Orin Hatch says the Indians should just take my word for it on sacred triballands [View all]

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Speaking alongside Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke about the Trump administration’s order to review — and potentially shrink or eliminate — nearly 30 national monuments, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said Native Americans were “manipulated” into their support for the 1.35 million acre Bears Ears National Monument southeastern Utah.

“The Indians, they don’t fully understand that a lot of the things that they currently take for granted on those lands, they won’t be able to do if it’s made clearly into a monument or a wilderness,” Hatch said on Sunday. “Once you put a monument there, you do restrict a lot of things that could be done, and that includes use of the land… Just take my word for it.”

 Hatch’s dismissal of native voices is not only condescending, it is incredibly inaccurate in the case of Bears Ears. Protections for Bears Ears were nearly 80 years in the making. Most recently, the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, which brought together five tribal nations, pushed for the protection of the Bears Ears region. After the group received no substantial response from the Utah Congressional delegation about protecting the area, the group opted to propose that President Barack Obama should create a national monument, which he did in December 2016.

Hatch’s comments come amid Zinke’s trip to Utah where he will conduct a review of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and provide recommendations to shrink or rescind the monuments. Native American tribes, who consider Bears Ears to be their sacred ancestral land, are well aware of what the monument’s creation entails and consider the national monument review to be an attack on those lands.

https://thinkprogress.org/orrin-hatch-says-tribes-dont-understand-ancestral-lands-34d19c1a563d