Restoring the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to its size and boundaries as they existed prior to December 4, 2017, will ensure that this exceptional and inimitable landscape filled with an unparalleled diversity of resources will be properly protected and will continue to provide the living laboratory that has produced so many dramatic discoveries in the first quarter century of its existence. Given the unique nature of the objects identified across the Grand Staircase-Escalante landscape, the threat of damage and destruction to those objects, and the current inadequate protection they are afforded, a reservation of this size is compatible with the proper care and management of this National Monument.
For more than 100 years, indigenous people, historians, conservationists, scientists and others advocated unsuccessfully for protection of Bears Ears. It was not until the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and Pueblo of Zuni united in a common vision to protect these sacred lands that Bears Ears National Monument became a reality. This proclamation confirms, restores, and supplements the boundaries provided by Proclamation 9558 to protect the ancestral homeland of Tribal Nations that all refer to the area by the same name — Hoon’Naqvut (Hopi), Shash Jaa’ (Navajo), Kwiyagatu Nukavachi (Ute), and Ansh An Lashokdiwe (Zuni): Bears Ears.
