Kreig Benally, waiter, web designer, Navajo

“The 45th president stole my land.”

Three miles east of the small town of Bluff, Utah, stand a few houses at the base of a red sandstone cliff near a church called St. Christopher’s Episcopal Mission.

In 2014, around the time Kreig Benally, a Navajo who was born and raised around the mission, learned about the campaign to protect Bears Ears, the Bureau of Land Management proposed selling an oil drilling lease on the slickrock bench above the mission. The lease would have allowed oil wells a mere 700 feet from the mission drinking well that Navajos visit from as far as 25 miles away for clean water.

If that well were to become polluted because of gas drilling, Benally knew it would mean having to drive elsewhere to find water for drinking and cooking, and possibly even bathing and laundry. He didn’t want to go back to that way of living.

“It was a sad day because I grew up hauling water, we didn’t have running water,” said Benally, 33, a waiter and a web developer. “I don’t want to worry about going to out of state or to the next town over to bring it home.”

Benally joined dozens of other Navajos at a public meeting to oppose the oil lease. When President Barack Obama proclaimed Bears Ears National Monument in Dec. 2016, Benally said the threat of an oil well polluting the mission’s water vanished.

However, less than a year later, when President Trump effectively eliminated Bears Ears, Benally began to feel his drinking water was threatened again.

“It’s just one more thing to worry about,” he said. “I don’t know who’s going to come here, corporations come in and drill as they please, we don’t want them to taint our water.”

Benally had dramatically evolved in his opinion of Bears Ears National Monument. Initially, he opposed it.

“At first I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t have the facts right, a lot of people were against it and I went along with the crowd,” he said.

This changed when he learned how much the national monument honored his ancestors, and how modern tribes would help manage the landscape.

“When I started doing my own research I decided it was a good thing, because all the surrounding tribes would have a say,” he said.

Benally called the Bears Ears region, “my big backyard.” He had learned its wild topography simply by exploring it, physically and mentally.

“I have a big imagination and I would have all these adventures,” he said. “All this hiking and climbing.”

He said that as a youth, he took the land for granted. But when he grew into an adult, and returned to the mission community after a few years in college in Salt Lake City, he realized the splendor of his homeland.

“Being older I go up there and I go, ‘Wow, it’s amazing,’” he said.

To Benally, Trump’s elimination of Bears Ears was a direct and personal attack.

“The 45th president stole my land,” he said. “I feel that my own backyard is just an open market for whatever minerals, whatever oil — I don’t want that.”

He wishes he could show the Trump not only the beauty of the landscape and its cultural artifacts, but also how much the community around St. Christopher’s Episcopal Mission needs clean water. He wishes he could show Trump his home — but silently.

“I don’t think I could know how to talk to Trump, I wouldn’t know how to use my words in a polite way, so I’d rather just show him,” Benally said. “Where I live, especially how native people are so dependent on this monument — they feel some sort of security, protected.”

Two days after Trump disassembled Bears Ears National Monument, Benally was still reeling from the insult he had felt the previous week when Trump held a ceremony to honor elderly World War II Navajo Code Talkers in front of a painting of President Andrew Jackson, architect of the Indian Removal Act. During that ceremony, Trump denigraded a political rival by calling her “Pocahontas.”

“It’s so disrespectful for him to use the term, ‘Pocahontas,’ it shows so much disrespect, it makes me angry,” Benally said. “I wanted to feel hatred, but I can’t allow myself to do that, it will consume me whole.”

Benally has decided that there is too much at stake to become swallowed by rage. Like keeping his community’s clean water.