Utah Dine Bikeyah at the United Nations confab: The Agenda 21 bugaboo in SLC?

At the U.N. conference: Eric Descheenie, former Arizona state House representative, Cynthia Wilson, traditional foods program director for Utah Dine Bikeyah, Angelo Baca, cultural resources coordinator for Utah Dine Bikeyah, and Kate Kopischke, moderator and social and environmental safeguard specialist for Green Climate Fund (Kopischke is married to former Salt Lake City mayor Ralph Becker, whose former chief of staff, David Everitt, was hired as interim San Juan County administrator by commissioners Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth Maryboy, both former board members of Utah Dine Bikeyah).

By Bill Keshlear

The public relations tactics of the pro-monument activist group Utah Diné Bikéyah and its allies seem limitless.

They’ve organized massive rallies, arts and cultural events, academic seminars, and upscale fund-raisers - mostly staged hundreds of miles from Bears Ears National Monument, the Navajo reservation, and the people whose culture they believe is under attack.

Their surrogates range from a multimillionaire actor (Robert Redford) to a 10-year-old actor hired to play an activist (Robbie Bond).

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Meet the child actor hired to fight Trump

Although Robbie Bond has no readily apparent connection to Utah or the desert Southwest, he’s emerged as a spokesperson of a manufactured pro-monument movement.

Since the middle of July 2017, Robbie and his Kids Speak for Parks campaign have been tireless. He has a website, a Facebook page and a Gofundme site. He’s been criss-crossing the country producing videos. His stops have included Washington, D.C., Washington state, California, Hawaii, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming.

He has a “sponsorship” from Patagonia, according to Nonprofit Quarterly. He’s appeared at Patagonia outlet stores in Salt Lake City and Reno, Nev.

The young actor has gotten extensive media coverage across the West, including KUTV and Fox13 in the Utah market. Perhaps most notably, he was named “Thursday Hero of the Week” in a Nov. 2, 2017 piece written by Utah-based freelance writer Cathy Free and published in the online version of People magazine.

Robbie was a featured speaker at Utah Diné Bikéyah's extraordinarily well-choreographed rally in December 2017 to protest President Trump’s expected announcement to shrink Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Robbie Bond, standing on the chair, speaks at a Salt Lake City rally organized by Utah Dine Bikeyah in December 2017. Prominent Salt Lake Democrats Patrice Arent, left, and Jackie Biskupski, current mayor of Salt Lake City, stand just behind him. They also spoke. Albert Holiday, a Utah Dine Bikeyah board member, is in the foreground. (Deseret News).

Robbie Bond was represented by an agent in California when he was hired to fight President Trump's environmental policies. This page has been deleted from the internet.

Robbie Bond is part of the sophisticated pro-monument campaign.

• Feldman Strategies is a left-leaning public relations firm in Washington, D.C. Here's what it says about Robbie: Feldman Strategies signed on with gifted 9-year-old Robbie Bond, to lead the PR and launch his progressive nonprofit organization, Kids Speak for Parks, to push the importance of keeping the parks undisturbed. Our media strategy, brought Robbie and Kids Speak for Parks to the national stage as a telling narrative of children standing up to the Trump administration’s dangerous agenda against our national parks and monuments. Through the success of our media relations effort, Robbie’s mission is quickly gaining traction across the country and the world, with notable support and potential sponsorship opportunities.

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Utah Diné Bikéyah's political campaign-style savvy was put on display yet again at the United Nations Civil Society Conference held in Salt Lake City. Utah Diné Bikéyah was among 70 groups to hold short workshops between longer conference sessions on August 27.

Just glancing at titles of other late-afternoon workshops, UDB's appears to have been the only one with an overtly political agenda. It was titled "Bears Ears National Monument: Native wisdom, illegal politicking, and reclaiming our own narrative."

• You can watch the panel discussion here. It's a UDB video, not something produced by conference organizers.

The discussion began with an introduction from Kate Kopischke. She said it was important to mention that even though there is no U.N. support of monument creation, there is "direct applicability" to Standard 6 of the United Nations Development Programme’s Social and Environmental Standards.

Standard 6 is about "promotion and protection of indigenous peoples' rights." UNDP's standards apply to voluntary partnerships formed to "help build nations that withstand crisis, and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone."

However, paragraph 6 within the Standard seems to go further (I added emphasis):

"UNDP Projects will recognize that indigenous peoples have collective rights to own, use, and develop and control the lands, resources and territories that they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired, including lands and territories for which they do not yet possess title.

“If the Project involves activities that are contingent on establishing legally recognized rights to lands, resources, or territories that indigenous peoples have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired, an action plan will outline the steps and timetable for achieving legal recognition of such ownership, occupation, or usage (see paragraph 14 below).

“In such cases, UNDP, with the consent of the relevant authority or Implementing Partner, will support such activities aimed at delimiting, demarcating and titling such lands, resources, and territories with due respect to the customs, traditions and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned.”

Kopischke started to lose me when she outlined some sort of extralegal "grievance and accountability mechanism" possibly modeled after UNDP's compliance process – something to hold miners, drillers, funders, and Trumpesque government officials accountable to Native American interests in and around Utah.

Was she implying the United Nations could somehow inject itself into decisions related to management of public lands in San Juan County, allowing UDB and its allies to dodge the U.S. regulatory, legislative, and judicial system to achieve their goals? Seems like a stretch. But then Utah Diné Bikéyah has already done exactly that.

(Nothing in that April 2018 statement to the U.N. written by Honor Keeler, assistant director of Utah Diné Bikéyah, titled "Looting & Grave-Robbing at Bears Ears National Monument – Ongoing Human Rights Violations" indicates it was endorsed by any federally recognized tribe, including the Navajo Nation. The activists have not indicated publicly that anything was accomplished.) 

With apologies to Charlton Heston and members of the National Rifle Association, U.N. involvement would happen only over the cold, dead bodies of a few (possibly more than a few) residents of San Juan County.

UNDP currently funds and administers 4,307 projects in 149 countries, unsung work to eradicate poverty, fight climate change, and reduce inequalities and exclusion. Any UNDP project involving Utah Diné Bikéyah in Utah as a partner or any partner at all would be groundbreaking because the agency has no projects in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, or Japan.

Since the United Nations' development branch doesn't operate in wealthy countries, why was Kopischke talking about it?

Her remarks might've unintentionally resuscitated the mostly dormant Agenda 21 bugaboo – mostly dormant, that is, except in San Juan County.

Agenda 21 you say? Read on.

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EXCERPT: I wrote about the nonprofit's trip to the United Nations as part of a lengthy article published last year by the Canyon Country Zephyr titled "Whose county is this anyway? Bears Ears activist wins squeaker for SJCo commissioner, District 3. What now?"

In a display of chutzpah and sheer tactical firepower, Utah Diné Bikéyah appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Council a couple of months ago, specifically the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and Special Rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, to “direct” the United States to respond to what it says are human rights violations regarding “ongoing” grave robbing and looting and “halt” preliminary steps to write a management plan for BENM replacements, Shash Jaa and Indian Creek.

"It (Bears Ears) is a place known for healing by all tribes and its (monument’s) creation was a recognition of tribal sovereignty, indigenous self-determination, and acknowledgement of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), and indigenous human rights,” according to a statement from Honor Keeler, assistant director at UDB.

Nowhere does Obama’s monument proclamation express “recognition of tribal sovereignty” and “indigenous self-determination.”

Nowhere does it specifically mention the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Nowhere does it grant special status, such as co-management, to Native Americans or specifically the five tribes associated with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.

(In fact, it says, "Nothing in this proclamation shall be deemed to enlarge or diminish the rights or jurisdiction of any Indian tribe.")

The proclamation is an eloquent statement on multiple-use management of public lands. It’s got something for everything and everybody: Native Americans and archeologists with an abiding sense of the area’s cultural significance; ancestors of Europeans who explored the area during the 18th century and Mormon settlers of the San Juan Mission who followed years later to establish what is now Bluff, Utah; geologists passionate about preventing destruction of the area’s unique rock formations; paleontologists who care deeply about preserving some of the most scientifically significant sites in the United States; plant life that supports a wide diversity of wildlife; and human communities that depend on the area’s watershed, forests, grasslands and a bit of an economic boost tourists provide.

What’s interesting is that the activists are calling for the U.N. to usurp the sovereignty of the United States as a way to expand tribal sovereignty beyond a reservation.

Even more interesting is that they’re doing it in a part of the country where it would affect more than a few residents who are obsessively suspicious of intrusion by the U.N. into U.S. affairs. UDB’s trip to the Big Apple might excite a certain strain of conservative paranoia that, for example, believes “Agenda 21” merits extreme vigilance, maybe even a call to arms.

Here it is in a nutshell: The United Nations seeks to create a one-world government using the rationale of ensuring the planet’s sustainability. The U.N. resolution passed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992  (reaffirmed in 2012) was the linchpin in a clandestine plot to deny property rights, undermine U.S. sovereignty and subjugate humanity under an eco-totalitarian regime.

Pundit, right-wing flamethrower and author Glenn Beck made a mint on his 2012 book “Agenda 21,” an Orwellian tale of a futuristic America in which a U.N.-led program spawns an authoritarian state where individuals are stripped of all personal rights and freedoms.

The Republican National Convention adopted a platform resolution the same year that said, “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”

The whole scenario is hokum, in my not-so-humble opinion. But a conspiracy-inclined, anti-environmentalist mind could interpret it as consistent with what Natasha Hale, a staffer at the influential environmental group Grand Canyon Trust, said about Bears Ears setting a precedent for expansion of tribal sovereignty.

Connect the dots.