#Diné leaders demand the return of
#BearsEars, fully intact
‘They call it protection. We call it theft.’
Natasha K. Hale and Angelo Baca October 27, 2026
Excerpt: "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
#SovereignNations, 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."
Read more:
https://www.hcn.org/articles/dine-leaders-demand-the-return-of-bears-ears-fully-intact/
Archived version:
https://archive.ph/cr7Fy
#USPol #IndigenousSovereignty #LandTheft #CorporateColonialism #Colonialism #LandBack #LandIsLife #ProtectTheSacred #TrumpSucks #BearsEarsNationalMonument #GrandStaircaseEscalante #IndigenousHistory 
