A DIVE INTO DEEP WATERS
A Q&A: “The Battle Over Bears Ears,” a documentary produced several years ago by KUED, Salt Lake City’s PBS station, examines the complicated, intensely personal and politically significant story behind Bears Ears National Monument. It gives marginalized voices a chance to tell their story.
“Battle Over Bears Ears” is a one-hour documentary produced by KUED in Salt Lake City.
According to the station’s website, it “explores the deep connections to place and the vast cultural divides that are fueling the fight over how the Bears Ears Monument is protected and managed. Whose voices are heard, whose are lost, and how do all sides find common ground in this uncommon place?”
Watch the trailer here.
The film was produced by Nancy Green, who specializes in documentaries for local, regional and national PBS broadcast. Her work at KUED spans nearly 25 years, focusing on diverse topics, including health care, the arts, history and the outdoors. Recent films include “Homeless at the End,” “Search and Rescue,” “The Utah Bucket List,” “Maynard Dixon to the Desert Again” and “On the Edge: Mental Health in Utah.”
Current projects include a history of film-making in Utah.
I sat down with Green in 2018 to talk about all things Bears Ears.
(This has been edited since it first appeared in the Canyon Country Zephyr.)
BILL KESHLEAR: Thanks for sitting down with me to talk about the film and other things. Congratulations on the “Battle Over Bears Ears.” As far as I can tell no other media outlet has devoted as much of its scarce resources to covering this complicated, intensely personal and politically significant story as your KUED production. The film gives voice to several marginalized voices that have been either inadvertantly omitted or consciously edited out of similar reports — even by some of the most prestigious news organizations in the country.
NANCY GREEN: I dove into some very deep waters on this one.
KESHLEAR: What surprised you about the residents of San Juan County, both for and against the monument?
GREEN: There’s a deep love of the place among residents of San Juan County — almost at a cellular level.
KESHLEAR: What were the untold stories that you attempted to tell? Did you succeed?
GREEN: There were just too many untold stories to truly succeed. But I think just trying to understand the worldviews of other people a little more was important. So much is personal and there were complex layers of history. I think I hinted at that but didn’t really succeed. … The notion of different worldviews hasn’t really been explored by mainstream media. For example, many in one group have a non-Western orientation of time and place. It’s part of the problem in resolving the conflict over Bears Ears. People were not only talking at each other, they were talking past each other.
KESHLEAR: On top of all that is the “elephant in the room.” There’s been a high-level, behind-the-scenes political and environmental effort to safeguard the Antiquities Act, according to Tommy Beaudreau, former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s chief of staff, speaking at a seminar held at Johns Hopkins University in April 2018. It included southeastern Utah monument activists Willie Grayeyes, newly elected San Juan County commissioner, and Josh Ewing, director of Friends of Cedar Mesa, sources in your movie. The panel did not include Utahns who might prefer alternatives.
“The conventional narrative is about how the monument was designated and then came Trump,” writes Utah resident Stacy Young in the Canyon Country Zephyr. “But that actually gets the order of events backward: Trump was already president-elect when the designation was made. … So, the Obama administration made the monument designation knowing full well that, at best, it wouldn’t be implemented. In fact, they knew it would result in a huge fight; that the fight would be protracted and its outcome uncertain. The Obama administration knew that it would draw attention to the area, possibly accelerating destruction of its fragile landscape and artifacts of early human habitation. They did it anyway.” Bears Ears represents their most “sympathetic plaintiff” in the legal fight over the Antiquities Act. Beaudreau says in the video that the boundary of Obama’s monument echoes what San Juan County’s Lands Council came up with through a lengthy public process. “We tried to hew to the PLI (Lands Council’s) proposal. We couldn’t argue with a straight face that there wasn’t consensus about the area.” The quote comes at 58:20 in the video.
GREEN: People talk about the Council. People really did sit across from each other. There was real negotiation happening. People might say it didn’t go far enough or it wasn’t terribly realistic. But it was at least a process that was started and could’ve been built into something.
KESHLEAR: Backseat driving I know, but I am thinking about alternatives to the “Trump and his oil-and-gas buddies vs. Native Americans protecting their sacred ancestral lands” narrative that’s been told over and over. Perhaps an all-Navajo perspective with Blue Mountain Dine or Descendants of K’aayelii as protagonists? Blue Mountain Dine, many of whom live outside the Navajo reservation in San Juan County, oppose President Obama’s Bears Ears National Monument while the relatively secretive group known as the K’aayeliis have taken no position on it. They’re the two San Juan County Navajo groups whose ancestors were most closely connected to Bears Ears. Many if not most of the archeological sites considered sacred in southeastern Utah reflect lives of indigenous groups who inhabited the area before Navajos arrived.
(To the Diné (the Navajo People), Manuelito and K’aayélii — principal Navajo headmen — and their followers are remembered as heroes of “The Long Walk” because they sought refuge in Bears Ears Country to escape what we would nowadays call the ethnic cleansing, even genocidal, campaign of the federal government led by Kit Carson, trapper, scout and soldier whose adventures made him a legend among European-Americans. In 1863, his troopers and Ute scouts-for-hire indiscriminately murdered Navajos, slaughtered sheep, burned corn fields and forced members of the tribe to relocate to a barren patch of desert 300 miles south in New Mexico at Fort Sumner. According to tradition, K’aayélii never surrendered, but went into hiding in southeast Utah, through the Henry Mountains, the La Sal Mountains, the Uncompaghre Plateau in Colorado’s Allen Canyon and the Abajo Mountains near Bears Ears buttes, where he might’ve been born. Bears Ears is hallowed ground to Navajos, in part, because its seemingly impenetrable crannies and canyons provided sanctuary from Carson’s marauding soldiers.)
GREEN: I wished I had been able to contact the K’aayeliis. That would’ve been fascinating.
KESHLEAR: Theirs would’ve been a David and Goliath story.
GREEN: Who is David? Who is Goliath?
KESHLEAR: Stewards of San Juan, Jami Bayles’ group …
GREEN: She got some funding from the Sutherland Institute (a conservative think-tank and political advocacy group based in Salt Lake City).
KESHLEAR: I think that’s a common perception among many monument backers.
(But it’s not true, according to Bayles: “From day one, the Stewards of San Juan has always been a grass roots-organization that relied mostly on its own dedication and hard work.”)
KESHLEAR: Can our current system of representative government solve problems like this? Are private interests with well-financed agendas so powerful that they’ll inevitably mute citizen voices?
GREEN: I think that’s one of the frustrating things about this. There were many higher-level, politically and financially driven interests inside of this conversation. It does make you wonder about whose voice gets heard. And that drives the further question: What does it mean to have your voice heard? If you don’t get your way does that mean you’re not heard? That’s difficult to answer.
KESHLEAR: Angelo Baca (staff member of Utah Diné Bikéyah and graduate student at New York University) is articulate on Navajo history, culture and spirituality. On the other hand, the first language of Willie Grayeyes is Navajo, and he might be somewhat limited in his ability to describe Navajo culture in English.
GREEN: I ran into that. It’s a difficult thing when you’re dealing with the media. The documentary was not filmed in the Navajo language. It creates a barrier. I spent a lot of time with Jonah Yellowman (board member of Utah Diné Bikéyah and spiritual adviser). I finally had to have him talk about Bears Ears in Navajo because it was his first language.
KESHLEAR: There were sequences in the film related to former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s visit to the area in 2016, about the time Hillary Clinton locked up the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. How did the direction of “Battle Over Bears Ears” change because she didn’t go on to win the election?
GREEN: The Native American voices would not have been different. The divisiveness perhaps would not have been as sharp. Perhaps the film would’ve focused on the monument and its management.
KESHLEAR: Much of the filming occurred in 2017 when the Trump administration was re-evaluating not only Bears Ears National Monument but the Antiquities Act itself. Status of the monument was in limbo — as it still is because of litigation to reverse Trump’s decision to shrink it. Obama’s monument existed in name only, and even as written it didn’t include anything that would’ve created real protection. If Clinton had won, the monument’s management plan likely would’ve been written by now. San Juan County residents and monument activists could’ve pushed for provisions to beef up law enforcement.
GREEN: If I could’ve put one more thing in the film … Bears Ears really needs law enforcement and funding. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, BLM had something like eight or nine rangers, some patrolling with helicopters.
(A bill introduced into Congress by Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah District 2, would increase the law enforcement presence within the modified Bears Ears boundaries. The bill also organizes an archaeological protection unit to assist law enforcement in understanding what areas to protect. Obama’s monument does neither. Representatives of the Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition have been critical of the measure, saying there was no consultation with the Native American community in the bill’s creation. The measure is likely dead because it has virtually no support from Democrats, who currently control of the U.S House of Representatives.)
GREEN: Don Simonis, an archeologist who has worked for the Bureau of Land Management, was quoted in the film. He supports the monument because it could provide a possible structure that could fund law enforcement.
KESHLEAR: Yet aggressive law enforcement of 30 years ago was authorized by the Archeological Recovery and Protection Act of 1979 and possibly other laws enacted specifically to beef up a toothless Antiquities Act that had been used to create national monuments. Those rangers in helicopters didn’t need monument designation to go after looters and grave robbers.
Given political gridlock in Washington, D.C., it’s an open question whether the Interior Department has the wherewithal to operate and maintain a monument of the size and complexity of Bears Ears. Jon Jarvis, Obama’s director of the National Park Service, who oversaw creation of almost two dozen additional NPS units during his tenure, said he regrets that he was not able to secure adequate funding to protect and maintain those units or the rest of the system. Jarvis made the comments while speaking at the University of Utah in October of 2018.
KESHLEAR: Did you talk to anyone with a plan to bring people together?
GREEN: I never got the sense there was an actual plan. Perhaps a couple of years ago, common ground could’ve been found. But at this point in the discussion, I think the level of personal injury has made it extremely difficult.
KESHLEAR: Who or what so far has “won” or “lost”?
GREEN: The landscape has been a loser. There needs to be some kind of management, some kind of cohesive vision whatever that might look like. To me, that’s the biggest tragedy.
