The Bears Ears proclamation was historic, creating an innovative tribal commission to help manage the monument. The new preserve grants “traditional ecological knowledge amassed by the Native Americans” the status of “a resource to be protected and used in understanding and managing this landscape sustainably for generations to come.”

At the core of that understanding of the land is a sense of wholeness, of interconnection. As the Inter-Tribal Coalition said in response to Zinke’s announcement, “The Bears Ears region is not a series of isolated objects, but the object itself, a connected, living landscape, where the place, not a collection of items, must be protected.”

When Zinke came to Utah in May on a “listening tour,” he spent just one hour with the leaders of the Inter-Tribal Coalition and several days with politicians ferociously intent on undoing Obama’s legacy. One of them, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, dismissed seven years of grass-roots work by Indian people, in Indian country, who gathered the data necessary to propose significant protection for Bears Ears.

The tribes, the GOP senator said, were “manipulated” by the “far left.” “The Indians,” he said, “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. Just take my word for it.”