Las Vegas Paiute Tribe member Fawn Douglas goes to Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area to connect with her ancestors. As an artist, she fuels her creativity there. On an April hike in Red Rock, Douglas carried water, tobacco, and a knife, as she typically does. She uses tobacco to give back to the land after foraging for medicine and tea. On the trail, she spotted native plants and herbs that she was looking for.
“Touching base with places where my ancestors walked,” Douglas says. “Where we hunted, where we foraged. We passed some agave roasting pits already, but it’s always nice these little identifiers of when my people were here and still here.”
At the end of the trail, a waterfall had formed from melted winter snowfall. Douglas stood, appreciating the land. It’s moments like these, she says, when she can imagine how her ancestors lived on the land.
“Sometimes I could just visually see people coming and going and walking and just putting pieces together,” she says. “And it feels really good.It's like I'm looking back in time.”
A drive any direction outside Las Vegas offers a glimpse of how difficult it would be to live off the unforgiving dry terrain. Still, this place is home not only to countless species of plants and wildlife, it has also belonged to the Southern Paiute and Shoshone people since the start of time.
Today, federal protections, such as national parks or monument designations, keep some significant Indigenous homelands from being developed. Red Rock is one example in Southern Nevada. Avi Kwa Ame National Monument is another. One that’s proposed for such protection is the East Las Vegas National Monument, located between Las Vegas and Lake Mead.
Yet under the current system, all it takes to undo decades of work to protect these sites is the action of one presidential administration.
In a recent example, elected Republican officials proposed legislation to sell off millions of acres of public land across the West, including in Nevada. They said the land sales could be used to develop more housing and would help pay for the GOP tax cuts and spending bill known as One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.
That provision was taken out of the bill. But President Trump has made it clear that he wants to open public lands for oil drilling and mineral mining. Some of the sites his administration is targeting are on land protected by the Antiquities Act, which grants sites national monument status, making them off-limits to development. And some of it is land that Nevada tribes consider sacred.
On May 27, the Department of Justice released a legal opinion siding with the president’s desire to strip certain sites of their national monument status, overriding the Antiquities Act and putting sacred Indigenous lands at risk.
One of these sites is Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. The area’s name, translated, means “Spirit Mountain,” according to Fort Mojave Paiute Tribe elder Paul Jackson. “It’s sacred holy land,” Jackson says. “Our beginnings, not just for the Fort Mojave Tribe, but for other tribes.”He added that Fort Mojave tribal members don’t approach the monument unless they are called to it in their dreams.
Indigenous Peoples in Nevada have a symbiotic relationship with their homeland. Tribal members perform dances on the landscape. Like Fawn Douglas was doing at Red Rock, they hunt for food, document history and forage for medicine. One of the Las Vegas Paiutes’ dances comes from the area proposed as the East Las Vegas Monument.
Douglas wasn’t always as connected to the land as she now is. In 2015, news outlets reported that petroglyphs in the Gold Butte area were being used for target practice. She drove there and found bullet holes in the middle of petroglyphs, the surrounding landscape trashed.
“I was mad,” she says. “I was just crying. It's almost like you're so angry, but there's nothing you could do, but you have to just release that.” She knew she had to do something about it. “That really was a spark for me.”
Her part of the solution was to mobilize volunteers and get the word out. The community's support got the attention of President Obama, who deemed it a national monument in December 2016.
For Fort Mojave’s Paul Jackson, getting Avi Kwa Ame federally recognized in 2023 was a struggle. And, he says, the work is not done yet. He’s seen the Colorado River shrink and water quality worsen over the years.
“We know we still got a battle on our hands,” Jackson says. “It's never going to be over, because even if we educate people about it, there's still going to be people around to try and take everything away. It's mostly for profit gained, but to us it's not. It's just our spirit again, a real sacred area.”
The current administration will remain in office until 2029, and its attempts to develop protected land are expected to continue. To Jackson, there is one ideal solution.
“Leave it alone,” he says. “The mountains are old and tired. They took care of the river, and they took care of us. They're old. Now it's our time to take care of them. If they're old, leave them alone.
