'A place to heal' Tribes urge Biden to protect sacred lands before exit

Hidden amid a vast expanse of snow-brushed pines in northern California is a half-million-year-old volcano called Sáttítla.

- Maanvi Singh

Thousands of years ago, its flows created crystalline mountains of obsidian and bands of pumice rock, which from a bird's-eye view look like ripples of toffee.

"When you're there, you really do feel like you're in another world," said Brandi McDaniels, a member of the Pit River Tribe in northern California, whose ancestral homelands encompass the area. "The way it glistens - deep black, but shiny like diamonds."

The Pit River Tribe and environmental groups have been trying to protect this landscape for decades, fending off geothermal development and large-scale logging enterprises, as well as poaching and other threats.

Now they are urging the Biden administration to designate it as a national monument and to protect it from 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... We want to have this space as a place to 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 important to the Pit River and Modoc tribes.

The area straddles three federally owned national forests in northern California, and sits atop volcanically formed aquifers that store as much water as the state's 200 largest surface reservoirs combined. The Pit River Tribe's creation narrative is set here, McDaniels said - and it is difficult to explain to people who have not visited just how idiosyncratic and extraordinary the region is.