June 20 (UPI) -- The Biden administration has reached a first-of-its-kind agreement with five Native American tribes to participate in the management of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
The new cooperative agreement was signed Saturday in White Mesa, Utah, by Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning, Agriculture Undersecretary Homer Wilkes, and representatives of the five tribes.
They included the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation and the Pueblo of Zuni.
Saturday's ceremony also included the installation of a new sign marking the boundary of the monument.
The deal was hailed as a unique effort to include Native leaders in the management of a national monument and a chance to resolve long-simmering tensions over what tribal leaders had criticized as previous mismanagement of a "profoundly sacred" land.
"This is an important step as we move forward together to ensure that tribal expertise and traditional perspectives remain at the forefront of our joint decision-making for the Bears Ears National Monument," Stone-Manning said in a statement.
"This type of true co-management will serve as a model for our work to honor the nation-to-nation relationship in the future," she added.
Under the agreement, each tribe will have one elected officer serving on the commission governing the monument who will be tasked with "planning, management, conservation, restoration and protection of the sacred lands."
"Today, instead of being removed from a landscape to make way for a public park, we are being invited back to our ancestral homelands to help repair them and plan for a resilient future," said Carleton Bowekaty, lieutenant governor of the Zuni Pueblo tribe and co-chairman of the Bears Ears Commission.
The deal comes after a years-long battle over the fate of the stunning preserve, which features rock art, dwellings, ceremonial sites, granaries and many other cultural resources reflecting its historical and cultural significance to a variety of Native American peoples.
The Biden administration last year issued Proclamation 10285, which reversed a 2017 move by President Donald Trump that reduced the size of the monument from 1.35 million acres to just over 200,000 acres, potentially opening up the remainder for development.
The proclamation restored the Bears Ears National Monument and "recognized the importance of knowledge of tribal nations in managing the monument" by re-constituting the Bears Ears Commission as originally established by President Barack Obama in 2016.