Resolved: Utah's legislators and the antiquity of Cedar Mesa

On February 26 the Utah Senate passed S.C.R. 4, a concurrent resolution regarding the creation of national monuments, by a wide margin. Its sponsor is Sen. Stephen Urquhart of St. George, and Rep. Mike Noel of Kanab is carrying it in the House, where it now goes. A concurrent resolution makes no law. It states the position of the Legislature and, once signed, the governor.

What the resolution says

S.C.R. 4 urges Congress to set up a process for creating national monuments that includes public participation and a role for the state and counties. It opposes the creation by a president of any large national monument in Utah, calling such designations a violation of the Antiquities Act’s requirement that a monument be confined to the smallest area compatible with the care of the objects it protects. It asks Congress to amend the Act, and it recalls the 1996 designation of Grand Staircase-Escalante, made with little warning to the state’s officials, as the example to avoid.

Then it turns to two places by name: the San Rafael Swell and Cedar Mesa. The resolution says the state favors protecting their scenic, recreational and sensitive areas, and notes that the state and Emery, Wayne and San Juan counties recently worked with the Bureau of Land Management on new resource management plans covering both. It goes on to say that the highest and best use of vast tracts in those areas is continued grazing and environmentally sensitive energy and mineral development.

What the resolution gets right

Some of its concerns deserve a fair hearing. A designation made without public meetings leaves the people who live nearest the land feeling ignored, and the 1996 experience still shapes how many Utahns view the Act. Ranching families on Cedar Mesa’s allotments have grazed cattle there for generations. San Juan County is large, poor by most measures and heavily dependent on public land. A process that brings counties and tribes to the table before a line is drawn on a map is a reasonable thing to ask for.

What it leaves out

The Antiquities Act speaks of objects. Its text lets a president protect “objects of historic or scientific interest,” and Congress passed it in 1906 largely because of looting of ancient sites in the Southwest. Cedar Mesa is a textbook case of what the law was meant for.

The human record on the mesa spans more than ten thousand years. Basketmaker farmers stored maize in its alcoves two thousand years ago, and their sandals, baskets and blankets survive there in the dry dust. Later Pueblo families built masonry homes in the canyon walls and on the mesa top in the 1100s and 1200s. Navajo and Ute families used and named the land after them. Hopi, Zuni and other Pueblo communities trace ancestry to these canyons. The Navajo Nation lies just across the San Juan River, and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has a community at White Mesa. Archaeologists count Cedar Mesa among the richest archaeological landscapes in the country.

That record has been under pressure for well over a century. Collectors stripped alcoves in Grand Gulch in the 1890s, and in 2009 a federal investigation charged two dozen people in the Four Corners with trafficking in artifacts. Cedar Mesa already has some protection: Grand Gulch has been managed as a primitive area since 1970, and visitors to its canyons need a permit from the BLM’s Monticello Field Office, issued at the Kane Gulch Ranger Station in season.

A resolution that names Cedar Mesa, describes it in the language of scenery and recreation, and finds its best use in grazing and minerals misreads the place. Whether a monument is the right tool there is a fair question, and Congress could answer it with its own legislation. But any answer, whether a monument, a conservation area or something else, has to start with the objects of historic and scientific interest that the Antiquities Act names. On Cedar Mesa they are everywhere underfoot.