Outdoor Insider Fall 2018 | Page 8

Utah Diné Bikéyah (UDB) is a nonprofit organization that supports indigenous communities in protecting their ancestral lands. Along with the five sovereign nations of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, UDB got the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument designated—the first tribally led national monument in American history. Its long-term vision includes linking indigenous practice directly to the natural resources indigenous people depend on, and ensuring that these resources are sustainably managed by federal agencies.

Outdoor Insider talked with Executive Director Gavin Noyes about the group’s work and its upcoming keynote at AORE’s Annual Conference. He holds degrees in natural resources and public policy and has experience in land planning, grassroots organizing, facilitation, and program evaluation.

How did you start working with tribes?

I spent a number of years working for nonprofits protecting U.S. Forest Service lands adjacent to Salt Lake. Eventually, I decided to try to launch a program building on some of the nonprofit work I’d done in Salt Lake City but taking it into southern Utah, helping local, rural communities protect the land and wildlife resources that they depend upon. I launched a project with another nonprofit to work with rural county commissioners, and they had a lot of experience working with indigenous people around the world, so they suggested that I reach out to tribes. Then, the work with the commissioners went really slowly, and the work with tribes grew faster and faster. That was 11 years ago. The Bears Ears project grew quite large and led to the formation of our current nonprofit.

So how did Utah Diné Bikéyah come about?

At the time, there were no Native American nonprofits working on off-reservation public land interests. But there were a lot of environmental groups, organized in different ways, working to protect the environment. We did a couple of things to kind of test out the waters: A lot of native people in San Juan County said the county and our state were way too discriminatory to ever consider Native American voices, so we put out a book that directly laid out those interests and the spiritual ties. That book started a conversation that made local native people feel comfortable that nonnative folks actually did respect a lot of those ties to the land. Then we carried out an extensive land-use mapping process asking people if they would be receptive to a Native American land conservation organization forming, and if there was a need for that, and basically everybody said

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Q&A

with

Gavin Noyes

Executive Director of Utah Diné Bikéyah