Proclamation 9558, Establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument

Proclamation 9558, Establishment of the Bears Ears National Monument, issued by the President of the United States and published in the Federal Register in 2016, is the founding legal instrument creating the monument, citing the area's ongoing religious and cultural significance to the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian and Zuni tribes among the reasons for protection. Its strength is that it is the primary legal record itself of what the proclamation actually established and on what stated grounds, the correct source for the monument's legal boundaries and official justification. Its limit is that a presidential proclamation states the government's own legal rationale rather than the tribes' own account of the land's religious meaning, and the monument's boundaries were themselves later reduced by a subsequent administration and partly restored again, a contested political history this 2016 text alone does not capture, so a claim about the monument's current legal status needs the more recent record alongside this founding proclamation.