President Joe Biden plans to create two new national monuments in California protecting lands important to Native American tribes, according to two people familiar with the White House’s plan.
The president will use the Antiquities Act of 1906 to create the 644,000-acre Chuckwalla National Monument, a sweeping desert landscape in Southern California, and the 200,000-acre Sáttítla National Monument, a region of dense pine forest in the shadow of Mount Shasta in Northern California, the people said. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the announcements.
The news was first reported by The Washington Post.
The moves could help shore up Biden’s conservation legacy. The president promised to prioritize conservation when he took office in 2021, setting a goal of protecting 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters by 2030. But the monuments could antagonize President-elect Donald Trump, whose primary use of the Antiquities Act when in office was to dramatically shrink national monuments created by former Democratic presidents.
Last-minute national monuments are frequently a way for exiting presidents to leave a historical mark, including President Barack Obama’s creation of the Bears Ears National Monument in December of 2016, President George W. Bush declaring the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument in his final weeks in 2009 and President Bill Clinton creating the Sonoran Desert National Monument before leaving office in 2001.
An analysis by POLITICO’s E&E News found that out of 18 presidents who used the Antiquities Act to issue almost 300 proclamations, half issued at least one after Election Day.
Biden has faced a bevy of requests to repeat this tradition, including fulfilling longtime asks from coalitions such as the one that has pushed for the Chuckwalla National Monument proposal, as well as others with more recently formulated campaigns. The designation of both Chuckwalla and Sáttítla has the support of more than two dozen of California’s congressional delegation, including Sen. Alex Padilla (D) and Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D).
Last month, Biden declared his seventh national monument memorializing the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, acknowledging the government’s role in attempting to eradicate Native American culture through a system of boarding schools run by the Interior Department.
The Sáttítla and Chuckwalla monuments both include federal lands that Native American tribes believe deserve greater protections.
“Sáttítla is not just a piece of land; it’s the heart of our heritage and the source of life for current and future generations,” said Yatch Bamford, chair of the Pit River Tribe, in a statement this winter urging the Biden administration to designate the area a national monument. “This is about honoring a promise to the Earth and to the people who have cherished it for centuries.”
Tribes and environmental groups have rallied for decades to secure additional protected status for the Chuckwalla lands. They pushed for conservation status amid an Obama-era management strategy — called the Desert Renewable Energy and Conservation Plan — to bring large-scale renewable energy to public lands in the California desert while also determining areas in need of protection. The monument boundaries were drawn up with the DRECP in mind to not conflict with areas of potential energy development, according to organizers who spoke with E&E News.
Chuckwalla has support from the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, the Cahuilla Band of Indians, the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, the Colorado River Indian Tribes and the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, as well as many local towns and chambers of commerce in the eastern Coachella Valley region.
“The Cahuilla Band of Indians is in strong support of the creation of the Chuckwalla National Monument,” said Erica Schenk, chair of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, in a statement last year. “The area includes village sites, camps, quarries, food processing sites, power places, trails, glyphs, and story and song locations, all of which are evidence of the Cahuilla peoples’ and other Tribes’ close and spiritual relationship to these desert lands.”
Its designation could help protect habitat for the chuckwalla lizard, desert tortoise and desert bighorn sheep. The designation would also preserve Camp Young and Camp Coxcomb, which were World War II-era military training sites used by Gen. George Patton to prepare soldiers for war overseas.
A fight over the Antiquities Act
Biden’s designation is expected to spark criticism from congressional Republicans who have accused Biden of exceeding presidential authority in designating national monuments. They argue that the 1906 law was never intended to give presidents unilateral power to set aside large swaths of U.S lands.
After Biden expanded last year the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) called it part of a “radical” agenda to sequester land and reduce local control.
Furor over presidents using the Antiquities Act to create national monuments goes back as long as the practice.
Litigation followed Theodore Roosevelt declaring the Grand Canyon a national monument in 1908. But the designation survived, and Woodrow Wilson later upgraded the Grand Canyon to a national park.
Franklin Roosevelt’s proclamation of the Jackson Hole National Monument in Wyoming in 1943, which later became the Grand Teton National Park, sparked a lawsuit over the breadth of the president’s authority under the act. That led to a 1950 law barring new national monuments in Wyoming unless by congressional approval, according to a Congressional Research Service report updated last year.
But national monument protections often prove popular over time and bolster presidential legacies.
“Initial opposition to some monument designations has turned to support over time,” the CRS report stated. “Some controversial monuments later were redesignated as national parks by Congress and today are generally considered popular parks with substantial economic benefit to the surrounding Communities.”
Many presidents over the last century have deployed the act to conserve land. Notable recent exceptions are Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Biden still falls short of some of his predecessors’ national monument legacies.
Jimmy Carter designated 15 national monuments during his presidential term. Bill Clinton created 19, and Obama set a record by designating or expanding 34 national monuments.
Trump shrank two national monuments in Utah at the urging of Republican state officials who have long chafed over their sizes. He reduced the Bears Ears National Monument by nearly 1.5 million acres to 228,784 acres and halved the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from about 2 million acres to 1,006,341 acres. That move was later reversed by Biden in 2021.
Trump used the Antiquities Act to create the Camp Nelson National Monument in 2018, commemorating a Civil War depot that was used for training African American soldiers and housing their families during the Civil War.
