'A place to heal': Native tribes urge Biden to protect sacred lands before leaving White House
Source: The Guardian
Thu 26 Dec 2024 09.00 EST
Last modified on Thu 26 Dec 2024 09.50 EST
Hidden amid a vast expanse of snow-brushed pines in northern California is a rare, half-million-year-old volcano called Sáttítla. Thousands of years ago, its flows created crystalline mountains of obsidian and dim grey bands of pumice rock, which from a bird’s-eye view look like ripples of taffy.
“When you’re there, you really do feel like you’re in another world, or on the moon or even another planet,” said Brandi McDaniels, a member of the Pit River Tribe in northern California, whose ancestral homelands encompass the area. “The way it glistens and twinkles – deep black, but shiny like diamonds.”
For years, the Pit River Tribe and environmental groups have trying to protect this landscape in the northernmost reaches of California for decades, fending off geothermal development and large-scale logging enterprises, as well as poaching and other threats. Now they are urgently pressing the Biden administration to designate it as a new national monument and to protect it from future extractive development.
“We’ve been fighting for this land for decades,” said McDaniels. “We don’t want our kids and grandkids to have to keep fighting to protect their sacred lands. We want to have this space as a place to heal, to really heal from historical traumas.” The Pit River Tribe is petitioning for tribal co-stewardship of this region, hoping to work with the broader community to maintain the landscape, and preserve cultural sites that are important to the Pit River and Modoc tribes.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/26/a-place-to-heal-native-tribes-urge-biden-to-protect-sacred-lands-before-leaving-white-house