Catherine Cooper speaks with Rebecca Robinson and Steve Strom about listening to and sharing the various opinions surrounding the formation of Bears Ears National Monument.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with.

Rebecca Robinson: Hello I am Rebecca Robinson. I am a writer and journalist based in Southwest Washington state.

Steve Strom: And I'm Steve Strom, a retired astronomer who has been working for the last seven or eight years on conservation related books.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. You've recently published a book called Voices from Bears Ears. Could you talk about what first drew your attention to the conversation around the proposed National Monument?

Rebecca Robinson: This project began it seems like a lifetime ago. In early 2015, at the time, conservation organizations, in particular the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, were leading a campaign to ask the Obama administration to establish a greater Canyon Lands national monument, which is a large swath of land red rock country in southeast Utah, the areas, ecologically and culturally significant to many people and Native American tribes, indigenous peoples in the region and like Bears ears, had natural resources that drilling and mining companies were ready to exploit. So the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA and its partners were asking, as I mentioned, then-President Obama, to establish this National Monument using something called the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt back in 1906 to quote, “authorize the president to create historic landmarks. Historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the government of the United States.” It's a mouthful, but it ends up being very significant in the battle over Bears Ears. So in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt ended up using it to protect the Grand Canyon. At that point, as a National Monument because Congress was failing to act. And again, this becomes very significant in the Bears Ears issue as well, so our initial interviews focused on the Greater Canyonlands proposal, but by the summer of 2015, our initial sources, some of whom were part of the same Greater Canyonlands, were really shifting their focus to another conservation movement in Southeast Utah, centered in the Four Corners region where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet, and it was led by a just-formed coalition of five Native American tribal nations. The Hopi, the Navajo, The Ute Indian tribe, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribe. They were petitioning the Obama administration to establish a Bears Ears National Monument that would protect ancestral lands from drilling, mining and the impacts of motorized recreation very similar to Greater Canyonlands, just in a slightly different region. And the Bears Ears is so-called named after a pair of two very large buttes that look to many people like ears of bears poking out of the earth. They really are key landmark in a wild landscape that can be seen for many miles in every direction, and they're sacred to the indigenous peoples of the region and what was unique about the Bears Ears campaign was that while conservation organizations played a key role in promoting and lobbying for protection and establishment of a monument, the true leaders were the tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, it was an indigenous led effort, the likes of which the US hadn't really seen before. It also wasn't a straightforward conservation proposal. The coalition emphasized the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape, which their ancestors had called home since time immemorial and, most significantly, the coalition proposed a co-management agreement with the federal government in which a representative from each tribe, tribes being sovereign nations who have a government-to-government relationship with the federal government would co-manage. the lands of the monument in a way that was consistent with their cultural values and also conservation values more generally. Actually, we also heard that there was fierce opposition to this proposal from some locals, though not all, critically, and elected leaders who saw the establishment of a National Monument as a, quote-uN-quote land grab by the federal government that by setting aside some of this land for protection could rob them of their livelihood. And access to some of their treasured places. [It was] a compelling story, we wanted to learn more. So we headed to the Four Corners region and started interviewing people. As tends to happen when following a story, one interview led to another and another and another until we knew that we had to spend some serious time on the ground in the region to truly understand the issues at play.

Steve Strom: The notion of a land grab, often used to oppose the Bears ears is a little bit deceptive in that the land that putatively was being grabbed was in fact public land, like for example a National Forest. So it's important to note that these are public lands that, like national forests ,belong to us all.

Rebecca Robinson: We found three themes that emerged that connected people on all sides of the issue. One was that they all had a cultural and spiritual connection to the landscape. Many of them in the local area, felt that their voices hadn't been heard by people who were deciding the fate of landscapes that they called home. And that they lived in a rural area with a lot of poverty and a lot of industries that had come and gone over the years, such as uranium mining, things that had gone boom and bust, and they faced an uncertain economic future, and that also informed their very passionate views on this. And it's also informed by ancient history, as well as more recent. And there's an intersection of religious beliefs and different visions for economic future and the meaning of the word sacred, as well.

Catherine Cooper: So it sounds like such a huge scope just around this one National Monument. How did you begin to formulate the project and then put together these interviews?

Rebecca Robinson: What drew us to the story was the seemingly epic nature of it and really encompassing so many different intersecting issues that at the time and still inform a lot of political and cultural debates in the West in particular, but also the country at large. So I mentioned before that we started with a couple of initial interviews and one interview led to another and to another and another. And everyone had someone to recommend. And we happened to have the luxury of time in certain parts of this project and we were able to invest the time in going to southeast Utah and other places in the Four Corners region and spend significant time on the ground in the communities we were reporting on and so that made it easier to identify people to interview.

Steve Strom: I think a crucial decision was made by Rebecca relatively early on in the process and that is to allow the story to be told by the individuals involved in the conflict, rather than doing as I had originally imagined, a book which would follow a more academic form description of the geography to a description of the indigenous history, Anglo history and so on, and I feel that to the extent that the book has real power, it derives from the decision to let people talk.

Catherine Cooper: That is absolutely one of the things that drew me to the book. I know this isn't a question I wrote down, but was there a commonality in how you conducted the interviews? Did you start with one question that was the same for everyone, and then go from there?

Steve Strom: My recollection is that we adjusted to each of the sources and tried to meet them. Where they were, I think that to the extent possible, we tried to engage them first on a personal level before going too deeply into the weeds of the Bears Ears discussion. And I think in the end, we followed pretty much the same themes in asking the questions. But I think that each of the interviews usually from my perspective were tailored to the individual.

Rebecca Robinson: I think that for some interviews we did get into the weeds because we knew that some politicians or some leaders of advocacy organizations were very much involved in the policy, which was a crucial part of understanding the story especially. One thing I didn't mention is that at the time that the Bears Ears proposal was taking shape, there were conversations led by a Republican congressman in Utah, representative Rob Bishop, that involved many different stakeholders. You had ranchers. You had business owners. You had rock climbers. You had representatives of Native American tribes all trying to come together to find a compromise on these thorny public lands issues. And there were reasons why it went off the rails that had to do with politics and cultural differences, but I think that when we spoke to some of the folks that had been involved with the policy aspect of things, we would tailor our questions more to policy and getting into the weeds of legislation and land boundaries and whatnot. But then we took a different approach with some respected elders in the Mormon community. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is hugely influential in the part of Southeast Utah where we were conducting our interviews. And so we very much focused on the spiritual connection to the land and how that very much informs views on how land should be managed and stewarded, and so I do think to Steve's point that we in some ways took the same approach, but approached the interviews from a different standpoint, based on who we were talking to.

Catherine Cooper: Steve mentioned this very unique structure to the book. How did you decide which interviews wou...