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The Trump administration said in a document published on Friday that it was eliminating two national monuments in California, monuments initially created by the Biden administration. Then the Trump administration updated the document, removed the reference and sparked confusion over the monument's future. NPR's Nate Perez reports.
NATE PEREZ, BYLINE: There's an area in southern California where the Mojave and Sonoran deserts meet. This is home to cholla and soweto cactus, rugged mountains and the endangered desert tortoise. This is Chuckwalla National Monument. It's named after a big-bellied lizard with flappy skin that roams the southwest desert.
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PEREZ: Gary Resvaloso drives his truck down a rugged sandy road pointing out landmarks.
GARY RESVALOSO: So it's called Painted Canyon, right? Some red, the blueish and all that.
PEREZ: Resvaloso is a Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla tribal member and a tribal council member. He says the red rocks out here signify the blood of Mukat, the Cahuilla tribe's creator, after a coyote grabbed Mukat's heart and ran with it.
RESVALOSO: As he ran with it, the blood dripped on the mountains out here on the Painted Canyon area. It's called (non-English language spoken). That means red rock.
PEREZ: These are the ancestral homelands to at least five tribes, including the Cahuilla and the Quechan tribes.
DONALD MEDART JR: The actual footprints of the Quechan people and many peoples, native people of the desert southwest, our footprints are there in this desert.
PEREZ: That's Donald Medart Jr. He's with the Fort Yuma Quechan tribe. He says he takes his kids out to the area to show them the history of their creation.
MEDART: For us, it's a burial ground. It's an area of trade. It's an area where we left artifacts from village sites.
PEREZ: Around 710,000 acres are now protected from new development and critical mineral mining. Chuckwalla doesn't have a visitor center yet. A patch of dirt functions as a parking lot, and there are trails but hardly any signs. Nada Wolff Culver helped establish the monument before she left the Bureau of Land Management in January.
NADA WOLFF CULVER: What makes this place amazing is how it survives and thrives in the desert. That makes the people who survive and thrive there amazing.
PEREZ: But protecting places like Chuckwalla have at times been contentious. Last Friday, after my reporting trip, President Trump caused concern among tribes and conservationists. The administration put out a document announcing the elimination of Chuckwalla and another monument in northern California. Then, adding to the confusion, that language was later removed.
During Trump's first term in office, he did reduce the monument boundaries for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah to try and spark uranium mining and oil and gas drilling. But Biden reversed that. So for now, Chuckwalla remains, and tribes are moving ahead with forming a tribal commission to work with the BLM to manage the land. That's according to Wolff Culver.
WOLFF CULVER: So that leaves it up to the tribes to decide how they would like to create that, not to tell them what to do, as sovereign nations.
PEREZ: But not everybody's happy about Chuckwalla. Take the city of Blythe, about an hour east from the monument, where around 18,000 people live. One of the city's main employers, a state prison, closed last year. And the population of Blythe has declined nearly 20% in the past decade. Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez says the monument takes up too much land and threatens the survival of their city.
JOHNNY RODRIGUEZ: All this is going to do is kill any future potential development that could help our area.
PEREZ: That's why Rodriguez and other city officials hope the Trump administration will adjust Chuckwalla's boundaries to open the door for any future energy production, such as lithium for electric vehicle batteries. That leaves conservationists like Kelly Herbinson, with the Mojave Land Trust, worried about the future of this monument and other public lands.
KELLY HERBINSON: We really need to be thoughtful about protecting big, big swaths of nature, whatever is left, so that we can maintain that ecosystem function for humans to be able to survive.
PEREZ: As for the tribes, Donald Medart Jr. says his people have been here since the beginning of time.
MEDART: And we're going to continue to do that. You know, no matter what happens today or tomorrow or next week, we will always thrive within this region.
PEREZ: But, he says, having monument status will help protect their ancestral home. Nate Perez, NPR News.
KELLY: The White House responded to a request from NPR asking to clarify the monument's status. They pointed us to the president's executive order from Friday, which makes no mention of changes to the monument. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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