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U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt did in 1906 what Congress was unwilling to do legislatively: he used his new authority under the Antiquities Act to designate Devils Tower, Wyoming, as the first national monument.

Then came Antiquities Act protections for the Petrified Forest in Arizona, the Chaco Canyon and Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley in California, and what are now the Zion and Bryce Canyon national parks in Utah.

The list goes on, as all but three presidents have used this law to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources.

President Joe Biden has created six monuments and restored, expanded or changed the boundaries of a handful of others. Native American tribes and conservation groups are pushing for more designations before he leaves office.

Proposals range from an area dotted with palm trees and petroglyphs in Southern California to a sacred site for Native Americans in Nevada’s high desert, to a historic black neighborhood in Oklahoma and a farm in Maine having belonged to the family of Frances Perkins, the first in the country. female member of the cabinet.

Looting and destruction

Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act after a generation of pressure from educators and scientists who wanted to protect the sites from commercial looting of artifacts and random private collecting. It was the first law in the United States to establish legal protections for cultural and natural resources of historical or scientific interest on federal lands.

For Roosevelt and others, science was the reason for saving Devils Tower. Scientists have long theorized about how once-molten lava cooled and formed the massive columns that make up the geological wonder. The stories of Native American tribes, who still hold ceremonies there, detail its formation.

Biden cited the spiritual, cultural and prehistoric heritage of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante regions of 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 monuments created by President Barack Obama during his term in office. Facing concerns that Obama had overstepped his authority and limited energy development, President Donald Trump reduced their size, while adding a previously unprotected portion to Bears Ears.

Biden called Bears Ears — the first national monument created at the request of federally recognized tribes — a “place of healing.”

Save sacred places

Early designations often drove tribes from their ancestral lands.

In one of his final acts as president in 1933, Herbert Hoover used the Antiquities Act to make Death Valley a national monument. Today it is one of the largest national parks, not to mention the hottest, driest and lowest.

While the establishment of the monument ended prospecting and the filing of new mining claims in the area, it also meant that the Timbisha Shoshone were forced to leave the last portion of their traditional territory. It took several decades for the tribe to reclaim a fraction of the land.

The Biden administration has made progress working with some tribes on public lands management and integrating more indigenous knowledge into planning and policymaking.

The Avi Kwa Ame National Monument was Biden’s second designation. The site outside Las Vegas is central to the creation stories of the tribes linked to the region.

Republican Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo said at the time that the White House failed to consult with his administration before making the designation in 2023 — and effectively blocked clean energy projects and other developments in the state.

Similar opposition arose when Biden designated the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument in Arizona a few months later. This time, it’s not the prospect of clean energy projects popping up in the desert, but rather uranium mining near the Grand Canyon that has prompted tribes and environmentalists to call for protections.

Create conservation corridors

Biden certainly hasn’t broken any records when it comes to the number of monuments he’s designated or the amount of land set aside. But environmental advocates say a more strategic use of the authority granted by the Antiquities Act will be valuable in the future, as developers seek to build more solar and wind farms and mine lithium and other minerals necessary 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 Chuckwalla National Monument project has the support of several tribes.

Such a designation would add a significant portion to one of the largest contiguous protected corridors in the United States – spanning thousands of square miles along the Colorado River, from Canyonlands in Utah, past monuments already designated by Obama and Biden to the desert oases of Southern California. .

“What is concerning is that a large amount of land is being used for renewable energy and this is completely killing the desert. And so if we’re not more proactive in 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 grandiose landscapes

Biden’s designations have reached 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. The designation comes as he attempts to maintain relevance in his final months in office and boost Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign as Trump narrows Democrats’ historic advantage with black voters.

In 2023, Biden established a national monument at three sites in Illinois and Mississippi in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Emmett Till was a black teenager from Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.

A petition is still on the table to designate 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 change the narrative to include stories about the land’s first inhabitants.