What Is Bears Ears National Monument

"Yesterday, President Obama declared two new sections of federal land national monuments. According to Coral Davenport at The New York Times, the new monuments are a 1.35 million-acre swath of southeastern Utah known as Bears Ears and 300,000 acres of Gold Butte, a mountainous section of rugged Mojave desert adjacent to Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in southern Nevada.

Davenport reports that efforts to protect the Bear’s Ears Buttes began in 1936, when Interior Secretary Harold Ickes first proposed the monument. Pressure to protect Gold Butte began in 2008 when environmentalists teamed up with the Navajo nation and other local Native American tribes to protect an area that is important to their history and culture. The new monument will include a tribal commission that will advise the managers of the new monument, a first in the national monuments system. “This is an exciting day for Navajo Nation. We have always looked to Bears Ears as a place of refuge, as a place where we can gather herbs and plants and as a place of sacredness,” Russell Begaye, president of the Navajo Nation tells Davenport. “It is a place of safety and fortitude. It is a place where our ancestors hid and survived from U.S. cavalry during the Long War.”..."
Bears Ears Monument