By Ryan Benally
...Secretary Zinke and I have in common the honor of serving our great
country in the military. During my deployments to the war in Iraq in
2003 and 2005 with the U.S. Marines, the thing that we valued above all
and saved lives was proper communication. We had to get the right
information to the right people to make the right decisions. Therefore,
it is my duty to my country, my homeland and to my fellow Native
Americans to provide the correct information to Secretary Zinke of why
Bears Ears National Monument is not the right decision.
Elders taught us plenty. They hold a special thing that resonates
with many people, and that’s the gift of perspective. Through their
eyes, one can see how the hands of federal supervision created certain
mistrust. My dear Grandma Betty Jones taught me that over-reliance on
federal management caused many intergenerational problems Native
Americans still have to this day. She’d know, she is one of the few
remaining, living examples of government relocation from the Glen Canyon
Dam area. Native people had to tragically pass through a terrible
history to understand what “federal management” means.
As a result, nearly all of San Juan
County’s natives sat in a Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources
Committee hearing in Blanding, Utah, last summer. They spoke to our
elected Utah leaders about why another national monument was the wrong
answer to protecting lands we all share. Why incorporate a national
monument when there are already existing federal protections for the
land for every single reason that creating a monument was called for?
With all these levels of protection, how did the monument still happen?
Years ago, out-of-state business organizations and radical environmental
groups tried to implement a “wilderness area” — the legislative
equivalent to a national monument. The boundary proposal was
suspiciously the exact dimensions as what Bears Ears National Monument
is today...
Native Americans living near Bears Ears have remained as distrustful
of any wilderness-monument type designation because it creates another
oppressive controlling systemic government-run entity, like the BIA. Our
people’s distrust of more government hasn’t change one bit. Still, a
national monument was unfairly pushed on San Juan County natives by
out-of-state organizations, such as the outdoor retail industry, which
showed its true intentions when it decided to make a spectacle of its
exit of the Outdoor Retailer show.
Information is pivotal. Information in
this instance reflects a sense of renewed faith in local native
stewardship when the state of Utah passed a resolution in support of
fully rescinding the Bears Ears National Monument...
Native Americans are fully aware of our living history and ties to the
lands we’ve managed for eons. Our culture will not be hijacked and will
not be made to believe that a national monument is the only
way we can ever preserve our cultural heritage. As a fellow veteran to
Secretary Zinke, it is my duty in this moment in time to convey a much
more realistic perspective of how a Native American of Utah truly views
this unwarranted Bears Ears National Monument designation.
Ryan Benally is Vice Chairman of the Stewards of San Juan County and a
lifelong Native American resident of San Juan County, Utah.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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