On this day a year ago, President Joe Biden came to the Grand Canyon State to declare his fifth national monument since taking office after consulting more than a dozen tribes, forming the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition.
“America’s natural wonders are our nation’s heart and soul,” said Biden during his proclamation at the Red Butte Airfield. “So today, I’m proud to use my authority under the Antiquities Act to protect almost 1 million acres of public land around Grand Canyon National Park as a new national monument.”
This sprawling landscape surrounding one of the seven wonders of the world became known as Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — or the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. Baaj Nwaavjo translates to “where Indigenous peoples roam” in Havasupai, while I’tah Kukveni means “our ancestral footprints” in Hopi.
This executive order to protect the greater Grand Canyon landscape was intended to honor and respect Indigenous peoples from the Southwest, but also meant to advance Biden’s climate and conservation agenda, including the America the Beautiful Initiative, with the goal of restoring 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.
“It’s amazing, an enduring symbol of America for the entire world,” Biden said. “That’s why, from day one, I’ve taken historic steps to conserve our natural treasures for all ages. We’ve already restored protections for three national monuments gutted by the last administration, two not so far from here in Utah: Grand Staircase and Bears Ears.”
Preserving them has been a tug-of-war between Democratic and Republican presidents.
The issue of public land management in the West has been a partisan issue. Democrats have aligned with Indigenous communities in pushing conservation, while Republicans back deregulation, often in support of energy and mining interests.
But now, Biden’s executive action, and similar orders, are under threat. And the future of national monuments could be decided in November, in part, by voters from the battleground state of Arizona.
The five tribes forming the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition — including the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe — sought to protect 1.9 million acres. But in 2016, then-President Barack Obama designated 1.3 million acres for Bears Ears National Monument.
A year later, former President Donald Trump shrank it to roughly 200,000 acres — or by 85% — while also cutting the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in half.
“And that is why I’m here today,” said Trump in Salt Lake City, “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington, and guess what? They’re wrong.”
He wanted to “restore the rights of this land to your citizens.” But in a twist, Trump at the Utah State Capitol tried to argue that the Antiquities Act — a 1906 law giving presidents the authority to declare national monuments to protect cultural and natural resources on public lands — actually undermined tribal sovereignty.
“We have seen how this tragic federal overreach prevents many Native Americans from having their rightful voice over the sacred land,” Trump said, “where they practice their most important ancestral and religious traditions.”
His administration sought to strip more monument protections, freeing up oil, natural gas and mineral deposits for possible extraction. Trump issued an executive order in 2017, advising then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to review all national monument designations, larger than 100,000 acres, between 1996 and 2016.
Biden ultimately restored Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in 2022.
Meanwhile, Arizona is home to 19 national monuments — more than any other state in the U.S. — comprising 3.7 million acres of federally-protected lands, or 5% of the state’s landmass.
“What is it that we’re exactly trying to protect?” Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma said. “It could be anything, really, that justifies a federal takeover of our land.”
But Arizona’s latest national monument, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, contains more than 3,000 known cultural and historic sites, including 12 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Despite those details, Toma and Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen filed a lawsuit earlier this year, arguing that Biden overreached last August.
They called it a land grab.
“When they take so much land off the table, it does affect the state,” Toma said. “Sometimes a mine will be by far the biggest taxpayer in a whole region, especially in rural Arizona.”
That comment offended Arizona Democratic Rep. Mae Peshlakai.
“The land grab started in 1492, and we were here on this continent,” said Peshlakai, who is Diné and from Cameron on the Navajo Nation. “We were always told by our ancestors: You don’t own this land. The land owns you.”
She represents Arizona state House District 6, home to at least eight tribes, many of which are culturally associated with the Grand Canyon.
In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to use the Antiquities Act, naming Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Two years later, he also designated Grand Canyon National Monument, before Woodrow Wilson turned it into a national park in 1919. But tribes, like the Havasupai, were forcibly displaced from their homelands in the process.
Despite that complicated past, Peshlakai says relationships between tribes and the federal government are better, particularly under the Biden administration a little more than a century later.
“The land was taken, lives were taken, and attempt to eliminate our people, our culture,” she said. “We are allies with the federal government in this designation and evolving relationships.”
Still, the Republican policy agenda at the state level has been to roll back sweeping public land protections, even calling on Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act altogether.
“But I am concerned for the future,” Peshlakai admitted. “The Republican Party in Arizona follows lockstep with former President Trump, who has stated, ‘Drill baby, drill.’ Nothing is sacred to him. It will expand to anything worth a penny, including uranium.”
She’s referring to the Pinyon Plain Mine, which is supposed to be the last uranium mine near the Grand Canyon. Formerly known as Canyon Mine, it’s nestled inside the Kaibab National Forest, but opened several months after Biden’s designation. His declaration halts future uranium mining, but this claim, which resides on these federally protected lands, was grandfathered by the General Mining Act of 1872.
The mining company Energy Fuels has told KJZZ News that it owns at least five other deposits in northern Arizona, and some, like Pinyon Plain Mine, are located within Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni. But if the national monument’s footprint is downsized, those uranium ore deposits can become operational one day.
“The restrictions on uranium are long overdue,” Peshlakai said. “This is the real concern, even though the mining will be up in the canyon, I fear for my other constituents, the Hualapai and Havasupai. I just hope that we can band together.”
Divided into three parcels, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni is now part of 16 neighboring national parks, monuments and recreation areas that act as buffers for the Grand Canyon and Colorado River.
“Further protections of our sacred homelands and surviving tribes must include banning uranium mines and transport near the Grand Canyon, including transit through tribal reservations,” added Peshlakai, following last week’s unannounced hauling of uranium ore from Pinyon Plain Mine through the Navajo Nation.
Polling has consistently shown Arizonans to be environmentally-minded voters who deeply care about public lands – regardless of political stripe or affiliation.
The 14th annual Conservation in the West poll, conducted by Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project, determined that 87% of Arizona respondents support the creation of new national parks, monuments and wildlife refuges, as well as tribal protected areas.
Almost three-fourths of them also prefer that elected leaders place more emphasis on protecting water, air, wildlife habitat and recreational opportunities over maximizing the amount of land available for mining and drilling.
Yet another poll showed nearly 9 out of 10 Arizona voters, regardless of political party, support preserving more lands around the Grand Canyon to protect the Colorado River and other water sources. The results were from a 2022 National Parks Action Fund survey of more than 600 registered Arizona voters.
And last year, a poll funded by Grand Canyon Trust, found that 96% of Democrats and 84% of Republicans approve of presidents continuing to designate national monuments.
Eighteen presidents from both parties have used their executive powers to proclaim more than 160 national monuments since 1906. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush are the only presidents who didn't do so.
Obama created 29 national monuments during his two terms in office, more than any other president in history, protecting approximately 554 million acres. By comparison, Trump established only a single national monument during his presidency to preserve a 380-acre site in Kentucky, honoring Black soldiers from the Civil War.
Though Biden isn’t on the 2024 ballot, Peshlakai says Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has her vote to pick up where he left off.
“As a woman, of course, an Indigenous woman, I totally support Kamala Harris,” said Peshlakai, “and I really do hope that she is our next president.”
But if Trump wins in November, he could again undo his predecessors’ work, and that’s exactly what Toma is hoping for.
“So yes, I would call on President Trump to limit it,” Toma admitted. “And if President Trump were to be elected, and I believe he will be, then, I do expect that it would be limited significantly – not nearly a million acres.”
