Bears Ears is a reminder that there was life here before — and that's OK.
Sometimes we will hear people say that the current Republican administration is trying to erase all evidence that Barack Obama was a President of the United States. This erasing takes the form of overturning anything and everything that he put his name on, but that isn’t true.
Obama is the distraction.
Those being erased are Native people and the proof that Native people were here long before anyone else set foot on this continent. Our state and federal officials are looking to remove the federal protections of the sacred site of Bears Ears in southern Utah. An area rich in archeological evidence of a great civilization, and a sacred place for the tribes of Utah.
As a Navajo, and as a member of the LDS Church, it saddens me to see our elected officials continue to remove my people from the history books. Sometimes, Americans will say that our original sin was African slavery, but it actually goes back much further. And our country has stopped slavery, but it never stopped the killing of Native people.
Our country’s original sin was actually legislation to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The idea was that you could make a Native person “non-Native” by outlawing his language, his religion and his way of life. Federal wars, boarding schools and legislation almost succeeded in wiping out Native people. But our ancestors fought to stay alive and to pass their knowledge, spirit and languages to us.
Haile Selassie said, “throughout history, it has been the inaction of the those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
I hope that it would be unpopular to kill a Native person outright, but I am not sure. I am not sure because I see many watching and doing nothing. The Native voice in Washington is very small. The Native voice in Utah is not received. I don’t see many standing beside Native people trying to protect their sacred sites. No one is helping Native people protect the evidence that they even exist today. When no one is using their voice to fight this revision of Native people’s existence, it only continues the actual killing of culture and of Native people today.
I get it, Native people are the grim reminder that our country isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t have to continue to be so. Yes, termination, assimilation and the extermination of Native people is still being practiced today. Instead of killing Native people using American soldiers with bullets, our state and federal governments have decided to kill Native people by erasing their past. By removing protections of sacred Native sites, and opening those areas up to natural resource exploration, our elected officials are perpetuating a battle against Native people who supposedly ended in the late 1860s.
I ask all of you to call your state legislator, your representative in Congress and your neighbors to stop the fight against Native people. I ask you all to save the Bears Ears National Monument designation. Let the national monument designation be evidence that my ancestors were here, but also let it be evidence that the state of Utah and the United States are not savage editors of American history.
Dustin Jansen is a husband, a father, and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.