(CNN) President Joe Biden on Tuesday officially designated a new national monument in southern Nevada while speaking at a conservation event at the Department of the Interior.
At more than 506,000 acres, Avi Kwa Ame National Monument is one of the largest tracts of land under federal protection so far during the Biden presidency, preserving Nevada’s Spirit Mountain and the desert that surrounds it.
“It is a place of reverence, a place of spirituality, a place of healing,” Biden said Tuesday. “Now it will be recognized for its importance and will be preserved forever.”
Biden’s proclamation is a major victory for the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, which has been advocating for the monument’s creation for some three decades.
“Avi Kwa Ame is the point of creation of the Mojave; it’s a very important and integral part of our history and belief system,” Ashley Hemmers, Fort Mojave tribal administrator, told CNN. “For us that mountain is a living landscape, it is like a person. If something happened to him it would be like losing a loved one.”
During an emotional speech Tuesday, Home Secretary Deb Haaland highlighted the Interior’s work to honor and uplift tribal nations and their knowledge of the land.
“We are incorporating indigenous knowledge and honoring tribes for their role in stewardship of our lands and waters since time immemorial,” Haaland said, crying during his speech.
“I was thinking about how the federal government tried to wipe out indigenous people in so many ways; taking their land, taking their children, taking their lives, and taking bison that were so central to many tribal nations,” he added, speaking of an order recent that he signed to restore the American bison. “The bison are still here, and the Indians are still here.”
Biden also designated Castner Range National Monument at Fort Bliss in West Texas, which was a training site for the Army during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
“It’s a place of incredible beauty,” Biden said of the Castner Range, describing the Mexican poppies that grow there as “transforming the desert hills into a sea of yellows and oranges.”
Together, the two monuments will protect nearly 514,000 acres of new public land. Additionally, Biden is directing Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to consider protecting all US waters around remote Pacific islands as part of a new national marine sanctuary.
Biden made the announcement at a summit for tribal leaders and elected officials hosted by the White House and the Department of the Interior.
While gathering, climate and youth activists rallied outside the Department of the Interior headquarters to protest the recently passed Willow Oil Drilling Project in Alaska. The Biden administration approved the controversial Willow Project last week. The drilling project, which is slated for the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, fueled a wave of online activism against it in recent months. environmental defenders have filed two lawsuits in federal court to stop the project.
Within the department, the focus was on protecting the new national monuments and the area around Spirit Mountain, which Biden initially promised to designate as a national monument in November at the White House Summit of Tribal Nations.
“When it comes to Spirit Mountain and the surrounding canyons and regions in southern Nevada, I am committed to protecting this sacred place that is essential to the creation story of so many tribes who are here today,” Biden said in his speech November. adding, “And I look forward to visiting Spirit Mountain and experiencing it with you as soon as I can.”
Spirit Mountain, known as Avi Kwa Ame in the Mojave language, is located in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts of southern Nevada. It is a sacred site for more than 10 tribal nations and is the site of tribal ceremonies and rituals.
Designating the new monument has angered some clean energy groups who warn it could hamper wind and solar power development in southern Nevada.
Native American petroglyphs line the rock faces at Hiko Springs within the proposed site for the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada.
Although Interior and the Bureau of Land Management have identified millions of acres in Nevada for renewable energy development, much of the public land within the proposed monument area cannot be considered for clean energy development because it is part of the critical habitat for a desert. species of turtle, the Interior Department said last year.
There is a pending application for a solar project on about 2,575 acres that the department has identified as conservation exempt, an Interior spokesman said last year.
Outside of the monument area, the Bureau of Land Management has identified more than 9 million acres of federal land that could be used to build large-scale solar panels, as well as 16.8 million acres of federal land that could be developed for wind power.
Hemmers said that while the tribe wants to actively encourage recreation in the newly created national monument, it wants to see clean energy and power development in other parts of Nevada.
“They can protect an area and at the same time move towards an energy future that leads us to meet our climate goals,” Hemmers said.
Hemmers, who watched Biden declare his intention to designate Avi Kwa Ame as a national monument in November along with his elderly grandmother, a survivor of the brutal federal attack native american boarding school program, said seeing the finalized proclamation would bring an immense sense of “relief.”
“It would give me a sense of relief that people in my community can’t have that burden on their shoulders, being threatened with the possibility of losing a part of us,” he told CNN.
