The ancestral Puebloan “Et Al” site, a profound testament to ancient ingenuity, lies nestled amidst the thick piñon and juniper forests of Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah. This archaeological marvel, inhabited until the early 1200s, once served as a vibrant community featuring a two-story "great house," an architectural echo of the magnificent structures found in New Mexico’s renowned Chaco Canyon. Alongside this central dwelling, archaeologists have uncovered two kivas—subterranean ceremonial chambers integral to Puebloan spiritual life—shrines, and other significant architectural features. Further to the north, the Owens site presents another imposing great house, distinguished by an even larger great kiva designed for major community ceremonies. These two pueblos, grander and more intricate than contemporaneous structures in the vicinity, clearly functioned as pivotal gathering points for the broader Cedar Mesa community, drawing people from across the ancient landscape for social and spiritual events.

Radiating outwards from both the Et Al and Owens sites are linear, human-engineered swales, often extending for more than a mile in remarkably straight lines. While their precise function remains a subject of ongoing archaeological debate, these "roads" are widely believed to be ceremonial or symbolic constructions. They likely served not only as physical pathways linking disparate communities but also as spiritual conduits, directing pilgrims and ceremonies towards sacred mountains or prominent natural landforms. The enduring significance of these pathways is underscored by archaeological finds, including Hopi pottery dating from the 1400s—centuries after the original inhabitants departed Cedar Mesa. Such discoveries indicate that the descendants of the ancient Puebloans continued to return to these ancestral lands, traversing the very paths their forebears built, maintaining a profound, multi-generational connection to their heritage. These "roads" fundamentally demonstrate that these ancient structures cannot be understood in isolation; they are an inextricable part of the region’s expansive cultural and natural tapestry, interwoven with the lives and beliefs of successive generations.

This intricate tapestry of cultural heritage and pristine wilderness has, for years, been at the heart of a contentious national debate over land management. In 2016, responding to the unified request of five sovereign tribal nations—the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and Zuni Tribe—President Barack Obama established the landscape-scale Bears Ears National Monument. This landmark designation protected thousands of irreplaceable archaeological sites, like those on Cedar Mesa, along with the surrounding ecologically vital lands. However, the monument’s future became uncertain a year later when President Donald Trump drastically shrank the boundaries of both Bears Ears and the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. President Joe Biden subsequently restored both monuments to their original expansive sizes. Yet, in a dramatic and unprecedented move this past July 13, President Trump renewed and broadened his attack on these cherished landscapes, signing proclamations that reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by approximately 90% each. This action stripped federal protections from over 2.9 million acres of public lands, including nearly all of Cedar Mesa and the pivotal Et Al and Owens sites, reigniting a fierce legal and environmental battle.

These recent cuts represent a far more extensive rollback of protections than his previous actions. At Grand Staircase-Escalante, Trump’s proclamation removed 1.69 million acres from national monument status. This decision immediately revived the contentious prospect of coal mining on previously leased areas within the fossil-rich Kaiparowits Plateau, opened the door to uranium extraction in the historic Circle Cliffs mining district, and cleared the way for expanded oil and gas drilling across vast swathes of the once-protected region. Furthermore, the new orders significantly eased existing restrictions on motorized travel, vegetation clearing, and livestock grazing, even on the minuscule portions that remain of both monuments, signaling a broader deregulatory agenda.

Beyond the physical reduction of land, Trump’s order also summarily terminated the Bears Ears Commission, a groundbreaking initiative that represented the five tribal nations instrumental in developing the monument’s original management plan. This commission embodied a progressive model of collaborative land stewardship, recognizing the deep historical and spiritual ties of Indigenous peoples to these lands. In a move widely interpreted as a direct affront to tribal sovereignty, federal agencies, following the White House’s directive, also removed the five tribes’ official seals from informational signs at the remaining fragments of Bears Ears, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. This symbolic act underscored the administration’s overt hostility towards the principle of Indigenous self-determination and co-management.

The administration’s proclamations were purportedly issued under the authority of the 1906 Antiquities Act, a foundational conservation law empowering presidents to designate federal land to protect natural landmarks, archaeological sites, and "other objects of historic or scientific interest." However, legal scholars across the spectrum assert that the Act grants presidents the power to establish national monuments, but not explicitly to rescind or substantially reduce them; that authority, they argue, is reserved solely for Congress. This fundamental constitutional question regarding the separation of powers and presidential authority over public lands is now poised for a monumental legal showdown, with the Supreme Court widely expected to ultimately decide the matter as a flurry of lawsuits filed by tribal nations, environmental organizations, and conservation advocates ascend through the judicial system.

Adding to the controversy, the administration’s legal justifications also claimed that national monument status was rendered unnecessary because the lands in question were already adequately protected by other existing federal laws and regulations. This argument, however, appears contradictory when viewed against the backdrop of the administration’s broader agenda. President Trump, in his consistent pursuit of "energy dominance," has actively sought to weaken and diminish those very same environmental and cultural protection rules and regulations. One particularly concerning maneuver, for example, aims to incapacitate Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, a crucial piece of legislation that theoretically safeguards cultural sites from destructive development and mandates meaningful consultation with tribes whose ancestral lands and sites may be impacted.

Beyond its openly destructive deregulatory agenda, the White House’s legal rationale for the monument cuts betrays a profound misunderstanding of the area’s unique landscape and rich history. The administration argued that the original boundaries encompassed too much land, thereby failing to comply with the Antiquities Act’s requirement that designations be confined to the "smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected." This reductionist interpretation fundamentally clashes with the ecological and cultural reality of the region. The state of Utah, in its own recent lawsuit seeking to dismantle both monuments, echoed this perspective, contending that each monument contains only a handful of "objects" worthy of protection, distinct from the surrounding landscapes, and therefore should be protected on a strictly individual basis rather than holistically.

Trump’s redrawn boundaries rigidly adhere to this reductionist approach, meticulously carving out narrow perimeters around only the most widely recognized landmarks and historic sites, while dismissively categorizing everything else as merely "generic topographic and geologic features." In Grand Staircase-Escalante, for instance, the new proclamations virtually annihilated the monument’s entire west side, leaving behind a minuscule square and a similarly tiny strip of land near the community of Big Water. This latter fragment was notably preserved because it was the site where paleontologists unearthed the bones of Sarabosaurus dahli, a newly identified species of the ancient Turonian mosasaurid, a sea-going dinosaur. This selective protection is particularly baffling given that this ancient creature and its contemporaries were not confined to such a small area; in fact, significant fossils abound across hundreds of thousands of acres of the Kaiparowits Plateau. Yet, this very plateau is also exceptionally rich in coal, oil, and natural gas, and, perhaps predictably, it is precisely these resource-rich areas that have now lost their federal protections, opening them up to industrial exploitation.

Bears Ears, meanwhile, has been drastically reduced to two primary units, Shásh Jáa and Indian Creek, complemented by a handful of tiny, discrete units that extend national monument status to specific Ancestral Puebloan sites such as Doll House, Moon House, and the Citadel. Ironically, the proclamation also extends protection to the Scorup Cabin, once inhabited by the "Mormon Cowboy" A.J. Scorup, and even to an oil well drilled in 1926—a perplexing move that protects an ancient oil well from potential new oil and gas development, underscoring the arbitrary nature of the new boundaries.

Had President Theodore Roosevelt, the visionary who first wielded the Antiquities Act, followed a similar logic when he established Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908, he would never have protected the original 800,000 acres. Instead, he would have designated a scattered collection of much smaller "units," each containing a single, discrete landmark—Havasu Falls, perhaps, or Mather Point, Vishnu Temple, or Bright Angel Point. However, Roosevelt possessed a far more profound understanding of the American West than the recent administration. He recognized that sacred and scientifically significant landscapes are profoundly more than the mere sum of a handful of isolated "objects." Can one truly extract the Vishnu Temple from the Grand Canyon and retain its meaning? Such so-called discrete "objects"—be they geological formations, ancient dwellings, or other cultural sites—are inherently inseparable from the broader landscape itself. To separate them is to strip them of their context, their profound meaning, and their very essence. Therefore, to genuinely protect them, as the Antiquities Act empowers the president to do, one must necessarily protect the expansive, interconnected landscapes that define and connect these seemingly individual features.

This holistic concept has, in fact, been upheld by the nation’s highest court. Following Roosevelt’s pioneering use of the newly minted Antiquities Act to establish the Grand Canyon National Monument, a mining interest with claims within the canyon sued, taking their case all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices, however, ruled decisively against the mining interests, affirming in their opinion that the law empowered the president to "establish reserves embracing ‘objects of historic or scientific interest.’ The entire Grand Canyon, as stated in his [Roosevelt’s] proclamation, is ‘an object of unusual scientific interest.’" This ruling provided a critical legal precedent for understanding "objects" in the context of entire landscapes.

President Obama brought this holistic conservation concept to fruition on an even grander scale when he established Bears Ears, aiming to protect not only prominent individual sites like Et Al, but also the intricate network of "roads," shrines, ancient agricultural fields, and the natural landforms that embrace and connect them. The "objects of historic and scientific interest" in these cases are clearly more than discrete landmarks; the very land itself, and particularly the Puebloan sites with their sophisticated synthesis of natural form and human community, makes this interconnectedness unequivocally clear. As Santa Clara Pueblo artist, architect, and scholar Rina Swentzell eloquently articulated in a 1991 paper on Ancestral Puebloan architecture, "Here, the human landscape is meaningless outside the natural context—human constructions are not considered out of their relationship to the hills, valleys and mountains." Swentzell further emphasized this profound connection, writing that "the material village constitutes one place within the whole. The web of human existence is interlaced with what happens in the larger natural context and therefore flows into the adjacent spaces, hills, and mountains." The recent proclamations, by reducing these sacred lands to isolated points on a map, fundamentally disregard this Indigenous worldview and the established legal and scientific understanding of a cultural landscape, setting a dangerous precedent for the future of public lands and Indigenous heritage in the United States.