INCENDIARY PROVOCATIONS CLOSE THE DOOR TO COLLABORATION | By Bill Keshlear

Jon Jarvis was director of the National Park Service during President Obama's tenure.

(Some of this has appeared in the Canyon Country Zephyr.)

(UPDATE September 1: On the road back from Monument Valley I stopped in at Friends of Cedar Mesa's Bears Ears Education Center in Bluff, home base of the nonprofit. Its mission, at least overtly,  is to tell people looting and vandalism of archeological artifacts is a bad thing. But I came away with a clearer sense of how difficult it will be to bring together opposing sides in the monument hoo-haw. I asked one of the volunteers there why the facility was not closer to places people have to drive through to get to Bears Ears country – like Monticello or Blanding. It’s about 100 miles out of the way en route from the north to a popular rock climbing site within the monument, Indian Creek. She said the Mormons would just burn down the building if located in either town. Really? Bigotry sometimes bubbles up in strange places. I expected she’d trot out standard pro-monument  talking points about imminent oil and gas development and other fictions. And she did. Friends after all is an environmental activist group. But her comment caught me by surprise. Is religious intolerance part of Friends’ educational program? Or its organizational culture? Is this something the BLM signed up for by partnering with Friends on several projects?)

When Jon Jarvis, President Obama’s director of the National Park Service, visited the University of Utah last year he said he regretted that a collaborative process in creating Bears Ears National Monument involving all local stakeholders had not been initiated.

In hindsight, he said, a lasting solution to protecting the area likely could never be imposed top-down, the opposite of what Gavin Noyes, executive director of the tribal-affiliated activist group Utah Diné Bikéyah, seemed to advocate in a Q&A with KUER reporter Kate Groetzinger.

Jarvis cited several successful examples of how bringing people together “over a thousand cups of coffee” can work.

Apparently unknown to Jarvis and Noyes (or at least unacknowledged publicly), San Juan County adopted precisely that strategy several years before.

In June 2015, a group of ranchers, environmentalists, Native Americans, ATV riders, miners, hunters and archeology buffs — collectively known as the San Juan County Lands Council — produced a plan to protect the Bears Ears and Cedar Mesa area of southeastern Utah through wilderness designation, national conservation areas and development zones.

The good-faith effort of those local residents was in effect sandbagged by powerful forces outside of San Juan County from both ends of the political spectrum, including Noyes' Salt Lake City-based organization and Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah. A local solution was never in the cards. 

However, somebody was listening. The boundary of Obama's eventual Bears Ears National Monument is virtually identical to what Council members came up with. And an unprecedented, possibly illegal, proposal by the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition for co-management of the monument between a tribal-appointed commission and the Interior Department never made it into Obama's proclamation.

Mark Maryboy at last week's town-hall style meeting at the Mexican Water chapter of the Navajo Nation.

Groetzinger's KUER report was a follow-up to incendiary remarks of Mark Maryboy, a board member and founder of Utah Diné Bikéyah, at a town hall-style meeting held last week at the Mexican Water chapter of the Navajo Nation just south of the state line in Arizona. He has a long track record of race-based provocations.

While it's unclear why Noyes was speaking for Maryboy instead of Maryboy speaking for himself,  KUER generously gave Noyes an opportunity to distance his organization from the unprovoked and inflammatory rhetoric (more on Maryboy's hate speech here and here).

He didn’t, and a door to the kind of conciliation Jarvis thought important was shut. Noyes’ failure to address racism and religious bigotry among members of his board of directors raises questions about whether going forward Utah Diné Bikéyah can legitimately play the role of a bridge-builder.

You'd hardly expect Noyes to be candid though. Noyes works for Maryboy and the other board members, not the other way around.

Let's check the facts

• Noyes: There’s very little understanding of, for example, why the Native community created Bears Ears. 

The Native community has had a deep and abiding interest in the Bears Ears region for a long, long time, and a well-organized and passionate portion of that community submitted a proposal with assistance from a guy who helped write President Clinton's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument proclamation and a network of others (That guy, Charles Wilkinson, sits along side Maryboy on the board of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance).However, that group did not "create" the monument. The proclamation Obama signed was, as mentioned above, actually very close to what that group of San Juan residents, the Lands Council, came up with through a lengthy public process, according to former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell's chief of staff Tommy Beaudreau.

“We tried to hew to the PLI (Lands Council’s) proposal. We couldn’t argue with a straight face that there wasn’t consensus about the area,” Beaudreau said. The quote comes at 58:20 in a video of a panel discussion held last year at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

Anti-monument voices just as passionate – but not as well organized and funded – among Navajos outside the Utah Diné Bikéyah circle have been muted.

One of those voices was that of former San Juan County Commissioner Rebecca Benally, who narrowly lost a primary bid in June of 2018 that would've virtually ensured her re-election. She criticized designation of Bears Ears National Monument; she didn’t trust the federal government because of its dismal historical record on Native American affairs; and she had ideological disagreements with Utah Diné Bikéyah and its allies about the importance of local control over county governance and management of public lands. Specifically, she said publicly that:

• Converting sacred lands to a monument will ultimately be controlled by “bureaucrats unfamiliar with Navajo history and traditional ways.”
• The federal government has broken promises of trust responsibilities and formal treaties again and again and again for the past 200 years.
• Promises related to creation of jobs managing the monument are not guaranteed.
• The federal government’s history of managing national monuments on sacred lands has been inconsistent, even disastrous.
• Groups outside of San Juan County — deep-pocketed environmental groups — should not be able to dictate the future of the region’s lands or pretend to speak for Navajos.

Those environmental and cultural preservationists of Utah Diné Bikéyah certainly do not speak for Betty Jones, “Grandma Betty,” an Elder possibly in her 90s whose family raised sheep in the Bears Ears region during the early part of the 20th century.

If anyone has a legitimate claim to Bears Ears, it’s Grandma Betty. Her story is about hard-scrabble interdependency between Native American herders of several tribes and clans moving from pasture to pasture and Mormon pioneers in a struggle to survive. It was passed down through her parents and grandparents and resonates with the authenticity of Navajo oral traditions.

Grandma Betty was a target of Mark Maryboy's venom at last week's town-hall meeting, and she lashed out in return.

Betty Jones, "Grandma Betty," was a target of Mark Maryboy.

• Noyes: The issue is that the white people live in the north, and the Native American people live in the south, and those are two different worlds that don’t interact.

While most Utah Navajos live on the reservation, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent Blanding's population is Native American, according to a city official there. It's one of Utah's most diverse communities. The north/south racial split is not as clear cut as Noyes suggests, and it's fiction to claim the two racial groups don't interact or don't interact with mutual respect.

• Noyes: Our priority is serving the Native communities in San Juan County, so we are committed to listening to those desires and facilitating positive change at the local level.

Despite Noyes’ “kumbaya” rhetoric, his organization has over the past eight years or so adopted tactics of unrelenting confrontation and intransigence. Leonard Lee, vice chairman of the group, expressed that sentiment early on, in 2011, “We don’t consider ourselves as stakeholders. … We’re the landlord."

One of the clearest examples came during a panel discussion Utah Diné Bikéyah hosted back in December. It offered a glimpse inside a long-term, no-holds-barred campaign for tribal management of a huge swath of federal land in San Juan County.

Activists discussed among other things their strategy to “undermine the Trump administration,” in the words of panelist Keala Carter, a public lands specialist with Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, and “re-indigenize” the region, according to Honor Keeler, assistant director of Utah Diné Bikéyah.

You need revolution before healing, said Carter. Moderator Angelo Baca, a graduate student at New York University and staff member of Utah Diné Bikéyah, echoed that sentiment toward the end of a recent movie produced by public television station KUED in Salt Lake City, as did the new county commissioners – Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth Maryboy, both former board members of Noyes' Utah Diné Bikéyah –  in interactions with some San Juan County constituents during their first few months in office.

This was an exchange during the public comment period at a commission meeting held a couple of months ago:

Kim Henderson, San Juan County resident: Is it my understanding that you have presented these current resolutions, Commissioner Maryboy? (pause waiting for an answer) Yes?

Commissioner Kenneth Maryboy: Yes. I have.

Henderson: Where can I go to find information on who participated in the dialog and the writing of these resolutions and who has authored them? Who has signed off on them?

Maryboy: That’s the job of (County Administrator) Kelly Pehrson and (County Attorney) Kendall Laws.

Henderson: They’re the ones who wrote them?

Maryboy: No. I said that’s where you get the answer.

Henderson: So they should have the information on that?

Maryboy: They should, and all those (GRAMA?) requests have been sent back.

Henderson: That’s an awful long process when it’s a simple request.

Maryboy: A simple request would say ‘the two commissioner as Native American … you are not … right now you’re saying that you’re too dumb to write a resolution.’ Is that what you’re saying? That’s what it comes down to.

Henderson: I deny that. That’s not what I said. I simply want to know who wrote it.

Unsubstantiated charges of racism – either stated overtly or implied – is a political tactic used over and over by board members of Utah Diné Bikéyah and its allies.

It was put on display in April when a group of San Juan County residents, including a Navajo woman, filed to begin the laborious process to put a referendum on the ballot during the county’s next election. If approved by voters it would've nullified a resolution passed just minutes before in support of an expanded version of Bears Ears National Monument and indicated the actual level of support in San Juan County for the monument.

The reaction of the San Juan County Democratic Party chairman, a close ally of Kenneth and Mark Maryboy, to even the possibility of a referendum was visceral and reflexive.

“Comments at the April 16 (county commissioner) meeting suggest that some white citizens of the county should have the right to submit a host of issues to referendum elections, rather than learn to work with the Navajo majority on the commission,” wrote James Adakai in a letter published by The Salt Lake Tribune and the Canyon Echo. “This is flatly racist.”

Shanon Brooks, president of Monticello (Utah) College responded: “Apparently, Adakai assumes that anyone who disagrees with him is a racist.”