BY TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
On Wednesday, December 28, 2016, President Barack Obama established the Bears Ears National Monument. Not only is this a beautiful gesture in the name of the Antiquities Act, but the opening paragraph of the proclamation is a beautiful description of the land itself:
Within this historic document the reader will find a language more akin to poetry than public policy, well worth reading out loud around a dinner table or campfire. Too often the politics of place obscures the spirit of a place. This proclamation has given voice to an evolving narrative of beauty and change, both human and wild, that has been visited upon this burnished landscape of sandstone and sage, mountains and canyons throughout time, deep time.
Aspen. MARC COLES-RITCHIE
To read the opening sentence of each paragraph creates a prose poem:
Red-spotted toad. LARA SCHNELLBACH
And then comes a litany of life residing in the Cedar Mesa landscape from desert cottontail to black-tailed jackrabbit to prairie dogs and pocket gophers; from badger to coyote to striped skunk to ringtail cat to gray fox, bobcat, and mountain lion following mule deer.
Reptiles from tiger salamander to red-spotted toad, to canyon tree frog to side-blotched lizard to striped whiptail to western rattlesnake and gopher snake; to golden eagle, peregrine falcon, northern harrier, goshawk, red-tailed hawk, great-horned owl and flammulated owl to violet-green swallows and rock wrens and the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher.
What appears is a region vast and mysterious where the handprints of past people can still be found on canyon walls, a landscape so chockful of earthly delights, why wouldn’t we as modern-day stewards move to protect it?
At a time when politics is so rancorous, so partisan, so blatantly in the hands of special interests like the fossil fuel industry, especially in the American West, the designation of Bears Ears National Monument signified a grace note in the centennial year of the National Park Service. We can pray that Utah’s congressional delegation’s relentless cries to rescind or gut this newest monument will fall on deaf ears within the Trump administration.
The United States government under the Obama administration listened to the leadership of native peoples. It heard the voices of the Navajo, the Ute nations, the Hopi, and the Zuni, all members of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition who asked for the protection of their ancestral lands to not only honor the graves of the ancient ones, but to honor the sacred nature of their ceremonies for future generations. We can all celebrate this triumph with the tribes as fellow residents of the Colorado Plateau.
It is this eternal beauty, interrelated and interconnected, that transcends the malfeasance of small-minded politicians who threaten to undo what had already been done long before they ever arrived on this Earth – the revolving nature of life. The evolutionary story of wonder has been written and revised as an ongoing narrative of change that allows us to remember what it means to be human in a world much larger than ourselves.
The proclamation of Bears Ears National Monument reminds us what native people have never forgotten: We are not the only species that lives and loves and breathes on this planet we call home.
Terry Tempest Williams is a resident of the Colorado Plateau and author most recently of “The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks.” This essay appeared in slightly different form in the Durango Herald on January 1, 2017.
Bears Ears National Monument
Also in this issue:
Hillary Hoffmann on the hidden wonders of the Colorado Plateau's national monuments. Read now ›