President Donald Trump signed proclamations on July 13, 2026, cutting the size of Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90% – meaning nearly 3 million acres will lose monument status and revert to ordinary public lands management in September. The Antiquities Act of 1906 requires presidents to use proclamations to establish or modify national monuments.

The cuts followed a long campaign by Utah’s Republican leadership to remove the designation and reopen the land for mining. Gov. Spencer Cox and members of the state’s congressional delegation stood with Trump at the signing, and Sen. Mike Lee said he had been working toward the reduction for roughly 18 months.

They argue that the original monuments were far larger than the Antiquities Act allows, since the law limits a monument to the “smallest area compatible” with protecting the objects inside it. Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated by Bill Clinton in 1996, and Bears Ears by Barack Obama in 2016. Cutting the monuments’ size opens the excluded land to mining. The Bears Ears proclamation points to the minerals underneath, including copper and uranium, as critical to national security.

The tribal nations that consider these lands sacred say they were not consulted. The Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition condemned what it called a move to “virtually eliminate” the monuments.

As a scholar of Native American and Indigenous Studies I see this decision as part of a pattern that is more than a century old: the United States repeatedly acknowledges that these lands are sacred. Yet, that recognition never comes with lasting protections.

What makes these places sacred

Bears Ears takes its name from twin buttes that resemble the head and ears of a bear rising above the canyon country of southeastern Utah.

The nations that hold the land sacred each know the name Bears Ears in their own languages: Hoon’Naqvut in Hopi, Shash Jaa’ in Navajo, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi in Ute, and Ansh An Lashokdiwe in Zuni.

For the Pueblo nations among them, the Hopi and Zuni, Bears Ears is inseparable from their own origin........

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