U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt did in 1906 what Congress was unwilling to do through legislation: He used his new authority under the Antiquities Act to designate Devils Tower in Wyoming as the first national monument.
Then came Antiquities Act protections for the Petrified Forest in Arizona, Chaco Canyon and the Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley in California, and what are now Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks in Utah.
The list goes on, as all but three presidents have used the act to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources.
President Joe Biden has created six monuments and either restored, enlarged or modified boundaries for a handful of others. Native American tribes and conservation groups are pressing for more designations before he leaves office.
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The proposals range from an area dotted with palm trees and petroglyphs in Southern California to a site sacred to Native Americans in Nevada's high desert, a historic Black neighborhood in Oklahoma and a homestead in Maine that belonged to the family of Frances Perkins, the nation’s first female cabinet member.
Looting and destruction
Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act after a generation of lobbying by educators and scientists who wanted to protect sites from commercial artifact looting and haphazard collecting by individuals. It was the first law in the U.S. to establish legal protections for cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands.
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For Roosevelt and others, science was behind safeguarding Devils Tower. Scientists have long theorized about how once-molten lava cooled and formed the massive columns that make up the geologic wonder. Narratives among Native American tribes, who still conduct ceremonies there, detail its formation.
Biden cited the spiritual, cultural and prehistoric legacy of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante areas in southern Utah when he restored their boundaries and protections through his first use of the Antiquities Act in 2021.
The two monuments were among 29 that President Barack Obama created while in office. Amid concerns that Obama overstepped his authority and limited energy development, President Donald Trump rolled back their size, while adding a previously unprotected portion to Bears Ears.
Biden called Bears Ears — the first national monument to be established at the request of federally recognized tribes — a “place of healing.”
Saving sacred places
Early designations often pushed tribes from their ancestral homelands.
In one of his final acts as president in 1933, Herbert Hoover used the Antiquities Act to set aside Death Valley as a national monument. It's now one of the largest national parks — not to mention the hottest, driest and lowest.
While establishing the monument brought an end to prospecting and the filing of new mining claims in the area, it also meant the Timbisha Shoshone were forced from the last bit of their traditional territory. It took several decades for the tribe to regain a fraction of the land.
Biden's administration has made strides in working with some tribes on managing public lands and incorporating more Indigenous knowledge into planning and policymaking.
Avi Kwa Ame National Monument was Biden's second designation. The site outside of Las Vegas is central to the creation stories of tribes with ties to the area.
Republican Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo said at the time that the White House didn't consult his administration before making the designation in 2023 — and in effect blocked clean energy projects and other development in the state.
Similar opposition bubbled up when Biden designated Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument in Arizona just months later. This time it wasn't the prospect of clean energy projects sprouting up across the desert, but rather uranium mining near the Grand Canyon that had tribes and environmentalists pushing for protections.
Creating conservation corridors
Biden certainly didn't break any records with the number of monuments he designated or the amount of land set aside. But conservationists say more strategic use of the authority under the Antiquities Act will be valuable going forward as developers look to build more solar and wind farms and mine for lithium and other minerals required for a green energy transition.
They are pushing for Biden in his final weeks to expand California's Joshua Tree National Park and establish a new monument that would stretch from the Joshua Tree border to the Colorado River where it divides California and Arizona. The proposed Chuckwalla National Monument has the support of several tribes.
Such a designation would add a significant piece to one of the largest contiguous protected corridors in the U.S. — spanning thousands of square miles along the Colorado River from Canyonlands in Utah, through the monuments already designated by Obama and Biden to the desert oases of Southern California.
“The concern out there is that so much land is getting used for renewable energy and it just kills the desert completely. And so if we’re not more proactive about protecting these places in the desert, we could lose them forever,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association.
More than sweeping landscapes
Biden's designations have gone beyond the canyons and mesas of the West.
In May, he designated a national monument at the site of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois. That designation came as he tried to retain relevance in his final months in office and boost Vice President Kamala Harris's presidential campaign while Trump cut into Democrats' historic edge with Black voters.
In 2023, Biden created a national monument across three sites in Illinois and Mississippi in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Emmett Till was the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.
A petition still is on the table for designating the Greenwood area of North Tulsa, Oklahoma — the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — as a national monument. So is a proposal to establish a monument along the Maah Daah Hey Trail in the North Dakota Badlands, where tribes want to shift the narrative to include stories about the land's original inhabitants.
