It was April 26, and the president was signing an executive order directing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to spend the next 120 days to evaluate more than two dozen national monuments and decide which of them should be shrunk, or repealed entirely. “It’s time we ended this abusive practice,” Trump said, referring the Antiquities Act, the Teddy Roosevelt-era law that gives the president the power to protect public lands. “I am signing a new executive order to end another egregious abuse of federal power, and to give that power back to the states and to the people, where it belongs.”
Giving power back to the people—it sounds great. Except that it’s a smokescreen. Many of the national monuments that are in the administration’s cross-hairs—places like Bear’s Ears National Monument in Utah and Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine—were established only after considerable public input. In each case, there were local detractors, but also broad local public support.
Perhaps Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will realize the extent of this support when he begins barnstorming across Utah this week, kicking off the process of deciding whether—or which—national monuments to rescind or reduce in size. “I’m going to ride a horse, like Teddy Roosevelt, and see the land and talk to the Navajo and the nations of tribes,” Zinke said last week at a conference in Houston.
Yet the Native American nations who spearheaded the effort to create the Bear’s Ears monument in Southern Utah say they can’t get a meeting with the secretary. “He needs to come down and talk to us. We need to talk to him,” says Jonah Yellowman, a Navajo who is the spiritual advisor to and board member of Diné Bikéyah, the pan-tribal organization that campaigned for years on behalf of the monument in southeastern Utah. For Yellowman, the silence from Zinke’s office is a reminder of long history of the federal government ignoring Native American nations. “After we did all to protect our lifestyle and our culture and our stories, to have them turn away and try to undo…
