The year 2020 may prove to be one of the most damaging to tribal sovereignty in this century. The Trump administration, emboldened by the seemingly unrestricted power of Executive Orders, has redoubled its efforts to claw back tribal lands to federal and corporate control under the guise of hot-button issues like “border security” and “local control.”
In the homelands of the Diné (Navajo), Hopi, Ute, Mountain Ute and Zuni nations, federal authorities continue to chip away at the protections secured by the Obama administration for the Bears Ears Monument, an 1.35 million acre expanse of rugged canyons and majestic buttes in southeast Utah.
Now a mere 25% of its original size, the Bears Ears area has been scheduled for a revision of its original management plan to include more off-road vehicle use, cattle grazing, and logging. The five indigenous nations whose lobbying convinced the previous administration to set aside the land for cultural preservation, are now fighting to push back against this blatant assault on tribal sovereignty. Known as the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, these tribal communities maintain a website that articulates the cultural significance of the area:
[we] hold the Bears Ears immediate landscape, as well as the lands fanning out from its twin plateaus, as traditional sacred lands. This land is a place where tribal traditional leaders and medicine people go to conduct ceremonies, collect herbs for medicinal purposes, and practice healing rituals stemming from time immemorial, as demonstrated through tribal creation stories.
The Bears Ears land is a unique cultural place where we visit and practice our traditional religions for the purpose of attaining or resuming health for ourselves, human communities, and our natural world as an interconnected and inextricable whole. When we speak about health, we are not only talking about an individual, we are talking about one’s health in relation to others around us and that of the land. We are talking about healing.
Our relationship and visits to Bears Ears and essential for this process. Ruining the integrity of these lands forever compromises our ability to heal. The traditional knowledge related to Bears Ears is important and irreplaceable in itself. The continuity of indigenous traditional medicine is in peril, as long as lands like the Bears Ears are not protected. [bearearscoalition.org]
The tribes have been joined in their defense by the Grand Canyon Trust [https://www.grandcanyontrust.org/bears-ears-national-monument]
Learn more about the BLM’s plans for Bears Ears ›
At the southern end of the Great Basin, a similar story is unfolding. There, along the US/Mexico border, and within the traditional homeland of the Tohono O’odham nation, the construction of the border wall has disturbed or destroyed archaeological sites, rare plant life, and traditional ceremonial spaces. Rep. R Grijalva (D, Arizona) has written the Department of Homeland Security a letter condemning the construction: “I strongly urge DHS to conduct meaningful government-to-government consultation with the Tohono O’odham Nation about the DHS’s planned border wall construction.” Ned Norris Jr., chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, also voiced the tribes opposition: The Nation categorically opposes the barrier construction projects, because they directly harm and threaten both the lands currently reserved for the Nation … and its ancestral lands that extend along the international boundary in Arizona.”
As the Tohono O’odham Nation makes clear in their statement, this is an issue of sovereignty as well as cultural and religious freedom.
The construction site, an ugly slash through the formerly pristine Organ Pipe National Monument, has also destroyed some of the rare cactus habitat that is world-renowned for its beauty and uniqueness.
https://images.app.goo.gl/xfRfevxHPD925vVS7
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2020/02/09/border-wall-native-american-burial-sites/
