Vote Harris, Save the Antiquities Act
Project 2025’s blueprint for Christian nationalist autocracy calls for repealing the law. For wild spaces and the tribes, that’s bad.
Sure, Trump keeps saying he has nothing to do with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s self-proclaimed “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.” But if you believe that, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d love to sell you cheap. Fact is, were Trump re-elected, he would appoint many of its authors and their acolytes to office, parrot its rhetoric, and begin to lay waste.
Project 2025 calls for increasing logging in national forests — just to reduce wildfire danger, don’t you know — and unleashing miners and drillers to have their fracking and stripping way with public and tribal lands. Part of that effort entails downsizing national monuments, offering the freed-up acreage for extraction, and defending this move against the legal challenges sure to follow. That’s not all.
“Finally,” the document continues, “the new Administration must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act” and leave it to Congress to designate as “national monuments those areas deserving of such congressional action.”
Trump showed what this dispensation would look like on his first go-round. But first, some background on the Antiquities Act and what’s at stake.
The Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities was signed into law in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt. It arose over longstanding concerns about commercial pot hunters pillaging ancient Indigenous ruins and grave sites and selling their loot, including human remains, to private collectors. The Antiquities Act empowers the president to proclaim national monuments on federal lands in order to protect important natural, cultural, and scientific features. In the course of his term in office, Roosevelt set aside 18 national monuments. Over the years and presidents since then, the law has been used nearly 300 times.
Congress can also declare national monuments, but the fraught politics of the polarized House and Senate these days make the legislative approach a no-go. That was why the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition turned to President Barack Obama and convinced him to proclaim Bears Ears National Monument, the first tribally initiated monument.
Once in office, Donald Trump, who hated all things Obama, couldn’t let that stand. Plus, he was beholden to mining and petroleum interests that had long turned a covetous eye toward Bears Ears and, along with various politicians and business leaders, portrayed national monuments as federal land grabs.
To create an illusion of deliberative policymaking, Trump dispatched Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to seek stakeholder input on Bears Ears as well as 26 other national monuments. In the case of Bears Ears, Zinke held zero public meetings, met with tribal leaders for a mere hour, and hobnobbed with fossil fuel executives and county officials who had opposed the monument since forever. It came as no surprise that he recommended massively cropping Bears Ears and cutting it into two much smaller, disconnected units. And to make it appear that he wasn’t singling out this good tribal idea for bad treatment, he also proposed lopping neighboring Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument as well as two other smaller, lesser known monuments.
The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition 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. Bears Ears is too precious a place, and our cultures and values too dignified and worthy, to backtrack on the promises made in [Obama’s] Presidential Proclamation.
Ignoring BEITC’s objections, Trump translated Zinke’s recommendation into a December 2017 proclamation that slashed-and-burned Bears Ears from 1.35 million acres to just 201,876, a wizened 15 percent of the original. It also broke the national monument into two disconnected units as Zinke wanted and the tribes hated. And Trump decided that Obama had given the tribes too much power on the ground. He limited the scope of the management remit for the Bears Ears Commission, which represents the tribes, to only one of the the lopped monument’s units.
Lawsuits challenging Trump’s legal authority to shrink national monuments were still making their plodding way through the courts even as he lost the 2020 election. President Joseph R. Biden made the litigation moot by restoring Bears Ears to its original boundaries and adding 11,200 acres in October 2021. He also ensured tribal “participation in the care and management” of the monument by re-establishing the Bears Ears Commission’s scope to include the whole expanded monument.
On June 18, 2022, that new arrangement resulted in the signing of an intergovernmental agreement between the five BEITC tribes and the Agriculture and Interior Departments, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. It ensures “consistent, effective and collaborative management” of the national monument by “centering Indigenous voices, including increasing the recognition of the value of traditional Indigenous knowledge and empowering Tribal Nations to make decisions for their cultural, natural, and spiritual values.”
This past March the Bureau of Land Management and the U. S. Forest Service released the draft Resource Management Plan for Bears Ears NM. During the 90-day public comment period that followed, the tribes advocated for the plan alternative that centers traditional Indigenous knowledge and the tribes’ management structure. Announcement of the review of public comments and the final plan is coming soon. Watch this space.
Responding to other tribal advocacy campaigns modeled after Bears Ears, Biden used the Antiquities Act to create Avi Kwi Ame in Nevada and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — Ancestral Footprints Grand Canyon in Arizona, and he expanded Snow Mountain and San Gabriel Mountains, both in California. Even now, a half-dozen tribes in alliance with over 225 business groups are lobbying the Biden administration to create Chuckwalla National Monument, a 627,000-acre preserve near Joshua Tree National Park plus 17,000 acres in the Eagle Mountains. With any luck, Biden will proclaim this latest monument in the remaining months of his presidency.
Were Trump to be returned to office and hew to Project 2025’s dictates, such significant steps toward environmental and social justice for Western tribes would surely stop and possibly be undone. Preventing the death of the Antiquities Act is one very good reason to make sure Trump never again occupies the Oval Office.
Coming Cast out of Eden events
Sunday, Sept. 29, 12:45 p.m., Berkeley Society of Friends: I'll be talking about the book, John Muir, and the foundations of the national park system in person at the meetinghouse, 2151 Vine St. (near Shattuck), Berkeley, CA 94709. Free and open to all.
Saturday, Oct. 5, 2 p.m., Orinda Books: I'll be reading from Cast out of Eden, answering questions and comments, and signing copies at this in-person event at Orinda Books, 276 Village Square, Orinda, CA 94563. Free and open to all.