The ancient Ancestral Puebloan “Et Al” site, an archaeological marvel, lies nestled amidst the thick piñon and juniper woodlands of Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah, its remnants bearing witness to a vibrant civilization that thrived until the early 13th century. Excavations have revealed a sophisticated village featuring a two-story "great house," echoing the monumental architecture found in New Mexico’s renowned Chaco Canyon, alongside two kivas—subterranean ceremonial chambers—shrines, and other significant structural elements. Further north, the Owens site presents another remarkable "great house," distinguished by an even larger kiva, indicating its role as a primary locus for major ceremonial gatherings. Both pueblos, notably grander and more intricate than other contemporaneous structures in the vicinity, clearly served as crucial communal hubs and ceremonial centers for the wider Cedar Mesa community, underscoring their profound historical and cultural importance.

Radiating outwards from both the Et Al and Owens sites are enigmatic linear swales, human-engineered depressions that stretch for more than a mile in remarkably straight lines. While their precise function remains a subject of archaeological debate, these ancient "roads" are widely believed to be ceremonial or symbolic conduits. They likely served not only to physically link disparate communities but also to forge spiritual connections to sacred mountains and prominent natural landforms, weaving together the physical and metaphysical landscapes. The enduring significance of these pathways is further underscored by the discovery of Hopi pottery dating to the 15th century along the Et Al "roads"—centuries after the original inhabitants departed Cedar Mesa. This finding suggests a powerful, intergenerational bond, indicating that descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans returned to visit and honor their ancestral homeland, reinforcing the idea that these ancient structures cannot be understood in isolation. Instead, they are an inextricable part of a vast, interconnected cultural and natural landscape, a testament to a worldview where human existence is deeply interwoven with the environment.

This profound, holistic understanding of the land stands in stark contrast to recent governmental actions impacting these very territories. In 2016, a landmark moment for Indigenous sovereignty and conservation, President Barack Obama, responding to a historic request from a coalition of five sovereign tribal nations—the Hopi Nation, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Zuni Pueblo—established the expansive Bears Ears National Monument. This landscape-scale designation encompassed Cedar Mesa and beyond, protecting tens of thousands of invaluable archaeological sites like those at Et Al and Owens, along with the rich biodiversity and cultural traditions of the surrounding public lands. However, this hard-won protection proved ephemeral. Just one year later, President Donald Trump significantly curtailed the boundaries of both Bears Ears and the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a move widely condemned by tribal leaders and conservationists. While President Joe Biden subsequently restored the monuments to their original sizes, the threat resurfaced with renewed intensity. Earlier this year, on July 13, the Trump administration, through executive proclamations, renewed and dramatically broadened its attack on these protected areas, reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by approximately 90% each. This sweeping action stripped federal protections from more than 2.9 million acres of public lands, including nearly all of Cedar Mesa, leaving the Et Al and Owens sites once again vulnerable.

These recent cuts represent an even more extensive rollback than previous actions. At Grand Staircase-Escalante, Trump’s proclamation removed an astounding 1.69 million acres from national monument status. This decision immediately revived the contentious prospect of large-scale coal mining on previously leased areas within the fossil-rich Kaiparowits Plateau, a region renowned for its extraordinary paleontological discoveries. Furthermore, it reopened avenues for uranium extraction in the historically significant Circle Cliffs mining district and for oil and gas drilling across vast stretches of the formerly protected expanse. Beyond resource extraction, the administration also eased crucial restrictions on motorized travel, vegetation clearing, and livestock grazing across the drastically diminished remnants of both monuments, signaling a broader deregulatory agenda.

Compounding the assault on conservation and Indigenous rights, Trump’s executive order also unilaterally terminated the Bears Ears Commission. This pioneering body, comprised of representatives from the five tribal nations, played an unprecedented role in co-developing the monument’s management plan, embodying a forward-thinking model of tribal co-management and self-determination. In a move that underscored the administration’s perceived hostility toward tribal sovereignty, federal agencies also removed the seals of the five tribes from official signs at what little remained of Bears Ears, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. This symbolic act was seen as a deliberate erasure of Indigenous presence and authority over their ancestral lands.

The proclamations underpinning these dramatic reductions were purportedly issued under the authority of the 1906 Antiquities Act. This landmark legislation empowers presidents to designate federal land to protect natural landmarks, archaeological sites, and "other objects of historic or scientific interest." Crucially, however, the Act does not explicitly grant a president the power to rescind or substantially reduce an existing national monument; legal scholars widely contend that such authority is reserved solely for Congress. This fundamental legal question is now poised to reach the highest echelons of the U.S. judiciary, with the Supreme Court anticipated to eventually weigh in as a torrent of lawsuits filed by tribal nations, environmental organizations, and conservation advocates ascend through the legal system. The administration’s defense further posited that national monument status was redundant, arguing that the lands in question were already adequately safeguarded by other existing federal laws and regulations.

Ironically, this claim of existing protections rings hollow when juxtaposed with the administration’s broader policy goals. In its relentless pursuit of "energy dominance," the government actively sought to diminish those very rules and regulations it cited as sufficient safeguards. One particularly insidious maneuver aimed to incapacitate Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, a critical piece of legislation that theoretically mandates federal agencies to consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties and requires consultation with tribes whose cultural sites may be impacted. This targeted undermining of protective frameworks exposed the administration’s true priorities, prioritizing resource extraction over heritage preservation.

Beyond its transparently destructive deregulatory agenda, the White House’s legal justification for the monument cuts revealed a profound misunderstanding, or deliberate misrepresentation, of the region’s intricate landscape and deep history. The administration contended that the original boundaries encompassed an excessive amount of land, thereby failing to comply with the Antiquities Act’s requirement that designations be limited to the "smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected." This reductionist interpretation was mirrored in a lawsuit filed by the state of Utah, which argued that while the monuments contained a "handful" of worthy "objects," these were distinct from the surrounding landscapes and should therefore receive protection on a strictly individual basis.

Trump’s redrawn boundaries rigidly adhere to this narrow, fragmented approach. They meticulously delineate lines around only the most widely recognized landmarks and historic sites, callously dismissing everything else as merely "generic topographic and geologic features." In Grand Staircase-Escalante, for example, the administration effectively annihilated nearly all of the monument’s west side. What remained were isolated, tiny squares and a similarly sized strip near the community of Big Water. This particular sliver was preserved specifically because it was the discovery site of the bones of Sarabosaurus dahli, a newly identified taxon of the ancient Turonian mosasaurid, a sea-going dinosaur. Yet, paleontologists confirm that this ancient creature and its contemporaries were not confined to such a minuscule area; vital fossils abound across hundreds of thousands of acres of the Kaiparowits Plateau. The true irony, and the clear motivation, is that this very plateau also holds immense reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas—and thus, predictably, it lost its protected status.

Bears Ears, meanwhile, has been dismembered into two primary units, Shásh Jáa and Indian Creek, complemented by a smattering of tiny, discrete units that extend monument status to a handful of Ancestral Puebloan sites like Doll House, Moon House, and the Citadel. The proclamation also bizarrely extends protection to the Scorup Cabin, once inhabited by the "Mormon Cowboy" A.J. Scorup, and even an oil well drilled in 1926—an astonishing inclusion that effectively protects an antique oil well from further oil and gas development, while opening vast, archaeologically rich areas to new drilling.

Had President Theodore Roosevelt, the visionary behind the Antiquities Act, applied similar reductionist logic when he established Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908, he would not have safeguarded the original 800,000 acres. Instead, he would have designated a fragmented collection of much smaller "units," each containing an isolated landmark like Havasu Falls, 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 significant landscapes are infinitely more than the mere sum of a handful of discrete "objects." One cannot truly extract the Vishnu Temple from the Grand Canyon, nor any ancient dwelling from its surrounding environment. Such so-called discrete "objects"—be they landforms, ancient dwellings, or other cultural sites—are inherently inseparable from the broader landscape itself. To sever them from their context is to strip them of their profound meaning and significance. Therefore, to genuinely protect these invaluable elements, as the Antiquities Act unequivocally authorizes the president to do, one must also safeguard the interconnected landscapes that define and give meaning to these "objects."

This holistic concept has a strong foundation in American jurisprudence. The Supreme Court itself affirmed this very principle following Roosevelt’s initial use of the newly minted Antiquities Act to establish the Grand Canyon National Monument. When mining interests with claims in the canyon challenged the designation, taking their case all the way to the High Court, the justices definitively ruled against them. In their seminal opinion, they articulated that the law empowered the president to "establish reserves embracing ‘objects of historic or scientific interest.’" The Court explicitly stated that the entire Grand Canyon, as outlined in Roosevelt’s proclamation, constituted "an object of unusual scientific interest." This powerful precedent directly contradicts the recent administration’s fragmented approach, bolstering the argument that vast, interconnected landscapes can and should be protected as singular, invaluable "objects" under the Antiquities Act.

President Obama brought this holistic concept to fruition on an even grander scale with the establishment of Bears Ears National Monument. His designation sought to protect not only prominent individual sites like Et Al but also the intricate network of ceremonial "roads," sacred shrines, ancient agricultural fields, and natural landforms that surrounded and connected them. In these critical cases, the "objects of historic and scientific interest" transcend mere discrete landmarks. As the land itself—particularly the Ancestral Puebloan sites, with their profound synthesis of natural form and human community—makes clear, the entire ecosystem and cultural matrix is the object of protection. Santa Clara Pueblo artist, architect, and scholar Rina Swentzell eloquently captured this worldview in a 1991 paper on Ancestral Puebloan architecture, stating, "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 elaborated 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 current legal battles over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante thus represent a critical juncture, a profound clash between this enduring Indigenous and ecological understanding of the land and a reductionist view driven by resource exploitation. The outcome will not only determine the fate of these ancient, sacred landscapes but also set a crucial precedent for public land management, environmental conservation, and the recognition of tribal sovereignty for generations to come, both within the United States and globally.