KPBS: Tribes push for 3 new national monuments across California

Watch, read, or listen to the the full news piece by Kori Suzuki on KPBS

Published November 4, 2024

From high above, Donald Medart Jr. looked down at the old mine.

“You can see for yourself the difference in the landscape and the devastation that it caused,” he said. “There’s just a scar left.”

Medart was sitting in the passenger seat of a small propeller plane flown by the conservation organization Ecoflight. He’s a tribal council member for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe. Thousands of feet below, desert mountains and rippling canyons stretched toward the horizon. The Colorado River glimmered in the distance.

For Medart, this region along the California-Arizona border is home. The desert landscape is the ancestral land of the Quechan Tribe. It harbors an intricate trail system used to exchange news with other tribes, geoglyphs and petroglyphs carved into rock and earth, and sacred formations like Indian Pass.

But the area has been under constant pressure from mining activity. For decades, Quechan leaders have fought to stave off companies in search of gold and other minerals. Older mines have left deep fissures in the earth that still remain decades later.

That’s why this year the Quechan Tribe is asking the Biden administration to make this land a new national monument — an area of protected public land similar to a national park. That would block any future mining and would also open the door for the tribe and the federal government to work together to manage the region.

Their proposal is one of three Indigenous-led campaigns for new national monuments reaching from the Imperial Valley to the Shasta-Trinity highlands in Northern California. Together, they could spur the federal government to protect close to 1 million acres and give several tribes more of a say over land that was taken from them generations ago.

Read or watch the full story on the KPBS website.