- After decades of activism by the Ajumawi–Atsugewi Nation (Pit River Nation) to protect its ancestral homelands from extractive industries, vandalism and looting, President Joe Biden created Sáttítla Highlands National Monument in northern California in 2025.
- Sáttítla’s management plan supports co-stewardship by Indigenous nations with connections to the landscape.
- The Trump administration has sown confusion over Sáttítla’s fate by releasing and then deleting documents and proclamations online that said the monument would be rescinded.
In northeastern California, the Upper Pit River undulates through evergreen forests, wet meadows and rugged mountains. It’s part of the snow-fed headwaters of the Sacramento River, the largest river in the state. The Sacramento flows some 611 kilometers (380 miles) to the San Francisco Bay, supporting diverse and unique ecosystems and carrying water to cities and agricultural communities along the way.
According to Brandy McDaniels, citizen of the Ajumawi–Atsugewi Nation (Pit River Nation) and an elected cultural representative of the Madesi Band, the river’s headwaters are so clean that people drink them untreated, an important aspect of the Indigenous nation’s cultural practices for millennia.
“It’s a pure water source where we drink the water without filtration. We do this in a ceremonial way. We do it in a subsistence way,” McDaniels said. The region is the center of her nation’s creation story. “It’s a really special, unique, interesting, beautiful area that we’ve been using and utilizing since the beginning time, since time immemorial,” she said. “We are the land, and one cannot exist without the other.”
In January, after decades of activism, the Pit River Nation finally saw part of the watershed protected from extractive uses as the newly designated Sáttítla Highlands National Monument. It’s one of the few, but growing, examples of protected areas created in the U.S. in collaboration with Indigenous nations. But the region has long been under threat from logging, mining and geothermal extraction and the Trump administration has hinted at trying to rescind this monument and others in California and beyond.
“The monument helps carve out co-stewardship, where there’s more tribal involvement,” from managing resources to supporting maintenance efforts, McDaniels said.
Sáttítla Highlands National Monument includes more than 80,000 hectares (200,000 acres) of a remote and unique landscape that McDaniels’ ancestors have inhabited since time immemorial. Its name means “obsidian place” in Ajumawi, the language of the Pit River Nation, which includes 11 related bands. It’s also the homeland of Modoc peoples. Other Indigenous nations including the Karuk, Klamath, Shasta, Siletz, Wintu and Yana consider the land protected by Sáttítla to be sacred.
The centerpiece of the national monument is the still-active Medicine Lake Volcano, one of the largest in the Western United States. Its eruptions have created resources such as minerals carved into tools traditionally traded south and west to the California coast and north into Oregon, and a volcanic stone field, where NASA astronauts have trained for navigating lunar landscapes and where water seeps through the porous surface into expansive underground aquifers. The landscape around the volcano includes lava tubes large enough to walk through and islands of old-growth forests that escaped the flows.
Sáttítla includes a diversity of habitats and ecosystems and is home to rare species of plants, animals and fungi, some of which are found nowhere else. The monument provides habitat for everything from the federally protected northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) in its forests to the long-toed salamander (Ambystoma macrodactylum), a California species of special concern, in its wetlands. The river’s chinook salmon are a symbol for the Pit River Nation and appear on its flag.
“There’s never been a time in which we have not been on this landscape,” McDaniels said.
Since European colonization, the Pit River watershed has contended with waves of extraction, even as its Indigenous peoples have contended with genocide, cultural extermination and the loss of ancestral lands. The national monument designation adds additional protections from resource extraction while also preserving culturally important sites and resources at risk from the ongoing threats of vandalism and theft. In the case of Sáttítla, the Pit River Nation battled geothermal company Calpine in court for more than 30 years to end its illegally maintained geothermal leases on land that is now included in the monument, putting that threat to rest.
A tool to preserve living homelands
Unlike national parks, which take an act of Congress, national monuments may be declared by a president under the Antiquities Act of 1906. National monuments protect historically or scientifically significant places on federal lands. Since President Theodore Roosevelt created Devils Tower National Monument in 1906, all but five presidents have created additional monuments (thus far, President Donald J. Trump is one of the five).
From their onset, protected areas in the United States ignored Indigenous history and excluded Indigenous peoples, sometimes violently, as David Treuer (Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation) described in a 2021 article in The Atlantic. Only in recent years have monuments such as Sáttítla been created to preserve both current-day cultural practices and resource access for Indigenous peoples and recreational opportunities for others. Designated by President Biden in 2025, the national monument is explicitly expected to be co-stewarded by Indigenous nations and the United States Forest Service, on lands carved from the Modoc, Shasta-Trinity and Klamath national forests. (Mongabay reached out to the Modoc National Forest, which did not comment on the creation of Sáttítla, and to the USDA, which oversees all forest service lands and has not responded as of publication.)
“For us, there’s been a long history of injustice — the boarding schools, the attempts to erase our culture and heritage and dispossess us from our homelands, and whatnot. But we’re still here,” McDaniels said. “I feel really fortunate that my kids have never known a time in their lives where they couldn’t have their ceremonies, sing their songs, dance their dances and speak their language. And then have access to these places that are required to receive the gifts that they are supposed to receive in their lives, and that you receive in certain places like Sáttítla.”
Through co-stewardship, the Pit River Nation will help the U.S. Forest Service fulfill its duties in the monument, at a time when McDaniels said the Forest Service does not have the resources to do all this work itself. “We plan on engaging a lot more with the Forest Service, knowing that they have lack of capacity to get this work done,” she said. The executive order states that Sáttítla will, “to the maximum extent possible,” incorporate Indigenous knowledge and expertise in its management, including for cultural burning practices and educational opportunities for the public, while ensuring that Indigenous people can access traditional resources within the park.
In April, the National Congress of American Indians released a statement in support of national monuments including Sáttítla, saying they are “an essential tool for preserving the living homelands for Tribal Nations — not just federally designated and protected locations,” and that “any move to erase those protections is a direct affront to the sovereignty, heritage, and spiritual lifeways of the Tribal Nations who fought for their designation.”
According to Brendan Cummings, conservation director at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, the Antiquities Act was enacted to “stop the plunder of our public lands.” In addition to protecting archaeological or geologic resources that could be taken away, Cummings said the act gave presidents a fast way to protect entire landscapes, such as the Grand Canyon National Park or Joshua Tree National Park, both of which were designated national monuments by a president before Congress made them parks. The Antiquities Act, Cummings said, recognized that protecting lands through Congress can take too long.
“There was a recognition that the president needed authority to act quicker than that, since loss of our natural resources is often irreparable,” Cummings said.
But in recent years, Republican members of Congress who see national monuments as overly restrictive and who question the entire process by which they are created, have supported reducing or eliminating the president’s power to create national monuments unilaterally. Upon the creation of Sáttítla, Representative Doug LaMalfa, a California Republican representing communities near the new national monument, issued a statement opposing “the use of the Antiquities Act to bypass Congress’ role.” (As of publication, LaMalfa has not responded to Mongabay’s request for comment.)
Some Republican members of Congress have long wanted to deregulate public lands and curtail presidents’ ability to protect lands using the Antiquities Act. State leaders have as well. In 2022, the Republican-led state of Utah sued over the creation of Bears Ears National Monument by President Obama and his expansion of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, alleging that the size of the monuments violated the Antiquities Act, which says that monuments “shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected,” and that these two monuments were too large to be well-managed. More broadly, Utah said that protected areas should be created by Congress rather than by the president. In his first term, Trump shrank national monuments created by his predecessors, including Bear Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, which protected landscapes sacred to multiple Indigenous nations from resource extraction. Biden reversed that decision, with legal experts questioning whether presidents have the power to shrink or rescind national monuments in the first place, but related litigation is still active in court.
For now, the fate of Sáttítla Highlands National Monument is uncertain. Since his second term began, Trump has sowed confusion about Sáttítla, releasing proclamations and documents suggesting that he was rescinding several national monuments including Sáttítla, but then deleting them, as reported by The Mercury News in March.
McDaniels takes the long view on the fight to protect Sáttítla. Her Indigenous nation has worked hard to protect a landscape that all people can access and enjoy, even without realizing that Pit River activism is responsible for its preservation.
“We have been carrying the heavy load — the weight of protecting these resources that a lot of people enjoy without any understanding or knowledge of who’s been behind it, to preserve and protect it for them, right?” she said. The national monument designation allowed the Pit River Nation to put down that multigenerational load, knowing a sacred landscape and cultural resources would be better protected.
“It put a long-term protection solution over this area so that our kids and our grandkids don’t have to spend their lives trying to defend this area, so they can actually just use this area as it was intended for them, for healing, for prayer, for ceremony and whatnot, and not have to spend all their time and resources and their lives fighting to protect it,” McDaniels said.
Banner image: A deer in the woodlands of Sáttítla Highlands National Monument. Image courtesy of Protect Sáttítla.
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