This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments

R.E. Burrillo is an archaeologist who has spent years working in the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, recording rock art, documenting sites, and watching the landscape he studies come under intensifying pressure from extraction industries, recreational overuse, and political maneuvering. This Contested Land: The Storied Past and Uncertain Future of America’s National Monuments, published by Torrey House Press in September 2022, draws on that experience to produce a book that is simultaneously a history of the national monument system, a political analysis of its current vulnerabilities, a series of place portraits, and a sustained argument about why monuments matter for reasons that transcend partisan politics.

The national monument system was created by the Antiquities Act of 1906, which authorized presidents to designate as protected areas federal lands containing objects of historic, prehistoric, or scientific interest. The act was specifically designed to allow rapid protection of sites threatened by vandalism, looting, or industrial development, without requiring the lengthy legislative process that creating a national park demands. It has been used by presidents of both parties to protect millions of acres of land containing some of the most significant archaeological, ecological, and geological resources on the continent. It has also been the subject of persistent political controversy, particularly when large designations have restricted resource extraction in economically important areas.

The controversy came to a head during the Trump administration, which undertook an unprecedented review of monument designations and significantly reduced the size of two Utah monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, in 2017. The Biden administration restored those boundaries in 2021. The legal and political battles surrounding those decisions were ongoing when Burrillo was writing, and the book reflects both the specific details of those cases and the broader questions they raised about what the Antiquities Act permits, what monuments are supposed to protect, and who gets to decide.

The Voices in the Landscape

Burrillo’s primary commitment in this book is to specificity. He does not write about national monuments in the abstract; he writes about specific places, specific communities, and specific objects, from petroglyphs on canyon walls to dinosaur trackways in desert sandstone to the archaeological sites of ancestral Puebloan cultures that are still spiritually significant to tribes whose members live in the region today. The specificity is the book’s most valuable quality. Arguments about whether a monument should exist are easier to make in the abstract; they become harder when you understand exactly what the monument contains and what would happen to it without protection.

The treatment of Indigenous perspectives is one of the book’s real strengths and, given the subject, one of the most important parts to get right. Bears Ears National Monument was the first monument whose creation was explicitly led by a coalition of tribal nations, including the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray, and the Pueblo of Zuni. Burrillo writes carefully about why Indigenous advocacy for monument protection is not simply a new development but a continuation of long-standing efforts to maintain access to and stewardship of ancestral landscapes. He interviews tribal members and leaders, and the voices he gathers are specific and authoritative rather than tokenized or generalized.

The book’s treatment of the opposition to monuments is similarly careful. Burrillo does not caricature ranchers, off-road vehicle enthusiasts, or extraction industry representatives. He describes the economic realities of rural communities in monument areas, the history of federal land management in the West, and the legitimate grievances that some monument opponents have about consultation processes, access restrictions, and the ways that outside interests have sometimes driven monument creation without adequate involvement of local communities. This evenhandedness is unusual in environmental writing and makes the book more persuasive than advocacy that simply dismisses the opposition.

Pacing

The book moves between modes: narrative travel writing about specific places, historical analysis of the monument system, political reporting on the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase controversies, and reflective passages about what archaeology and landscape mean in the context of a contested land. These transitions are generally smooth but occasionally create a slight unevenness of pace: the political chapters require close reading and move more slowly than the landscape descriptions, which have a natural propulsive quality from Burrillo’s evident pleasure in and knowledge of the places he is describing.

The historical chapters on the development of the Antiquities Act and the long history of monument designations and challenges are necessary background and are written clearly enough to hold the reader’s attention without being dry. Burrillo places the current political battles in a much longer context of federal land management conflict in the American West, which prevents the book from reading as partisan commentary on a single administration’s actions. That longer perspective is important: the Antiquities Act has been contested in one form or another since its passage, and the Trump-era reductions were a sharp escalation of an ongoing struggle rather than an unprecedented attack.

Deeper Thematic Exploration

The book’s deepest theme is the question of what it means to protect a place and for whom. The national monument system reflects a specific set of assumptions: that some places contain objects or values that transcend the immediate economic interests of the people who live near them, that the federal government is the appropriate trustee for those values, and that protection from development is the primary mechanism of preservation. Each of those assumptions has been challenged, from multiple directions, over the century since the Antiquities Act was passed.

Burrillo takes those challenges seriously. He is honest that monument designation sometimes displaced existing users of the land, that the conservation movement has historically prioritized certain kinds of value, usually scenic and ecological, over others, including the economic needs of rural communities and the ongoing cultural relationships of Indigenous peoples to specific places, and that the federal management of monuments has sometimes fallen short of what protection actually requires. The critique is not of the monument system itself but of how it has been implemented and of the narrow definitions of value that have sometimes driven its use.

The chapters on Bears Ears are particularly rich on the question of what Indigenous stewardship means and how it differs from the dominant federal management approach. Burrillo describes the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition’s vision of co-management as a model for monument management that takes Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge seriously rather than treating tribal consultation as a legal requirement to be satisfied and set aside. This model has gained ground since the monument’s restoration, but the book is honest about how far the reality is from the ideal.

The concluding sections address the question of what the national monument system needs to survive and to fulfill its purpose in the current political environment. Burrillo argues for permanent statutory protection for the most significant monuments, for genuine co-management with tribal nations where ancestral connections to the land exist, and for better engagement with the rural communities that live within and near monument boundaries. These are specific, practical recommendations rather than rhetorical gestures, and they reflect the book’s consistent preference for what might actually work over what sounds best.

Style and Voice

Burrillo writes with the kind of authority that comes from knowing a landscape intimately over years rather than from research conducted at a distance. When he describes specific canyon systems, specific rock art panels, specific archaeological sites, you believe he has been there and that what he is describing is real rather than synthesized from secondary sources. This ground-level authority is what makes the abstract policy arguments in the book feel consequential rather than academic.

The prose is clear and direct without being spare to the point of dryness. Burrillo allows himself to express frustration, occasionally anger, when the situation warrants it, and he is honest about his own position: he is an archaeologist and a committed conservationist, and he does not pretend to a neutrality he does not have. What he does is make the argument rather than just assert it, and the argument is grounded in evidence and in genuine engagement with the complexity of the subject.

Verdict

This is the most thorough and fair-minded book about the national monument system available for a general reader, and it arrives at a moment when the questions it addresses are more urgent than they have been in a generation. If you have strong opinions about federal land management, this book will either confirm them with better evidence than you currently have or complicate them in useful ways. If you have only passing familiarity with the Bears Ears controversy or the broader history of monument politics, this book will give you the context to follow those debates with real understanding.

It is best suited for readers who are willing to engage with policy and history as well as landscape. This is not primarily a nature writing book, though the landscape descriptions are excellent. It is primarily a book about how a society decides what to protect and who gets to make that decision, and those questions are important enough to deserve the careful attention Burrillo gives them.

Frequently Asked Questions about This Contested Land by R.E. Burrillo

What is This Contested Land by R.E. Burrillo about?

The book is a history and political analysis of the national monument system in the United States, organized around the Antiquities Act of 1906 and the century-long debate over its use. Burrillo, an archaeologist who has worked extensively in the Colorado Plateau, focuses particularly on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, which were significantly reduced in size by the Trump administration in 2017 and restored by the Biden administration in 2021. The book combines place-based narrative with political history, Indigenous perspectives on monument stewardship, and policy analysis of what the system needs to survive.

What is the Antiquities Act and why does it matter for national monuments?

The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives the President of the United States authority to designate as national monuments federal lands containing objects of historic, prehistoric, or scientific interest. It was designed to allow rapid protection of at-risk archaeological and natural sites without requiring legislation. Over a century, presidents of both parties have used the act to protect millions of acres, including the Grand Canyon (before it became a national park), Dinosaur National Monument, and Bears Ears. The act’s scope and whether presidents can reduce existing monuments has been consistently contested, and the legal questions have not been definitively resolved by the courts.

What role did Indigenous nations play in creating Bears Ears National Monument?

The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, composed of five sovereign tribal nations, was the primary advocate for the monument’s creation and the entity that proposed its specific boundaries and management approach. This was the first major monument whose creation was driven by an Indigenous-led coalition rather than by environmental groups or federal agencies. The coalition’s vision included a co-management role for tribal nations in oversight of the monument, drawing on Indigenous ecological and cultural knowledge. The co-management framework has been incorporated into subsequent management plans, though Burrillo is candid about the gap between the vision and its implementation.

Is This Contested Land balanced in its treatment of monument opponents?

Yes. Burrillo writes carefully about the legitimate concerns of ranchers, rural communities, and off-road vehicle users who oppose monument designations or existing restrictions. He describes the history of federal land management in the West, which has often been experienced by rural communities as imposed by outside interests with little regard for local economic needs. He also explains the extraction industry’s objections to specific monument designations in economic terms rather than dismissing them as bad-faith arguments. The book’s conservationist position is clear, but it engages seriously with the opposition rather than caricaturing it.

What is the current legal status of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments?

As of the book’s publication in September 2022, both monuments had been restored to their original boundaries by President Biden in 2021, reversing the Trump-era reductions. Legal challenges to the restorations from Utah state officials and industry groups were ongoing at the time of publication. The underlying legal question of whether a president has the authority to reduce or eliminate a monument previously created by an earlier president had not been definitively resolved by the Supreme Court. Readers interested in the most current status should check recent news sources, as the litigation and political situation continue to evolve.

What kinds of places are included in the national monument system?

National monuments vary enormously in character and size, from small historic sites protecting a single building or artifact to vast landscapes protecting millions of acres of wilderness. They include archaeological sites with major concentrations of prehistoric remains, geological formations of scientific importance, marine areas with significant biodiversity, historic sites associated with military conflicts and civil rights history, and landscapes that combine ecological, geological, and cultural significance. Burrillo focuses primarily on the larger landscape monuments of the American West, but his history of the system covers its full range.

How does This Contested Land compare to other books about public lands and conservation?

It is more policy-focused and more historically grounded than most nature writing about the American West. Books like Wallace Stegner’s The Sound of Mountain Water or Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire are primarily literary responses to western landscapes; Burrillo’s book is more analytical and explicitly political. Among policy-focused public lands books, it is unusual in giving as much attention to Indigenous perspectives as to environmental advocacy or political history. Readers who want both landscape description and policy analysis in the same book will find this among the better examples of that combination.

Should I read This Contested Land if I do not live in the American West?

Yes, if you are interested in how democratic societies make decisions about land use and what obligations governments have to different constituencies with competing claims on public resources. The specific places Burrillo describes are in the West, but the questions his book addresses are national in scope: what does the federal government owe to rural communities that depend on public lands, what do governments owe to Indigenous nations whose cultural heritage is embedded in specific landscapes, and how do we protect things of lasting value against short-term economic pressures? Those questions arise in some form in every region of the country and in most democratic nations.