Mark Maryboy, former San Juan County Commissioner & Navajo Nation Councilperson

“We need to focus on standing with environmental groups that are sympathetic to our case. We have an opportunity in this country to challenge the president of the United States.”

For Navajo leader Mark Maryboy, the story of the quest to preserve the red high-rise mesas and twisting white canyons of Bears Ears National Monument began in the late 1800s, when new settlers marched Navajo clans off their ancestral land, and bands of resisters hid under the twin remote bluffs known as the Bears Ears.

Two generations later, descendants of the white settlers joined the preservation quest. In the 1930s, archaeologists, dazzled by the region’s cultural treasures, proposed that President Franklin D. Roosevelt designate the landscape a national monument.

But the story Maryboy tells about how he joined the quest begins 50 years ago, when he was 11, and his family brought him across the San Juan River on the Navajo Reservation in Utah to see a special visitor. Maryboy remembers running around an event hall, playing with his brothers, when his father seized him by the arm and told him to pay attention. Talking with some of his elder relatives was senator and soon-to-be presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Maryboy said that when the event was over, he asked his grandparents what they had talked about.

“That’s when I became aware of Bears Ears, this was when I asked my grandma and my grandpa, that’s when I learned all the stories about where we used to live,” Maryboy said.

Around 2010, Maryboy began organizing with the six other Navajo chapter houses in Utah. The group grew into the Bears Ears National Monument advocacy group Utah Dine Bikeyah. Hopis, Zunis and Utes joined the alliance. In early 2016, the tribal leaders formally petitioned President Barack Obama to designate the national monument. They were jubilant in December 2016, when Obama made the proclamation and preserved 1.35 million acres.

Less than a year later, President Donald Trump reneged on Obama’s promise.

“I was frustrated, angry,” Maryboy, 61, said over a plate of biscuits and gravy at the Twin Rocks Cafe in Bluff, a few miles west of his home. “I knew it was going to happen but it was still a feeling of betrayal by a stupid president.”

Maryboy said he had readied himself for Trump to slash the monument. In the spring of 2017, Trump’s Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, toured Bears Ears National Monument, mostly accompanied by those who opposed the designation. Zinke didn’t make much time to meet with supporters.

“He spent less than one hour with Native Americans,” Maryboy said. “We spent a lot of time with (Obama Interior Secretary) Sally Jewel, not with him.”

His pessimistic view of what Zinke would do grew over the following months, as the secretary became embroiled in a number of scandals and was accused of improper politicking and charging taxpayers for flights for him and his wife, all while aggrandizing himself by commissioning commemorative coins with his name on them and ordering his staff to raise a flag whenever he stepped inside his office in Washington D.C.

“That told me this guy’s not honest,” Maryboy said.

When asked what he would say if he could circumvent Zinke and meet with Trump directly, Maryboy said he would refuse.

“I think the guy is dense,” Maryboy said. “He’s just beyond any reasonable thinking.”

Maryboy said the next chapter in the long story to preserve Bears Ears will hinge on lawsuits charging that Trump’s proclamation was illegal.

“We need to focus on standing with environmental groups that are sympathetic to our case,” he said. “We have an opportunity in this country to challenge the president of the United States.”

Maryboy said tribal nations around the region would speak with one voice in defense of Bears Ears. As for the few individual tribe members who posed for photos with Trump in Salt Lake City as he destroyed Bears Ears, Maryboy said they had historical antecedents too.

The Apaches who betrayed Geronimo.