WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is signing a proclamation to establish two new national monuments in California, in part to honor two tribes, a person familiar with the decision said Monday.
The proclamation will create the Chuckwalla National Monument in Southern California near Joshua Tree National Park and the Sáttítla National Monument in Northern California, said the person, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans that were to be announced Tuesday in California.
The declaration bars drilling and mining and other development on the 600,000-acre (2,400-square-kilometer) area in Southern California and roughly 200,000 acres (800 square kilometers) in Northern California.
The establishment of new monuments were first reported in The Washington Post. Biden, who has two weeks left in office, is in New Orleans on Monday meeting with the families of the victims in the New Year's attack in the French Quarter and was heading to California later Monday.
The flurry of activity has been in line with the Democratic president’s “America the Beautiful” initiative launched in 2021, aimed at honoring tribal heritage, meeting federal goals to conserve 30% of public lands and waters by 2030 and addressing climate change.
The Pit River Tribe has worked to get the federal government to designate the Sáttítla National Monument. A number of Native American tribes and environmental groups began pushing Biden to designate the Chuckwalla National Monument, named after the large desert lizard, at the start of 2023.
The area would protect public lands south of Joshua Tree National Park, spanning the Coachella Valley region in the west to near the Colorado River.
Advocates say the monument will protect a tribal cultural landscape, ensure access to nature for local residents and preserve military history sites. The California Legislature passed a resolution in August 2024 to urge Biden to establish the Chuckwalla National Monument and another National Park Service-managed national monument adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park, as well as the Kw’tsán National Monument, which would border Mexico and Arizona.
Tribal leaders have also called for the Chuckwalla monument to honor tribal sovereignty to include local tribes as co-stewards, following in the footsteps of a recent wave of monuments such as the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, which is overseen in conjunction with five tribal nations.
“The protection of the Chuckwalla National Monument brings the Quechan people an overwhelming sense of peace and joy," the Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe said in a statement. “Tribes being reunited as stewards of this landscape is only the beginning of much-needed healing and restoration, and we are eager to fully rebuild our relationship to this place.”
In May, the Biden administration expanded two national monuments in California — the San Gabriel Mountains in the south and Berryessa Snow Mountain in the north. In October, Biden designated the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary along the coast of central California, which will include input from the local Chumash tribes in how the area is preserved.
Last year, the Yurok Tribe in Northern California also became the first Native people to manage tribal land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed by the tribe, Redwood National and State Parks and the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League, which is conveying the land to the tribe.
Ding contributed to this report from Los Angeles. Long reported from New Orleans.
President Joe Biden speaks at a reception for new Democratic members of Congress in the State Dining Room of the White House, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would move to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a name he said has a “beautiful ring to it.”
It's his latest suggestion to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere. Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st State,” demanded that Denmark consider ceding Greenland, and called for Panama to return the Panama Canal.
Here's a look at his comment and what goes into a name.
Since his first run for the White House in 2016, Trump has repeatedly clashed with Mexico over a number of issues, including border security and the imposition of tariffs on imported goods. He vowed then to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. The U.S. ultimately constructed or refurbished about 450 miles of wall during his first term.
The Gulf of Mexico is often referred to as the United States' “Third Coast” due to its coastline across five southeastern states. Mexicans use a Spanish version of the same name for the gulf: “El Golfo de México.”
Americans and Mexicans diverge on what to call another key body of water, the river that forms the border between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. Americans call it the Rio Grande; Mexicans call it the Rio Bravo.
Maybe, but it's not a unilateral decision, and other countries don't have to go along.
The International Hydrographic Organization — of which both the United States and Mexico are members — works to ensure all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. There are instances where countries refer to the same body of water or landmark by different names in their own documentation.
It can be easier when a landmark or body of water is within a country's boundaries. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama approved an order from the Department of Interior to rename Mount McKinley — the highest peak in North America — to Denali, a move that Trump has also said he wants to reverse.
Just after Trump's comments on Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said during an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson that she would direct her staff to draft legislation to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, a move she said would take care of funding for new maps and administrative policy materials throughout the federal government.
The body of water has been depicted with that name for more than four centuries, an original determination believed to have been taken from a Native American city of “Mexico.”
Yes. In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a bill to rename portions of the gulf that touch that state's beaches “Gulf of America,” a move the bill author later referred to as a “joke.” That bill, which was referred to a committee, did not pass.
Two years earlier, comedian Stephen Colbert had joked on his show that, following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it should be renamed “Gulf of America” because, "We broke it, we bought it.”
There's a long-running dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan among Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, with South Korea arguing that the current name wasn't commonly used until Korea was under Japanese rule. At an International Hydrographic Organization meeting in 2020, member states agreed on a plan to replace names with numerical identifiers and develop a new digital standard for modern geographic information systems.
The Persian Gulf has been widely known by that name since the 16th century, although usage of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in many countries in the Middle East. The government of Iran threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the company's decision not to label the body of water at all on its maps.
There have been other conversations about bodies of water, including from Trump’s 2016 opponent. According to materials revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of her campaign chairman’s personal account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 told an audience that, by China’s logic that it claimed nearly the entirety of the South China Sea, then the U.S. after World War II could have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”
Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.
President-elect Donald Trump walks from the podium after a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
