In push for efficiency, Navajo president urges federal administration to protect Bears Ears

The Newspaper Rock Petroglyphs are pictured along Indian Creek in Bears Ears National Monument near Monticello on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025. Photo: Spencer Heaps

NAVAJO NATION – As an anticipated reduction to the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by the Trump administration looms, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren is calling for the monuments to be kept at their current sizes in the name of efficiency.

“In light of the current administration’s stated priorities on efficiency and reducing waste, we believe that maintaining the integrity of established monument boundaries supports those goals,” Nygren wrote in a letter to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, according to a post by the Navajo leader on X. “Changing the boundaries and reopening finalized planning processes would not only risk the loss of valuable progress but may also lead to inefficiencies, duplicative expenditures, and delays in implementing conservation strategies.”

The letter asks that no changes to the monuments’ sizes be made without a meaningful dialogue with “all tribal nations with ancestral ties to these lands.”

In his confirmation hearing, Burgum hinted at support for reducing the monuments and echoed Utah leaders’ criticism of use of the Antiquities Act to put protections on large areas of land.

Bears Ears has deep spiritual and cultural importance to a number of Indigenous peoples, including the Diné, or Navajo, Nygren said in his post, noting that like neighboring Grand Staircase it is a “revered landscape.”

The monuments in southeastern Utah have been a political football for multiple presidential administrations, starting with the establishment of Grand Staircase in 1996 by President Bill Clinton who used his power under the Antiquities Act, a law passed in 1906 that gives the president authority to declare national monuments to protect areas of cultural, historical and scientific significance.

President Barack Obama then used the Antiquities Act at the end of his term in 2016 to give monument status to Bears Ears, an area tribes had long lobbied to protect.

Both monuments were scaled back by President Donald Trump when he took office in 2017, cutting Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to 1 million acres, and Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.35 million acres to 229,000 acres.

In 2021, President Joe Biden restored the monuments to their original sizes, a decision Utah is challenging in court.

Meanwhile, polling indicates that 71% of voters favor maintaining Bears Ears as a national monument, while 74% support keeping Grand Staircase-Escalante as a national monument.

Written by McKensie Romero for Utah News Dispatch