Shrinking of monuments infuriates native leaders

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump will announce plans next week to shrink two sprawling Utah national monuments by nearly two-thirds, an action that environmentalists and tribal leaders called illegal and another affront to Native Americans.

Trump has already offended Native Americans by overriding tribal objections to approve the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines and using a White House event honouring Navajo Code Talkers to take a political jab at a Democratic senator he has nicknamed “Pocahontas.”

Leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press show that Trump plans to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by nearly 85 per cent and reduce Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half. The plan would cut the total amount of land in the state’s red rock country protected under monument status from more than 1.3 million hectares to about 485,00 hectares.

The proposals prompted an outcry from environmental groups, tribal leaders and others who say Trump’s actions threaten important archeological and cultural resources, especially Bears Ears, a more than 525,000-hectare site in southeastern Utah that features thousands of Native American artifacts, including ancient cliff dwellings and petroglyphs.

Trump has told Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch and other Utah officials that he will follow the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink both monuments, but the White House and Zinke’s office have not offered details about how they would redraw the monument boundaries.

Trump is travelling to Utah on Monday and is expected to release details about his plan to shrink the two monuments, the first and the largest monuments targeted for reduction by Trump after a review of monuments across the U.S. this year.

The proposed changes would be the most significant reductions by any president to monument designations made under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president wide authority to protect federal sites considered historic or geographically or culturally significant. Trump ordered Zinke to review 27 monuments created in the past two decades, with Bears Ears the top priority.