Utah’s politically contentious southeast corner is a living landscape of culture and civilization. For 11 months, it was federally protected. It’s not clear who will be its steward now. This is what remains of Bears Ears.
“The biggest threat to Bears Ears was first looting of cultural sites by locals, so there’s a lot of animosity toward the federal government for actually cracking down on operations to systematically loot Native American sites throughout that region — millions of dollars made in illegally harvesting and selling artifacts,” said Sally Jewell, who was interior secretary from 2013 to 2017.
The BLM’s tactics led to a civil suit after one of the suspects arrested in the raid committed suicide. The lawsuit was thrown out, but animosity toward the federal government remains strong. For the Hopi, the fight to preserve Bears Ears intersects with a struggle to be recognized. Vandals may take a pot from a site because they think it’s cool, but they are looking past the reason it exists, said Clark Tenakhongva, the vice chairman of the tribe.
“Right now this monument is not being managed. This area is not being managed by the BLM or the Forest Service or anybody else, except for Google,” said Josh Ewing, the executive director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, a local nonprofit advocacy group that is a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits. “Google is the main manager of this monument, because it’s sending people all over the place.
A smaller cousin just northeast of the more famous Monument Valley, this desert valley is dotted with stone pillars that jut vertically out of the valley floor and rise straight upward for hundreds of feet. It took millions of years of wind and rain to carve these outcroppings from solid stone. Unlike the archaeological mélange of artifacts on Cedar Mesa, the eons of sandstone in Valley of the Gods are clearly separated in contrasting layers of red and orange.A similar separation helped Clovis artifacts survive for millennia. Elsewhere in the region, successive cultures obscure the history of those who came before.
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