(Above: One focus of Greater Bears Ears Partnership (formerly Friends of Cedar Mesa), based in Bluff, Utah, is a field program "to reimagine cultural preservation as an opportunity to reconnect Indigenous communities to cultural sites within the Bears Ears region." (Greater Bears Ears Partnership)
Both have been community leaders for much of their adult lives: Jamie Harvey through administration of the Aneth Chapter of the Navajo Nation and the Utah Navajo Health System; and Silvia Stubbs through her longtime work at Utah State University Blanding.They are not single-agenda-driven political activists. They do not consider themselves to be politicians and have never held public office. Stubbs says she has a lot to learn. But that wasn’t an obstacle at other stages of her career, she said. Harvey plans to help improve countywide social services.
Their
election in November closes a stormy chapter in the four-year saga of
Bears Ears National Monument activists Willie Grayeyes and Kenneth
Maryboy, both Democrats, as the first Native Americans in Utah to govern
as a majority on a county commission.
It possibly signals a
shift: back to county governance with a full-time focus on local needs,
less distracted by Bears Ears buzz; and from hard-edged pro-monument
politicking driven by sophisticated, nationwide, public relations and
lobbying to a long-term effort guided by Native American tribes whose
priorities and values are fully supported at the highest levels of the
federal government.
A
"rebranded" and re-staffed Greater Bears Ears Partnership (formerly
Friends of Cedar Mesa), based in Bluff, Utah, is poised to facilitate
that collaboration.
Grayeyes and Maryboy prioritized environmental protections and support of their traditional culture and spiritual teachings rather than economic development. Issues related to dire problems on Utah’s strip of the Navajo Nation - for example, providing household water and electricity and improving health services to those living in what amounts to Third World America - seemed less urgent.
By contrast, one of the first resolutions adopted by the new county commissioners was in support of economic development.
Patrick
Gonzales-Rogers, now an instructor at Yale University and former
executive director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, which was
formed in 2015 to represent five tribes – the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation,
Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray
Reservation and the Pueblo of Zuni – said there has been a dramatic
shift since Joe Biden won the presidency.
“Now we have a reset.
Within days of Biden winning the election and then getting a transition
team in place, there was already a reach out,” said Gonzales, who was quoted
in the conservation-oriented publication Mongabay, as part of its
series on finding common ground in often-thorny conservation disputes.
He noted “there was a day-and-night difference in terms of the
responsibility and the basic engagement” between the Trump and Biden
administrations.
“Yes, the Bears Ears represents one of the
premier public land’s issues. And then when you intersect it against
environmental social justice, it’s probably the premier issue because
you have the combination of these two big puzzle pieces. But the
reflection of what is due to the tribes was not lost on the Biden
administration. And there was an immediate kind of change in the
complexion, constitution, and comportment on how they were going to
engage the tribe.”
______________
National politics aside, the 2022 election amounts to a setback for state Democrats (Anglo and Native American) attempting to establish a beachhead of sorts in rural Utah.
The campaign of Davina Smith demonstrated how far Democrats are from being competitive. She attempted to unseat District 69 incumbent Republican Phil Lyman.
Phil Lyman led a protest in 2014 through Recapture Canyon near Blanding, Utah. (E&E News)
The race was a test, at least partially, of the flamboyant anti-federal government critic's standing among voters after he aggressively challenged public-health rules intended to slow the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic's height and was pardoned by President Trump in 2020 after a conviction in connection with leading an illegal motorized protest through a canyon near Blanding, Utah. The Bureau of Land Management had closed Recapture Canyon to protect artifacts many Native Americans consider sacred.
Smith established herself as a qualified candidate and an assertive advocate for Native American rights and tribal sovereignty. She is a member of the Bureau of Land Management's current (Bears Ears) Monument Advisory Committee. Salt Lake residents know her as executive director of the environmental nonprofit Salt Lake Water Protectors.
She is currently Tribal Coordinator for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association.
Smith ran a solid campaign on “kitchen table” issues – education, jobs, affordable housing, voting rights and healthy families. An, given results of the election, she received what could be considered overly optimistic coverage from a report by public radio station KUED that quoted the associate director of University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics.
(Smith sits on the station's advisory board.)
Voters in Grand and San Juan counties responded positively to her message and her personality, especially on Utah's Navajo Nation strip, as a viable alternative to Lyman. But the massive district was gerrymandered in 2020 to include precincts of ultra conservative Kane, Garfield, Wayne and Emery counties west of the Colorado River. In each adjacent House district – 66, 70, 71 and 72 – Democratic candidates got no more than 18 percent of the vote; the party didn’t even field candidates in Districts 66 and 70. Nary a Democrat was on the ballot in any of those counties' local races.
The process that led to uncompetitive districts across Utah is being challenged in court.
Even though District 69 now has the largest Native American population of any state House district in Utah at 19 percent and includes the increasingly liberal enclaves of Moab, Kanab and Torrey, Smith lost in what would be considered a landslide in most states (59 percent to 41 percent). But for a Democrat in rural Utah, she did extraordinarily well.
She won only liberal leaning Grand County (58
percent), but barely lost on home turf, San Juan County (49 percent).
Results in Emery, Garfield, Kane and Wayne counties were routs: Smith received 18, 23,
29, and 31 percent, respectively.
If Smith was prevented from having a fair chance at winning partly because of a gerrymandered district, the tenures of commissioners Maryboy and Grayeyes
were enabled in large part by a federal judge who in 2017 declared that
the districts in San Juan County disenfranchised Native American voters
and ordered them redrawn. The new political boundaries ensure Navajos get a fair chance at governing majorities on the
commission.
Maryboy and Grayeyes got a boost
from the powerful Navajo Nation Human Rights Council. Salt Lake- and
Moab-based Democrats poured in thousands of dollars, even creating and
funding a nonprofit called Rural Utah Project. It successfully
ran what, in effect, was the candidates' 2018 campaign and mobilized
Navajos to vote like never before. The fiery, litigious environmental nonprofit
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, based in Salt Lake City, helped fund
RUP. Many of its board members had experience running SUWA.
The
San Juan County commission now comprises all Republicans: Anglo incumbent (Bruce Adams),
a Navajo (Harvey) and a Latina immigrant from Argentina (Stubbs). It
will be a multilingual commission (Spanish, Dine’ Bizaa’d or Navajo and
English) and could be the most diverse county commission in Utah in what
could be the most conservative county in Utah.
All three are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Republican candidates also won races for San Juan County clerk, sheriff and attorney. It was a clean sweep.
Other
candidates associated with pro-Bears Ears activism were defeated as
well: Incumbent Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez lost to Nez Buu
Nygren, who was born in Blanding, Utah, and lives in Red Mesa, Ariz.;
Navajo activist Smith, mentioned above, lost a bid to unseat state House
District 69 incumbent Phil Lyman; longtime Bears Ears activist and
board chair of the Native activist nonprofit Utah Diné Bikéyah Davis
Filfred lost his race to represent Mexican Water, Red Mesa, TeecNosPos
and Aneth chapters in the Navajo Nation Council of Delegates, the
principle Navajo legislative body; and Hank Stevens, vice chair of Utah
Diné Bikéyah, lost his bid to represent Naa’tsis’aán and Oljato.
Results of the 2022 San Juan County vote at least suggests the electorate there had grown tired of the drama and political viciousness that seemed to shadow Maryboy and Grayeyes.
Substantive discussions surrounding protection of Bears Ears never got off the ground until
about 2010 when U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, invited Kenneth and Mark
Maryboy and others to put together a proposal on managing federal land
in the region. He offered them a seat at the policy-making table, and
they helped form a nonprofit called Utah Diné Bikéyah as a "grassroots"
collaboration to get things rolling. The David and Lucille Packard
Foundation provided seed money, and Round River Conservation Studies,
based in Salt Lake City, and other nonprofits provided technical
assistance.
In those early years, much of the organization's
staff comprised non-Native American graduate students, young lawyers-to-be,
environmental activists and passionate volunteers. The nonprofit honed its fundraising skills, messaging and organizational prowess over the course of a few years, paving the
way for it to spearhead the campaign that eventually proved successful
in creating Bears Ears National Monument.
A grand alliance of environmental nonprofits and outdoor recreation companies, formed in part through collaborative work of UDB and like-minded activist groups, began in about 2014 to pour tens of millions into creation and administration of a long-term national campaign with the precedent-setting goal — at least from a tribal perspective — of extending Indian Country sovereignty into non-tribal areas, the first being southeastern Utah. Natasha Hale, a staffer at Grand Canyon Trust, suggested as much: “If the tribes are successful in the (monument) proposal with the coalition of conservancy groups, it will set the platform for other protection issues outside of reservation land.”
Then in 2015, a remarkable partnership between historical enemies called the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition – Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni and Ute Indian Tribe – was established and submitted a monument proposal to President Obama's Interior Department. Obama signed off on a proclamation to create Bears Ears National Monument using using unilateral authority granted under the Antiquities Act during the final days of his administration the next year.
The coalition remains a force in efforts to expand tribal sovereignty in Utah and across the country.
However, Maryboy and Grayeyes, as small-county officials who became celebrities of sorts in Indian Country and among non-Native liberals sympathetic to their cause, did little publicly to advance their decade-long preservation goals or cement and expand efforts of coalition.
Kenneth Maryboy and Willie Grayeyes
Their competency and legitimacy to hold commission seats were continuously challenged. They responded defensively, resulting in a downward spiral of legal maneuvering, stonewalling of requests for transparency and lack of trust, pettiness, pique and peevishness.
From the outset, the two chose to govern, in part, through non-binding, ideologically tinged resolutions written by their longtime private attorney and Native American rights activist, Steven Boos, working out of Cortez, Colo., and his paralegal in Moab, Utah, Liz Thomas, a board member at SUWA. They were mostly approved over the objections of fellow commissioner Adams without advice or informed consent of virtually anyone in the county.
There was an immediate, bitter and continuing backlash.
“I have a background in history,” Shanon Brooks, president of Monticello (Utah) College, told commissioners at a February 2019 public meeting, “and this has happened many, many times where tyranny has come in and overridden the will of the people. This is textbook.”
“I’m into history. My
ancestors were here. When did yours come?” said Grayeyes, replying with a
confusing and provocative, if not exactly ahistorical, non sequitur.
Brooks told commissioners at their April 16 public meeting he was concerned about policy being influenced by a “proxy” government unaccountable to San Juan County residents and the motivations of politically partisan lawyers providing normally expensive services to Maryboy and Grayeyes for free.
Shanon Brooks addresses San Juan County commissioners in 2019. (Bill Keshlear)
Maryboy and Grayeyes often seemed unfamiliar with legal requirements of the office, turning a deaf ear to the duly elected county attorney and state-level officials tasked with steering often-inexperienced rural county administrators across Utah away from legal and financial pitfalls. Instead, they relied on Boos and Thomas for free legal, process and political advice.
Their time in office ended with a politically, and possibly racially, charged audit by state lawmakers into potential violations of Utah’s Open and Public Meetings Act by the two Navajo commissioners and undue influence by outside individuals on how the commission was run. Representatives of the Utah Office of Legislative Auditor General, August Lehman, audit supervisor, and Jesse Martinson, audit manager, briefed commissioners on Dec. 6 at their regular meeting in Monticello, Utah. Grayeyes did not visibly respond and had no questions; Maryboy was not present.
__________________
At the end of September, archeologists, federal and state land managers and representatives of Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Zuni, Pueblo of Acoma and the Hopi Tribe met in Bluff, Utah, to discuss the future of Bears Ears. The series of panel discussions was organized by the nonprofit Friends of Cedar Mesa as part of "rebranding" and re-staffing effort: Friends of Cedar Mesa, the only pro-monument group based in San Juan County, changed its name to Greater Bears Ears Partnership to reflect a broader mission.
According to the organization's website:
FCM's Honahnie is facilitating conversations with the tribes, mainly Pueblo of Acoma, west of Albuquerque, N.M., on possible preservation efforts. The consensus among archeologists is that ancestors of present-day Pueblo peoples built, inhabited then abandoned structures scattered across southeast Utah and migrated south into what is now New Mexico, possibly 200 years or more before Spanish colonists arrived.
He candidly acknowledged, in an interview after his presentation, that monument creation using the Antiquities Act as a preservation tool was unlikely given the multiyear political and legal firestorm that followed Obama's Bears Ears proclamation at the end of his tenure in office and President Clinton's 1996 proclamation that created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to the west. Few want to repeat those fiascos.Uncommon ground revisited
First Obama, then Trump, now Biden’s chapter of the Bears Ears saga
Part 1, A new day? Biden administration trumpets its commitment to re-framing policy initiatives surrounding the government's fraught relationship with Native Americans.
Part 2, C’mon down: Federal land management agencies have been unable to contain the damage that tourism and outdoor recreation has inflicted on once-pristine public land. What’s changed?
Part 3, Co-management vs. cooperative management: The differences are substantial, but tend to be conflated in service of political agendas.
Part 4, Toward true “co-management" in Montana: Pitfalls and possibilities (Blackfeet attempt to re-claim Badger-Two Medicine south of Glacier National Park and Salish-Kootenai purchase Kerr Dam on the Flathead River).
Part 5, Tribal perspectives at the forefront: An acknowledgment of the Biden administration rooted in the fact that Bears Ears coalition tribes consider the area sacred.
Part 6, Priorities: The BLM and Forest Service say they'll safeguard "objects" within the monument and "values" associated with the monument. Recreation access has second-tier status.
Part 7, Historical suspicions: Effective federal management to protect the Bears Ears region's artifacts, unique geological formations, plants and wildlife would have to overcome deeply ingrained skepticism.
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