The Places That Hold Our Nation’s Stories Are Not for Sale

By John R. Welch, Paul F. Reed, and Skylar Begay

(March 4, 2025)—At Archaeology Southwest, a Tucson-based nonprofit that works across the US Southwest, we believe in the power of place. Places embody people’s stories, and the public lands carved out of Native American territories safeguard ancestral homes, burial sites, and collective memories. Archaeology Southwest collaborates with Tribal Nations and local communities to understand, share, and protect sites and landscapes for the stories they hold and the people they serve.

Our work is at odds with Interior Secretary Douglas Burgum’s plans to “unleash” industrial exploitation of public lands. Burgum’s February 3 Secretarial Order 3418 requires review of all public lands withdrawn from fossil fuel and mining development. The order sets intentions to open national monuments and other lands protected by both Republican and Democratic presidents to oil and gas “production, transportation, refining, distribution, exporting, and generation.” Burgum’s order seeks to gut public land stewardship principles enshrined in law and in the time-honored American tradition of bipartisan conservation.

The order fails multiple tests for good public policy. Burgum has refused to allow public participation in the “review” of what are, after all, our lands. Burgum’s order ignores the multiple-use mandate that guides decision-making for most of the lands under his management, including the tens of millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management tracts already dedicated to fossil fuel, solar, and wind energy generation and transmission. Burgum’s order ignores the truth that, for nearly a decade, our country has been the world’s leading oil and gas producer. Burgum’s order discounts the many ways public lands address the climate and extinction crises and help fulfill the federal government’s legal and fiduciary duties to Tribal Nations. It also actively disables these lands’ contributions to our country’s safe, verdant future.

Most importantly, to us, Burgum’s order ignores places, and the history and wisdom embedded in them. Burgum’s order means that 138 national monuments are being scoured not to make best use of the landscapes they conserve, the economies they sustain, or the experiences and services they provide to all Americans, but for their potential to boost already-skyrocketing profits for powerful corporations and their shareholders. Burgum’s order means that all national monuments—approximately 19 in Arizona; 15 in New Mexico; and 9 each in Colorado and Utah—are targets for profit-driven industrial transformation. Picture it: new drill rigs, pump jacks, and pipelines adjacent to Chaco Culture National Historical Park; uranium and lithium mines in Bears Ears and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni national monuments; and exploratory drilling and power lines across the Ironwood, Sonoran Desert, and Rio Grande del Norte national monuments.

Burgum’s order seeks to erase nearly 150 years of bipartisan cooperation to safeguard public lands and the senses of place and pride they convey to all Americans. For Native Americans in particular, Burgum’s actions signal a return to the laissez faire policies that brought Tribal Nations to the brink of collapse in the 1800s. Our public lands must be understood as places of memory and community having essential importance to the original Americans. These lands, effectively inseparable from Tribal Nations, are cherished by millions of visitors and users every year. Burgum’s intentions to maximize extractive industrial use and minimize conservation is desecration.

For these reasons, Tribal coalitions, local communities, and organizations like ours will continue to speak against disingenuous claims—made on behalf of extractive industry leaders with no personal or spiritual connections to these landscapes—about the need for energy dominance. We invite Americans to stand up and show love for their lands. Burgum and his cronies must not be allowed to ravage and privatize the landscapes that hold our stories across millennia, through to the present and into the future.

Banner image: Ironwood Forest National Monument, Bob Wick, USBLM

AZ: https://www.visitarizona.com/places/parks-monuments/

CO: https://www.colorado.com/activities/national-monuments

NM: https://www.newmexico.org/places-to-visit/national-parks-monuments/

UT: https://www.utah.com/articles/post/utah-s-national-monuments/

John R. Welch is Archaeology Southwest’s Vice President for Preservation & Collaboration and Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University. John has spent more than three decades facilitating research, resource management, and outreach partnerships with Tribes in upland Arizona and New Mexico. He served as the archaeologist and historic preservation officer for the White Mountain Apache Tribe from 1992 to 2005. John has published widely on Apache sovereignty and on opportunities at the interface of cultural and natural resource management in Indigenous contexts.

Paul F. Reed is Archaeology Southwest’s New Mexico State Director and has worked with the organization for 25 years. Paul works extensively with Pueblos and Tribes to protect landscapes and elevate Indigenous voices. Over the last decade, he has been working to protect the Greater Chaco Landscape from the effects of expanded oil-gas development associated with fracking in the Mancos Shale formation of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico. Through years of meetings and forums with Tribal leaders, public officials, various US government agencies, and New Mexico’s congressional delegation, Paul, on behalf of Archaeology Southwest and with our partners, has worked to expand protections to sites, traditional cultural places, and fragile landscapes in the greater San Juan Basin.

Skylar Begay (Diné, Mandan and Hidatsa) is Archaeology Southwest’s Director of Tribal Collaboration. A graduate of Arizona State University, Skylar has led Arizona Conservation Corps crews as part of their Ancestral Lands Program. He also worked for the US Forest Service, where he was a member of the Ouray Ranger District’s Off-Highway Vehicle Trail Crew. He is a leader of Archaeology Southwest’s advocacy work to permanently protect public lands and is co-author of the organization’s Model for Tribal Collaboration.

About Archaeology Southwest

We help ensure that people’s stories in and on the land endure well into the future. The places and stories that connect us all to our humanity and its history are alive. We collaborate with Tribes, local communities, and you to help understand, restore, and protect those stories, places, and connections.

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