Bears Ears and the Question of Who Decides

On December 28, 2016, President Barack Obama signed a proclamation designating 1.35 million acres in southeastern Utah as Bears Ears National Monument.¹ On December 4, 2017, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation reducing the monument by approximately 85 percent, to roughly 202,000 acres.² On October 8, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation restoring the monument to its original boundaries.³ In 2025, the monument faced the prospect of reduction again.

The land itself, a landscape of red sandstone canyons, mesa tops, and desert valleys in San Juan County, Utah, did not change during any of these actions. The archaeological sites, estimated at more than 100,000 across the region, remained where they had been for centuries and millennia.⁴ The cliff dwellings, granaries, rock art panels, and ceremonial sites of ancestral Puebloan, Navajo, Ute, and other Indigenous peoples were neither created nor destroyed by presidential proclamation. The ecological systems, including pinyon-juniper woodlands, desert grasslands, and riparian corridors along the Colorado River tributaries, continued to function according to their own logic, indifferent to the legal status imposed upon them.

What changed, repeatedly and dramatically, was the answer to a question that American law has never fully resolved: who has the authority to determine how this land is used, and under what principles that authority should be exercised.

The Antiquities Act and the power it created

The legal instrument at the center of the Bears Ears dispute is the Antiquities Act of 1906, a statute that was old enough to have been signed by Theodore Roosevelt and brief enough to fit on a single page.⁵ The Act authorized the President of the United States to declare, by public proclamation, historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest situated on lands owned or controlled by the federal government to be national monuments. It further authorized the president to reserve parcels of land as part of such monuments, with the stipulation that the reservations be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

The Act was a response to a specific problem. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeological sites on federal land in the American Southwest were being systematically looted. Pottery, tools, bones, and ceremonial objects were removed by commercial diggers and sold to collectors and museums. Cliff dwellings were dynamited to access artifacts. The scale of the destruction prompted anthropologists, archaeologists, and preservation advocates to seek federal protection for sites that were being destroyed faster than they could be documented.⁶

The Antiquities Act gave the president the power to act unilaterally, without congressional approval, to protect threatened sites. This was a deliberate design choice. Congressional action was slow. Legislation to protect individual sites could take years to move through committee. The Act was intended to give the president the ability to respond quickly when archaeological or scientific resources were at risk.

Over the following century, presidents of both parties used the Antiquities Act to designate 161 national monuments.⁷ Some were small: a single archaeological site, a fossil bed, a historic building. Others were vast. Theodore Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908, protecting more than 800,000 acres over the strenuous objections of Arizona mining interests.⁸ Jimmy Carter designated 56 million acres in Alaska in 1978, a single action that protected more land than any other presidential proclamation in American history.⁹ Bill Clinton designated Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah in 1996, covering 1.7 million acres of redrock canyons and plateaus that had been the subject of coal mining proposals.¹⁰

Each of these designations generated opposition. Each raised the same fundamental question: does the president have the authority to withdraw this much land from commercial use, and if so, what are the limits of that authority?

The tribal coalition and the proposal

The Bears Ears designation was unusual in one critical respect: it originated not from the White House but from a coalition of five sovereign tribal nations. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, composed of the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni, formally proposed the monument in 2015.¹¹

The coalition’s proposal was grounded in a claim that predated not only the Antiquities Act but the existence of the United States itself. The landscape that Anglo-American law calls “Bears Ears,” named for the twin buttes visible from across the region, has been continuously inhabited, used, and held sacred by Indigenous peoples for at least 12,000 years.¹² The archaeological record is among the densest in North America. The cliff dwellings at Moon House, the rock art panels at Newspaper Rock, the granaries tucked into sandstone alcoves across Cedar Mesa, and the kivas and great houses of the ancestral Puebloan period represent a continuous human relationship with the land that spans hundreds of generations.

For the five tribes, the land is not a historical artifact. It is a living cultural landscape. Navajo families continue to gather medicinal plants in the canyons. Hopi and Zuni peoples maintain ceremonial connections to ancestral sites. Ute communities have historical and ongoing relationships with the land that predate the reservation system. The coalition argued that the monument designation was necessary to protect not just archaeological objects but the integrity of a landscape that remains central to the cultural and spiritual lives of living peoples.¹³

The coalition also proposed something unprecedented: co-management. Under their proposal, a Bears Ears Commission composed of representatives from the five tribes would collaborate with federal land management agencies in developing and implementing the management plan for the monument.¹⁴ This was not a request for advisory input. It was a proposal for shared governance, a formal role for tribal nations in the management of federal land that had been their homeland for millennia before it became federal land.

The designation and the reduction

President Obama’s December 2016 proclamation designated Bears Ears National Monument at 1.35 million acres and included a provision for a Bears Ears Commission with a collaborative management role.¹⁵ The proclamation cited the Antiquities Act’s authority to protect objects of historic and scientific interest, and it identified dozens of specific cultural, archaeological, paleontological, and ecological features within the monument’s boundaries.

The Utah congressional delegation opposed the designation uniformly. Senator Orrin Hatch called it “a slap in the face to the people of Utah.”¹⁶ Representative Rob Bishop, who chaired the House Natural Resources Committee, had introduced legislation to create a smaller conservation area through congressional action, a proposal the tribal coalition rejected as insufficient. Governor Gary Herbert argued that the designation would harm the local economy by restricting access to energy resources and limiting traditional uses of the land.¹⁷

Less than a year later, President Trump signed a proclamation reducing Bears Ears by approximately 85 percent, from 1.35 million acres to roughly 202,000 acres divided into two smaller units.¹⁸ The reduction removed protection from the vast majority of the monument’s cultural sites, including areas with high densities of archaeological resources, and opened the excluded land to potential mineral leasing, mining claims, and other commercial uses.

The legal basis for the reduction was contested from the moment of the announcement. The Antiquities Act grants the president authority to “declare” national monuments and to “reserve” land for their protection. It does not explicitly grant the authority to reduce or revoke a monument designation. No provision of the Act addresses what happens when a subsequent president disagrees with a predecessor’s monument.

The question of whether a president can reduce a national monument had arisen before. President William Howard Taft reduced the Navajo National Monument in 1912. President Woodrow Wilson reduced Mount Olympus National Monument in 1915. In total, at least 18 monument reductions had been made by presidents prior to the Bears Ears action.¹⁹ But none of these reductions had been challenged in court, and none had been ruled upon by the Supreme Court. The legal authority for presidential monument reduction remained, as of the Bears Ears dispute, an unresolved constitutional question.

The legal question that remains open

The constitutional argument against presidential monument reduction proceeds from the text of the Antiquities Act and from the broader principle of separation of powers. The Act grants the president the power to designate. It does not grant the power to un-designate. The Property Clause of the Constitution (Article IV, Section 3) vests Congress with the authority to “dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.”²⁰ Under this reading, the president’s designation power is a delegation from Congress, and the scope of that delegation is limited to what the statute authorizes. Since the statute authorizes designation but not reduction, a president who reduces a monument is acting beyond delegated authority and encroaching on congressional power over federal property.

The counterargument holds that the power to designate inherently includes the power to modify. If a president determines that a monument reservation is larger than the “smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected,” then reducing the reservation is not revoking the monument but correcting its boundaries to comply with the statute’s own limitation. Under this theory, the Trump reduction was not a reversal of Obama’s action but a recalibration of the monument’s size to conform to the Antiquities Act’s requirements.²¹

Five tribal nations and multiple environmental organizations filed suit to challenge the reduction. The cases were consolidated in federal court in Washington, D.C. Before the court reached a decision, President Biden restored the monument, rendering the legal challenge procedurally moot.²² The restoration resolved the immediate dispute but left the constitutional question unanswered. No court has ruled on whether a president has the legal authority to reduce a national monument designated by a predecessor under the Antiquities Act.

This unresolved question means that every monument designation exists in a state of constitutional uncertainty. A designation made by one president can be reversed by the next, and the reversal can itself be reversed by the president after that, with no judicial determination of where the legal authority lies. Bears Ears has experienced this cycle twice in seven years. Grand Staircase-Escalante, also in Utah, has experienced a parallel pattern: designated at 1.7 million acres by Clinton in 1996, reduced by roughly half by Trump in 2017, restored by Biden in 2021.²³

The instability affects not just the legal status of the land but the practical management of it. Land managers cannot develop long-term conservation plans for areas whose protected status may change with each presidential transition. Archaeological sites that require monitoring and protection may lose their federal management priority when a monument is reduced. Species management plans, recreation infrastructure, and law enforcement priorities all depend on knowing the legal status of the land, and that status has become a variable rather than a constant.

The co-management experiment

The Biden restoration of Bears Ears included a significant innovation: a formalized co-management framework that gave the Bears Ears Commission, representing the five tribal nations, a substantive role in the management of the monument.²⁴ This was the first time a national monument had been managed under a formal government-to-government co-management agreement between federal agencies and tribal nations.

The co-management structure was more than symbolic. Under the agreement, the Bears Ears Commission participated in the development of the monument’s management plan, including decisions about resource protection priorities, access policies, cultural site management, and recreational use. The commission’s input was not advisory in the traditional sense; the agreement established a collaborative decision-making process in which tribal perspectives were integrated into management at the planning stage rather than being solicited after the plan was already drafted.²⁵

The co-management model reflected a broader shift in federal land management. In 2021, the Department of the Interior issued a joint secretarial order on “Fulfilling the Trust Responsibility to Indian Tribes in the Stewardship of Federal Lands and Waters,” directing federal agencies to collaborate with tribal nations in the management of lands with tribal cultural significance.²⁶ The order acknowledged what tribes had argued for decades: that federal land management decisions affecting tribal cultural resources and traditional uses should not be made without tribal participation.

For the five tribes of the Bears Ears Coalition, co-management represented a partial recognition of a more fundamental claim. The land designated as Bears Ears National Monument is not land the tribes have no connection to. It is land that was taken from them, through a combination of military force, treaty negotiations, and the establishment of the reservation system, and that remained central to their cultural and spiritual lives even after they were removed from it. Co-management did not return the land to tribal ownership. It did, for the first time, give tribal nations a formal role in governing land that the federal government had claimed as its own.²⁷

The durability of this arrangement is uncertain. Co-management agreements, like monument designations, can be modified or revoked by subsequent administrations. An executive order can be superseded by a new executive order. A management plan developed under one administration can be revised under the next. The structural vulnerability that defines the monument’s legal status applies equally to its management framework.

The resource extraction question

Beneath the legal and cultural disputes over Bears Ears lies a more straightforward economic conflict. Southeastern Utah contains commercially significant deposits of uranium, vanadium, potash, and oil and gas. The region’s geology, which makes it archaeologically and ecologically significant, also makes it a target for extractive industries.²⁸

The uranium mining history of the region is not theoretical. The Navajo Nation bears the scars of a uranium mining boom that lasted from the 1940s through the 1980s, leaving behind hundreds of abandoned mines, contaminated water sources, and elevated cancer rates in mining communities.²⁹ The legacy of uranium mining on and near the Navajo Nation is one of the most severe environmental justice catastrophes in American history, and it is not fully remediated. Some abandoned mine sites continue to leach radioactive material into groundwater. Some communities still lack access to uncontaminated drinking water.

Monument designation under the Antiquities Act withdraws the designated land from new mining claims under the General Mining Law of 1872 and from new mineral leasing under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920.³⁰ When Trump reduced Bears Ears, the excluded land became available again for mineral claims and lease applications. Environmental organizations documented that mining companies had filed claims in areas excluded from the reduced monument within months of the reduction.³¹

The economic argument for opening the land to resource extraction is that southeastern Utah is one of the poorest regions in Utah, and that energy and mineral development would create jobs and tax revenue. The counterargument is that the outdoor recreation economy, which depends on the landscape’s scenic and cultural character, already generates substantial economic activity, and that monument designation supports rather than hinders this economy. Nationally, the outdoor recreation economy contributed approximately $887 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product in 2022, supporting 4.5 million jobs.³²

In San Juan County specifically, the economic data are contested. Monument supporters argue that visitor spending increased significantly after the 2016 designation, benefiting local businesses, particularly in the town of Bluff. Monument opponents argue that increased visitation brought traffic, crowding, and strain on local infrastructure without sufficient economic return to offset the loss of potential mining and drilling revenue.³³ The economic debate is genuine, and it resists simple resolution, because the comparison is between certain short-term revenue from resource extraction and longer-term, less concentrated benefits from recreation and tourism.

What Bears Ears reveals

Bears Ears is often discussed as a conservation story or a tribal sovereignty story or a legal story about the limits of presidential power. It is all of these things. But it is also, more fundamentally, a story about the architecture of decision-making in American public land management.

The United States owns approximately 640 million acres of land, roughly 28 percent of the nation’s total land area.³⁴ The decisions about how that land is managed, what is extracted from it, what is protected on it, who has access to it, and whose cultural connections to it are recognized, are among the most consequential domestic policy decisions the government makes. These decisions affect water supplies, wildlife populations, carbon storage, recreational access, Indigenous cultural practices, and the economic prospects of rural communities across the West.

The current system distributes this decision-making authority across multiple, often competing, institutions. Congress can designate wilderness areas, national parks, and conservation lands through legislation. The president can designate national monuments through the Antiquities Act. Federal agencies (BLM, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service) manage the land day to day under statutory mandates that sometimes conflict. State governments assert interests in federal land within their borders. Tribal nations hold trust responsibilities and treaty rights that predate the federal government. Local communities depend on the land for their livelihoods and their identities.

Bears Ears exposes the instability that results when these competing authorities are not reconciled. A presidential designation that can be reversed by the next president does not provide stable protection. A co-management agreement that can be rescinded by a subsequent administration does not establish durable tribal governance. A legal question about presidential authority that has been pending for over a century and remains unresolved by the Supreme Court does not provide a reliable framework for land management.

The land itself does not require resolution. The canyons will erode at their geological pace. The archaeological sites will persist or deteriorate according to the forces acting on them: weathering, vandalism, visitation, neglect. The plants and animals that inhabit the mesas and creek bottoms will respond to rainfall, temperature, and disturbance regardless of which proclamation is currently in effect.

What requires resolution is the human system that governs the land. The question of who decides is not merely a procedural matter. It determines whether 100,000 archaeological sites are monitored or abandoned, whether uranium mining returns to a landscape already scarred by its legacy, whether five tribal nations with millennia of connection to the land have any formal role in its stewardship, and whether the conservation of a globally significant cultural landscape depends on the outcome of each presidential election.

Bears Ears has not answered this question. It has, through seven years of designation, reduction, restoration, and renewed uncertainty, demonstrated why the question must be answered.