Editor’s note: you can listen to a longer conversation with Autumn Gillard in the audio attached to this story.
On January 15, 2026, the Government Accountability Office said that after review, it had determined that the resource management plan for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument could be considered a “rule,” and was therefore subject to the Congressional Review Act. Under that law, any member of Congress could introduce a bill called a “resolution of disapproval,” and a simple majority would be enough to overturn the rule.
The decision prompted criticism from environmental advocates, as well as opposition from tribes that have called the Grand Staircase-Escalante region home since time immemorial.
Autumn Gillard is Southern Paiute, and is an enrolled member of the Paiute Indian tribe of Utah. She serves as the coordinator for the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition. The other five tribes that make up the coalition are the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Zuni Tribe.
Gillard said the resource management plan, approved in January 2025, was a stark contrast from the previous resource management plan, approved in 2020 under the first Trump administration.
“There wasn't a lot of consultation that was done with the Native people connected to these lands, to integrate their opinion and their voices about how their cultural landscape should be managed by the Bureau of Land Management,” she said.
President Bill Clinton first designated the 2.9 million-acre national monument in Southern Utah in 1996. In 2017, the first Trump administration shrunk the monument’s boundaries by about 47%, along with nearby Bears Ears National Monument, established in 2016 by President Barack Obama. The Biden administration restored both Utah monuments to their original sizes in 2021. The 2020 plan Gillard referred to reflected the monument’s smaller size, and a new plan was needed once the monument was restored.
Gillard said it was crucial that tribal voices be at the table when the BLM began drafting the new plan in 2022,, and that tribes could contribute to the plan via the public comment process.
“We are the first scientists here on this continent,” she said. “Our ancestors knew how to take care of it. And, we pass that information down generationally so that we as current contemporary Native people still carry those teachings. So it was really refreshing to see that some of our recommendations had been included into the current resource management plan.”
One suggestion that was crucial to the coalition was the protection of petroglyph panels, which are sacred to the tribal nations in the coalition. Gillard said they wanted to ensure responsible protection from the BLM around these sites.
“And you can see that reflected in the current resource management plan, that there is verbiage in there articulating the need for protection and preservation of sacred cultural sites,” she said. “We also want these (sites) protected so that other people outside of our culture, if they're to visit these sites, they can look at them and they can enjoy them as much as we do as Native people.”
But it was Utah’s congressional delegation, including Rep. Celeste Maloy, a Republican whose district includes Grand Staircase-Escalante, who requested that the Government Accountability Office determine whether the resource management plan was subject to the Congressional Review Act.
“The locals oppose it. Trail users oppose it. The local agricultural community opposes it,” she said in a social media video. “It undercuts rural economic development.”
“My constituents have been telling me they don’t like being locked out of their own back yard,” she added. “They don’t like when their family traditions are banned on the lands that they’ve been using, and that’s why they oppose the RMP.”
Gillard said she felt that Maloy’s comments drew a line of “us versus them” that didn’t really need to exist. She said Maloy’s comment seemed to imply that the tribes weren’t Utah residents, and discounted that the tribes had made efforts to hear other perspectives, too.
“I would go and ask questions to hear their perspective because I wanted to make sure that when I was making a vocalization in reference to Southern Paiute history and culture, that I also wanted to understand the other side of the local history and descendants of Euro-Americans that had arrived to the Utah Territory,” she said.
“That is the point of creation of public lands, so that all people can enjoy them and interact with them.”
In addition, Gillard disagreed with the contention that the monument negatively affected Utah’s economy.
“These small counties rely heavily, these small towns rely heavily on tourism that is visiting these public lands,” she said.
A recent review from Headwaters Economics shows that there was long-term economic growth in the communities near national monuments, including in the Grand Staircase-Escalante region. It also shows that there was no marked decrease in other economic activities, like mining and agriculture.
The use of the Congressional Review Act to overturn a national monument’s resource management plan would be unprecedented, though in the past year, Congress has used the law to throw out resource management plans at local BLM field offices. Gillard said one of her biggest concerns is that a new plan would not integrate Indigenous voices, and that it would damage the region’s arid desert landscape.
“I think that that is definitely a big concern of mine: what will happen to all of those beautiful resources, not only the cultural, but the environmental?” she said. “You know, Grand Staircase alone has over 650 species of bees that rely on that ecosystem. And considering how important pollinators are to our natural ecosystem, if we disrupt that system, it could send a ripple effect outside of those monument boundaries.”
Gillard is also worried about the potential for extractive activities that would occur if the monument boundaries were to be shrunk back to their 2017 size, or if its monument status were to be rescinded altogether.
“How will that ripple out outside of that landscape?” she asked. “Because you even think about the Escalante River, which feeds into the Colorado River, which then in turn goes into the Grand Canyon, (and) you know, this is also another very sacred space for many of us tribes that sit on this coalition.”
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
