Battle Over Bears Ears

(soft music) - This is the Bears Ears, and it's alive, and it has its own spirit, has its own agency, its own power and its own gift - These resources are too valuable.

They're irreplaceable.

It's like tearing pages out of a history book and once they're gone, they're gone.

- Tension is growing in the Southeastern corner of Utah.

Native Americans propose a new national monument called Bears Ears to honor the region's significance.

This is an example of public lands.

It belongs to the people that live on the East Coast to the West Coast.

This is gonna set the tone for other public lands conversations throughout the nation.

- But many towns people oppose the monument.

- This is more than recreation to me.

This is my home.

For the government to come in and make this monument and take away the freedoms that we enjoy here?

It's like taking America away from me.

- The very tool that you want to use to protect something is the very thing that will bring people in to destroy it.

- Who has the final say on how the region is managed and protected.

The Bears Ears, debates will challenge, local versus national control.

Presidential power to Native American sovereignty.

It will tear apart a community and it will reflect deep divides in the nation.

- I was born and raised here.

I feel like I grew up on the frontier and to a certain extent, it still is the frontier.

It's a harsh landscape here.

You have to be tough and you really rely on Mother Nature to a certain extent, more than in other areas.

- The proposed monument would exist in Utah's San Juan County.

It's a county about the size of New Jersey, but home to just over 15,000 people.

People who don't have much control over the land because most of it is federally owned.

Only 8% is privately held.

- It's the poorest county in the state, economically, it's difficult to make a living.

There've been a few boom times, uranium boom brought untold and unprecedented wealth to the county, but that has long since gone away.

- It's a remarkably diverse county.

So almost exactly half Native American, half not Native American.

And it can become dangerous to make assumptions of based upon the color of someone's skin or where they live, what their viewpoints are, whose voices are heard.

Does everyone get an opportunity to develop a plan for the future.

- For archeologists it's Disneyland, just really, rare unusual artif that are one of a kind, that have never been found anywhere else.

I know these places have stories to tell and archeology can get at those stories.

It's as close as we can come to having a time machine.

- The human stories began around 13,000 years ago.

Clovis people hunted mammoth here.

Centuries later, ancient Puebloans would build their rock homes in sacred Kivas on the canyon walls.

Southern Paiutes, Utes and Navajo would settle here and call it home.

And ruts in the rocks still show the grueling path of Mormon pioneers.

- People were here for thousands of years and it's very difficult to go anywhere and not be on a site.

- Tens of thousands of historical and archeological sites are sprinkled all around Bears Ears, and there might even be more we've yet to discover.

- Bears Ears has more archeological sites than any other US national park or monument.

It has all this sacred value to Native Americans.

It has archeology that's important for American history.

This is a place of international significance that we need to be protecting.

- Most people agree that the resources should be protected, but how?

A national monument can be set aside by the president to protect cultural and historic sites, but only Congress can declare a national park and the balance of protections for both vary.

National parks have strict guidelines about park, visitation and use, while national monuments have more latitude on what they can allow or prohibit.

Activities like grazing, hunting and wood gathering can vary from monument to monument.

Monument supporters say they want better management, greater funding and more protection, especially from looting and future oil and gas drilling.

This region has some oil and gas potential along with uranium mining although its development is questionable.

The debate over resources stretches throughout the year, both on a national and local level.

We wanna protect it for everyone.

- But there is a growing fear on the other side, that a monument will restrict use, bring more visitors and actually harm the landscape.

- You are inviting these people into our land - To vandalize it.

- Concerns are mounting in San Juan County.

Here ties run deep and land is more than just soil.

This ground is rooted in family, traditions, and heritage spanning generations and nearly everyone in the Bears Ears debate feels a profound, cultural and spiritual connection to the land.

But how they define and experience that connection differs.

- The blood of your ancestors is the blood that you have.

And you're carrying that through.

My name is Angelo Baca and in the traditional way, I would introduce myself in Navajo.

I would say Angelo Baca, [speaks in Navajo] I have all sides of my family in that introduction.

I've lived here in San Juan County on and off my whole life.

My grandmother has a lineage that goes back to Bears Ears as well.

It's very traditional.

She didn't speak any English.

She was here when some of the first roads were built.

Some of the first white people came in, you know, when the first automobiles would break down and get stuck out in the middle of nowhere.

So she had seen a lot of changes.

She was very supportive of the work of protecting and conserving and preserving Bears Ears.

In particular, she thought that it would be significant for Navajo people to have as a ceremonial place and of healing and prayer.

- I grew up on a ranch.

I come from a ranching family.

So I was riding when I was pregnant with Preston, even before he can remember he was riding a horse.

- I've been able to ride out here with my grandpa, my dad's dad and my mom's father and everything else.

And so, I mean, that's all I know.

So it's kinda hard to take it out of me.

It's how I make my living.

It's how my kids have been raised.

I got two little boys and one little girl that like coming out here and my two boys they love riding their horses, and moving cows and doing everything else.

Being out and doing what I've done all my life.

It gives you a greater respect for what things are and where they come from.

When the land gets dry and it's not greening up in the brush and the grass isn't looking good.

I'm feeling that too, because that's how I live off the rain and the moisture we get and the cows.

And I guess you could say it's sacred.

- I believe this world is created by our heavenly father for man to live on.

And man is to be the steward of that land and he's to use it, but not abuse it, you know, not just let it sit out there and look at it and go to waste, to become somebody's playground from Wasatch Front or Washington DC or what else.

He expects us to actually do something useful.

- I just always thought, this is our backyard.

We'd come up here and have family reunions, just go fishing or hiking, camping up, up basically learned how to drive a truck up on this mountain, learn how to shoot a gun.

I fell off a horse, my first horse on that mountain, you know, I killed my first deer on that mountain.

So there's all of these memories, these things that mean so much to us and make us who we are and they're tied to this land.

And so it becomes a part of you.

This spot here is really, really special to me.

And it's because my boyfriend took his last breath right here.

And so this, you know, I come out here to visit instead of the cemetery, we talk about sacred places.

This is incredibly sacred to me.

There's a ton of sacred spots.

It's not just me.

It's not just this spot right here.

It's this entire area.

When you have a place like this, that's so special to you and you have this vision of people putting signs up by it or people coming and going and not realizing just what it means to somebody.

It it's like a gut punch.

- This is a place that helps me to become a better human being and get myself reconnected to the land again.

To me, it helps me reorient myself what I'm doing, what my work is, what my purpose is.

And I understand that this place is something that is so special that I have to do everything I can to try to preserve and protect and take care of it.

And if I could do that, then I feel like I would have done something significant with my life.

- The idea of protecting the region dates back more than a century.

It began with archeologists who recognized its cultural treasures.

In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration proposed a national monument of 4 million acres.

Decades later, conservationists took up the fight, but now it's different.

For the first time Native Americans are leading the charge.

- This is my birthright.

And as I understand who wants to sell their birthright?

- Willie Grayeyes' lifelong dream is to see the Homeland of his Navajo ancestors protected beyond reservation boundaries.

He helped create an advocacy group called Utah Dine Bikeyah or the People's Sacred Ground.

Soon five tribes with a history of fighting united for the caurse.

- The Navajo and the Hopi were not always on good terms.

Neither were the Navajo and the Ute.

And to be able to find that common ground and goal was absolutely imperative that we needed to heal from within.

- The Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition formed in 2015.

They asked the Obama administration to create a 1.9 million acre national monument.

The coalition's plan is unprecedented.

Native Americans would manage the land alongside federal agencies.

- Equality is the first of its kind to literally have Native Americans sitting at the table, making policies with other agencies.

- The tribes want the White House to use the Antiquities Act of 1906.

This law empowers presidents to set aside land, to preserve scientific and archeological treasures without congressional approval.

But Utah's political leaders bristle.

To them, it's presidential overreach.

- States and governors are saying, you know, we don't like this unilateral, one man wave the wand and come into our backyards and make the significant changes that impact us maybe with good intentions, but have in fact, some significant draw backs.

- Utah leaders oppose executive action.

They want Congress to decide and they back a solution Utah Congressman Rob Bishop has been working on for years.

The fight comes to a head in the winter of 2016.

Representative Bishop's bill is all but dead.

President Obama's term is about to end.

Time is running out.

- I had said all along, we believe these areas weren't protected, and we do have the authority to act through presidential authority.

We'd rather work with you and we did on drafting assistance and so on.

But if you don't act we will.

- President Barack Obama signs a proclamation creating the Bears Ears National Monument on December 28th, 2016.

There is no fanfare, just a document posted on the White House website.

It says, "Rising from the center "of the Southeastern Utah landscape "and visible from every direction, "are twin buttes so distinctive "that in each of the native languages of the region, "their name is the same, Bears Ears."

- The United States has done something that very few places in the world have done, which is they've taken their best, most special places, and they've set them aside for all of the public to enjoy.

And they tell the story of our painful journey.

They tell the story of our triumphs and our tragedies.

That's something that we need to honor and preserve and protect, not just for now, but for future generations.

- I only celebrated for maybe about five minutes and I was already calling other people saying, okay, now what do we gotta do to protect it.

(crowd cheering) - The office of president of the United States.

- With the arrival of the Trump administration, the future of the monument is in doubt.

Opponents are hopeful they will be heard and the Bears Ears National Monument dismantled.

- You're just filled with this passion that's combined with rage, that's combined with pretty much every other emotion you can think of.

And trying to get somebody to understand that has been really difficult for us down here.

- Jami Bayles is the president of the Stewards of San Juan County, a local group seeking to rescind the monument.

- We're not anti monument and we're not pro drill, drill, drill.

It's just, we were so against the process and how can we have all of our elected officials in the State of Utah, in all of San Juan County and agree on one thing, but no, a monument is not the right thing for this area.

It feels like we were purposely left out of even having a say like everybody else around us has a say, but San Juan County doesn't.

- They also raise questions about who's really behind the monument.

- The Bears Ears Coalition.

This group came up really late in the process.

Many of them are simply fronts for environmental groups that are actually pushing a different agenda.

- It makes a difference when Grand Canyon Trust starts writing you checks.

the Wilderness Society's been doing it Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

If you read the Conservation Lands Foundation minutes, they say, "do we really wanna hitch our wagon "to the Navajos?"

It's their agenda.

Let's hitch this wagon to the Navajos and we can't lose.

- To say that Native Americans are a proxy group for conservationists is absurd.

To see the Hopis, the Navajos, the Utes, and the other tribes come together for the first time in the history to champion this, they're doing that on their own.

They're not proxies of any white people.

- The tribal leaders requested of these groups that they would support us.

And if there's anything that the tribes would need, that they then could help.

They were not to speak in behalf of the tribes.

And they were not to make decisions.

- A national monument should be an honor to any county.

Well, that's not what Bears Ears is at all.

You know, at 1.35 million acres, it covers anything and everything.

And it's a totally politically motivated.

- It's not about protection.

It's about these other organizations who want to profit off of it.

They wanna make it their playground.

They don't give a [bleep] about the locals.

The ones that have been taking care of the area for generations.

That's the frustrating thing, is it's going to be a circus.

- When the biggest threat to artifacts is human traffic is declaring this a national monument in the best interest of protecting the artifacts.

It's not, it's almost the worst thing you could do.

- Initially it is going to cause more damage.

We have the potential though, to do something with this monument and increased staff, increase management of it, but we're looking long-term.

If we do not do anything, people are gonna keep coming.

We're not gonna be able to manage it, and eventually we're gonna lose it anyway.

- I think if we took more time to understand the landscape, and if politicians took more time to actually be out on the land and see what's actually here, we'd have a much better discussion than this abstract political fight that we're in.

- Part of the political fight centers on energy development.

Active oil and gas fields Sit on the north east sides of the monument.

Uranium deposits are scattered throughout San Juan County fueling a boom more than a half century ago.

- The argument is, oh, it's gonna be mined to death.

It's gonna be drilled to death.

It's gonna be developed to death.

That's not happening.

If that was going to happen, it would have already happened.

The last drill rig that was out there was four years ago.

They didn't find anything.

- There is potential.

I would give it a medium development potential for oil and gas down in that Southeast corner.

And then there's probably a medium potential for wells up in the Northeast corner.

But for the vast majority of the Bears Ears National Monument, the potential is fairly low.

There have been 287 oil and gas wells drilled within the monument boundary.

Only nine of those 287 have had any kind of historic production.

- A lot of people completely deny that there's any potential here, but that really doesn't speak to the facts as we know them.

If there is no interest from the oil and gas industry to drill in the area, why are they buying up leases right on the monuments border?

So I have no doubt if the monument went away and leasing activity was allowed there, there'd be oil and gas companies lining up to buy those leases.

- Because you have massive amounts of oil and gas production directly adjacent to the monument, a lot of people think that, that's gonna translate to the areas of directly to the west within the monument.

And it's just not the case.

It's very different geology.

Just because you have production adjacent doesn't mean there's going to be production within the monument.

Due to the low oil and gas prices that we're seeing since about mid 2014, there has been no interest before the monument was named.

It's because it's just a high risk area.

- Yes, oil and gas in the Bears Ears area is speculative.

Certainly in the current market, it's not economic to develop the oil and gas potential of Bears Ears right now, but should the oil and prices go up in the future, we're looking toward protecting this landscape for the next generation in the next century.

And these are concerns that we have over the longterm.

- Few knew at the time that energy companies were urging the Trump administration to reduce the size of the monument.

The New York Times would uncover emails from an aide and Senator Orrin Hatch's office requesting that the Department of Interior consider shrinking the monument's Southeast boundary to quote, resolve all known mineral conflicts.

- You know, like they're saying, oh, Bears Ears.

This isn't about oil and gas.

This isn't about uranium.

And then we see these clear as day documents, proving that the state of Utah requested this be reduced.

If you wanna drill and because you think that's good for jobs in the economy, then just say it and make your argument.

But don't try to make us think it's something else.

So, I mean, this is also an illustration in Bears Ears.

The vast majority of it is not developed.

It's meant to be a choose your own adventure sort of place.

We wanna be a little bit careful in here.

We're starting to get into what we call the midden area, where there's gonna be a lot of pottery and stuff around which we always encourage people to kind of leave where it is.

Places like this, that we have a lot of pottery left, still have a lot of scientific value.

And so that helps us greater understand when people were living here, who they were trading with?

What they were eating in some cases?

Whether the site was used for religious and gathering purposes?

Or was just a dwelling.

So a few simple pieces of pottery can tell us a lot about a place.

- The land is our textbook.

Mother Earth, she's our teacher.

Where my people and ancestral Puebloans and other indigenous people have recorded their history is on the Canyon walls, out on the landscape where they built their dwellings without that we don't have any documentation.

I can't go to any library.

Our library is out here and once that's gone, we'll never get it back.

That library, it's been ransacked, volume after volume, story after story has vanished over time, sometimes looters took the artifacts, but often it was ordinary people who'd pick up an ancient pot or arrowhead and take it home.

- It was just a fun recreational type of thing that people did.

They went out and collected arrowheads.

Some people dug in ruins back in the early decades.

It is true that a lot of early museums actually hired local people who weren't even archeologists to supply them with artifacts for their museums.

- But in 1979, Congress cracked down what used to be a local pastime became a crime under the Archeological Resources Protection Act.

Opponents insist national monument protections won't do any good.

They say federal laws are already in place to punish anyone caught damaging or pillaging cultural resources.

But monument supporters say existing laws just don't work.

They have no teeth, they haven't been enforced.

- This is the side of a pretty heinous looting incident where literally the grave of an infant was dug up in modern times.

The argument that looting isn't happening anymore A, is contrary the fact, but also just because it's maybe on a smaller scale than it used to be, doesn't mean it's any less dangerous.

So we wouldn't argue that well, murder rate has gone down.

We shouldn't care about murders anymore.

There's a lot of cultural material that we need to protect.

And you don't do that by sticking your head in the sand.

And pretending that undoing a monument is gonna send the looter somewhere else.

They know that the stuff is here.

They've been coming for more than a century, and they're gonna keep coming until they are convinced that if they dig something up, they're gonna go to jail.

- There have been times when the federal government has tried to enforce the law, but what everyone here remembers is the Blanding raid.

- So in 2009, an army of federal agents, this was BLM, FBI came roaring into town with guns drawn, and they came in and arrested scores of people and processed them like animals.

It was really strong arm tactics by the federal government.

- Today's action is a sad reminder that the stealing and destruction of archeological and American Indian treasures from public lands is a highly lucrative business for the criminals involved in those kinds of activities.

And we will not tolerate that kind of activity in the United States.

- There were no convictions from the raid.

There were tragic deaths that resulted from it, Dr. James Redd, who delivered my youngest child.

He was arrested as part of that and committed suicide.

This message that needed to be sent that you cannot plunder was never received because of how the raid took place.

Local residents, the majority of local residents just absolutely thought that the raids had been mishandled.

And that this was a negative story about the federal government and overreach of federal agencies.

I think that there's a strong anti-government sentiment in San Juan County, anti federal government, anti distant government.

And there was a feeling that that process in which Bears Ears was developed was similar to the process at which these ridiculous raids occurred.

Where was the local solution to the problem?

(crowd applauding) - The new president brought new hope that Washington would finally listen to people who were against the monument that they mattered and that their views about federal overreach aligned with president Trump's.

- The Antiquities Act does not give the federal government unlimited power to lock up millions of acres of land.

And it's time we ended this abusive practice.

- Trump ordered a review of 27 national monuments.

Bears Ears was in his crosshairs and in the spring of 2017 Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visits, Utah.

He's charged with advising the president on the future of Bears Ears.

Within the crowd are Native Americans.

Although the majority of tribes and bands support Bears Ears, this group represents a small, but vocal faction fighting against it.

- Well, I hope he listens to the San Juan County and the locals that we do not want this to be a monument.

- Danielle Shirley is a student advocate who lives on the Navajo reservation in Monument Valley.

She and her grandmother have been at the forefront of the fight to rescind the monument.

- It's already protected, It's beautiful.

If you actually lived here, you actually used the resources, you were born here, you grew up here, you would understand that this is our backyard.

And we use it.

It's my life.

It's my people.

It's my home, my family, that is our temple.

That's our source of life right there.

And you're just allowing it for everyone up to utilize and to walk over to trash, to pollute it, to not understand how sacred it is to us.

That's where it hurts.

- Danielle believes that Navajo nation leaders who are fighting to keep the monument should be fighting to provide basic needs for people on the reservation.

She feels forgotten and ignored, not just by the federal government, but also by her own people.

- They could be spending their money here in our people's community.

The people who need their food, the people who don't have electricity or running water, because we're still living that right now.

You know, I have kids who say it during the weekends, like they don't have food, they're being overlooked.

And I feel like as Native Americans, we're be always being overlooked.

Why trust the federal government now?

- Ryan Zinke is not listening.

The Native Americans have to kick and scream for an hour of his time.

I believe that if he really truly listened that he would have granted tribes and even people in other groups in general, the opportunity to be heard by him.

- Well, we wanna make sure that everyone's voice is heard.

And a lot of the anger that is out there in our country is that local communities in states just don't feel like they've had a voice.

We wanna work with local communities.

We wanna solve problems and not create them.

- So did Ryan Zinke speak to you guys?

- What did he say?

- The established system is set up for an indigenous person to fail.

It's a very visceral everyday experience.

- Racism seems like it's not stated, it's not clearly identified in this process, but it's in the back of everybody's minds.

It's in the back of ours and far be it that the Indians would rise up to be leaders for everybody.

- Bears Ears is really just a flashpoint for previous existing issues that were really under the surface, very latent.

So all of the issues between indigenous communities and Anglo communities, they have been there.

The tensions have been there, but Bears Ears is just something that brought it all out on the table.

- Yeah, I've never seen such rancor and such hostility and division, as I've seen come out of this.

It is to the point where if you oppose the monument, you're a racist.

- And I don't know, I still don't know how to respond to that, to being accused of racism.

Other than to say, no, I'm not, I'm not a racist.

If they want to say, well, we have to do a monument because of racism then I guess racism is playing a role in it.

But it's more of the idea of racism than actual racism because national monuments were not a tool to fix racism.

There were tool to protect objects of antiquity.

If that were the dialogue, there's no real fight in that.

- I think indigenous people have a very long timeline, a long frame of how long they've been there.

Anglo communities I think they feel like they've arrived on the scene and it's a claim has been staked and a place has to be defended and walls are put up.

Fences are up and defenses are up.

I think indigenous peoples do think in cycles.

They think in circles, they think in completion that everything's connected.

And I think that a lot of Western Euro American systemic thought is very linear.

One group is thinking in squares and lines and the other group is thinking in circles and cycles.

So it's very, very different, even from the very beginning of conversations.

- I think if you could put a fence around San Juan County, and say, hey, you guys work out your issues.

We would come together with a lot of shared reality and truth but the thing is, we've got these outside interests that come in, people whose deliberate attempt is to divide us.

- Across America, over 2 million people, submit comments to the Department of the Interior.

The vast majority want the national monuments to remain intact specifically Bears Ears.

- These scenic, sacred, and precious lands are valued not just by Utahns, but by people all over the country and all over the world.

(crowd cheering) We cannot allow these lands to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

We cannot allow no trespassing signs to be put up on our public lands.

(crowd cheering) - While the national debate talks about protection and access to public lands, many people here are concerned about tourism and the threat it poses to their way of life.

- When I first came out here in the 70s and 80s, there wasn't the recreational industry that there is now to begin with.

And it used to be when I got out here, I was worried about the extractive industries and oil and gas wells.

And now I'm still a screaming environmentalist who's worried about it being urbanized and overrun with people.

I mean, we all know that industrial tourism and recreation has impacts.

We know that's a fact.

I mean, we can see it.

You can see it at the Grand Canyon.

You can see it in Moab and at Arches.

And it's prevalent around the west.

A recreation tourist economy dramatically changes the demographics of the community.

It changes who can even move to the community in the future.

Most people who live in rural communities like Monticello and Blanding don't have the resources.

They don't have the capital, they don't have the money and they don't have the expertise to really take advantage of an amenities economy.

- It isn't recreationalists that are preventing there to be better ranching jobs or more extractive industries.

It's that America and the world is changing.

Some of the traditional legacy industries are dying and the way to make sure there's a bright future for your children if you're a second, third or fifth generation Utahn from Monticello or Blanding is to embrace the future and figure out how to thoughtfully meld that with the past, rather than seeing the future in the rear view mirror that you can somehow make Southern Utah great again, with uranium mining, ranching and oil and gas.

It is communities evolving in a direction to embrace and support visitors who wanna come to live there to recreate, to enjoy the landscapes.

And that doesn't mean you have to give up on the legacy industries.

I do believe they really care about the landscapes and what they hold, but they're just fearful of those new people moving in.

- Lack of respect for the history of these communities and for the people who live there is creating more animosity and anger and division than anything else I can think of.

There's a great line from To Kill a Mockingbird, you know where Atticus tells Scout, You never know somebody until you stand in their shoes and walk around in them for awhile.

And if there was ever a lesson that we could all learn, it's that, you know, try to figure out why exactly do they feel the way they do?

- [whistling] - Well, I got a lot of ties here I've been here a long time.

Oh my dad's and them, his dad, and all them come down here and homesteaded over around Monticello.

And then we run cattle over there.

- This ranch has been in the Johnson family for generations.

The Bears Ears proclamation states that they will still be able to run cattle within the monument.

But they're skeptical about the future.

- That's why I don't want this monument.

I wanted it left here for we can ranch but you can't trust the government.

They say one thing and do something else.

- And they will bring in more regulations because they're gonna have to pick a management plan.

And that's where they get in.

Well, everything's gonna stay the same and you can still run cattle there.

Well, yeah, for now, we're gonna keep our numbers up.

But every time they get a chance to try this year, catch back and then they keep cutting back and cutting back till you have not, you do not have a viable unit anymore.

- You're gonna have to go find somewhere else to live and you're gonna have to go find something else to do to provide for your family.

So, yeah, I feel like I'm under attack.

- And these environmental groups have not, they've not been shy about what their agenda is and they do not want mining, they don't want drilling and they don't want cattle.

These environmental groups make big money.

And it's much bigger movement than let's protect the Bears Ears.

It's about protecting their jobs.

- Well, they want it locked up just where nobody can use it.

That's what they wanted to do it.

- This land is sacred to me and this land is my home, I choose to live here and raise my family because it's a good life.

This is my American dream that I want and I've worked for.

And they don't feel that way and I know they don't, they just use the land as their ploy to further their agendas of control and power and money.

- Nobody has any greater respect and ties to this land than we do.

I just wanna be right here.

I'd like to be buried right here because it's home it's a place where I was born.

It's a place where you love to be.

- Bear Ears is an iconic landscape.

It's spiritual for me.

It puts me in touch with something far greater.

It's the recognition that our civilization is just a smaller slice of the billions of years that have come before and will come after.

- It's lot of what you might get.

If you're deeply religious and spiritual and you go to church, it's the same sort of thing.

The overwhelming majority of people who have been advocates to champion this, they're not in it for the money.

Patagonia, we didn't lose probably a dollar of sales or Black Diamond wouldn't lose a dollar of sales if the area wasn't protected, but we're there championing it because we love the area.

Our customers love this area and many companies in outdoor space feel like they represent the interest of their customers who want to see areas like this protected so that yes, they can go recreate.

So is there some self-interest to see beautiful, pristine, iconic, wild landscapes protected for recreational, hunting, sportsmen uses?

Absolutely, because we care, because we want our children to see, witness, and experience what we have the opportunity to witness.

We're championing it because we believe in it.

It's part of our humanity.

- In the Summer of 2017, suspense is building.

Whose voice is being heard?

What will the monument eventually look like?

The word is that Interior Secretary Zinke will recommend shrinking Bears Ears, but by how much?

- If they would rescind it, then start over, great.

If not, if they scale it down considerably, I guess that would be a victory.

An announcement was supposed to be made yesterday.

And it was sort of like crickets, nobody heard anything.

You know, I don't know.

We're just all sitting on pins and needles waiting to hear.

I know we don't know what to plan for.

- [Singing in Navajo].

- It took a lot of time just by getting together like this, to create the monument.

So now we turn the page and see how we deal with President Trump.

- As Native American people, we're always waiting for something or somebody.

And it's one of the most difficult things because you wanna be able to get up in the morning and know what your direction is.

And when you don't have that, it's like living in an uncertainty.

- [Singing in Navajo].

- There's going to be resistance from Native Americans.

And I think the only way to resolve this issue is probably through the court system.

We're not just gonna lie down and do what they want to do, and we will fight.

So I say my knowing my know that the process go.

- I will be Indian.

I will be Native American.

I will be the person of the land.

Even if this monument gets eroded to thousands of acres, it'll still hold the sacred place in my heart.

Now, I have a grandparent that's over 100 years old and she has memories here.

My great grandfather lived up here during the Summer months.

You know, that part of my family and my history that would go away if something gets destroyed, it's like taking away your family member.

When something sacred and being taken away from you it hurts.

- President Trump travels to Salt Lake City on December 4th, in 2017 to announce his decision on the fate of Bears Ears.

It's just shy of a year after president Obama created the national monument.

Protests began even before Trump arrives.

- The Bears Ears is home and having it reduced to a small amount of size is just terrible.

- We've had our land taken away over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

- She is a champion.

This, she is not - She is not told no.

let's get out - Let's thank this commissioner.

- When Bears Ears National Monument was designated, it was a disheartening day for my communities and San Juan County citizens.

- Like the first time indigenous peoples have a say in the way like sacred lands are being managed.

It was such a monumental win and now it's not anymore.

- As a Native American Dine woman, it was insulting that bureaucras thousands of miles away didn't believe we were capable of protecting and preserving our Homeland.

We may be only 15,000 strong, but we matter.

(crowd cheering) - I've become an expert in monuments and the Antiquities Act was never intended to preven it was intended to protect.

Our public land is for the public to use and not special interests.

- Depending on how this turns out, that's gonna affect every tribe's ability to protect its sacred lands off the reservation, because then precedent will be set.

So that tribes will have no say in their sacred lands.

- I wanna thank the president for giving a voice to the hardworking people of Utah, who for too long have been ignored in the debate over public lands.

- To destroy our land, and like, take it away from like generations and generations after us.

And after taking so much from generations before us, it just, it's so awful and cruel.

- I've come to Utah to take a very historic action to reverse federal overreach and restore the rights of this land to your citizens.

We will not only give back your voice over the use of this land.

We will also restore your access and your enjoyment public lands will once again, be for public use.

(crowd cheering) - It was surreal, and then for the president to say, you know, it's - that this was unnecessary and this was an abuse of the Antiquities Act, which is gonna be our next fight.

And to have this victory is, it's a really good feeling.

And we wanted to fight for the little guy basically, we kind of felt like we're the underdog, but I know this is gonna be tied up in legal battles.

And I don't know how that's gonna work.

Where do we go from here?

- The Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition had asked the Obama administration for a national monument encompassing 1.9 million acres.

President Obama's proclamation was smaller just under 1.4 million acres.

But President Trump would go even further shrinking the monument by 85% and creating two new monuments.

The tribes and environmentalists filed lawsuits even before the day ends, raising questions about presidential overreach once aga.

- I told them once before you want to make America great, then why aren't you talking to the first Americans and allowing them to help you get there?

But for some reason, they wanna fight.

And I'm here to tell you if it's a fight they want, it's a fight they're gonna get.

We've awoken as Indian people, Ute tribe, the Navajo nation, the Zuni tribes, the Pueblos, and all the other tribes in North America have finally decided enough's enough.

All it took was for them to honor their responsibility to Native American tribes, and actually put aside our differences and talk about common interests, which could benefit us all.

But they chose not to.

I'm sorry that we had to witness this, but we're ready for the fight that's ahead of us.

So thank you.

- I wish that the polarization would stop now and I wish it would've stopped years ago.

If there was some common ground that was sought and found, we wouldn't be in the position we are now.

- We need to find opportunities to build a common language, to understand what we mean when we say protection.

To sit across the table from one another, to get to know each other as human beings and recognize that we're actually not very far apart.

We care deeply about these landscapes.

We care about our families and the next generation, and the traditions that are important to us.

- We're not listening to each other.

We're not compromising.

It's either I win or you lose, or you lose and I win.

It's really become a political football.

That's caught up in all this national politics.

- It's far from over.

That's not going away.

It's never gonna go away because it's not done the right way.

There needs to be a peacemaking process to get things restored, back to balance.

I'm actually optimistic that we can take this head on together as a community, because that's the only way if people wanna live in peace together.

So no matter how many times we fail, we're gonna always have to come back to the beginning until we get it right.

(soft music)