‘A place to heal’: Native tribes urge Biden to protect sacred lands before leaving White House

Hidden amid a vast expanse of snow-brushed pines in northern California is a rare, half-million-year-old volcano called Sáttítla. Thousands of years ago, its flows created crystalline mountains of obsidian and dim grey bands of pumice rock, which from a bird’s-eye view look like ripples of taffy.

“When you’re there, you really do feel like you’re in another world, or on the moon or even another planet,” said Brandi McDaniels, a member of the Pit River Tribe in northern California, whose ancestral homelands encompass the area. “The way it glistens and twinkles – deep black, but shiny like diamonds.”

For years, the Pit River Tribe and environmental groups have trying to protect this landscape in the northernmost reaches of California for decades, fending off geothermal development and large-scale logging enterprises, as well as poaching and other threats. Now they are urgently pressing the Biden administration to designate it as a new national monument and to protect it from future extractive development.

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“We’ve been fighting for this land for decades,” said McDaniels. “We don’t want our kids and grandkids to have to keep fighting to protect their sacred lands. We want to have this space as a place to heal, to really heal from historical traumas.”

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The Pit River Tribe is petitioning for tribal co-stewardship of this region, hoping to work with the broader community to maintain the landscape, and preserve cultural sites that are important to the Pit River and Modoc tribes.

The area straddles three federally owned national forests in northern California, and sits atop volcanically formed aquifers that store as much water as California’s 200 largest surface reservoirs combined.

It’s one of the most unusual, striking landscapes in the US, said McDaniels, who grew up trekking through the region, foraging for medicinal and edible plants. The Pit River Tribe’s creation narrative is set here, she said – and it is difficult to explain to people who have not visited just how idiosyncratic and extraordinary the region is.

It’s home to more than 450 native plant species, 19 of which are rare or endangered, including the whitebark pine. It is part of the range of the threatened northern spotted owl, the sierra martin and the Pacific fisher. In the summer, patches of colorful wildflowers paint the region with vibrant color. In the winter, snow blankets the region – making much of it inaccessible to vehicles.

“Being in nature can make you feel small, but here you feel even smaller,” said Nick Joslin, a geologist who studied the volcanic formations at Sáttítla, and who now works with the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, a local environmental advocacy group. Sáttítla is a shield volcano – a broad, gently sloped formation that looks like a giant warrior’s shield – much larger than other types of volcanoes.

Dense forest suddenly gives way to a jet-black obsidian landscape, which blends back into forest. “It feels sort of chaotic when you’re on the ground,” Joslin said. “And only when you zoom out, you can see sense in the chaos, you can see the ripples of volcanic flow.”

A national monument designation could come with additional resources and funding to improve trails, treat the landscape to make it more resilient to wildfires, and better prevent the poaching of obsidian and rare flowers and plants.

The Pit River Tribe is part of a coalition of tribes and environmental groups that is asking Joe Biden to altogether designate three national monuments in California – Sáttítla in the north, and Kw’tsán and Chuckwalla in the south – before Donald Trump takes office on 20 January. These designations would protect about 1m acres in California from development, mining, and oil and gas extraction.

The Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, which is championing the effort to designate Kw’tsán, a 390,000-acre expanse in the state’s south-eastern corner, along the border with Mexico, has said that protections are urgently needed to fend off attempts to mine for gold in culturally and ecologically important areas. Meanwhile, backers of Chuckwalla have been working to protect a region that includes the ancestral homelands of the Iviatim, Nüwü, Pipa Aha Macav, Kwatsáan and Maara’yam peoples and serves crucial habitat for more than 20 threatened, endangered or sensitive species.

Biden’s White House had set a goal to conserve 30% of US land and water by 2030, as part of its America the Beautiful plan. So far, the administration has placed 46m acres – an area slightly larger than Florida – under some form of protection, inching the total percentage of protected land up from 12% when he took office to 13%. “Declaring this monument is totally aligned with Biden’s [America the Beautiful] plan,” McDaniels said. “There’s really no good reason for him not to do this.”

Trump, meanwhile, had threatened to open up public lands to extraction and development and accelerate a drive to “drill, baby, drill”. His nominee to lead the Department of the Interior, North Dakota’s governor, Doug Burgum, has promised oil industry leaders that the administration would “stop the hostile attack against all American energy” on “day one”.

Creating national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906 is one of the few ways that Biden can deter his successor’s extractive agenda – though it is far from infallible. During his first administration, Trump took the unprecedented step of shrinking national monuments – slashing the Bears Ears monument in Utah by 85% and the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument by half. Biden later restored the monuments.

In October, more than 160 scientists signed a letter urging Biden to designate Sáttítla, writing that “protecting this hydrological treasure is an essential factor towards California’s long-term resilience to climate change”. The California senators Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler, as well as representative and Senator-elect Adam Schiff, have also urged Biden to make the designation.

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In 2019, the Pit River Tribe and environmental groups won an important victory in what had been a 22-year battle against industrial geothermal development on Sáttítla, when the ninth circuit court of appeals upheld a court order that voided the 40-year extensions of 26 geothermal leases held by the Calpine Corporation on thousands of acres in the region.

The tribe and local environmentalists have warned that the hydraulic fracturing technology used in the geothermal energy process could contaminate the massive volcanically formed aquifer in the region, tainting the main water source of the tribe and communities across northern California. “We have some of the purest water, we’re able to drink it without filtration,” said Radley Davis, a Pit River tribal member and vice-chair of the coalition working to protect Sáttítla. Once it’s contaminated – even a little bit, he added – it would be impossible to set the aquifer back to how it was before.

So far, Davis said, the Pit River Tribe has been considered a “stakeholder” in the federal government’s decisions about the region. “But we’re not just ‘stakeholders’ – we are not the store on the corner or the homeowner across the way – we’re decision makers and a tribal nation. And we need a seat at the table and a say in how we protect this biodiversity.”