The order directs Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke to provide an interim report to Trump within 45 days of the order (no later than June 5) and a final report to the President within 120 days of that order. The bookends are the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument of 1996 and the Bears Ears National Monument Dec. 28, 2016. Trump’s executive order is at the least a terrible colonial mistake, if not an outright international crime, to ever let Utah State take over Bears Ears. Do not let that happen by action of the U.S. President, the Secretary of Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture or federal legislature.
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(The awesome Wayback Machine still has
BLM>National Conservation Lands>Monuments and it page entitled “
National Monuments” which is the archived webpage from April 25th before it was disappeared April 26th by Trump! It’s at:
is.gd/… )
Antiquities Act of 1906 grants Presidential authority to designate national monuments in order to protect “objects of historic or scientific interest.” While most national monuments are established by the President, Congress has also occasionally established national monuments protecting natural or historic features.
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Bears Ears has been home to Hopi, Navajo, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni for countless generations, many thousand years. That national monument has taken more than 80 years to designate. The Obama December, 2016 proclamation acknowledges a cultural landscape rich in antiquities, with more than 100,000 archaeological and cultural sites sacred to dozens of tribes. It also declares, that with the full force of Federal law, the Secretary of the Interior must work with the Bears Ears Commission on the management and protection of the resources within the monument. The permanent protection of Bears Ears is long overdue, and has finally given indigenous native nations a strong voice in how these land are managed unless Trump's abusive action of April 26, 2017 is allowed to prevail. More is to be learned at at http://bearsearscoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/BearsEarsCommission_LettertoZinke_March17.pdf
Interior Secretary Zinke: your vigorous protection for this sacred ancestral nationally treasured landscape is nonnegotiable.
Lend your voice! Tell Secretary Zinke to Honor Tribes, Honor Bears Ears. Ways to do so:
In July of 2015, leaders from five Tribes founded the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, representing a historic consortium of sovereign tribal nations united in the effort to conserve the Bears Ears cultural landscape. The five nations are committed to working together. A total of 30 Tribes have expressed support for protecting the Bear Ears region for future generations of Americans. Native American peoples are also seeking active engagement in future management of the area.
The members of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition are:
All are represented in the Bears Ears Commission
24 national monuments in jeopardy of losing their National Park protection status, include the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona, the Giant Sequoia National Monument in California, and the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in New Mexico (source: April 26th running list update of Trump Exec. Orders).
Click on the picture below to get a list of five replies to a tweet about a briefly captioned partial list of sacred waters and lands endangered by Trump & Zinke: