Native artifacts are being stolen and the Native Nations are trying to keep the thieves away.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/utah-monument-fight-pits-native-americans-against-land-use-militants?akid=14533.294211.NVfuKK&rd=1&src=newsletter1061867&t=26

By all accounts, the looting was terrible. Across the Southwest a century ago, thousand-year-old Native American granaries were pillaged by clay pot hunters. Grave robbers worked in the open. In the sandstone dwellings perched high in the cliffs, tourists cut souvenirs out of the ancient ceiling beams. Vandals carted off heirlooms by the wagonload.

In response, Congress acted swiftly. In the summer of 1906, the House and the Senate passed, and President Theodore Roosevelt quickly signed, a law known as the Antiquities Act, which was designed to protect America’s cultural and physical treasures. Results were immediate. Within two years, Roosevelt had invoked the new law to protect Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower (held sacred by the Cheyenne and the Lakota as “Bears Lodge”) from timber and mining interests, to provide new security to Chaco Canyon and Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico, and to safeguard Arizona’s Montezuma’s Castle and the Grand Canyon.

A century later, a similar (if less intense) looting spree is once again destroying tribal artifacts in Utah’s red rock country, in an area known as Bears Ears. According to archaeologists, San Juan County, Utah, may be home to as many as 100,000 archaeological and cultural sites. Grave robbing and vandalism, always a problem in the vast and under-policed region, is on the rise. Since 2011, federal officials have reported at least 25 incidents of looting and disturbance of human remains, though citizen watchdog groups say the number is likely twice as high. In one instance, vandals dismantled a 19th-century Navajo hogan for firewood. Prehistoric petroglyphs have been found pockmarked with bullet holes—the North American equivalent of, say, using the Chartres Cathedral’s rose window for target practice.

Native Americans are in shock. “In the region here, the looting and vandalism of cultural sites is pretty rampant. It’s a serious offense, but if it gets reported, it doesn’t get dealt with,” Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, a councilmember of the Ute Mountain Ute, told The American Prospect. “This is the final resting place of our ancestors. We feel they deserve the same respect as, say, the battlefield at Gettsyburg. … When places like that get destroyed, it’s like ripping a page out of history.”