Until this year, public-health officials have abided by a simple playbook for measles outbreaks: Get unvaccinated people vaccinated, as quickly as possible. The measles component of the measles, mumps, and rubella shot that nearly all American kids receive today is “one of the best vaccines we have,” William Moss, a measles expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Two doses in early childhood are enough to cut someone’s risk of getting measles by 97 percent. And vaccination is the only surefire way to slow the spread of the wildly contagious disease.

In the weeks since a measles outbreak began in West Texas and spilled into neighboring New Mexico, local health departments have run that play, scrambling to set up free vaccination clinics. The federal government, though, appears to be writing its own rules for the game. The epidemic has already surpassed 200 known cases. But that’s likely a drastic undercount, experts told me. And it appears to have claimed at least two lives, including that of a six-year-old unvaccinated child. And yet, the CDC waited to release its first statement on the outbreak until a month or so after the epidemic began, and even then, it didn’t directly urge parents to get their kids up-to-date on MMR shots.

More recently, the Department of Health and Human Services has called for doses of the vaccine to be shipped to Texas; at the same time, HHS is working on dispatching vitamin A to the region, and the department’s new secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is overinflating the importance of those supplements in managing measles. In some parts of Texas, vitamin-A-rich cod-liver oil is flying off shelves, while some parents are doubling down on their hesitations over vaccines.

When reached for comment, an HHS spokesperson noted that the “CDC recommends vaccination as the best protection against measles infections,” but added that “Secretary Kennedy and HHS are committed to aggressively handling the measles outbreak with a comprehensive, all-of-the-above approach to do what we can to save lives.”

The United States has long had small groups of people who have opted out of vaccination, but in this outbreak, the first major one of Trump’s second term, the fracture between the unvaccinated and the worried well is looking especially stark. Many of the people most eager to get a shot are the ones who need it least: young, healthy individuals nowhere near a detected outbreak, who already have all the MMR doses they’ll likely ever need. Meanwhile, those who would most benefit from vaccination have been pointedly reminded that doing so is a personal decision, as Kennedy has put it—a framing that could add to the growing death toll.

Before the 1960s, when the measles vaccine became available in the U.S., the virus infected roughly 3 to 4 million Americans each year. In most cases, the disease would resolve after a few days of cough, fever, and a telltale rash. But measles can also quickly turn dangerous, causing complications as severe as pneumonia and brain swelling. Researchers have estimated that the virus can infect 90 percent of the unimmunized people it comes into close contact with, and roughly one out of every 1,000 cases will result in death. One study found that, in the era before the vaccine, up to half of all infectious-disease deaths in kids might have been caused by measles. Those who survive the disease are sometimes left with permanent brain damage; the virus can also warp the immune system, wiping out the body’s memory of past infections and vaccines, which leaves people more vulnerable to disease.

In the U.S., getting measles as a child—and risking all of those horrors—was once considered a grim matter of course. Decades of vaccination helped the U.S. eliminate measles by the year 2000 and keep the virus mostly at bay since then. But the cracks in that wall have been widening. For a virus as contagious as measles, vaccine coverage needs to remain above 95 percent to prevent outbreaks. A drop of even just a couple of percentage points in immunization can double the virus’s attack rate, Mark Jit, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me. In many parts of the U.S., that’s now a real threat: Nationwide, less than 93 percent of kindergartners were fully vaccinated against measles for the 2023–24 school year. Unvaccinated and undervaccinated people also tend to cluster; the outbreak in West Texas, for instance, has hit particularly hard in Gaines County, which is home to a Mennonite community wary of the health-care system, and which has a kindergarten-vaccination rate of just 82 percent.

Vaccine-uptake rates in the region appear to have risen in the weeks since the outbreak began. But several experts told me they were disturbed by the lack of strong, consistent messaging from federal leadership. In the past, outbreaks have prompted immediate vaccine advocacy from the federal government: During a 2018–19 measles outbreak clustered in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, the CDC director, Robert Redfield, and HHS secretary, Alex Azar, issued joint statements emphasizing the importance of vaccination. Redfield called on health-care providers to “assure patients about the efficacy and safety of the measles vaccine”; Azar stressed that the safety of the shots “has been firmly established over many years in some of the largest vaccine studies ever undertaken.”

People aren’t necessarily taking their first cues from federal appointees. Studies show that health-care-provider recommendations are a major factor in people’s decisions about vaccination. But national messages can still cue local health officials and physicians to double down on their efforts, Robert Bednarczyk, an epidemiologist at Emory University, told me. And some of the most powerful health partnerships can involve community leaders with cachet among families. During the 2018–19 measles outbreak, public-health officials made “deliberate attempts to work with religious leaders,” whose recommendations would be trusted, Moss told me. Those efforts seem lacking in this current outbreak: One pastor in Seminole, Texas, told the Associated Press that he hadn’t received any direct outreach from public-health officials, and wasn’t engaging with parents in his congregation about vaccines.

A statement from HHS released this week did give some emphasis to the potency of measles shots. But it also continued to echo Kennedy’s constant praise of vitamin A as a top-line method to manage the virus, a statement now also highlighted on the CDC website. Vitamin A deficiency can worsen a case of measles that has already begun—but those deficiencies are estimated to affect less than 1 percent of Americans. Kennedy has also called out steroids and antibiotics as measles-fighting tactics, but those interventions, too, are more geared toward reducing the severity of disease once it’s already set in. “The vaccine is the only thing that stops people from getting infected,” Jit told me. And casting supplements and drugs as comparable to, or even preferable to, prevention is especially dangerous for a disease that has no cure or antivirals.

When vaccination is framed as just one option among many, parents might think twice about opting into a shot for their kid, Rupali Limaye, a health-communications scholar at George Mason University, told me. Kennedy has also framed vaccination as a personal choice, and something about which parents should “consult with their healthcare providers to understand their options”—all couches, Limaye told me, that make doing nothing an especially convenient option. “That, to me, is automatically going to lead to more morbidity and more mortality,” she said.

Meanwhile, primary-care physicians such as Sarah Turner of Lutheran Health Physicians, in Indiana, are getting frantic questions from patients who are asking if they need boosters or early shots for their infants, not yet old enough for their first MMR. Although some people, those born before 1989, may have received only one dose of MMR in childhood and be eligible for another, in most instances, the answer to those questions is usually no—especially if local cases haven’t been detected and a family isn’t planning to travel into an area where measles is rampant, Turner told me. Protection from the vaccine is thought to last for decades, maybe even an entire lifetime, in most people: “If you have two doses of measles vaccine, you don’t have anything to worry about,” Shelly Bolotin, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, told me.

These misalignments are a pattern in the U.S.’s reaction to infectious disease. During the worst days of COVID, too, politicians hocked dubious treatments for the virus, and anti-vaccine sentiment roiled in underimmunized communities, while some of the worried well sought out extra shots before it was clear they needed them. More recently, when mpox cases began to explode in the United States in 2022, a broad swath of Americans clamored for shots—even though the outbreak was, from the start, concentrated among men who have sex with men, who didn’t receive focused resources for weeks. And as H5N1 cases in the U.S. have risen over the past year, public worry has concentrated on the safety of pasteurized dairy products, rather than the real risks to dairy and poultry workers.

Measles is not a forgiving virus. It moves so quickly that it can capitalize on any defensive wobbles or holes in protection. As childhood-vaccination rates continue to lag and the nation’s leaders continue to dismiss data and undermine scientific rigor, experts worry that outbreaks such as these—and the country’s muddled responses to them—will become a deadly norm. Global rates of measles are rising, giving the virus more opportunities to slip into the United States. At the same time, the percentage of American children potentially susceptible to measles has grown in recent years, Bednarczyk’s research has shown. When more sparks hit more kindling, conflagrations will grow. Just over two months into 2025, the U.S. has already logged more than 150 measles cases—more than half of the total cases documented in all of 2024. If the U.S. has any hope of containing this crisis—and the ones that will surely follow—it’ll have to succeed at concentrating its resources on those most at risk.

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In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January. An unvaccinated school-aged child recently died from measles in Texas—the first known death from measles in America in about a decade, and the first child to die from the disease since 2003. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covers science and health, about why vaccination is the only way to prevent the spread, and how a surge in illnesses that had previously faded from American life could reshape childhoods.

Lora Kelley: Why is measles so reliant on vaccines to prevent its spread?

Katherine J. Wu: Measles is arguably the most contagious infectious disease that scientists know about. Researchers have estimated that, in a population where there’s zero immunity to measles, one infected person is going to infect roughly 12 to 18 other people. That is extremely high. In most cases, it is a respiratory infection that’s going to cause fever, cough, and rash, but it can also restrict breathing, cause complications such as pneumonia, and be deadly.

This is a disease that requires really, really high levels of vaccination to keep it out of a community, because it’s so contagious. Researchers have estimated that you want to see vaccination rates in the 95 percent range to protect a community. If you start to dip just a bit below that threshold, like even 92 percent or 90 percent, you start to get into trouble. Lower uptake creates an opening for the virus to start spreading. And the more unvaccinated people there are, the faster the virus will spread, and the more people will get seriously sick.

Lora: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that this recent outbreak is “not unusual” and pointed to past measles outbreaks. How do you view this current outbreak relative to other times when cases spiked, such as the 2019 outbreak in New York?

Katherine: The current outbreak actually is not as big as the 2019 New York one yet. And we almost lost our elimination status for measles then. But there are ways in which I would argue that this one is worse than the 2019 outbreak. An unvaccinated kid has died. We haven’t had a reported measles death in this country in about a decade. If the situation worsens, that death might only be the first.

Lora: Could people who are vaccinated be affected by a measles outbreak?

Katherine: The MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, generally provides immunity from measles for decades. But there are kids who are not old enough to be fully vaccinated against measles (kids get one shot at 12 to 15 months and then again at 4 to 6 years old). And it’s rare, but some people, including immunocompromised people, might not respond well to vaccination and may not be protected by it. Also, as people get further from their vaccination date, they may be more vulnerable to the disease. The more measles is around, the more vulnerable even the vaccinated population will be.

Lora: Measles hasn’t been a big issue in this country for a long time. What tools does America have to fight this disease if it resurges in a big way?

Katherine: Because this disease spreads so quickly, the main tool we’ve used to fight it is vaccination. And if people are letting that go, we’re in trouble. There are no antivirals for measles. Doctors generally just have to do what they can to manage the symptoms. Plus, health-care workers aren’t used to diagnosing or dealing with measles cases anymore, which makes it easier for outbreaks to get out of control.

Lora: How might the recent layoffs at federal agencies focused on public health and disease affect America’s ability to respond to outbreaks?

Katherine: I do worry that a lot of the public-health workforce is slowly getting hollowed out, including at the CDC. We’re going to lose our ability to prevent and stop epidemics—we saw resources that researchers rely on to track outbreaks temporarily disappear from the CDC website in January and February, for example. If people’s attitudes keep shifting away from childhood vaccination, a whole other host of diseases could creep in. In refusing the MMR vaccine, you are by definition also refusing protection against the mumps and rubella.

And RFK Jr. has made rampant speculations about the MMR vaccine being more dangerous than the disease itself, which is completely untrue. This week, he published an op-ed on the Fox News website acknowledging the importance of vaccinating against measles but also framing vaccination as a “personal” choice, and described nutrition as “a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.” I can promise that no multivitamin will work against measles as well as the MMR vaccine, which has been proved safe and effective at protecting people from disease. Measles, meanwhile, can kill.

Lora: What would more frequent outbreaks mean for America’s kids and their childhood?

Katherine: In the world kids live in now, when they get sick with a disease they catch from other children, it’s not that big of a deal most of the time. Measles outbreaks are just so different from the colds picked up from day care or the stomach bugs you catch at Disneyland. If we choose to let measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases come back, there will be more childhood mortality. Kids might get pneumonia more often. They might be hospitalized more often. Some might grow up with permanent brain damage. Childhood will not only be about whether a kid is going to get a good education or make enough friends. It will once more be about whether a kid can survive the first few years of their life.

Related:

RFK Jr. is America’s leading advocate for getting measles, Benjamin Mazer writes. The return of measles

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

​Trump’s tariffs are his most inexplicable decision yet. The nicest swamp on the internet Good on Paper: You may miss wokeness.

Today’s News

The Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico, and doubled tariffs for China. In response, Canada put 25 percent tariffs on billions of dollars of American goods, Mexico will announce retaliatory tariffs on Sunday, and China will add tariffs on some American imports on March 10. Donald Trump will deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m. ET, in which he is expected to lay out his vision for his second term. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that last week’s Oval Office meeting was “regrettable” and proposed a partial cease-fire with Russia to resume peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty.

When America Persecutes Its Teachers

By Clay Risen

Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.

Read the full article.

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After leaving Hollywood, Gene Hackman retired in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he became a fixture in the community.

In 1956, an aspiring young actor named Gene Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in California, struggling to find a way into a field he’d been fascinated with since childhood. Hackman, who was born in 1930, had already served five years in the Marine Corps, then bounced around New York, Florida, Illinois, and other places without much luck. His good friend at Pasadena was another ambitious performer, Dustin Hoffman; together, they were voted “least likely to succeed” by their peers before washing out and moving back to New York to try scratching out a living. Even at the age of 26, Hackman’s hardscrabble features meant he looked like the furthest thing from a marquee idol—he seemed destined to be a bit player at best.

But over the next 50-odd years, Hackman would become the greatest, coolest, earthiest star of what’s now known as New Hollywood: an everyman who defined a generation of moviemaking better than anyone else.

Authorities in Santa Fe, New Mexico, announced this morning that Hackman had died at the age of 95. (His body was found along with that of his wife and one of their dogs; further details are pending, although the cause is not suspected to be foul play.) He retired from acting more than 20 years ago, after a career that won him two Oscars and propelled his rise to genuine if unconventional stardom. Over the course of the 1960s, Hackman had graduated from small parts and theater roles to attention-grabbing supporting work in Bonnie and Clyde, earning his first Oscar nomination in 1968. Four years later, the Academy would name him Best Actor for The French Connection, in which his work as the New York cop Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle characterized the real-world grit he brought to the silver screen.

The Conversation, 1974 (Everett)

“Doyle is bad news—but a good cop,” The French Connection’s poster roared. The slogan put the audience in the shoes of a casually bigoted, insubordinate alcoholic who bends the NYPD’s rules in pursuit of drug runners. The director William Friedkin’s film—which also won Best Picture—was part of a tidal wave of challenging, morally complex storytelling that washed ashore starting in the late ’60s. Bonnie and Clyde served as one of the movement’s first examples; its graphically violent antiheroism shocked and thrilled a new generation of moviegoers. The then–relatively unknown Hackman played Buck Barrow, the easygoing older brother to Warren Beatty’s bank robber Clyde. At that point, Hackman was most notable as a stage actor, but he stole every scene he was in alongside the better-established movie stars, grounding the brutality with his textured, endearing work.

Bonnie and Clyde received a slew of Academy Award nominations, including a Supporting Actor nod for Hackman, and lost most of them. Yet Hackman continued to scoop up meaty supporting parts, securing another Oscar nomination for 1970’s I Never Sang for My Father. With The French Connection in 1971, he vaulted to coveted leading-man status. The Academy’s tastes had caught up to the expanding influence of New Hollywood by then, a shift that the film’s five Oscar wins seemed to affirm. Hackman was now an A-lister at the age of 41, though the kind who would happily play a villain or make a cameo as well as fill severe lead roles. He was an actor with very little on-screen ego, even if he did develop a reputation for being somewhat ornery on set.

In the ’70s, he had several memorable leading turns: in the disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure, the shaggy road comedy Scarecrow (alongside his similarly regarded contemporary Al Pacino), and the wonderful neo-noir Night Moves, which reunited him with the Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn. He was also the Man of Steel’s preening arch-enemy, Lex Luthor, in Christopher Reeves’s Superman franchise—a role he then returned to in two sequels, underlining that Hollywood saw him as a go-to tough guy. Maybe his best-ever screen performance came in 1974 with The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful exploration of paranoia. Hackman tamped down all of his gritty charm to embody a squirrely surveillance expert, again showcasing a skillful adaptability early in his career.

[Read: Someone is watching. Is it God, or your boss?]

But the actor did receive another chance to remind Hollywood—and the Academy—just how electrifying his screen persona could be. His turn in 1992’s Unforgiven as “Little Bill” Daggett, a dictatorial sheriff butting heads with Clint Eastwood’s aged outlaw in the Wild West’s dying days, won Hackman a second Oscar; in the ensuing Western revival that followed, he booked roles in films like Geronimo, Wyatt Earp, and The Quick and the Dead. He swung against type in the years that followed, however: In Get Shorty, he abandoned all his masculine swagger to portray a ditzy, failed B-movie director; and he was terrific as the baffled straight man of Mike Nichols’s anarchic comedy The Birdcage.

Bonnie and Clyde, 1967 (Everett)

Hackman’s three best performances in the denouement of his career exemplified the height of this versatility, even as he was winding down. In Crimson Tide, the director Tony Scott’s take on a Cold War thriller, the actor matched wits with Denzel Washington on a submarine, chewing scenery and smoking cigars with dazzling aplomb. He was outstanding in the writer-director David Mamet’s Heist as a hard-case, no-nonsense thief who, according to Mamet’s dialogue, was “so cool, when he goes to sleep, sheep count him.” And in some of his greatest on-screen work ever, Hackman depicted the resentful, acidic patriarch in the Wes Anderson dramedy The Royal Tenenbaums. The role captured all of his ironic charm and misanthropic appeal within the kind of debonair character that the perennial everyman had never quite shown us before. (He earned one last Best Actor trophy for his effort, at the Golden Globes.) After nearly five decades, the actor was still capable of surprises.

Hackman retired from acting shortly after Tenenbaums; his ultimate credits are the little-regarded legal thriller Runaway Jury (2003) and the poorly reviewed comedy Welcome to Mooseport (2004). Even his retirement seemed to reflect his celebrity-shunning, workmanlike approach to acting: He ensconced himself in Santa Fe, where he would be seen around town pumping gas or grabbing food occasionally. He spent his dotage writing historical novels and otherwise avoiding the limelight. The strange particulars of his passing remain a mystery thus far, but Hackman’s life was lived in quiet defiance of Hollywood fame and the strictures of celebrity. It stands to reason that his final years would be no different.

Texas authorities reported a surge in cases since January in communities with low vaccination rates.

A slab of uplifted rock larger than Italy sits in the center of the American Southwest. It is called the Colorado Plateau, and it is a beautiful place, higher ground in every sense. What little rain falls onto the plateau has helped to inscribe spectacular canyons into its surface. Ice Age mammoth hunters were likely the first human beings to wander among its layered cliff faces and mesas, where the exposed sedimentary rock comes in every color between peach and vermillion. Native Americans liked what they saw, or so it seems: The plateau has been inhabited ever since, usually by many tribes. They buried their dead in its soil and built homes that blend in with the landscape. In the very heart of the plateau, the Ancestral Pueblo people wedged brick dwellings directly into the banded cliffs.

Some of the best-preserved Ancestral Pueblo ruins are located near two 9,000-foot buttes in southeastern Utah, 75 miles from where its borders form a pair of crosshairs with those of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Ancestral Pueblo were not the only Native Americans in the area. Other tribes lived nearby, or often passed through, and many of them describe the buttes as “Bears Ears” in their own languages. Thousands of archaeological sites are scattered across the area, but they have not always been properly cared for. Uranium miners laid siege to the landscape during the early atomic age, and in the decades since, many dwellings and graves have been looted.

In 2015, five federally recognized tribes—the Navajo Nation, the Zuni, the Hopi, the Mountain Ute, and the Ute—joined together to request that President Barack Obama make Bears Ears a national monument. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, as they called themselves, wanted to protect as many cultural sites as possible from further desecration. They asked for nearly 2 million acres centered on the buttes. In 2016, Obama created a monument of roughly two-thirds that size.

The borders of that monument have been shifting ever since. In late 2017, President Donald Trump erased all but roughly 15 percent of the protected land, in the name of reversing federal overreach and restoring local control; and in the years that followed, mining companies staked more than 80 new hard-rock claims within its former borders. The majority were for uranium and vanadium, minerals that are in demand again, now that a new nuclear arms race is on, and tech companies are looking for fresh ways to power the AI revolution.

In 2021, President Joe Biden put the monument’s borders back to where they’d started—and the miners’ claims were put on hold. Now Trump is reportedly planning to shrink Bears Ears once again, possibly during his first week in office.

With every new election, more than 1 million acres have flickered in and out of federal protection. People on both sides of the fight over Bears Ears feel jerked around. In southeastern Utah, the whipsaw of American politics is playing out on the ground, frustrating everyone, and with no end in sight.

Vaughn Hadenfeldt has worked as a backcountry guide in Bears Ears since the 1970s. He specializes in archaeological expeditions. Back when he started, the area was besieged by smash-and-grab looters. They used backhoes to dig up thousand-year-old graves in broad daylight, he told me. Some of these graves are known to contain ceramics covered in geometrical patterns, turquoise jewelry, and macaw-feather sashes sourced from the tropics. Thieves made off with goods like these without even bothering to refill the holes. Later on, after Bears Ears had become a popular Utah stopover for tourists passing through to Monument Valley, the looters had to be more discreet. They started coming in the winter months, Hadenfeldt told me, and refilling the ancient graves that they pillaged. “The majority of the people follow the rules, but it takes so few people who don’t to create lifelong impacts on this type of landscape,” he said.

Hadenfeldt lives in Bluff, Utah, a small town to the southeast of Bears Ears. Its population of 260 includes members of the Navajo Nation, artists, writers, archaeologists, and people who make their living in the gentler outdoor recreation activities. (Think backpacking and rock climbing, not ATVs.) The town’s mayor, Ann Leppanen, told me that, on the whole, her constituents strongly oppose any attempt to shrink the monument. More tourists are coming, and now they aren’t just passing through on the way to Monument Valley. They’re spending a night or two, enjoying oat-milk lattes and the like before heading off to Bears Ears.

[Read: What kinds of monuments does Trump value?]

But Bluff is a blue pinprick in bright-red southern Utah, where this one town’s affection for the monument is not so widely shared. Bayley Hedglin, the mayor of Monticello, a larger town some 50 miles north, described Bluff to me as a second-home community, a place for “people from outside the area”—code for Californians—or retirees. For her and her constituents, the monument and other public lands that surround Monticello are like a boa constrictor, suffocating their town by forcing it into a tourism economy of low-paying, seasonal jobs. The extra hikers who have descended on the area often need rescuing. She said they strain local emergency-services budgets.

I asked Hedglin which industries she would prefer. “Extraction,” she said. Her father and grandfather were both uranium miners. “San Juan County was built on mining, and at one time, we were very wealthy,” she said. She understood that the monument was created at the behest of a marginalized community, but pointed out that the residents of Monticello, where the median household income is less than $64,000, are marginalized in their own right. I asked what percentage of them support the national monument. “You could probably find 10,” she said. “10 percent?” I asked. “No, 10 people,” she replied.

The two bluffs known as the "Bears Ears" stand off in the distance at sunset in the Bears Ears National Monument on May 11, 2017 outside Blanding, Utah. George Frey / Getty

The election-to-election uncertainty is itself a burden, Hedglin said. “It makes it hard to plan for the future. Even if Trump shrinks the monument again, we can’t make the development plans that we need in Monticello, because we know that there will be another election coming.” Britt Hornsby, a staunchly pro-monument city-council member in Bluff, seemed just as disheartened by what he called the federal government’s “ping-pong approach” to Bears Ears. “We’ve had some folks in town looking to start a guiding business,” he said, “but they have been unable to get special recreation permits with all the back-and-forth.”

[Read: Return the national parks to the tribes]

The only conventional uranium-processing mill still active in the United States sits just outside the borders of another nearby town, Blanding. Phil Lyman, who, until recently, represented Blanding and much of the surrounding area in Utah’s House of Representatives, has lived there all of his life. Lyman personifies resistance to the monument. He told me that archaeological sites were never looted en masse, as Hadenfeldt had said. This account of the landscape was simply “a lie.” (In 2009, federal agents raided homes in Blanding and elsewhere, recovering some 40,000 potentially stolen artifacts.) While Lyman was serving as the local county commissioner in 2014, two years before Bears Ears was created, he led an illegal ATV ride into a canyon that the Bureau of Land Management had closed in order to protect Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings. Some associates of the anti-government militant Ammon Bundy rode along with him. A few were armed.

To avoid violence, assembled federal agents did not make immediate arrests, but Lyman was later convicted, and served 10 days in jail. The stunt earned him a pardon from Trump and a more prominent political profile in Utah.When Biden re-expanded the monument in 2021, Lyman was furious. While he offered general support for the state of Utah’s legal efforts to reverse Biden’s order, he also said that his paramount concern was not these “lesser legal arguments” but “the federal occupation of Utah” itself. Like many people in rural Utah, Lyman sees the monument as yet another government land grab, in a state where more than 60 percent of the land is public. The feds had colluded with environmentalists to designate the monument to shut down industries, in a manner befitting of Communists, he told me.

Davina Smith, who sits on the board of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition as representative for the Navajo Nation, grew up just a mile outside of Bears Ears. She now lives in Blanding, not far from Lyman. Her father, like Mayor Hedglin’s, was a uranium miner. But Native Americans haven’t always been treated like they belong here, she told me. “People in Utah say that they want local control, but when we tried to deal with the state, we were not viewed as locals.” Indeed, for more than 30 years, San Juan County’s government was specifically designed to keep input from the Navajo to a minimum. Only in 2017 did a federal court strike down a racial-gerrymandering scheme that had kept Navajo voting power confined to one district.

Smith, too, has been tormented by what she called the “never-ending cycle of uncertainty” over the monument. The tribes have just spent three years negotiating a new land-management plan with the Biden administration, and it may be all for naught. “Each new administration comes in with different plans and shifting priorities, and nothing ever feels like it’s moving toward a permanent solution,” Smith said.

The judicial branch of the federal government will have some decisions of its own to make about the monument, and may inject still more reversals. In 2017, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and other groups sued the government over Trump’s original downsizing order, arguing that the president’s power to create national monuments under the Antiquities Act is a ratchet—a power to create, not shrink or destroy. No federal judge had ruled on that legal question by the time of Biden’s re-expansion, and the lawsuit was stayed. If Trump now shrinks the monument again, the lawsuit will likely be reactivated, and new ones likely filed. A subsequent ruling in Trump’s favor would have far-reaching implications if it were upheld by the Supreme Court. It would defang the Antiquities Act, a statute that was written to protect Native American heritage, empowering any president to shrink any of America’s national monuments on a whim. (The Biden administration launched an historic run of monument creation. Project 2025, a policy blueprint co-written by Trump’s former head of BLM, calls for a shrinking spree.) The borders of each one could begin to pulsate with every subsequent presidential handover.

An act of Congress might be the only way to permanently resolve the Bears Ears issue. Even with Republican lawmakers in control, such an outcome may be preferable to the endless flip-flops of executive power, Hillary Hoffmann, a co-director of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, told me. “The tribes have built bipartisan relationships with members of Congress.” They might not get as much land for the monument as they did under Obama or Biden, she said, but perhaps a grand bargain could be struck. A smaller allotment of protected land could be exchanged for the stability that would allow local communities—including monument supporters and opponents alike—to plan for their future.

In the meantime, people in southeastern Utah are waiting to see what Trump actually does. When I asked Smith how the tribes are preparing for the new administration, she was coy. She didn’t want to telegraph the coalition’s next moves. “We are definitely planning,” she told me. “This isn’t our first time.” Everyone in the fight over Bears Ears has to find some way to cope with the uncertainty; for Smith, it’s taking the long view. She invoked the deeper history of the Colorado Plateau. She called back to the Long Walk of the Navajo, a series of 53 forced marches that the U.S. Army used to remove thousands of tribe members from their land in New Mexico and Arizona in the 1860s. “When the cavalry came to round up my people, some of them sought refuge in Bears Ears,” she said. “To this day, I can go there and remember what my ancestors did. I can remember that we come from a great line of resilience.”

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Photographs by Todd Webb

The photographer Todd Webb met Georgia O’Keeffe in the 1940s, at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place. O’Keeffe liked Webb and his work, and they became friends for life. Partly at O’Keeffe’s urging, Webb moved to New Mexico in the early 1960s, and he was a frequent guest at O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu. He often brought his camera.

Driving, 1959 (Todd Webb Archive)Dogs in the Abiquiu garden, ca. 1962 (Todd Webb Archive)Ghost Ranch kitchen, 1962 (Todd Webb Archive)

Webb’s images from those visits provide a window into the painter’s daily life. O’Keeffe wore hats to protect her face, and scarves to protect her long, lustrous hair; she said you should never let your hair get sunburned. She wore crisp white collars, which turned whatever else she wore—black linen, blue denim—chic. She liked to make “Tiger’s Milk” for breakfast, a concoction of banana, skim milk, powdered milk, wheat germ, and brewer’s yeast, recommended by the nutritionist Adelle Davis. O’Keeffe kept a series of Chow dogs, which she loved for their loyalty and dignity, their massive beauty. Their coats were so thick that she had a shawl made from the sheddings. When her favorite dog, Bo, died, she buried him at the White Place, her name for the pale, majestic hills near Abiquiu that appear in many of her paintings. Years later, she wrote to Webb that she liked to think of Bo at night, still “running and leaping” through the hills.

A letter from O’Keeffe to Webb, 1954 (Todd Webb Archive / Collection Center for Creative Photography)Twilight Canyon, New Mexico, 1964 (Todd Webb Archive)

Webb taught O’Keeffe how to use a camera. They photographed each other standing in the doorway at her house in Abiquiu. She once said that she’d bought the house because she was transfixed by that door, which she depicted in her paintings over and over, always empty. The images are austere and abstract: It’s hard to find the magic in the blank black rectangles. But O’Keeffe and Webb, each standing alone in the frame, reveal the doorway’s unearthly proportions: It was too wide for humans, too high for animals, too narrow for carriages. Who was it for? The gods.

This article appears in the February 2025 print edition with the headline “O’Keeffe in the Frame.”