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Letter: The hoo-ha over renaming Bears Ears to Shash Jaa is puzzling

(Rachel Molenda | The Salt Lake Tribune) Protesters gathered at the capitol building in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Monday, December 4, 2017, to protest President Donald Trump's plan to shrink Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.

I’m puzzled by the most recent hoo-ha over protecting Bears Ears country (“By renaming new Utah monument Shash Jaa, is Trump trying to divide Native American tribes?”). Here’s why:

Last year, before President Barack Obama’s proclamation, Angelo Baca, a Navajo, filmmaker and Ph.D. student at New York University, released an ethnographic film. In the context of a historical collaboration of five tribes “to save their homeland by making it a monument,” according to the film’s website, it gave voice to Navajos living on the reservation in Utah.

Baca is currently a cultural resources coordinator at Utah Diné Bikéyah. He works under the direction of Gavin Noyes, executive director of the nonprofit that’s played a prominent, possibly decisive, role in creating the monument. Noyes is quoted as saying, “The selection of the Navajo name (Shásh Jaa’ for President Trump’s scaled-down monument) tramples the Native American true history of the place.”

That’s interesting, because the name of Baca’s award-winning film is “Shásh Jaa’ (Bears Ears).” Was he, like Trump, “trampling” on true history when he gave his film that name?

Was the all-Navajo film crew that produced it — including Mark Maryboy, featured in the film and a board member of Utah Diné Bikéyah — also showing contempt for the past?

Bill Keshlear, Salt Lake City