Obama designates Bears Ears and Gold Butte as national monuments

Story: 2016 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 2016

In the final weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama used a century-old law to permanently protect two of the American West’s most ecologically and culturally significant landscapes — one in Utah and one in Nevada — over fierce objections from state politicians and energy interests.

What the designation covers

• Bears Ears National Monument: A 1.35 million-acre site in Utah’s Four Corners region, home to an estimated 100,000 archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings considered sacred by five Indigenous tribes.
• Gold Butte National Monument: A 300,000-acre area northeast of Las Vegas featuring Native American rock art, rare fossils, recently discovered dinosaur tracks, and fragile desert ecosystems including Joshua tree forests.
• Tribal commission: Bears Ears became the first national monument to include a tribal advisory commission, giving elected representatives from five Native nations — including the Navajo Nation — a formal role in land management.

A law older than any living president

Obama invoked the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives a sitting president the authority to designate federal lands as national monuments to protect objects of scientific, historic, or cultural significance. The law was originally championed by Theodore Roosevelt — himself a committed conservationist — and has been used by presidents of both parties ever since.

By the time he left office, Obama had created or expanded monuments covering more acreage than any previous president. The Bears Ears designation came in direct response to years of advocacy from a coalition of Southwestern tribes who argued the land had been inadequately protected from looting and vandalism.

Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye called it a historic moment. “We have always looked to Bears Ears as a place of refuge,” he said. “The rocks, the winds, the land — they are living, breathing things that deserve timely and lasting protection.”

Why Indigenous voices drove this fight

The coalition of five tribes — the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, and Ute Indian Tribe — had spent years building the case for federal protection. Their advocacy was grounded not in legal strategy alone but in living connection: oral histories, ceremonial practices, and generations of knowledge about these landscapes that no government survey had ever fully captured.

The tribal commission created for Bears Ears was genuinely new. Federal land management agencies have long made decisions about Indigenous sacred sites with minimal input from the communities those sites belong to. This structure, however imperfect, offered a model for something different — shared stewardship rather than top-down administration.

At Gold Butte, Native American rock art and artifacts are scattered across sandstone formations and mountain ranges where people have lived and traveled for thousands of years. The designation formalized protections for cultural heritage that had faced ongoing threats from looting and off-road vehicle damage.

Lasting impact

The Bears Ears designation in particular energized a broader movement for Indigenous-led conservation. It demonstrated that tribes could act as unified political forces on federal land policy — and that the Antiquities Act could be a tool for cultural preservation, not just scenic protection.

Both monuments also added to a growing national inventory of protected public land that benefits wildlife, supports tourism economies, and preserves geological records stretching back millions of years. Bears Ears sits in one of the most archaeologically rich areas on the continent. Gold Butte protects dinosaur tracks that scientists had only recently begun to study.

Retiring Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who had long championed the Gold Butte designation, called it “a wonderful capstone to a career of fighting to protect Nevada’s pristine landscapes.” For the communities that had fought for these protections, it was a hard-won validation after years of federal inaction.

The monuments also gave new weight to a legal question that had rarely been tested: the Antiquities Act grants presidents the power to create monuments, but legal scholars and courts have consistently held that it does not give them — or their successors — the authority to undo one.

Blindspots and limits

The designation was not without real tension. Many rural Utah residents and ranchers had legitimate concerns about losing access to land they had used for generations — and the monument’s boundaries were drawn significantly smaller than what the tribal coalition had originally requested. The tribal commission, while historic, was advisory rather than binding, leaving ultimate authority with federal agencies.

The political fight did not end with Obama’s signature. President-elect Donald Trump had signaled openness to reversing or shrinking monument designations, and Utah’s Republican senators vowed to pursue exactly that. Whether the protections would endure became an open question almost immediately — and the years that followed proved those concerns well-founded, as the boundaries were later reduced before being restored under a subsequent administration.

The legal and political battles over Bears Ears in particular continued long after 2016 C.E., making it one of the most contested conservation designations in recent American history. What it established, though — the principle that Indigenous communities deserve a formal voice in the stewardship of their ancestral lands — proved harder to roll back than the boundary lines.

For more on the Antiquities Act and its history, the National Park Service’s Bears Ears page offers ongoing updates. The Bureau of Land Management maintains records on all designated national monuments. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, whose advocacy was central to this story, is documented through their own public record. And for broader context on the Antiquities Act’s legal history, the Wilderness Society provides a detailed overview.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Associated Press via Yahoo News

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous land rights take center stage at COP30
• Ghana establishes a marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• The Good News for Humankind archive on conservation

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