Bears Ears: The Monument at the Center of a National Debate

Visible on clear days from the mesa tops around Blanding, a pair of flat-topped sandstone buttes rise from the canyon lands to the south, their profiles distinctive enough that indigenous people named them for what they resemble: bears ears. The Bears Ears formation stands at the center of one of the richest concentrations of archaeological sites in North America, an area that scholars estimate contains as many as one hundred thousand separate sites where Ancestral Puebloan people lived, worked, and left their marks on the landscape over thousands of years.

Five Native nations, including the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, and the Ute Indian Tribe, regard the Bears Ears landscape as sacred and sought legal protection for it for generations. In December of twenty sixteen, President Barack Obama used the Antiquities Act to designate Bears Ears National Monument, protecting one point three million acres. Less than a year later, President Donald Trump reduced the monument to roughly two hundred thousand acres, one of the largest reductions of any monument's boundaries in American history. President Joe Biden restored the monument to close to its original size in twenty twenty-one.

The legal and political contest over Bears Ears drew international attention because it surfaced a fundamental question: who speaks for ancient sites on public land, and how should the federal government weigh indigenous heritage claims against other uses? For visitors to this part of southeastern Utah, the debate matters less immediately than the landscape itself, a canyon country where the distance between the present and a thousand years ago is measured in a short walk.