McKenzie Long is a rock climber, graphic designer, and writer who, inspired by the “contest” over the Bears Ears National Monument where she loved to climb in the Indian Creek basin, decided to visit a select group of national monuments to gain a deeper understanding of why and how they are contested.” Her travels take her from Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument to Hawaii, just beyond which is the vast Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

Long can turn a pithy phrase, as in her observation that “National monuments are like the scrappy younger siblings of national parks.” “Younger” because the monuments she visits are all recently designated as opposed to the many proclaimed over the years by presidents from Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 to George W. Bush in 2006. “Siblings” because the rationales for them are generally like those of national parks though the process of designating them is different. Many national parks of today started out as national monuments.

Long began her journey with a perspective gained from her experience of Indian Creek and Bears Ears. She understood that support for and opposition to measures like designation of portions of the public domain as protected areas often come from the same place – a deep connection to the land, though the connections vary in many ways. Some love a place for its beauty, its wildness, as a refuge, even as sacred space rich in legacies of prehistory and history. Others value places for recreation, from which to make a living, or for the profit they can gain from its exploitation. As Long reveals in her visits to 12 of the 13 national monuments she explores, their contested nature involve clashes in values (the 14th, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, is far out into the Pacific Ocean beyond Hawaii and closed to public visitation).

Writing about her visit to Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Long observes that, “Our society overall has accepted basic human rights on principle, and acknowledges life has value. Land is the same. Its innate value should be revered.” A few pages later she writes:

Even if we could not recreate on a plot of earth, could not pull a profit from its boundaries, could not even visit, land still retains value. The survival of the Mardon skipper [butterfly] does matter, even if I haven’t seen one. A Douglas fir can still grow for one thousand years even if no one counts its rings. Biodiversity loss can happen when no one is paying attention. And the way we choose to value and care for and interact with landscapes still has an effect on the world, even if we are still searching for the right answer.

As she visits Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, Castle Mountains National Monument, Hanford Reach National Monument, and Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, among others, she interviews monument advocates, opponents, managers, and visitors, describing monument values and issues that arise from them.

Hanford Reach is “not the most scenic national monument,” admits wildlife biologist Dan Haas, who helped draft the monument proclamation, helped write the management plan, and works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the nearby McNary National Wildlife Refuge, which manages this monument. The Hanford Reach of the Columbia River loops around the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site, which produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program for decades. The national monument nearly surrounds the site.

Long observes that, “We manufacture a harmful element and use it to bomb others at a time of great emergency. Its by-product threatens us for thousands of years. Meanwhile, bald eagles perch on branches overlooking cocooned reactors and radioactive earth.”

The irony of this is clear – a place that was part of the creation of the most destructive weapons in history and protected from any other human uses for the sake of national security, provides protection for a natural world compromised on the surrounding land. The monument extends the protection for nature provided by the secured site, and with companion monuments in other locales, recognizes the importance of the history made there.

Long’s approach to national monuments in This Contested Land is personal. She shares her reflections on the history, issues, and her personal experience of the land and the people who value them and sometimes contest their very existence. She offers a sketch of each monument’s history and the reasons for its designation. She hikes with friends and family, exploring the physical landscape and its overlay of story, quoting philosopher Edward Casey in her essay on Organ Mountains – Desert Peaks: “Places not only are, they happen.”

Once in these mountains, for instance, soldiers thought they had Geronimo trapped in a cave only to have him escape by wriggling “through stone passageways, using his intimate knowledge of the earth and, perhaps, even his powers to control natural forces, to squeeze his way to freedom. In defiance of containment, impervious to walls, his silent footsteps receded into the creosote-filled night.”

The story might be legend, but as Long explores the Robledo Mountains in the monument, the story enhances her experience, as does that of Billy the Kid and others who made their mark upon the place.

Bears Ears and its plight launched her on her monument journey, and the story of the monument’s origins inspired her to reflect on injustices suffered by Indigenous people in the history of America’s public lands. A former Utah congressman (Rob Bishop) undermined his own effort to achieve compromise on allocation of that state’s federal land by saying, at a hearing on his Public Lands Initiative, “If anyone here likes the Antiquities Act the way it was written, die.”

This intransigence led the Navajo to form a nonprofit called Utah Diné Bikéyah, and ultimately expand to five tribes forming the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, which drafted its own proposal for a monument. Ultimately, President Obama invoked the authority of The Antiquities Act to establish Bears Ears National Monument. His proclamation was a compromise but recognized  the tribes’ involvement and interests. The new monument was to be managed by the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, and a commission “composed of one elected official from each of the five tribes unified in the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition.”

Along came Donald Trump and the monument was drastically reduced and any hint of co-management with the tribes eliminated.

Reflecting on this and the history of Indigenous people’s treatment in the history of America’s public lands as she travels, Long ponders how the injustice of it might be addressed. She reflects on how land was “owned” in song by Indigenous people, and how that was changed by colonization.

“As property ownership took hold in the United States, the idea of the world as a place where people share and partake in nature around them was suppressed in favor of advancement, wealth, dominance, and individualism. The rise of land ownership and industrialization coincided with the loss of connection, the silence of song.”

The result was, of course, dispossession of Indigenous people. How, she wonders, as contests over public land occur today, might there be some measure of justice served? She writes of Fawn Douglas, a member of the Las Vegas Band of Paiutes and board member of the nonprofit Friends of Gold Butte National Monument, who pointed out to her that places like Gold Butte are “in our songs, they’re everything”:

Douglas speaks a truth that must be honored and understood: public land in America is the sacred land of Indigenous people; it is vital that they participate in or lead management and decision-making for land that is integral to their past, their present, and their future. Public land in this country was predicated on Indigenous people’s removal; this should not be forgotten. But it need not continue to be public land’s legacy. We can create a new legacy, one in collaboration. Indigenous history should be celebrated and respected. People of all ethnicities and backgrounds should feel welcome. What has brought all people to this place in time – the actions of our ancestors, the wrongdoings of the past – are shared histories that are lived in land.

Long’s perspective here is very insightful, for today there are calls for “land back” from some elements of the Indigenous community and their supporters, and this seems a difficult and even impossible prospect, but perhaps there is a way, sharing histories and management, that is possible and offers a measure of justice.

Long has so many such insights in this book that it is difficult to do her justice in a review. Her mentor, writer Kathryn Aalto, writes that Long “reframes national monuments in the American consciousness,” and I think Kathryn is correct. Long advocates complicating our perception of national monuments and, I might add, national lands in general, including national parks. She writes that, “The first step is embracing the complexity, welcoming the duality of both tragedy and beauty present in these places. Making room for story…. A monument is more than just a land designation; it is the story of everything that happened in that place before, everything that continues to happen there, and the story that comes next.”

Seeing them this way, as Long does the 13 she highlights in This Contested Land, is a reframing.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in national monuments today, their values, and the issues surrounding them. President Biden reversed the decisions of President Trump on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument (the Republican had reversed the decisions of presidents Clinton and Obama before him), and perhaps Biden will in turn be reversed by a presidential successor, but one hope is this political contest over portions of the people’s land will soon cease.

If people read and think about what Long has found in her journey, they will be better equipped to participate in the contests over public land, and especially national monuments, than they would be otherwise. The text of The Antiquities Act authorizing presidents to proclaim monuments, which is remarkably brief, is included in this book, as well as a list of presidential monument proclamations under the Act from 1906 to 2022. As someone steeped in the literature of public lands, this readable and insightful book added much to my thinking about how our protected areas are “contested land.” It also offers hope that there will be a future of more collaboration and less conflict over an invaluable asset of the American people.