美国国家公共电台 NPR Montana Monument May Expand Under Trump Administration

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Secretary of the interior Ryan Zinke follows the Trump 1 administration's playbook. He's pushing to shrink national monuments across the country. But Zinke makes an exception in his own home state. He's recommending a new national monument in a park in Montana.

Yellowstone Public Radio's Nate Hegyi reports.

NATE HEGYI, BYLINE 2: Huddled 3 behind his white pickup 4 truck in northwestern Montana, Roland Kennerly stuffs his hands into his coat pockets.

ROLAND KENNERLY: Oh, this wind. (Laughter) It's starting to snow now.

HEGYI: The road has turned into a muddy slop. And beyond us is a pocket of socked-in mountains and roadless grassland 5 known as the Badger-Two Medicine area.

KENNERLY: You can only get in there by walking or by horseback. And so it keeps it in its natural state. And I hope it stays that way for my kids and my kids' kids.

HEGYI: Badger-Two Medicine is sacred to Kennerly's tribe, the Blackfeet Nation. It's part of their creation story. And this summer, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended it become a new national monument. That designation would protect more than 200 square miles of federal land from any future oil and gas development. But President Trump has called these large monuments massive federal land grabs by his Democratic predecessors 6.

And Zinke has recommended the president reduce the size of some of those monuments, including Bear's Ears in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada. Now, Zinke hasn't commented publicly on the newly proposed monument, and his spokesperson says interior has nothing new to say about it. So the recommendation has a lot of people scratching their heads, including Blackfeet tribal 7 chairman Harry 8 Barnes.

HARRY BARNES: I'm falling back on - I think it's because of his kinship that's been developed with the Blackfeet tribe.

HEGYI: Zinke is a former Montana congressman 9 who grew up in Whitefish, Mont. - a couple of hours west of the reservation. He even played high school basketball against the Blackfeet Nation. Barnes points to Roland Kennerly, the man who took me to see the newly proposed monument.

BARNES: This guy played basketball against them, although now he had to change his story. He was telling me before, oh, yeah. We used to whip Whitefish's [expletive] all the time.

HEGYI: Now Barnes says Kennerly puts it more diplomatically and just says he used to play against Zinke.

BARNES: So we've had a connection for a long time. We've lobbied him in the state legislature. We've lobbied him in Washington, D.C.

HEGYI: And when the congressman became interior secretary, the first place he visited was Glacier 10 National Park, inviting 11 the Blackfeet to join him for a prayer. But Land Tawney, president of the Montana-based sportsmen's group Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, says it feels like Zinke is proposing a new national monument for more ambitious reasons.

LAND TAWNEY: You know, I think the secretary has talked about, you know, wanting to come back to Montana after he's done being secretary and potentially run for governor.

HEGYI: Tawney says protecting public lands here is a huge issue. And since becoming secretary, Zinke has encouraged mining, drilling and reducing the size of national monuments elsewhere in the country while leaving existing national monuments in Montana alone and urging mining bans near Yellowstone National Park. Tawney says these proposals imply Zinke is protecting public lands in his home state.

TAWNEY: I think that the people of Montana hold our special places very near and dear. And if you do not protect those places, I think that's a political nightmare for you in this state.

HEGYI: David Parker, a political scientist at Montana State University, says Zinke may even want to run for president someday.

DAVID PARKER: Whatever his ambitions are, Montana's important to that. I think moving forward he can't say you're going to be on the national stage and be a serious candidate if you don't have strong support from your home state.

HEGYI: Blackfeet tribal chairman Harry Barnes says Zinke's political ambitions don't really matter to him. In fact, just having a Montanan in Trump's cabinet is good enough.

BARNES: If we can get a friend in there that'll do us a solid now and again, great - because it's something we don't normally see.

HEGYI: For NPR News, I'm Nate Hegyi in Browning, Montana.