New Delhi, July 14 -- WASHINGTON - Davina Smith-Idjesa, a Navajo Nation citizen who co-chairs the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, called the landscape a "living cultural site" hours before President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday reducing it and a neighboring Utah monument by roughly 90 percent, a move her coalition said it would take to federal court.

The order cut the combined protected area of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments from approximately 3 million acres to 300,000 acres, the largest rollback of federal monument protections in modern US history. The acres stripped of monument status - roughly 2.7 million in total - would become eligible for coal mining, uranium extraction, and other resourc...