greater fascination is the discovery of an elk bedding area. Pawing at the flattened grasses, he notes they were there just this morning. This is good to know.

Always alert, he climbs a ridge above a broad tree-lined meadow. He knows he must find his pack, but he has no idea how to start searching when there is no wolf scent.

The short winter day is ending. Now the wolf feels the full weight of fatigue after his sleepless three-day ordeal. He finds a shallow depression next to a fallen tree. He circles, lies down.

And the wolf dreams. He dreams he is running through a forest. Up ahead, he can just see the bounding prey he is chasing but he cannot gain any ground. He yips in frustration and abruptly wakes to a pink sky dawning in the east.

A meadow below is shrouded in fresh snow and stillness. Then—a movement that electrifies his attention. A small herd of female elk is browsing among the trees.

He rises into a crouch and silently descends the ridge on an intercepting path. The elk pause upon reaching the meadow, then begin to cross the open space. One of them has a hitch in her walk and lags behind.

The wolf immediately explodes into a run. Simultaneously, the elk launch into a panicked flight.

The wolf races through the snow-covered grass. As the paths of prey and predator converge, he leaps and seizes the laggard’s rear leg. She kicks and he lets go. He falls back and is startled to see her stop and turn to face him. The ailing elk is already spent. He leaps again, his jaws clamping down on her throat. She stands for only moments before collapsing. In minutes she is dead.

The meadow is quiet again. The wolf is suddenly overwhelmed with hunger as he tears into the elk’s belly, powerful jaws ripping open the hide.

As his own belly fills, the wolf feels the fear of these last days falling away, and in that moment he sees, among the pinyons and junipers, a pair of eyes watching him. It is another captured wolf that had been released, a coal-black female.

She emerges from the shadows, head and tail down, but walking without hesitation. She comes before him and raises her muzzle to lick the blood off his. He does not object.

He turns back to the kill. She comes closer, then pauses to weigh his reaction. There is none, and the black wolf eagerly feeds.

In the weeks to follow, the grey wolf and the black wolf explore their new home. When they hear the howl of another wolf, they reply: “We are here. You stay there.”

They find a location for a den and learn to hunt well together. In time, their prey will learn things, too, and both they and the landscape itself will be better for it.

As winter turns to spring, the black wolf shows signs that a new pack is being created. A family in a tradition as old as the ancient hills themselves—is being born.

Clint McKnight is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a former national park ranger and natural history illustrator.

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If you visit the area you will immediately see the blight that comes from all-out oil and gas production: More than 30,000 wells have been drilled throughout the region, yet 10,000 of those are inactive and many will never be plugged and reclaimed. Sacred landscapes have been transformed into an industrial wasteland littered with rusting tanks and drill pads and connected by now-abandoned roads and pipelines. 

Almost as troubling is that in 2014, NASA satellites detected clouds of methane gas from thousands of leaking wells and pipelines. The party responsible for the ongoing destruction is a federal agency — the Bureau of Land Management. It administers public lands extending for many miles around Chaco.

The BLM has a long history of deferring to industry and handing out concessions to oil and gas companies. But left out from these deals with private companies are the tribes and their desires to protect ancestral sites from harm.

With the arrival of the more open Biden administration, newly invigorated tribal governments — including the All-Pueblo Council of Governors, the Navajo Nation and the Hopi tribe — are calling for a thorough reform of BLM oil and gas leasing and sales.

The demands of the tribes are basic: to be consulted in advance of leasing proposals, and to participate as active partners in the management of their ancestral lands.

E. Paul Torres, former governor of Isleta Pueblo, calls Chaco “a vital part of our present identity through active pilgrimage, story, song and prayer passed to us from ancestors whose footsteps we follow today.” And Brian Vallo, the governor of Acoma Pueblo, adds, “If the department brings the tribes into planning and decision making about oil and gas leasing early and often, our irreplaceable ancestral resources will be better protected.” 

In a report just released by Archaeology Southwest, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, archaeologist Paul Reed describes in detail the failure of the BLM to meet its trust responsibility to Native Americans. Tribal governments are generally ignored or consulted only at the last moment, Reed found, and when it occurs, “key decisions have been made, leaving the tribes to suffer the consequences of prior agency decisions.”

The Reed report recommends including tribal governments at every step of the leasing process. In addition, he recommends that tribal members and their cultural experts should be empowered to conduct field surveys to identify cultural sites, to look at alternatives to proposed oil and gas development, and to recommend any mitigation measures.

A final recommendation goes to the essence of what meaningful regulation and enforcement requires: Oil-gas operators should be prohibited from disturbing the land in any way “until all tribal concerns are identified and successfully addressed.” So far, however, tribal proposals along these lines have fallen on deaf ears.

For example, in 2019, the New Mexico congressional delegation sponsored legislation to establish a cultural protection zone within a 10-mile radius around Chaco. There, oil and gas leasing on federal public lands would be banned.

The legislation passed the House by a vote of 245 to 174, only to die in the Senate. Prospects for action in the present Congress remain uncertain. Meanwhile, a new pathway to reform has opened up.  President Biden’s appointment of Native American Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary is a first in the Department’s history. She is an enrolled member of Laguna Pueblo, and as a former New Mexico Congresswoman, co-sponsored the failed 2019 Chaco protection legislation.

Secretary Haaland has powerful management tools granted by the 1976 Federal Land Planning and Management Act. That act authorizes the Secretary to close tracts of public lands from all forms of mineral leasing for up to 20 years. That sets the stage for Secretary Haaland to protect Chaco by doing what Congress has failed to do — establishing a 10-mile buffer zone around the magnificence that is Chaco. 

All she needs is an affirmative “let’s go” from the President. The tribes have been waiting for a very long time. Bruce Babbitt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a former Secretary of the Interior Department and also served as governor of Arizona.

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