Led by the Navajo, Ute Mountain, Hopi, Zuni, and Uintah and Ouray Ute nations, a coalition of 25 tribes has asked the president to preserve 1.9 million acres of public lands surrounding the Bears Ears buttes. The Intertribal Coalition proposes co-management of this monument through an eight-member commission. One person would come from each tribe, and one representative could come from each federal agency that manages land within the boundaries – the National Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management.

The Native leaders emphasize community over commodity. As Eric Descheenie, Navajo co-chair of the Bears Ears Coalition, says, this land is a “who,” not a “what” or a “that.” It is a living land that Native people “relate to in a religious way,” loving the Bears Ears no differently than they would a family member. He emphasizes this “indigenous truth” as the foundation for all discussions about “healing, a people’s movement, and collaborative management.”

Hopi Tribal Vice Chairman Alfred Lomahquahu Jr. calls this new approach a breakthrough for Native Americans. He sees it as a return to the original intent of the Antiquities Act and an approach that could serve as a template for national monuments elsewhere in the country. Co-management creates a new “tool of self-determination and sovereignty to benefit the tribes,” he said.

This extraordinary landscape deserves protection for all the reasons that we typically think of as imperatives — its ecological and wilderness values, all of which are threatened by destructive oil and gas development. Cedar Mesa, in the heart of the Bears Ears proposal, shelters more than 56,000 cultural sites that reach more than 12,000 years into the past. This unbroken cultural record makes this remote corner of southeastern Utah among the richest archaeological districts in the United States. Yet Bears Ears, the nation’s most significant unprotected cultural resource, is also starkly threatened today by vandals who ransack prehistoric graves.