Utah senators voted 22-6 to urge President Trump to cancel the Bears Ears National Monument designation made in the last days of the Obama administration, reports Deseret News. The 1.35-million-acre area is used by Native American groups, including the Navajo, to forage for wild foods like pine nuts and juniper berries, and to hunt rabbits.
The Utah House had already approved the resolution, and the governor signed it. Republican lawmakers argued that the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to name national monuments, is an example of federal overreach and that the land’s fate should have been decided by in-state legislation.
But the Native groups and environmentalists who called for the monument are preparing their defense.
“Grass-roots people who depend on this landscape every day would like the opportunity to explain why we have worked so hard and so long to create this first-ever Native American national monument that honors our history and points toward our future,” said the Utah Dine Bikeyah in a letter to new Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. The Navajo organization invited Zinke to travel to Utah to meet with the many people who supported the monument.