The agreement to preserve the national monument was ratified in an agreement signed on Saturday and honored with the unveiling of a new Bears Ears welcome sign, which includes the insignia of the five tribes that will help the operation of the monument, the Interior Ministry said in one statement. “Today, instead of moving away from a landscape to open a public park, we are being called back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them,” said Carleton Bowekaty, Zuni Pueblo’s vice-governor. Mr. Bowekaty is the co-chair of the Bears Ears Committee, a group that also includes representatives of four other tribes that were once ousted from the land: the Hopi, the Navajo, the Ute Mountain Ute and the Ute. Indian tribe of Uintah and Ouray Reservation. “This type of true management will serve as a model,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Homeland Security Office. Homer Wilkes, Undersecretary of Natural Resources and Environment, said in a statement that the pact was a “unique cooperation agreement” that outlined a common vision for managing and protecting these lands. The agreement requires the Office of Land Management to “co-operate substantially” with the committee in areas including spatial planning, management and conservation, while working to protect the traditions “that are part of the way of life of tribal nations in these territories”. The tribes and the government will also work together to develop public planning in the Bears Ears and to “explore opportunities” for the repatriation of items removed from the land. The purpose of the agreement, according to the agreement, is to ensure “that the management decisions affecting the monument reflect the know-how and the traditional and historical knowledge of the tribal nations and peoples concerned.” Bears Ears got its name from two adjacent hives that rise above the landscape in a similar way. Hikers appreciate its beauty and emptiness, while Native American tribes see the earth as the center of a number of traditions, including hunting and storytelling, citing stories told in ancient sculptures on the monument’s sandstone walls. National monuments are protected from development by law. They are similar to national parks, but the monuments are established by presidents through the Antiquities Act of 1906, while national parks are created by Congress. Bears Ears first became public land in December 2016 as part of President Barack Obama’s efforts to strengthen his environmental heritage before being succeeded by Donald J. Trump. A year later, Mr. Trump reduced the Bears Ears by 85%, seeking to use the land for economic growth, particularly through oil and gas exploration. President Biden reversed that decision last year with an adviser to Deb Haland, the interior minister and the nation’s first Native American secretary of state. Ms. Haaland visited Bears Ears in 2018 while campaigning for a seat representing New Mexico in the House of Representatives. “There are some amazing ruins out there and, you know, I don’t even like to call them ruins,” Haaland told the Guardian in 2019. “People ‘s spirit never goes away.”
