Trump signs an executive order in December 2017 drastically reducing the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah. Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images

By Emily Holden, Jimmy Tobias and Alvin Chang • October 26, 2020

Clark Tenakhongva resides on the Hopi reservation in north-eastern Arizona, but his true home is a five-hour drive north in Utah, amid the rust-colored canyons and jutting buttes of Bears Ears, a beloved ancestral site of the Hopi people.

“For me, when I go there, it’s got its own place in my heart,” said Tenakhongva, the vice-chairman of the Hopi tribal council. “I feel like I’m back home.”

But after Donald Trump took office in 2017, Bears Ears was the focus of a sophisticated, pro-development pressure campaign.

For thousands of years, Native nations of the US south-west lived in the majestic canyons of Bears Ears.

But it was land that conservative politicians and corporate interests also sought to control.

So in late 2016, the Hopi celebrated when the Obama administration protected Bears Ears by declaring it a national monument, sheltering it from development and extraction.

Just one year later, after Donald Trump took office, he drastically reduced the size of the monument by 85%.

The administration justified the rollback by pointing to some local residents who opposed the monument. In truth it was also responding to a push by groups with deep ties to major GOP donors and the extractive industries.

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