The United States has designated two new national monuments in the American Southwest, President Joseph Biden announced designations this week that will provide additional protections to areas in Nevada and Texas that are home to Indigenous art, including pictographs and petroglyphs.
The move will protect more than half a million acres of land in southern Nevada, which contains much of what is known as the Spirit Mountain region, or as the Mojave Avi Kwa Ame. The area is one of the largest contiguous wildlife corridors in the United States, rich in biodiversity and contains “sacred lands that are central to the creation story of so many.” [Native American] tribes that have been here since time immemorial,” Biden said Tuesday (March 21) at the White House. Some 33,000 acres of the Avi Kwa Ame area were already under national protection under the Wilderness Act of 1964.
The Avi Kwa Ame area is also home to many examples of petroglyphs that represent nearby resources like water, big game and acorns, and even pictographs that appear to indicate migration directions, according to the White House. In addition to native petroglyphs, rock carvings made by late 19th century Euro-American settlers have been found in some areas.
Biden also designated the Castner Range in Texas as a national monument, more than 50 years after residents of nearby El Paso began demanding guarantees for the area at the Fort Bliss military base. The area is still filled with unexploded ordnance left over from when the fort was used as a training site during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.
Federal Castner Range protections will extend to 6,672 acres of the region, which stretches from the Franklin Mountains at the westernmost point of Texas to the plains of the Chihuahuan Desert at the Mexican border. Novelist Jack Kerouac described the area in his 1950 book The tramps of Dharma, writing that from the Franklin Mountains he could see “all of Mexico, all of Chihuahua, all of her desert glittering with sand, under a late waning moon that was huge and bright”. The Castner Range is also known for the Mexican golden poppies that bloom in the area each spring.
Archaeologists have identified 41 archaeological sites in the Castner Range with ties to the Apache and Pueblo peoples, the Comanche Nation, the Hopi Tribe, and the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma. The Castner Range is also home to sites containing Indigenous rock art from as far back as 1350 CE.
Biden placed both areas under protection using the Antiquities Act, a law dating back to 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt designated Devils Tower in Wyoming as the United States’ first national monument.
