A co-management plan is operating at Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument; that means the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and an inter-tribal council made up of members from tribal communities all work together to manage the land.
New research suggests this arrangement has an impact on the collection of firewood — which, as Kate Magargal, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, explains, was identified by people living in nearby tribal communities as an important aspect of their interaction with the landscape.
Magargal joined The Show to discuss what this co-management plan entails.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: What does this co-management plan entail? And it sounds like maybe it's made the situation better than it was while at the same time not meeting everybody's needs.
KATE MAGARGAL: Yeah, so the designation of the national monument had in its defining language the establishment of this co-management model, which, although not brand new in the whole world, is something really unique in the United States. And that agreement basically says that not only will the federal land management agencies, in this case, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service, not only will they be, you know, the people at the table, but so will the tribes that have traditional relationships with that landscape. And the tribes will be represented through the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, which has representatives from each of the five tribes that are associated there.
BRODIE: Has that made an appreciable difference? I mean, has that led to things changing that that, you know, from what they were before?
MAGARGAL: I mean, I think that that alone is a huge step and is a huge difference from how things operated with land management in the past. There have certainly always been or for a long time been laws on the books that guided the land management agencies to consult with tribes, But this model actually goes a step beyond that and involves tribal representatives in ways that are much more about creating the actual management policies themselves rather than just being consulted after they're created.
So how it will actually play out, you know, we don't really know yet, but the structure itself is actually a huge step in the direction of having Native voices represented in land management.
BRODIE: Well, it sounds like they kind of have those voices in a seat at the table on the front end as opposed to sort of just being told, here's what the decision is.
MAGARGAL: Yeah, exactly, that's the idea.
BRODIE: So how does all this relate to the, the collection of firewood and some of the practices that go along and the significance that goes along with that for these tribal members?
MAGARGAL: So given that folks from the Native communities had identified firewood as a really central part of their relationship with that landscape. It was the focus of the research that I was a part of. And one of the things we found that although our focus was always on that sort of material element of the firewood itself, we found lots of different interconnections that are relevant to folks.
So, things like forest health, the distribution of tree species. We found that all of that doesn't exist in a vacuum when it comes to how people from Indigenous cultures relate to this landscape, but it's also connected with lots of traditional practices like medicine gathering, promoting healthy, you know, for promoting a healthy body. Other things related to being on the land with other people, promoting a healthy sense of kinship, for example. And still others relating to being in relationship with other elements of the land like connecting culturally with stories related to the landscape and philosophies,.
So, yeah, as a non-Indigenous researcher myself, like I'm not always totally clear on those specific details because I'm not, you know, part of that culture, but the importance of those elements have been communicated throughout the research that we've done around firewood and all of those interconnections.
And I think it's still kind of an unfolding process with the management and how the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition has communicated those things. But the idea is that those relationships will be centered rather than just the resources and what they are themselves.
BRODIE: Well, it sounds like there are some sort of practical concerns here in terms of having wood to burn for fires, for heat or for cooking in some areas or maybe to, you know, help in constructing homes, but also some more maybe cultural or sacred components that are less practical and more just sort of culturally important.
MAGARGAL: Yeah, that has been kind of an interesting dimension in conversations that I've been part of over some years about this. I think with like a, a Western perspective, we sort of naturally separate those things and say they're sort of economics and sources over here in this box. And then there's sort of spiritual cultural health in this other box.
And something that was communicated through this research time and again is that those things really aren't very separable. Like they inform each other, they're in relationship with each other. So for part of the idea of Bears Ears is to bring that understanding and awareness to how the land is actually managed through, through these plans.
BRODIE: Does it seem as though this kind of plan, this co-management plan, could be used in other parts of the country, specifically maybe other parts of the West where, you know, there's sort of this conflict between federal land managers and and tribal communities?
MAGARGAL: Yeah, I think there are tons of opportunity for this. And I have spoken to a lot of people that want to move the conversation away from one of that's centered on this idea of conflict and move it more towards this idea that there is a lot of opportunity for collaboration.
The thing that everybody wants out of these situations is for these public lands to continue to be healthy in the future and for their human communities to continue to be healthy in relationship to those lands.
So I've got to ask, because Bears Ears, of course, was the subject of controversy between the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. So now that [President Donald] Trump will be coming back into office, is there a concern or is there maybe a feeling that either the co-management plan or maybe how it's operated might change with a change in administration?
MAGARGAL: Yeah, I, I mean, certainly there is a lot of concern about that. A lot of folks are, you know, holding their breath to see what will happen. And I think the biggest challenge with that is to be in this back and forth constantly. It really makes it hard for a system of collaboration to be established, or for a system of acting upon a management policy to really play out so that we can see what works and what doesn't.
I will say that, you know, I don't want to speculate on what will happen over the coming years, but a lot of folks who I've worked with, especially from the Native communities, have really centered that there's been a lot of, you know, shifting currents many times for those communities. And the relationship with the land is still there and will still persist regardless of what happens with things like monument designations.
