Click the link to read the article on The Los Angeles Times website (Jack Herrera). Here’s an excerpt:
January 3, 2024
In February 2020, Dave Herrero drove into the canyon country here in southeastern Utah to visit a slice of land that was up for sale — a 320-acre ranch that stretched deep into the red-rock canyon near the small town of Bluff…In July, his California-based employer, the nonprofit Wildlands Conservancy, purchased the ranch for $2.5 million from the family that owned it and began writing a deed that it hopes will become a model for working with tribes to protect wilderness in the American West from real estate developers, mining companies and oil drillers. In what would be a novel arrangement, the deed is expected to include a coalition of five tribes as co-owners and managers with Wildlands — an effort to acknowledge the history of the land, which the conservation group named Cottonwood Wash.
“There are once tribes that lived in these areas that were forcibly removed,” said Davina Smith, a member of the Diné, or Navajo, who has worked with different organizations to protect land in the Four Corners region. “We have to recognize that.”
[…]
The traditional model of conservation in the West has long followed the lead of environmentalists such as John Muir— the “father of the national parks” — who saw untracked wilderness as a sort of Eden that would fall to corruption under man’s influence. His model of conservation was simple: Keep people out…That school of thought feels foreign to Natives such as [Davina] Smith, 49.
“You have all these prominent writers writing about the West, but they focus on the landscape,” she said. “They don’t think about the Native tribes who have always actually been living in this landscape.”
[…]
In 2015, a coalition of five tribes — Hopi, Navajo, Uintah and Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni — sent a letter to then-President Obama proposing the creation of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah on land known as the Colorado Plateau. Under a novel co-management scheme, the tribes would have direct say in ecological stewardship and how to regulate economic activity and recreation…Less than a year after Obama issued a presidential proclamation creating the monument on Dec. 28, 2016, then-President Trump undid it at the urging of the Utah state government, which wanted to leave the land open to uranium mining, oil drilling and cattle grazing. When President Biden took office in 2021, one of his first acts was reestablishing Bears Ears…The Cottonwood Wash lies within the boundaries of the Bears Ears Monument, but because it’s private property, it wasn’t included as part of the monument. That gave Wildlands a playbook. In 2022, its leaders approached the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, the official alliance of the five tribes, to say they were considering buying the Cottonwood Wash and were interested in joint ownership and management. As part of their push, Herrero and Haney drove to four reservations to meet with tribal leaders. Some were suspicious at first. Anthony Sanchez, the head councilman for the Pueblo of Zuni, explained that non-Native groups will sometimes use supposed ties to tribes to boost their own PR.
