After years of campaigning for the designation of the Chuckwalla National Monument, five Native American tribes will now formally work together to preserve and protect it.
The Chuckwalla National Monument Intertribal Commission will include representatives from the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, the Cahuilla Band of Indians, the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT).
Councilman Zion White, of the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe, said the goal of the commission is to get tribal values and tribal-land-stewardship expertise incorporated into management practices at the monument, and weigh in on any topics that come up regarding the land.
“We’ve stewarded these lands since time immemorial, and it’s been a multi-generational effort to get a seat at the table,” White said. “It’s really about incorporating those values and having that seat at the table so that we can express how we feel that this area should be cared for, whether it be the flora and the fauna, or the other natural resources that are within the boundaries.”
The Chuckwalla National Monument covers more than 624,000 acres of land south of Joshua Tree National Park, across Riverside and Imperial counties—including areas in the eastern Coachella Valley, like Painted Canyon and Box Canyon in the Mecca Hills area. It also includes significant military-history sites, like Camp Young, where the U.S. Army trained soldiers during World War II. The lands received the designation in January, in the final days of the Biden administration. Like other national monuments, it falls under the purview of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management.
The formation of tribal commission is a unique exercise of tribal sovereignty, at a time when changes in the U.S. federal government could threaten the future well-being of protected lands. President Trump has threatened to roll back President Biden’s designation of Chuckwalla, and there are serious questions about how much bandwidth the Interior Department will have moving forward. In October, a court filing revealed that the Interior Department plans to lay off more than 2,000 people, including 474 employees of the BLM.
Against that backdrop, it’s vital that stakeholders come together to making sure they can plan for the future. The formation of Chuckwalla was supported by a broad, bipartisan coalition, including more than 300 business owners, environmental groups and recreation leaders. Proclamations supporting the designation received bipartisan support in the state Legislature.
“It’s not just tribes that have a stake in this,” White said. “We realize this landscape is shared and managed by the federal government, so it’s about coming to agreements and being at the table together.”
The proclamation that formed the tribal commission—issued in mid-October, in the midst of the federal government shutdown—directs the Secretary of the Interior to meaningfully engage with the commission on matters including the planning and management of the monument.
In a statement, Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians Chairman Joseph Mirelez said the lands are “more than a habitat,” but the embodiment of life itself.
“It is our inherent role to be the stewards and guardians of these lands, and in this moment of federal government dysfunction, (it is) all the more important that we reassume it formally,” Mirelez’s statement said.
“We’d like to see as much preservation of the land as possible so that it remains, you know, pristine, because once something is changed or altered, it’s that way forever moving forward.”
Councilman Zion White, of the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe
One of the reasons people sought to protect the land is its tribal connections. The monument lies within traditional homelands of the Iviatim (Cahuilla), Nüwü (Chemehuevi), Pipa Aha Macav (Mohave), Kwatsáan (Quechan), Maara’yam and Marringayam (Serrano), and other Indigenous peoples, according to a press release.
White, from the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe, said there are many sensitive sites in the Chuckwalla that are important to the cultural identity of tribes, including village sites, camps, food-processing sites, and story and song locations.
Looking ahead, White said he anticipates the commission may have to weigh in on issues of mineral retraction. Chuckwalla is bordering lithium-rich areas, and White said the commission will “want to make sure that those don’t impact things that are sensitive to tribes.”
“We’d like to see as much preservation of the land as possible so that it remains, you know, pristine, because once something is changed or altered, it’s that way forever moving forward,” he said.
White also said he hopes the commission can become involved in documentation and analysis of the land as it is today. He said the commission has discussed looking into ethnographic studies for each tribe, to document and codify what was once there, and what remains. Typically, such studies are done only when there are proposals to build on land, and environmental and ethnographic reports are required as part of the planning process.
“I think it would be great having this commission really push for the studying and documentation of what is actually out there, so we have a 2025 picture of what’s in the landscape,” he said. “We have (tribal knowledge that’s held within individual tribal members and tribal experts), but I think moving forward, we need to really document what’s out there. … I think this commission would be a great driver for those sorts of things.”
Beyond Chuckwalla, White said the commission is an example of what can be done as an exercise in sovereignty. Members of the general public do not always recognize that tribes are sovereign nations with certain authorities.
“There’s supposed to be government-to-government consultation in the management of public lands,” he said. “I think this is a really good step in a direction that hasn’t been walked yet. This is pretty innovative, and I’m hoping that this really inspires other tribes and other sovereign nations to think about similar avenues to have better inclusion for themselves as tribes.”
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