Natural History Wanderings

The New York Times reports

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

“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.