Voices: The strike on Grand Staircase is a strike on my culture and my history

As a Southern Paiute woman, I have a strong connection to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, as it is referred to today. Areas like Grand Staircase are known in the Southern Paiute language as our Yanawant, our Holy Land. It is through our strong connection to these places that we maintain our spiritual and religious beliefs and practices.

Part of what makes the newest strike on Grand Staircase so painful is that it would undo protections for our ancestral places. This time, instead of going after Grand Staircase’s boundaries, members of the Utah congressional delegation are taking aim at the monument’s resource management plan.

Many people think of Grand Staircase as a science monument. They think of the amazing geology and paleontology, the many dinosaur fossils that have made it famous. But for us, as Native people, Grand Staircase is so much more than a research laboratory or a library of our planet’s past.

Grand Staircase holds thousands of years of Southern Paiute cultural history. It also holds ancestral history and important spiritual ties for our relative Tribes. And we are all still here. We are the living descendants of the ancestors that left their footprints and writings on these landscapes, who hunted and gathered plants and medicines here, who raised their children and practiced their religion on these lands, just as we do today.

Grand Staircase’s resource management plan was made final in January 2025 after two years of public input, including input from Tribes. The plan’s directives protect cultural resources and sacred places, petroglyphs, springs, plants and animals that are still important to our people today. Many assume that cultural sites have been abandoned or refer to them as “ruins.” These places are not abandoned, nor are they ruined. But without the important protections of the management plan, certain individuals will feel free to loot these areas, graffiti or vandalize sacred petroglyph panels, trample medicinal plants, and hurt the land.

Despite these very real risks, members of the Utah delegation have set in motion a plan to use the Congressional Review Act to force a vote in Congress to revoke Grand Staircase’s management plan. If they succeed, the monument’s thoughtful, balanced resource management plan, which protects our cultural and religious places, will be thrown out. Not only that, any future plan that is “substantially the same” would be prohibited. This would leave all of Grand Staircase vulnerable to damage and destruction.

We cannot let this happen. As Native people, we are taught to care for ancestral places and to pass our knowledge and traditions to future generations. In Southern Paiute teachings, we are taught from infancy that we are the stewards of these lands which must be protected and preserved for future generations. These future generations include all our future children and grandchildren, yours and mine. We are all stewards of these lands.

Stripping Grand Staircase of its protective management plan would hurt the futures of so many young Utah students who utilize monuments like Grand Staircase to grow their educational experience and better understand our world.

Removing the management plan would harm the many ethnobotanical resources within Grand Staircase, not to mention the many animals — from deer to the hundreds of species of bees who pollinate the monument’s plants. The whole ecosystem would be affected.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to visit Grand Staircase. Camp. Go look at the petroglyph panels. Grand Staircase is one of the most beautiful areas to observe the stars. When you go out there with somebody who has never seen the Milky Way, somebody who grew up in a city, they look up and they get to see this beautiful galaxy that we’re a part of and it touches their heart.

Any attempt to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Resource Management Plan is a strike not only on the monument itself, on its natural beauty and resources, but on our history, our culture and our sacred places.

I urge Utah’s members of Congress to uphold the approved resource management plan from January 2025 and the important guidance it contains about how to maintain, restore and conserve these lands for future generations of Americans to enjoy and appreciate.

Autumn Gillard is Southern Paiute and a member of the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition.

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