So many great blogs, so little time.

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Every few months for much of his life, the 66-year-old Navajo spiritual leader has trekked from his nearby home to this slice of land in southeastern Utah, not far from the base of the Bears Ears buttes, to gather sage. Throughout the year, he uses the plant in ceremonies, often sharing it with people seeking wisdom or health, or as a way to offer thanks.

“This is our land and our herb,” Yellowman said. “It has to be protected. It’s all we have.”

Last year, President Trump signed proclamations slashing the size of Bears Ears National Monument by 85% and neighboring Grand Staircase-Escalante by about half, the largest combined rollback of federally protected land in the nation’s history.

With several lawsuits set to be decided early next year, the decision — a recommendation by outgoing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose short tenure included opening millions of acres of public land for drilling — struck critics as a clear example of what they characterize as a larger attack on indigenous communities. The scaling back of Bears Ears, they say, feels especially targeted, since it was a coalition of tribes that had lobbied to have the land designated as a national monument.

In December 2016, President Obama signed a proclamation protecting 1.35 million acres of land as part of the newly created Bears Ears National Monument, named for the distinctive buttes that resemble a bear peering over the horizon.

“The land,” Obama’s proclamation read, “is profoundly sacred to many Native American tribes.”

So a year later, when Trump opted to shrink the monument to about 200,000 acres, potentially opening hundreds of thousands of acres to mining operations, many tribes took it as an affront.

Of the nation’s nearly 130 national monuments, Bears Ears was the first one that Native American tribes had proposed and fought for, said Natalie Landreth, an attorney representing several tribes that have filed suit to reverse Trump’s action.

“This is the first monument Trump attacks,” Landreth said. “That is no coincidence — it’s a direct assault on the exercise of tribal sovereignty that resulted in the monument, and an assault on the cultures the tribes are trying so desperately to protect.”

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I thought that there is federal law that any federal land the government no longer uses in automatically returned to the native americans.  Anybody?