October 22-23, 2026, the Getches-Wilkinson Center and American Indian Law Program at Colorado Law School co-convened for the Martz Symposium on public lands. With a nod to this year's theme, “Toward a New Era for Public Lands – Restoration and Renewal,” presenters called for enduring and stable public lands policy and were emphatic that the pendulum swing of protections granted under one administration, and those same protections rescinded under the next, is not sustainable for anyone. The panelists also reminded the audience that it's not just protection of ecological resources that are at stake; it's culturally significant resources as well, like those at Bears Ears National Monument and in the buffer zone surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
The current dismantling of public lands and their management agencies affects Americans and the health of the land we own together at every level from the physical to the spiritual. In opposition to the heavy backslide in public lands protections, Hilary Tompkins, the first indigenous solicitor of the interior, called for Hózhó, a Navajo philosophy of balance which includes both the peace way and the war way.
“Peace way is good because it brings resolution and brings different minds together. But war is good too because it can protect yourself and it can deal with injustice,” Tompkins said in her keynote address.
The Antiquities Act
One policy that captures the pendulum swing most prominently is the changing interpretations of the Antiquities Act. Signed in 1906 under President Theodore Roosevelt, the act provides the authority for the president to designate areas of historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest to be preserved in the smallest area compatible to achieve that goal of preservation. The act has been used by 18 presidents across the political spectrum to designate over 160 national monuments across 33 states and, notably, since 1938, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has held that you cannot un-designate a monument that was previously designated under the Antiquities Act. But the Trump administration has been working to change that. In May of 2025, the DOJ rescinded its long-held opinion in favor of un-designating monuments. The Trump administration’s first target, Bears Ears National Monument, lies at the heart of the Southwest.
Bears Ears National Monument
In 2016, under the Obama administration, Bears Ears was created in a landmark designation led by five tribes in the region–Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Ute Mountain Ute, and Ute Indian tribe. Bears Ears marked the first national monument to be designated by an effort led by tribes. As Tompkins explained, “[the designation] was based on our own knowledge, our own traditional beliefs, our own understanding of that place, and President Obama honored that. That was so profound for me, as the solicitor of Interior, that this was happening in this country. It was based on science, knowledge, legitimate protection of important lands for the country as a whole, based on indigenous origins and leadership.”
In 2017, the first Trump Administration reduced Bears Ears by 83%. The Biden Administration then restored Bears Ears to its full size on the grounds that the Trump I reduction was unlawful. Then this past July, the second Trump administration reduced Bears Ears by 90% and dismantled the five tribal nations commission that had been overseeing and managing Bears Ears. Each reduction has been disruptive; “it's destructive. It's not honoring the first Americans of this country. It's dishonoring again. It is reopening old wounds,” Tompkins said.
Bears Ears is just one example of what has amounted to an attack and destabilization of public lands.
Chaco Canyon National Historical Park
The greater Chaco landscape is an area in the Four Corners containing thousands of Ancestral Puebloan cultural sites. Today it is the epicenter of the fight for environmental justice in the Southwest.
In the 1800s, millions of artifacts of cultural patrimony were stolen from the Greater Chaco Landscape. In response, in 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt first designated Chaco Canyon as a national monument, pursuant to his presidential authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906. Although the protection includes important sites such as Pueblo Bonito, the Greater Chaco Landscape expands far beyond the park boundaries into areas in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah and remains largely unprotected.
The Chaco Landscape also lies on top of the San Juan Basin, which is the second largest gas basin in the coterminous United States, stretching across northwest New Mexico into Southern Colorado.
Since the discovery of oil and gas resources in the San Juan Basin in the 1920s, the area has been a major target for oil and gas extraction. The fervor over resource extraction increased under the Nixon Administration, when the Four Corners region was designated as a national energy sacrifice zone under Project Independence, an initiative to expand domestic natural resource extraction.
Julia Bernal is the Executive Director of Pueblo Action Alliance. During the panel on Preservation of the Greater Chaco Landscape, Bernal told the audience that Project Independence frontlined Indigenous community members “in a non-consensual way, [it] put them in a strain on the economy, where public health also just like the safety of community members from oil and gas industry would essentially be sacrificed for the pursuit of domestic oil and gas.”
Today there are over 40,000 oil and gas wells within the surrounding state, federal, and Navajo allottee lands. During the same panel, Senior Attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, Kyle Tisdel, said that of those 40,000 wells, there are “about 22,000 active oil and gas wells. 12,000 of those wells have been plugged, and there are 850 identified orphaned wells or abandoned wells that are unplugged in the landscape.” When you take those numbers together, you fall short of 40,000, but Tisdel said, “part of that is also the story of the oil and gas industry, right, where industry will lose track of wells, the state will lose track of wells, the federal government will lose track of wells. But what happens is that these wells, the wells that remain unplugged, the wells that are orphaned, the wells that people have forgotten about that have been built, these wells are impacting the landscape. They're causing emissions. They're destroying water resources. They're hazards on the landscape, and people live near lots of these wells and are being impacted by them every single day.”
Despite thousands of unaccounted-for wells on the landscape, the industry is not looking to slow down. The BLM’s last resource management plan was completed in 2003. At the time, 32,000 wells had already been drilled, and they anticipated 10,000 more. The BLM thought new wells would be like the others in the basin: conventional gas wells. And to their credit, at that time it was not economical to drill for the shale oil in the southern portion of the basin. However, the BLM did not plan for drilling technology to change. So in the 2010s, when the oil and gas industry developed a new drilling technique- horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing that new technology was not accounted for . According to Tisdel, in 2014, 11 years after the 2003 resource management plan, the BLM anticipated “almost 4,000 additional wells on top of the 10,000 they already predicted were going to be drilled in the southern portion of the basin”
Those 4,000 additional wells drilled with new technology will largely be in the southern portion of the basin, where the shale oil is. That region is also home to Chaco National Historical Park, a lot of the Eastern Agency of the Navajo Nation, Navajo allotment lands, and where contemporary Indigenous communities live.
Following years of advocacy by Pueblo leadership and indigenous-led organizations, a buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park was established in June of 2023 by then Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland. The buffer zone created a 20-year moratorium on new oil, gas, and mineral leases in a 10-mile radius around the park, an area that contains thousands of identified cultural, historical, and sacred sites. For Julia Bernal, the decision to establish a buffer zone goes beyond the need to protect cultural heritage sites; “it's also about protecting our cultural integrity as indigenous peoples and our sovereign right to use land and water as our ancestors did before colonization.”
In March of 2026, the Chaco buffer zone became one of the many targets of the current administration's assault on public lands. The BLM announced that the current Secretary of the Interior proposed to revoke the buffer zone, and that the plan would be undergoing an environmental assessment under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The public comment period was open for 14 days, a stark contrast to the years-long process and 150-day comment period that led up to the 2023 creation of the buffer zone.
Despite the short time frame, the public made their voice heard; over 200,000 public comments were made. The decision on the draft environmental assessment has not yet been made.
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Bears Ears and the Greater Chaco Landscape are integral parts of the Southwest. They are landscapes laden with cultural resources and heritage, and they are landscapes targeted for extraction, continuing the legacy of the Four Corners as a sacrifice zone. Tribes have led the fight to protect these landscapes; stable federal policies could help ensure that once these fights are won, they will not have to be won again, again and again. In her closing remarks, former Solicitor Hilary Tompkins offered this important reminder: “I'm making a reminder to myself and all of you that we continue to walk the walk. We don't just talk the talk, and that's the English saying. For the Navajos, it's what we say, we need to strike that balance, find that harmony, and be sure that we, as a society, as humanity, in concert with the world and universe that we live in, and all the animals that we live in, and all the natural resources around us, that we continue to follow that corn pollen path and walk in beauty.”
