In a Return to the Land, Tribes Will Jointly Manage a National Monument

Five Native American tribes will work with the Bureau of Land Management to plan and conserve Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, officials said.

Bears Ears National Monument, whose red-rock landscape sprawls across more than 1.3 million acres in southeastern Utah, will be managed jointly by the federal government and Native American tribes in what administration officials said represents a “one-of-a-kind” model of cooperation.

The arrangement to preserve the national monument was ratified in an agreement that was signed on Saturday and commemorated with the unveiling of a new Bears Ears welcome sign, which includes the insignia of the five tribes that will help run the monument, the Interior Department said in a statement.

“Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them,” Carleton Bowekaty, the lieutenant governor of the Zuni Pueblo tribe, said in the statement.

Mr. Bowekaty is the co-chair of the Bears Ears Commission, a group that also includes representatives of four other tribes that at some point were driven off the land: the Hopi, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation.

“This type of true comanagement will serve as a model,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, which is within the Interior Department.

Homer Wilkes, the under secretary of natural resources and the environment, said in a statement that the pact was a “one-of-a-kind cooperative agreement” that outlined a common vision for the management and protection of those lands.

The agreement requires the Bureau of Land Management to “meaningfully engage” with the commission on areas including land planning, management and conservation while working to protect traditions “that are part of the tribal nations’ way of life on these lands.”…