Inter-Tribal Gathering to Protect Historic Site

BY SHINE SALT

Special to the Times

BEARS EARS, UTAH – The smell of wet sage lurked in the air of Shash Jaa’ Butte (Bears Ears) Saturday morning. High trees populated the area with canyons and the San Juan River just below the valley. At the top of the butte, you can view Navajo Mountain to the Southwest side.

To the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni and Ute Mountain tribes, Bears Ears holds significant history, where Willie Grayeyes says Natives have been residing, even before discovery of 1492.

Chief Manuelito of the Bit’ahnii clan along with his older brother K’aayelii (Bag of Arrows) and brother-in-law Hoskininni (Angry One) resided within Shash Jaa’, traveling by the San Juan River to Monument Valley and Navajo Mountain. They protected their people and fought against invaders who were taking them captive.

The name "Manuelito" came from the Spaniards, but the chief was known by many names like Ashkii Diyini (Holy Boy). Manuelito was said to be part Navajo and Ute, who stood over six feet tall.

“There are stories that Manuelito was a young man running with his band up here,” said Grayeyes, from Navajo Mountain and is the chairman with Utah Diné Bikéyah. “K’aayelii was also up in this area and Hoskininni was down in Oljato. Those are the three brothers. Manuelito took his band to various places because other tribal scouts of the United States cavalry were after them.”

As a young girl, Evangeline Grey remembers when her father would tell her stories of their great-great-grandmother and her daughter. Her ancestral family origination at Bears Ears, where Grey said her great great-grandmother was of the Bit’ahnii people in the same family group as Manuelito and K’aayelii.

“My great-great-grandmother was married to a man in Monument Valley and they had a son and a daughter,” said Grey. “One day her husband and son went somewhere while she and her 12-year-old daughter were left with her in-laws. A young man in the family said he had seen a trail of dust rising from a distance and excitingly proclaimed it was a nidáá’ (squaw dance) stick being brought towards them.”

“Then the family heard noises echoing from the canyon walls. It was the sound of the troop’s metal rubbing and clattering,” continued Grey. “The family attempted to gather the sheep to escape, but were captured and taken to Fort Summer. At Fort Sumner, the young daughter had a child by a Spaniard soldier from Barcelona, Spain. When they were released to go back to the homeland, the soldier took the oldest child. While she traveled home pregnant with the second child (Grey’s grandfather), who was born in Bears Ears and raised in Monument Valley.”

K’aayelii was never captured because he hid his band to a place north of Bears Ears called Dark Canyon.

“I hear there’s a cave big enough to put horses and sheep in,” said Grayeyes. “Hoskininni moved down the conflux of Colorado and San Juan River with the other members of Navajo Mountain residence, and moved down the canyon. They spent three or four years there invading U.S. cavalry.”

Grayeyes said the bands were called, Doo Yishnah Nishɬį́į́da (I’m not a captive). Manuelito was in Gray Mountain when his band ran out of food and badly wounded, so they marched to Fort Wingate and surrendered themselves.

When Manuelito, Barboncito, Narbono and other headmen agreed to the Navajo Treaty of 1868, it released about 9,000 Navajos and some Apache. The treaty allowed them to go back to their homelands but on an established reservation with tribal sovereignty.

Bears Ears is not protected under federal designation and denote federally owned public lands, organized by the Bureau of Land Management.

“Getting a land designation is an incredibly challenging task because doing land conservation in Utah is one of the hardest places to do this,” said Gavin Noyes, who’s the Executive Director for Utah Diné Bikéyah.

Tribes of the Bears Ears Coalition and Utah Diné Bikéyah met Friday during the Inter-Tribal Gathering event with the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Bureau of Land Management to support the designation of 1.9 million acres to be a National Conservation Area or a National Monument through the Antiquities Act of 1906.

The Diné Bikéyah National Conservation Area proposal will also include a co-management relationship, increase funding allocation to improve management of resource and recognition of the Navajo on federal land.

Grayeyes said the management is critical and if successful with the endeavors of the area, it would place a precedent in the face of the general public, that tribes have consideration issues of the many developments going.

“Our basis for approaching this congressional land initiative is we did an assessment among the medicine people, the Navajo chapters in San Juan County and the elders who contributed their knowledge of how this land was used,” said Grayeyes. “If you have assessment data, you have substance to argue with. In this case, we did have it and we demonstrated that we have hunting rights, herbal gathering, fire wood gathering, organic food, ceremonies plus sacred sites up here that we’d like to continue to use. That’s how we mobilized our proposal by utilizing all these status.”

Over 100,000 archaeological sites are within Bears Ears including petroglyphs, cliff dwellings, and 1,300-year-old Hogans and sweat lodges, but some have been vandalized and erased by visitors.

“A lot of negative things have happened here and a lot of negative things continue to happen, so the things we’re dealing with today are people that go out and target practice on petroglyph sites or climb into cliff dwellings,” said Noyes. “That’s not acceptable and that’s not a way to respect the human history of this place. There are sites up here that reflect all these different cultures.”

While the Ute bear dance ceremony songs echoed at the meadows of Kwiyagatu (Bears Ears in Ute), 93-year-old Stella Eyetoo remembers the canyons when she traveled with her family.

“We use to ride our horses to Blanding and in the canyon we had the Bear Dance down there,” said Eyetoo We had horse down there too. All night the old people they sing songs. I know the songs.”

Eyetoo said she was only a little girl, picking nuts and wild onions while her father and brothers hunted deer.

“My father was leaving that time and my brother too. That time I was young, now I’m too old,” laughed Eyetoo. “I stayed in a Hogan and shade house and we traveled on a horse just to go around. I stayed in the canyons, that’s where our land was. There’s horse trails. We’d stay there for a week.”

Noyes said the Zuni tribe has plants that are described in their stories, but some have never seen them until they came back to Bears Ears.

“Places make up a big part of who we are and if we lose that, we lose part of ourselves,” said Noyes.

Grey’s grandfather became sick and went back to Blanding to ask the law enforcement office if he could ride his horse back into the mountains to his birthplace.

“He asked if he could go to Bears Ears and live the little remaining days of his life,” said Grey. “He was told, ‘No you can’t do that.’ So he went to live his remaining days with his children in West Water community. His Hogan is there still and is clasped in a traditional burial way.”