The Ancestral Puebloan “Et Al” site, an archaeological marvel, lies nestled amidst the thick piñon and juniper forests of Cedar Mesa in southeastern Utah, a region rich with millennia of human history. Excavations reveal that this village, inhabited until the early 1200s, once featured a prominent two-story “great house” strikingly similar in architectural design and scale to those found within the vast and influential Chaco Canyon complex in New Mexico, along with two kivas, ceremonial shrines, and other sophisticated architectural elements. A few miles to the north, the Owens site presents another testament to the region’s ancient inhabitants, boasting a similar great house and a monumental great kiva, a larger, often circular subterranean structure central to major community ceremonies and spiritual gatherings. These two pueblos, notably larger and more elaborately constructed than other contemporaneous structures in the vicinity, strongly suggest their role as vital gathering hubs and ceremonial centers for the wider Cedar Mesa community, drawing people from across the ancient landscape.

Radiating outwards from both the Et Al and Owens sites, intriguing linear swales, clearly human-built, stretch for more than a mile across the terrain in remarkably straight lines. While their precise function remains a subject of ongoing archaeological debate, prevailing theories suggest these ancient “roads” served not merely as thoroughfares but as deeply ceremonial or symbolic constructions. They likely connected distant communities, facilitated pilgrimages to sacred mountains or prominent natural landforms, and perhaps even aligned with celestial events, weaving together the spiritual and practical dimensions of Ancestral Puebloan life. The profound, intergenerational significance of these connections is underscored by the discovery of Hopi pottery from the 1400s along the Et Al "roads," centuries after the original inhabitants had migrated from Cedar Mesa. This evidence indicates that descendants of the ancient Puebloans returned to visit and honor their ancestral homeland, reaffirming the enduring spiritual and cultural ties to the landscape. These ancient pathways unequivocally demonstrate that structures like Et Al and Owens cannot be understood in isolation; they are inextricable components of a vast, interconnected cultural and natural landscape, each element holding meaning only in relation to the whole.

This deep-seated understanding of interconnectedness lies at the heart of the ongoing, fervent debate surrounding the protection of these irreplaceable lands. In 2016, a historic coalition of five sovereign tribal nations—the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and Zuni—advocated for the establishment of Bears Ears National Monument. Recognizing the profound cultural, archaeological, and ecological significance of the region, President Barack Obama subsequently designated the landscape-scale monument on Cedar Mesa and surrounding areas, safeguarding thousands of archaeological sites, petroglyphs, and vital ecological zones. This designation was unique, establishing the first-ever national monument with a co-management structure involving tribal nations, a groundbreaking recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and traditional ecological knowledge in federal land stewardship.

However, the monument’s existence immediately became a political flashpoint. Just a year later, in 2017, President Donald Trump significantly reduced the boundaries of both Bears Ears and the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a move that ignited widespread condemnation from tribal communities, conservationists, and legal scholars alike. His administration argued that the original designations were an overreach of federal power and encompassed too much land, hindering economic development. Following a change in administration, President Joe Biden, in 2021, restored both monuments to their original sizes, acknowledging their immense value and the importance of tribal consultation. Yet, the legal and political battles persist, with the original Trump-era proclamations and their underlying philosophy continuing to influence the dialogue around public land management and the interpretation of presidential authority. The prospect of future administrations revisiting these protections looms large, highlighting the enduring vulnerability of these culturally significant landscapes to shifting political tides and the relentless pursuit of resource extraction.

The initial Trump administration’s reductions were drastic, altering the protective status of over 2.9 million acres of public lands. At Grand Staircase-Escalante, a staggering 1.69 million acres were excised from national monument status. This action immediately revived the controversial prospect of coal mining on previously leased areas of the fossil-rich Kaiparowits Plateau, a geological treasure trove known for its unparalleled paleontological record, yielding numerous new dinosaur species. Furthermore, it opened the door to uranium extraction in the historic Circle Cliffs mining district and expanded opportunities for oil and gas drilling across the once-protected expanse. Beyond industrial development, the administration also eased restrictions on motorized travel, vegetation clearing, and livestock grazing within the significantly diminished remaining fragments of both monuments, further jeopardizing their ecological and cultural integrity.

Perhaps most controversially, the Trump administration’s order in 2017 terminated the Bears Ears Commission, a body specifically designed to ensure direct tribal input and co-management in the monument’s stewardship. This commission represented the five tribal nations whose ancestral ties to the region are undeniable and who played a pivotal role in advocating for the monument’s creation and shaping its management plan. The symbolic significance of this termination was underscored by reports, including those from the Salt Lake Tribune, that federal agencies also removed the five tribes’ seals from official signs at the remaining portions of Bears Ears, a clear affront to tribal sovereignty and a stark demonstration of the White House’s perceived hostility towards Indigenous self-determination.

The legal basis for these reductions hinges on the 1906 Antiquities Act, a landmark piece of legislation empowering presidents to designate federal land to protect natural landmarks, archaeological sites, and “other objects of historic or scientific interest.” However, the Act itself does not explicitly grant a president the authority to rescind or significantly reduce an existing national monument. Legal scholars widely contend that such authority rests solely with Congress. This fundamental legal question has propelled a cascade of lawsuits filed by tribal nations, conservation organizations, and advocacy groups, challenging the legality of the reductions. The outcome of these complex cases, which are expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court, will have profound implications for the future of public land protection and the interpretation of executive power in the United States.

The administration’s proclamations, in part, argued that national monument status was superfluous because the lands in question were already covered by other federal laws and regulations. This argument, however, stood in stark contrast to the administration’s broader agenda, which consistently sought to diminish and deregulate those very same environmental and cultural protection statutes. A particularly insidious move involved efforts to incapacitate Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, a crucial law that mandates federal agencies consider the effects of their undertakings on historic properties and consult with tribes whose cultural sites may be impacted by development. Such actions highlighted a deeper, more destructive deregulatory agenda beneath the surface of the monument boundary debate.

Moreover, the White House’s legal justification for the monument cuts displayed a profound misunderstanding of the region’s intricate landscape and its history. The administration contended that the original boundaries encompassed an excessive amount of land, thereby failing to comply with the Antiquities Act’s stipulation 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 echoed in lawsuits from the state of Utah, which acknowledged the presence of a few "objects" worthy of protection but argued they were distinct from the surrounding landscapes and thus merited only individual, isolated protection.

In practice, the Trump administration’s redrawn boundaries rigorously adhered to this reductionist philosophy, carving out lines around only the most recognizable landmarks and historic sites while summarily dismissing everything else as merely “generic topographic and geologic features.” This approach fundamentally ignored the complex, interwoven nature of these cultural and natural landscapes. For instance, in Grand Staircase-Escalante, the monument’s vast west side was almost entirely eliminated, save for a minuscule square and a similarly sized strip near the community of Big Water. This latter fragment was preserved primarily because it was the site where paleontologists unearthed the bones of Sarabosaurus dahli, a new taxon of the ancient, sea-dwelling Turonian mosasaurid. Yet, these ancient creatures and their contemporaries did not confine themselves to such a tiny, arbitrary plot; invaluable fossils abound across hundreds of thousands of acres of the Kaiparowits Plateau. This same plateau, however, is immensely rich in coal, oil, and gas, and consequently, much of its paleontological heritage, inextricably linked to the broader landscape, lost its protective status.

Similarly, Bears Ears was drastically reduced to two primary units, Shásh Jáa and Indian Creek, complemented by a scattering of tiny, discrete units extending monument status to a handful of Ancestral Puebloan sites like Doll House, Moon House, and the Citadel. The proclamation also controversially extended protection to the Scorup Cabin, once inhabited by the “Mormon Cowboy,” A.J. Scorup, and even an oil well drilled in 1926—an ironic twist of protecting an ancient oil well while opening vast tracts for new extraction.

This approach stands in stark contrast to the vision of early conservationists. Had President Theodore Roosevelt, the very architect of the Antiquities Act, applied such a narrow logic when he first established Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908, he would not have protected the original 800,000 acres. Instead, he would have designated a collection of much smaller “units,” each containing a singular landmark—Havasu Falls, perhaps, or Mather Point, Vishnu Temple, or Bright Angel Point. However, Roosevelt possessed a far more nuanced understanding of the American West than the later administration. He recognized that sacred and significant landscapes are profoundly more than the mere sum of a handful of discrete “objects.” Can one truly extract the majestic Vishnu Temple from the breathtaking expanse of the Grand Canyon? Such so-called discrete “objects”—be they landforms, ancient dwellings, or other cultural sites—are inherently inseparable from the landscape itself. To sever them from their natural and historical context is to strip them of their profound meaning and significance. Therefore, to genuinely protect them, as the Antiquities Act empowers the president to do, one must safeguard the encompassing landscapes that define and connect these seemingly individual components.

The Supreme Court has previously affirmed this holistic concept. Following Roosevelt’s establishment of the Grand Canyon National Monument, mining interests in the canyon challenged his authority. The High Court, however, ruled decisively against the mining claims, asserting in its 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 proclamation, is ‘an object of unusual scientific interest.’” This landmark ruling established a powerful precedent for understanding the vastness and interconnectedness that can constitute a single “object” under the Antiquities Act.

President Obama brought this holistic concept to its fullest expression on an even grander scale with the establishment of Bears Ears, aiming to protect not only prominent archaeological sites like Et Al but also the ceremonial "roads," ancestral shrines, ancient agricultural fields, and the natural landforms that intricately surround and define them. In these instances, the "objects of historic and scientific interest" transcend mere discrete landmarks; the very land itself, particularly the Ancestral Puebloan sites with their profound synthesis of natural form and human community, embodies a comprehensive cultural landscape. 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 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."

This profound Indigenous worldview, which sees humanity and nature as inextricably linked, forms the philosophical bedrock of the Bears Ears monument and the ongoing struggle for its comprehensive protection. The legal battles over its boundaries are more than just disputes over land; they are fundamental conflicts over competing worldviews regarding public land management, the sanctity of cultural heritage, the interpretation of environmental law, and the recognition of Indigenous self-determination. The outcome will not only determine the fate of these ancient sites but will also set a crucial precedent for how future generations define and protect the priceless cultural and natural heritage embedded within America’s public lands, influencing conservation efforts and Indigenous rights movements far beyond the borders of Utah.