The Bureau of Land Management has entered into a partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the five Native American tribes of the Bears Ears Commission to manage and protect Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
“We are so pleased to celebrate this unique partnership between Tribal Nations and federal agencies to manage and protect the remarkable and sacred Bears Ears landscape,” said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning in a June 21 news release. “This is an important step as we move forward to ensure that tribal expertise and traditional perspectives remain at the forefront of our joint decision-making for the Bears Ears National Monument. This type of true co-management will serve as a model for our work to honor the nation-to-nation relationship in the future.”
After the June 18 signing ceremony, the three organizations celebrated their newly marked cooperative agreement by traveling to state Highway 191 to unveil the Bears Ears National Monument sign, which includes insignias of the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.
In October 2021, President Joe Biden issued Proclamation 10285, which officially restored the Bears Ears National Monument status. As part of the announcement, Biden also highlighted the importance of Tribal Nations in managing the monument by re-constituting the Bears Ears Commission as established by President Barack Obama in 2016, consisting of one elected officer each from the five Tribes.
The monument is jointly managed by BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, with the two outlining a management plan for federal lands within the 1.36 million-acre boundaries of the Bears Ears National Monument. The plan also calls for working with tribal members of the Bears Ears Commission to protect and restore the monument objects and values.
“Instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them and plan for a resilient future,” said Carleton Bowekaty, Bears Ears Commission co-chair and lieutenant governor of Zuni Pueblo, in the release. “We are being asked to apply our traditional knowledge to both the natural and human-caused ecological challenges, drought, erosion, visitation. What can be a better avenue of restorative justice than giving tribes the opportunity to participate in the management of lands their ancestors were removed from.”
