Another
Front Opens In the Republican War on Science
By Sarah Okeson
Archeologists helped draft the law that presidents use to protect areas like the Grand Canyon, but today’s Republicans want to muzzle archeologists and others to keep them from weighing in on a lawsuit over Trump’s yanking protections from Utah sites that date back to the end of the last Ice Age.
Our nation’s Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to
protect ancient American Indian sites, but Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Jean Williams asked a federal judge not to accept legal documents from
archaeologists objecting to Trump’s largely dismantling two national monuments
in Utah.
She said the blitz of documents was “inherently prejudicial” to Trump and the other defendants.
She said the blitz of documents was “inherently prejudicial” to Trump and the other defendants.
“Federal defendants do not have adequate time or space to
address every formulation of the arguments,” Williams wrote.
Williams works in the environmental division, led by Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who represented BP in lawsuits over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the nation’s largest oil spill.
The Hopi Tribe, other American Indian tribes and environmental
organizations sued Trump over eliminating 85% of Bears Ears in Utah, the first national monument designated
at the request of Native Americans, and
carving Grand Staircase-Escalante, also in Utah, into three smaller monuments.
Legal scholars Michael Blumm and
Olivier Jamin have called reducing national monuments and other attacks on
public land by Trump and Republicans “the most substantial rollback in
public lands protections in American history.”
Archeologists who aren’t plaintiffs in the lawsuit want to file
documents in the case. The American Anthropological
Association and the Archaeological
Institute of America helped draft
the Antiquities Act, giving presidents the authority to create national
monuments. Other groups, including 26 U.S. senators and 92 U.S.
representatives, also want to weigh in. Judge Tanya Chutkan, an
Obama appointee hearing the lawsuit in federal court Washington. D.C., will
decide.
“This may be their only opportunity to be heard,” wrote
attorney Natalie Landreth of
the Native American Rights Fund.
The Department of Justice’s own manual says department attorneys “shall nearly always
consent” to filing an amicus brief that complies with the rules.
Grand Staircase was “the last place in the continental
United States to be mapped.” People
have lived in the area since as early as A.D. 700.
Only 5% to 7% of Grand Staircase has been surveyed. The monument
is rich in rock art and petroglyphs and has 3,985 officially recorded
archaeological sites. Trump’s proclamation would remove protections from 1,915
of those sites, including ones dating back to the end of the last Ice Age.
The Lampstand, known for Ancestral Puebloan villages, and
the Hole-in-the-Rock Road, a
historic trail used by Mormon settlers, were both removed from Grand Staircase.
Bears Ears has about 9,000 recorded archaeological sites,
including petroglyphs, woven cloth, human remains and ancient roads. Trump removed
the Greater Cedar Mesa area, “one of the most significant concentrations of
archaeological sites in the nation.”
ACTION BOX/What
You Can Do About It
Call
Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark at 202-514-2701 to tell him your
thoughts on using taxpayer money to try to muzzle archaeologists who want to
protect Native American sites on our public lands or write him at Department of
Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20530-0001.
The Native American Rights Fund can be reached at
202-785-4166.