One man’s mission to bring Indigenous voices to the management of their ancestral land

By Rico Moore

Angelo Baca (Diné and Hopi) laced up his running shoes and took off down a trail near his hometown of Blanding, Utah. Angelo’s family and ancestors have known and lived in the region since time immemorial. To them, the lands known to so many Americans as “public” are their ancestral territory, their homelands. Angelo stayed present as he ran, calculating each step to avoid a twisted ankle. He wound down a desert wash, weaving a path through sagebrush, piñon and juniper.

 But unlike so many people who trail run on public lands, Angelo wasn’t alone: he was being followed. His outspoken leadership on issues related to Indigenous rights and Tribal sovereignty on his ancestral territory — and specifically his advocacy related to the Bears Ears region — had made him a target. 

 “They were tracking me. I tried to lose them on a couple trails, on different roads, and they still four-wheeled to go to find me,” Angelo says. He went off trail to make sure he was no longer being followed, but knew he was. “There was nothing else out there. It was pandemic time,” he says.

Feeling threatened, he never tried to find out who trailed him. “I’m already way the hell out there. So it was really easy to make me disappear and have no reason to know why I didn’t come back,” he says.

Fortunately, he escaped.

This happened in the same area where European settlers and the U.S. government killed Indigenous people, put them in concentration camps, forced them to walk miles upon miles away from their homes and stole their land. It was a cultural and physical genocide that traumatized the original caretakers and their descendants for generations to come. “So when there’s hesitancy on our side, it’s because we’ve been hunted. We have been rounded up. We’ve been killed,” Angelo says.

The medicine of Bears Ears

Despite these threats and intergenerational cultural trauma, Angelo works diligently on behalf of the Indigenous people of the Bears Ears region as the cultural resources coordinator for Utah Diné Bikeyah (UDB), a Native American-led grassroots nonprofit organization working to promote healing of people and the earth through conservation of cultural lands. As part of its efforts, UDB has worked in partnership with the outdoor retailer Patagonia to improve the company’s relationships with Indigenous communities.

He is also completing his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at New York University with a dissertation focused on Indigenous representations and narratives of the Bears Ears region from within the communities of the region versus interpretations from outside. As a result, he thinks deeply and often about how stories are told and the impacts that different narratives can have. 

Bears Ears National Monument was established by president Obama in December 2016 after a years-long effort led by Tribal leaders that formed the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, comprised of the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni and Ute Indian Tribe. In December 2017, then-President Trump shrunk the boundaries of the monument by 85% (it was later revealed by a New York Times report that oil extraction was a primary factor in this decision). The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition sued the Trump administration over the decision. In a separate lawsuit, UDB, Patagonia and other groups also sued Trump. President Biden has since requested a report on the monument from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who in turn recommended the President restore the original boundaries. The Inter-Tribal Coalition recently launched a marketing campaign and requested that President Biden restore and expand the monument boundaries to 1.9 million acres.  

Bears Ears is not Bears Ears without its Indigenous people. In the same way, stories of Bears Ears are naught without centering the voices of Indigenous people. To ignore this history, these stories, re-enacts the white supremacist settlement and colonial dispossession of land, culture and life. Conversely, to amplify and honor by helping empower Indigenous voices is to move toward restoring what colonialism and extractive capitalism has so insidiously destroyed (and continues to destroy). This can help heal the earth by ensuring the original caretakers are the primary speakers and leaders in the management of their ancestral territories, which are often America’s public lands. Ensuring Indigenous people are among the leaders guiding land management decisions guarantees they have access to the lands, which is in turn healing for them. 

For example, running runs in Angelo’s blood. His grandfather, Hugh Yellowman, performed a sacred duty for his people by catching deer and killing them without weapons. Angelo says the object is not to pierce the hide. “You don’t want to destroy the skin by violence, by shedding their blood, because it’s going to be used in ceremony,” he says.

Bernd Heinrich recorded Angelo’s grandfather’s hunting practices in the book Why We Run as they were recounted to him by the folklorist and scholar professor Barre Toelken.

“What I saw was my friend [Hugh] Yellowman (in the 1950s he was about 40 or 45) jogging along on the trail of a deer in semi-open desert country. The deer runs in bursts and then stops, listens, and then sprints again. The hunter, by consistently jogging along the trail left by the animal, eventually tires it out. Then, approaching the exhausted deer, he slowly puts an arm-lock on it and holds his hand over the mouth and nose of the deer, smothering it. His hand is supposed to have corn-pollen in it, which is considered sacred.”

 “It’s trying to come to an understanding with the animal once you’re both exhausted,” Angelo says. “‘We’re asking for permission to harvest you now.’ The animal has to agree to it. They have to give up. It’s a really long process and those hides are extremely valuable, because it’s really hard to do that.”

These hides were used in ceremonies, and Angelo’s mother, Ida Yellowman, still uses them in this way. Angelo says this is evidence that the Indigenous people of Bears Ears still frequent the region to hunt and utilize the land for their ceremonial life and subsistence.

“We say that it’s medicine. It’s not just like, ‘Here’s a plant, eat it,’ No, the fact that she’s got ceremonially harvested deer hides that we’re using for others’ ceremonies — for their healing — it’s other medicine begetting other medicine,” Angelo says.

Preparing for the process of harvesting hides and animals for food is also a ceremonial process dependent upon the lands of the Bears Ears region.

“Back in the day, it was process, it was ceremony,” Angelo says. “They’d go into the sweat lodge, and you’d cleanse yourself for days and prepare, and make sure you didn’t have any interaction with other folks to mess up your balance. You wanted to be focused and concentrate on the task at hand. It was in a prayerful way that you would go and do that harvesting because it’s a very powerful thing that you’re doing, taking a life and harvesting it. It’s actually feeding your family and providing skins for the ceremonies.”

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