Political Whiplash in the American Southwest

A slab of uplifted rock larger than Italy sits in the center of the American Southwest. It is called the Colorado Plateau, and it is a beautiful place, higher ground in every sense. What little rain falls onto the plateau has helped to inscribe spectacular canyons into its surface. Ice Age mammoth hunters were likely the first human beings to wander among its layered cliff faces and mesas, where the exposed sedimentary rock comes in every color between peach and vermillion. Native Americans liked what they saw, or so it seems: The plateau has been inhabited ever since, usually by many tribes. They buried their dead in its soil and built homes that blend in with the landscape. In the very heart of the plateau, the Ancestral Pueblo people wedged brick dwellings directly into the banded cliffs.

Some of the best-preserved Ancestral Pueblo ruins are located near two 9,000-foot buttes in southeastern Utah, 75 miles from where its borders form a pair of crosshairs with those of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Ancestral Pueblo were not the only Native Americans in the area. Other tribes lived nearby, or often passed through, and many of them describe the buttes as “Bears Ears” in their own languages. Thousands of archaeological sites are scattered across the area, but they have not always been properly cared for. Uranium miners laid siege to the landscape during the early atomic age, and in the decades since, many dwellings and graves have been looted.

In 2015, five federally recognized tribes—the Navajo Nation, the Zuni, the Hopi, the Mountain Ute, and the Ute—joined together to request that President Barack Obama make Bears Ears a national monument. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, as they called themselves, wanted to protect as many cultural sites as possible from further desecration. They asked for nearly 2 million acres centered on the buttes. In 2016, Obama created a monument of roughly two-thirds that size.

The borders of that monument have been shifting ever since. In late 2017, President Donald Trump erased all but roughly 15 percent of the protected land, in the name of reversing federal overreach and restoring local control; and in the years that followed, mining companies staked more than 80 new hard-rock claims within its former borders. The majority were for uranium and vanadium, minerals that are in demand again, now that a new nuclear arms race is on, and tech companies are looking for fresh ways to power the AI revolution.

In 2021, President Joe Biden put the monument’s borders back to where they’d started—and the miners’ claims were put on hold. Now Trump is reportedly planning to shrink Bears Ears once again, possibly during his first week in office.

With every new election, more than 1 million acres have flickered in and out of federal protection. People on both sides of the fight over Bears Ears feel jerked around. In southeastern Utah, the whipsaw of American politics is playing out on the ground, frustrating everyone, and with no end in sight.

Vaughn Hadenfeldt has worked as a backcountry guide in Bears Ears since the 1970s. He specializes in archaeological expeditions. Back when he started, the area was besieged by smash-and-grab looters. They used backhoes to dig up thousand-year-old graves in broad daylight, he told me. Some of these graves are known to contain ceramics covered in geometrical patterns, turquoise jewelry, and macaw-feather sashes sourced from the tropics. Thieves made off with goods like these without even bothering to refill the holes. Later on, after Bears Ears had become a popular Utah stopover for tourists passing through to Monument Valley, the looters had to be more discreet. They started coming in the winter months, Hadenfeldt told me, and refilling the ancient graves that they pillaged. “The majority of the people follow the rules, but it takes so few people who don’t to create lifelong impacts on this type of landscape,” he said.

Hadenfeldt lives in Bluff, Utah, a small town to the southeast of Bears Ears. Its population of 260 includes members of the Navajo Nation, artists, writers, archaeologists, and people who make their living in the gentler outdoor recreation activities. (Think backpacking and rock climbing, not ATVs.) The town’s mayor, Ann Leppanen, told me that, on the whole, her constituents strongly oppose any attempt to shrink the monument. More tourists are coming, and now they aren’t just passing through on the way to Monument Valley. They’re spending a night or two, enjoying oat-milk lattes and the like before heading off to Bears Ears.

[Read: What kinds of monuments does Trump value?]

But Bluff is a blue pinprick in bright-red southern Utah, where this one town’s affection for the monument is not so widely shared. Bayley Hedglin, the mayor of Monticello, a larger town some 50 miles north, described Bluff to me as a second-home community, a place for “people from outside the area”—code for Californians—or retirees. For her and her constituents, the monument and other public lands that surround Monticello are like a boa constrictor, suffocating their town by forcing it into a tourism economy of low-paying, seasonal jobs. The extra hikers who have descended on the area often need rescuing. She said they strain local emergency-services budgets.

I asked Hedglin which industries she would prefer. “Extraction,” she said. Her father and grandfather were both uranium miners. “San Juan County was built on mining, and at one time, we were very wealthy,” she said. She understood that the monument was created at the behest of a marginalized community, but pointed out that the residents of Monticello, where the median household income is less than $64,000, are marginalized in their own right. I asked what percentage of them support the national monument. “You could probably find 10,” she said. “10 percent?” I asked. “No, 10 people,” she replied.

The election-to-election uncertainty is itself a burden, Hedglin said. “It makes it hard to plan for the future. Even if Trump shrinks the monument again, we can’t make the development plans that we need in Monticello, because we know that there will be another election coming.” Britt Hornsby, a staunchly pro-monument city-council member in Bluff, seemed just as disheartened by what he called the federal government’s “ping-pong approach” to Bears Ears. “We’ve had some folks in town looking to start a guiding business,” he said, “but they have been unable to get special recreation permits with all the back-and-forth.”

[Read: Return the national parks to the tribes]

The only conventional uranium-processing mill still active in the United States sits just outside the borders of another nearby town, Blanding. Phil Lyman, who, until recently, represented Blanding and much of the surrounding area in Utah’s House of Representatives, has lived there all of his life. Lyman personifies resistance to the monument. He told me that archaeological sites were never looted en masse, as Hadenfeldt had said. This account of the landscape was simply “a lie.” (In 2009, federal agents raided homes in Blanding and elsewhere, recovering some 40,000 potentially stolen artifacts.) While Lyman was serving as the local county commissioner in 2014, two years before Bears Ears was created, he led an illegal ATV ride into a canyon that the Bureau of Land Management had closed in order to protect Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. Some associates of the anti-government militant Ammon Bundy rode along with him. A few were armed.

To avoid violence, assembled federal agents did not make immediate arrests, but Lyman was later convicted, and served 10 days in jail. The stunt earned him a pardon from Trump and a more prominent political profile in Utah.When Biden re-expanded the monument in 2021, Lyman was furious. While he offered general support for the state of Utah’s legal efforts to reverse Biden’s order, he also said that his paramount concern was not these “lesser legal arguments” but “the federal occupation of Utah” itself. Like many people in rural Utah, Lyman sees the monument as yet another government land grab, in a state where more than 60 percent of the land is public. The feds had colluded with environmentalists to designate the monument to shut down industries, in a manner befitting of Communists, he told me.

Davina Smith, who sits on the board of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition as representative for the Navajo Nation, grew up just a mile outside of Bears Ears. She now lives in Blanding, not far from Lyman. Her father, like Mayor Hedglin’s, was a uranium miner. But Native Americans haven’t always been treated like they belong here, she told me. “People in Utah say that they want local control, but when we tried to deal with the state, we were not viewed as locals.” Indeed, for more than 30 years, San Juan County’s government was specifically designed to keep input from the Navajo to a minimum. Only in 2017 did a federal court strike down a racial-gerrymandering scheme that had kept Navajo voting power confined to one district.

Smith, too, has been tormented by what she called the “never-ending cycle of uncertainty” over the monument. The tribes have just spent three years negotiating a new land-management plan with the Biden administration, and it may be all for naught. “Each new administration comes in with different plans and shifting priorities, and nothing ever feels like it’s moving toward a permanent solution,” Smith said.

The judicial branch of the federal government will have some decisions of its own to make about the monument, and may inject still more reversals. In 2017, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and other groups sued the government over Trump’s original downsizing order, arguing that the president’s power to create national monuments under the Antiquities Act is a ratchet—a power to create, not shrink or destroy. No federal judge had ruled on that legal question by the time of Biden’s re-expansion, and the lawsuit was stayed. If Trump now shrinks the monument again, the lawsuit will likely be reactivated, and new ones likely filed. A subsequent ruling in Trump’s favor would have far-reaching implications if it were upheld by the Supreme Court. It would defang the Antiquities Act, a statute that was written to protect Native American heritage, empowering any president to shrink any of America’s national monuments on a whim. (The Biden administration launched an historic run of monument creation. Project 2025, a policy blueprint co-written by Trump’s former head of BLM, calls for a shrinking spree.) The borders of each one could begin to pulsate with every subsequent presidential handover.

An act of Congress might be the only way to permanently resolve the Bears Ears issue. Even with Republican lawmakers in control, such an outcome may be preferable to the endless flip-flops of executive power, Hillary Hoffmann, a co-director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, told me. “The tribes have built bipartisan relationships with members of Congress.” They might not get as much land for the monument as they did under Obama or Biden, she said, but perhaps a grand bargain could be struck. A smaller allotment of protected land could be exchanged for the stability that would allow local communities—including monument supporters and opponents alike—to plan for their future.

In the meantime, people in southeastern Utah are waiting to see what Trump actually does. When I asked Smith how the tribes are preparing for the new administration, she was coy. She didn’t want to telegraph the coalition’s next moves. “We are definitely planning,” she told me. “This isn’t our first time.” Everyone in the fight over Bears Ears has to find some way to cope with the uncertainty; for Smith, it’s taking the long view. She invoked the deeper history of the Colorado Plateau. She called back to the Long Walk of the Navajo, a series of 53 forced marches that the U.S. Army used to remove thousands of tribe members from their land in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1860s. “When the cavalry came to round up my people, some of them sought refuge in Bears Ears,” she said. “To this day, I can go there and remember what my ancestors did. I can remember that we come from a great line of resilience.”