Bears Ears

The usual pattern for a sacred site in the United States is that a nation objects to something already decided. Bears Ears began the other way round.

In 2015 the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation and the Pueblo of Zuni formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and jointly proposed a national monument, with a management role for themselves written into it. Nothing quite like it had been attempted. These are nations with different languages, different religions and, historically, reason to be wary of one another; what they share is the ground and a set of ancestral places on it.

President Obama created the monument on 28 December 2016 by Proclamation 9558, reserving about 1.35 million acres. Proclamation 9681, of 4 December 2017, removed roughly 1.15 million acres. Proclamation 10285, of 8 October 2021, restored the boundaries to about 1.36 million acres, and a co-management arrangement with the five nations followed.

On 13 July 2026, Proclamation 11043 reduced it again, to approximately 121,096 acres in two units, Shash Jaa and Indian Creek.

What the proclamation says, and why it matters

The 2026 proclamation is unusually explicit about its reasoning, and it is worth reading rather than paraphrasing. It describes the canyons and mesas as "generic features" that are not landmarks or objects of historic interest. It holds that "lithic scatters, projectile points, prehistoric campsites, petroglyphs, and pictographs are found across the American West and are not unique to the Bears Ears region", that their commonness counts against protecting the particular instances here. And it argues that other statutes already cover what deserves covering.

Set beside the coalition's case, the two are not really arguing about acreage. The Antiquities Act protects objects: things that can be counted, catalogued and compared for rarity. The nations have consistently said that what they are asking to protect is not an inventory of artefacts but a relationship with a specific place that is still being used, the difference between a museum and a church. The statute has no category for that, so the argument gets conducted in the only vocabulary the law provides, which is the vocabulary of objects.

This entry is current to July 2026. The dispute is live and the boundaries may change again.

Bears Ears is co-managed under an arrangement that gives sovereign tribal nations a formal seat in decisions over federal land, a structure that predates and outlasts any single monument boundary.

Five nations, one coalition

The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, formed by the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe and Pueblo of Zuni, proposed the monument jointly and negotiated a management structure in which tribal representatives sit on a commission advising federal land managers directly, an arrangement without close precedent on other American public lands at this scale.

What the land actually holds

Within the broader landscape, sites such as the cliff dwellings and structures known as the Doll House and Moon House ruins preserve Ancestral Puebloan architecture, granaries and rock art panels, some over a thousand years old, alongside more recent Navajo and Ute cultural sites, making the area a continuously used landscape rather than an abandoned one.

Boundaries that keep moving, coalition that has not

The monument's legal boundaries have been redrawn more than once by successive federal administrations, expanding and shrinking the protected area each time political control changed. The coalition itself, and its claim to a management role regardless of acreage, has persisted through every redrawing, arguing that the relationship to the land does not depend on where a map line falls.