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KSJD Local Newscast - January 29, 2025

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The future of three national monuments in the Four Corners area is now highly uncertain.

In January, finalized resource management plans were announced for two monuments in southern Utah – Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. However, the possibility that President Trump will drastically downsize those monuments, as he did in his first term, looms over them.

And the new Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni - Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in northern Arizona, which was designated by President Biden in 2023, also could be in the crosshairs of the new administration.

The two Utah monuments have had their boundaries stretched and retracted like rubberbands. President Obama designated 1.35 million acres as Bears Ears National Monument in 2016. In 2017, President Trump downsized it by 85 percent. Then in 2021, President Biden restored it to its original size.

A similar thing happened to the 1.9-milliion-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It was designated by President Clinton in 1996, reduced in size by half by Trump in 2017, and restored by Biden in 2021.

Meanwhile, Arizona lawmakers had filed a legal challenge against the 900,000-acre Baaj Nwaavjo monument, but a U.S. district judge on Jan. 27 dismissed it, saying the plaintiffs had no standing to challenge the designation.

Now, opponents of that monument say they will turn to the Trump administration for help.

All the uncertainty over the status of these monuments has had an effect on businesses that depend on their proximity to the protected areas.

One of those is Ancient Wayves River and Hiking Adventures in San Juan County, Utah, which offers guided hikes and raft trips in the Bears Ears landscape. The business is Indigenous-owned and its guides are also indigenous, including members of Hopi, Zuni, Jemez, Pueblo, and other tribes.

“We respectfully extend acknowledgement to the many clans of the Hopi, Ute, Paiute, Zuni, Dine (Navajo) and many other Pueblo nations who consider this area their ancestral homelands,” the Ancient Wayves website states.

Owner Louis Williams, who is Diné (Navajo), told KSJD in a recent phone interview that he believes the monument status is critical to managing that landscape.

“The monument is key. It’s protecting that area,” he said. “The layer of it being a monument is key for its longevity. Before it was a monument, we were out there crossing our fingers. I hope this place stays the same.”

Williams started Ancient Wayves in 2020. Because of the Covid pandemic, it did not really get going until the next year. He said the business currently employs 15 people and is still growing.

Because of their background, the guides are able to offer a special perspective while leading their tours.

”People who come to visit this area want to learn about the culture,” Williams said.

“We try to keep it as sustainable tourism, cultural tourism. We encourage you to take care of the place.”

In December, a representative poll of 500 registered voters across Utah conducted by the Republican research firm New Bridge Strategy found that 65 percent supported retaining the current number and size of the state’s national monuments. Even among registered Republicans, a majority – 54 percent – supported keeping the existing monuments as they are.

A separate poll of 500 registered voters in Arizona, done in December by the research firm GDR, found that 81 percent support the Baaj Nwaavjo National Monument.

Williams said the Bears Ears landscape holds meaning for many different tribes, including the Diné.

“I’m taught to wake up and greet the sun to the east every morning. We are guided by hozho throughout the day.”

Hozho, he said, means a balance between the forces of nature and physical, spiritual, and mental health. To go out on the landscape and see native plants and animals, potsherds, and ancient structures built more than a thousand years ago provides that sense of harmony and balance.

“The remoteness is important,” Williams said. “There are many places where you don’t get a cell signal. That’s what the people come out for. We have guests from all over the world. They say, ‘I don’t want to hear any horns or see any vehicles.’

“It’s uplifting. Smelling the Bears Ears dirt, the sagebrush after a rain, this is it, hozho.

“That’s what we do with our guests. It’s a good experience for everybody.”

National-monument status helps preserve those characteristics, he said.

“The area has feelings,” Williams said. “We personify the landscape. It’s a bear sitting there resting. It has feelings. It’s a being.

“The bear is a protector. It’s at the point where the protector needs some help.”

Opponents of the national monuments are critical of the restrictions they place on new energy drilling and uranium extraction, which can provide considerable economic boosts to the region. But those operations are viewed as harmful by many indigenous people.

Williams lives in Blanding, Utah, near the White Mesa Uranium Mill. Uranium-mining has a long history of deleterious impacts to Native American communities, including contamination of groundwater. The uranium mill sits just five miles from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s White Mesa reservation.

“Our guests come back to civilization after Bears Ears and they see the mill and they ask, ‘What is that?’ They see the threats.”

Williams said the Bears Ears landscape needs its national-monument status so it can remain a place where indigenous culture is kept alive and plants and animals can flourish.

“We’re giving voice to the landscape,” he said. “The bighorn sheep can’t talk, the cryptobiotic soil can’t talk, but we can. All the wildlife, the yucca, the sagebrush – we’re giving them a voice.”

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Gail Binkly is a career journalist who has worked for the Colorado Springs Gazette and Cortez Journal, and was the editor of the Four Corners Free Press, based in Cortez.