- United States
- Utah
- Letter
Resign Over the Illegal Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Monument Reductions
To: Sen. Curtis, Sen. Lee, Rep. Moore
From: A verified voter in Logan, UT
July 16
Resign. Stripping nearly 1.5 million acres each from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is unconstitutional, and you know it. The Antiquities Act gives presidents the power to designate monuments — not gut them. Earthjustice called this move "just as illegal today as it was in 2017," and they're right. You've handed sacred Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and Ute lands — ancestral villages, burial sites, cliff dwellings — to oil companies and corporate developers. That's not giving land back to the people. That's looting it for your donors.
Voters in Utah and across the country oppose this. The five tribal nations who requested Bears Ears be protected in the first place were not consulted — a clear violation of federal legal obligations, as Davina Smith-Idjesa of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition has stated directly. You stood at that signing ceremony and called it a win. It isn't. It's a betrayal of the public trust, of Indigenous sovereignty, and of the law. Step down.