President Trump on Monday slashed the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by nearly 3 million acres.
He and the members of Utah’s congressional delegation cited local control as one reason for doing so, in addition to the potential for critical mineral extraction.
Indigenous nations like the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah consider those monuments culturally and ecologically significant and a part of their ancestral homelands.
KNAU’s Chris Clements spoke with Keitti Jakes, the tribe’s environmental program coordinator and its representative in the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition.
CHRIS CLEMENTS: What was your first reaction when you heard the news?
KEITTI JAKES: Our first reaction probably was deep disappointment. He didn't just slash it by a little bit. He went for the jugular on this one, and he only left [about] 180,000 acres, and so it was just frustrating.
CLEMENTS: Could you talk to me about the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah's connection to Grand Staircase?
JAKES: We have a creation story that is rooted in Grand Canyon, but it talks about how we have been traveling back and forth from the Kaiparowits Plateau and to Grand Canyon, and our people, depending on the time of year, [that’s the area] where they would settle, and they had a lot of settlements in Grand Staircase. There are a lot of cultural sites. There are a lot of religious ceremony sites.
CLEMENTS: Are you folks concerned about the future of some of those sites given what might end up happening with Grand Staircase?
JAKES: Absolutely concerned. When you shrink areas, it really cuts off connection for tribal members. They can no longer go there to gather. They can no longer go there to connect or do prayer, and so I think it not only fragments the area, but it fragments the connection that we try to maintain there. But also, I think sometimes with that fragmentation is loss of community and loss of culture, and loss of identity because we are rooted there.
CLEMENTS: Do you happen to know if your tribe's leadership was consulted by federal officials before these decisions to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase were made?
JAKES: They were not.
CLEMENTS: What's your reaction to that lack of consultation?
JAKES: It's super frustrating, because I think we've been left out of many conversations before. The frustration is tribal concerns are continuing to be overlooked, and we're constantly having to defend our ancestral homelands. I really feel that there is a disconnect between tribal leadership and state leadership and federal leadership, when we are sovereign nations.
CLEMENTS: At the signing ceremony, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said the intention of national monuments is for them to be the smallest area possible to protect antiquities. How do you react to that argument?
JAKES: That's frustrating too, because the Antiquities Act was enacted to protect places of historic, prehistoric, scientific and cultural significance, and Grand Staircase was designated because of it has a ton of resources there, and it's vast, and has a lot of things all working together. It's frustrating because protecting only fragments of that landscape fails to protect the whole.
CLEMENTS: Is the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah planning to join a lawsuit against these reductions?
JAKES: Yeah, so with the Grand Staircase Inter-Tribal Coalition, we had early on made some connections with NARF, the Native American Rights Fund. We are considering litigation through them for the coalition. The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah is in the process of trying to approve that and support that.
