ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt did what Congress wouldn’t do through legislation in 1906: He used his new authority under the Antiquities Act to designate Devils Tower in Wyoming as the first national monument.
Then came Antiquities Act protections for the Petrified Forest in Arizona, Chaco Canyon and the Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley in California, and what are now Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah.
The list goes on, as all but three presidents have used the law to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources.
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President Joe Biden has created six monuments and restored, expanded or adjusted borders for a handful of others. Native American tribes and conservation groups are pushing for more appointments before he leaves office.
The proposals range from an area dotted with palm trees and petroglyphs in Southern California to a site sacred to Native Americans in Nevada’s high desert, a historic black neighborhood in Oklahoma and a homestead in Maine that belonged to the family of Frances Perkins , the first in the country. female cabinet member.
Looting and destruction
Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act after a generation of lobbying by educators and scientists who wanted to protect sites from the looting of commercial artifacts and indiscriminate collections by individuals. It was the first law in the US to establish legal protections for cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific importance on federal lands.
For Roosevelt and others, the science was behind protecting Devils Tower. Scientists have long theorized about how molten lava once cooled and formed the massive columns that make up this geological wonder. Stories from Native American tribes, who still perform ceremonies there, describe its formation.
Biden cited the spiritual, cultural and prehistoric legacy of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante areas of southern Utah as he restored their boundaries and protections through his first use of the Antiquities Act in 2021.
The two monuments were among 29 that President Barack Obama created during his time in office. Amid concerns that Obama would overstep his authority and limit energy development, President Donald Trump has scaled back the size while adding a previously unprotected portion of Bears Ears.
Biden called Bears Ears — the first national monument established at the request of federally recognized tribes — a “place of healing.”
Saving sacred places
Early designations often displaced tribes from their ancestral homelands.
In one of his last acts as president in 1933, Herbert Hoover used the Antiquities Act to set aside Death Valley as a national monument. It is now one of the largest national parks, not to mention the hottest, driest and lowest.
Although the monument’s creation put an end to prospecting and new mining claims in the area, it also meant that the Timbisha Shoshone were displaced from the last bit of their traditional territory. It took decades for the tribe to regain some of the land.
The Biden administration has made progress in working with some tribes to manage public lands and incorporate more indigenous knowledge into planning and policymaking.
Avi Kwa Ame National Monument was Biden’s second designation. The location outside Las Vegas is central to the creation stories of tribes with ties to the area.
Nevada’s Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, said at the time that the White House had not consulted his administration before making the 2023 appointment — essentially blocking clean energy projects and other developments in the state.
Similar opposition bubbled up when Biden designated Arizona’s Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument just months later. This time, it wasn’t the prospect of clean energy projects popping up in the desert, but rather uranium mining near the Grand Canyon that had tribes and environmentalists pushing for protection.
Creating nature corridors
Biden certainly hasn’t broken any records with the number of monuments he has designated or the amount of land set aside. But conservationists say more strategic use of the authority under the Antiquities Act will be valuable in the future as developers look to build more solar and wind farms and extract lithium and other minerals needed for a green energy transition.
They are pushing in his final weeks for Biden to expand California’s Joshua Tree National Park and erect a new monument that would extend from the Joshua Tree border to the Colorado River, where it divides California and Arizona. The proposed Chuckwalla National Monument has the support of several tribes.
Such a designation would add an important piece to one of the largest contiguous protected corridors in the US – stretching thousands of square miles along the Colorado River, from Canyonlands in Utah, through the monuments already designated by Obama and Biden to the desert oases of Southern California. .
“The concern out there is that so much land is being used for renewable energy and this is completely killing the desert. And so if we are not more proactive in protecting these places in the desert, we could lose them forever,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.
More than vast landscapes
Biden’s designations go beyond the canyons and plateaus of the West.
In May, he designated a national monument at the site of the 1908 race riots in Springfield, Illinois. That appointment came as he sought to maintain relevance in his final months in office and boost Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, while Trump disrupted Democrats’ historic lead among black voters.
In 2023, Biden created a national monument at three locations in Illinois and Mississippi in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Emmett Till was the black teenager from Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.
There is still a petition on the table to designate the Greenwood area of North Tulsa, Oklahoma – the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre – as a national monument. That includes a proposal to erect a monument along the Maah Daah Hey Trail in the North Dakota Badlands, where tribes want to shift the narrative to stories about the land’s original inhabitants.
