Lamentations
Trump 47 bodes ill for tribes, public lands, and those of us who care about such things.
I had another, very different post planned for this week, all written and ready to file. Then as late Tuesday blurred into early Wednesday and Trump’s electoral vote count soared above 270, I knew that CAST OUT OF EDEN need to go a different direction.
In addition to his darkly insensible weaves, obscene gestures with microphones, and obsequious kisses planted on dictators’ rings, Trump 45’s actions against Bears Ears National Monument chart yet another gnarly, nasty path Trump 47 is sure to follow. Get ready.
“The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
William Faulkner
By way of background, President Barack Obama set aside the 1.35 million acres of public lands that make up the national monument in southeastern Utah in late 2016. What makes Bears Ears unique is its standing as the first national monument proposed by tribal initiative. The Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition — Hopis, Dinés, Uintah and Ouray Utes, Ute Mountain Utes, and Zunis — joined forces to address a common need:
The rampant looting and destruction of the villages, structures, rock markings, and gravesites within the Bears Ears landscape saddened and sickened our ancestors, and that sense of loss and outrage continues today.
Given his visceral hatred of all things Obama, Trump 45 couldn’t let the new national monument stand, of course. For one thing, he made a payback point of undoing his predecessor’s achievements. For another, he was beholden to mining and petroleum interests that had long turned a greedy eye on Bears Ears.
To create the illusion of deliberative policy-making, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke — the one-time Navy SEAL so corrupt that even ever-shady Trump 45 had to send him packing — was dispatched to seek stakeholder input on Bears Ears. Zinke was picky about who he listened to, tilting to fossil fuel executives and San Juan County officials who couldn’t stand the very idea of Bears Ears. Zinke held zero public meetings and met with BEITC leaders for a mere hour. It was hardly surprising that he recommended massively cropping the national monument and cutting it into two much smaller, disconnected units.
BEITC called out Zinke’s recommendation as the insult it was:
For us, Bears Ears is a homeland. It always has been and still is. The radical idea of breaking up Bears Ears National Monument is a slap in the face to the members of our Tribes and an affront to Indian people all across the country….
The Bears Ears region is not a series of isolated objects, but the object itself, a connected, living landscape, where the place, not a collection of items, must be protected. You cannot reduce the size without harming the whole.
Ignoring BEITC’s objections, Trump 45 translated Zinke’s recommendation into a December 2017 proclamation that added some 11,200 acres to Bears Ears as public relations cover, then slashed-and-burned the national monument to just 201,876 acres, only 15 percent of its original size. He also broke the monument into two disconnected units, as Zinke wanted and BEITC hated.
Trump held that Obama’s proclamation violated the Antiquities Act by setting aside far more land than the minimum good management required. Since Obama’s Bears Ears boundaries, Trump 45 argued, included sites that are hardly unique — once you’ve seen one kiva, you’ve seen them all, right? — and preserved other features that already enjoyed protection under federal law, the original proclamation added up to a federal land grab. Plus, Obama had given the tribes all together too much power on the ground. Trump 45 limited the collaborative Bears Ears Commission’s scope to just one of the shrunken monument’s units and required that, besides the tribal officers, it include one sure-to-be hostile San Juan County commissioner.
The proclamation also declared that more than 1.1 million acres of the newly unprotected land would be opened to mining and drilling, which was the whole point. The energy industry had won the day, BEITC had lost.
When Biden assumed the presidency, he promulgated a new proclamation that restored Bears Ears’ original boundaries, kept the 11,200 acres Trump added, and restored the collaborative management approach. Only recently, that management plan has cleared the last legal hurdles and is now in place.
Bears Ears opened the door for a series of tribal initiatives to protect sensitive and sacred landscapes that Biden soon proclaimed new national monuments: Ave Kwa Ame in southern Nevada, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints Grand Canyon in Arizona, expansions of the Berryessa Snow Mountain and San Gabriel Mountains reserves in California, and most recently the Chumash Heritage Marine Sanctuary north and west of the Channel Islands off the California coast.
Recent reports say that several more candidate tribal monuments are in the approval pipeline. Rest assured that Trump 47 will shut them down and, in a reprise of Trump 45, dismember as much and as many of the Biden set-asides as he can. Neither tribes nor public lands matter to the incoming regime except as resource extraction zones. Those of us to whom they do matter will be called upon to fight back, often and hard — starting now.
CAST OUT OF EDEN will be one forum for informing this struggle. I’ll continue to highlight the historical roots of the environmental movement, since we can’t understand where we are headed until we know where we’ve been. And I’ll also focus on those places at the intersection of tribes and public lands that are currently most at risk.
The struggle to seek a well-lighted path through Trump 47’s deepening dark has begun. Please join me.
I may be wrong, Robert, but I'm pretty sure I saw a note in the news yesterday stating that Trump's performance in areas with a large concentration of Native Americans improved significantly this time. If accurate, seems so very strange, but a similar pattern happened among Black and Hispanic men, and young men. So troubling and hard to fathom.