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The Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe is calling for the permanent protection of over 390,000 acres of public lands in Southern California as the Kw'tsán National Monument. The proposed monument area includes ancestral homelands of the Quechan people, as well as cultural objects and ancestral trails.
The national monument would connect to a greater cultural landscape that includes the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument—a 700,000-acre landscape north of the proposed Kw'tsán National Monument—and Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, which President Joe Biden designated using the Antiquities Act in 2023. The Quechan people once traveled from Avi Kwa Ame to the Lower Colorado River Valley, which encompasses the proposed national monument.
Designating Kw'tsán National Monument would safeguard the landscape from ongoing threats of mining, unregulated off-road vehicle use, and harmful development, all of which pose dangers to cultural resources and wildlife that rely on the landscape. The area provides habitat for desert tortoise, chuckwalla lizards, and numerous bird species. It also serves as a migration corridor for bighorn sheep and mule deer.
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We takes our kids to show them the footprints that made the trails. We take them to show them where we came from and where the songs came from.”
