Sáttítla: What It Took to Protect a Living Place

Sáttítla did not become important when it became a national monument. The designation came after generations of relationship with the place and decades of work to protect it. On January 14, 2025, President Joe Biden established Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, reserving approximately 224,676 acres of federal lands and interests in lands.[1] The date belongs in the story. So do the people and the persistence that brought the story to that point.

An announcement on the Pit River Tribe’s website from March 2015 gives a glimpse of that work. It called people to San Francisco for an appeals-court hearing, a sunrise gathering, a march, and a rally. The issue was geothermal leasing at Medicine Lake Highlands. The announcement described an ongoing place of healing, ceremony, and gathering, held sacred by Pit River and neighboring Native nations. It warned that industrial development threatened the place and its waters.[2]

The combination is revealing: a courthouse calendar beside a gathering of people defending a living relationship. Legal proceedings demanded arguments about agency decisions and statutes. The reason to keep showing up reached beyond the language available in those proceedings.

Medicine Lake Volcano helps explain why this landscape also commands scientific attention. The U.S. Geological Survey describes a broad volcanic region northeast of Mount Shasta, formed through repeated eruptions over roughly half a million years. The summit contains a wide caldera and the lake. Relatively recent eruptions formed the obsidian flows of Little Glass Mountain and Glass Mountain. A geothermal system remains beneath the volcano.[3] Those features make the highlands legible to scientists and energy developers in different ways. Neither description exhausts what the place means to the people connected to it.

Water adds another relationship that a surface map can hide. Research by USGS scientists Robert Mariner and Jacob Lowenstern examined water from springs, wells, and snowpack in and around the volcano. Their 1999 study found that Fall River Springs draw on recharge across a large region and contain a mixture of distinct waters. The study identified contributions consistent with recharge from the Medicine Lake caldera together with the Fall River and Long Bell basins, while describing uncertainty about another component.[4]

That research supports a careful account of connection. The monument boundary, the volcano’s footprint, and the area supplying groundwater are different things. Describing their relationship accurately helps people ask better questions about protection: which activities might affect which waters, what is measured, and where does uncertainty remain? A dramatic claim about the amount of water beneath one mountain cannot answer those questions by itself.

The legal struggle also needs its particulars. In September 2019, the Ninth Circuit upheld a judgment in favor of the Pit River Tribe and allied organizations concerning twenty-six geothermal leases. The Bureau of Land Management had continued those leases for as long as forty years on the basis that another lease within their shared development unit was capable of commercial production. The court held that the relevant statutory provision required the production-based decision to be made lease by lease.[5]

The result mattered, but its limits mattered too. The judgment set aside the challenged continuations and returned the matter to the agency. It did not affect the separate continuation of the one proven lease.[5] A court victory over an agency’s decision could interrupt development without settling every question about the landscape’s future. This helps explain why the protection campaign continued after successful litigation.

The public monument campaign gave that continuing work a new form. In November 2023, the Pit River Nation called on the president and California’s congressional delegation to protect Sáttítla. Its announcement reported that the Tribal Council had supported monument protections by resolution in May 2022. Chairman Yatch Bamford, Brandy McDaniels, and Radley Davis described the connection between defending the place, sustaining cultural life, and protecting water and other living things.[6] The public appeal asked others to take responsibility alongside the Tribe.

After designation, Davis spoke about the effort in an interview published by the California Native Plant Society. He described building relationships before partnerships, developing trust with allies, and working with surrounding communities. He also insisted that the Tribe belonged in decisions about the land.[7] This is an important part of the story’s scale. A presidential signature is easy to locate in an archive. The conversations, organizing, and persistence that make one possible are distributed among many people and many years.

The proclamation created substantial protections, including withdrawal from new mineral and geothermal leasing, subject to valid existing rights. It retained Forest Service management; it did not transfer the land to the Tribe. It preserved existing water rights and created no federal water reservation. It directed the government to seek co-stewardship opportunities and meaningfully engage affiliated Tribal Nations, while requiring a management plan within three years.[1] These provisions establish responsibilities and possibilities. An invitation to negotiate is not evidence of a completed agreement; an advisory role is not automatically authority to decide.

The durability of protection remains a public question. In May 2025, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion asserting presidential power to revoke earlier monument designations. The opinion expressly considered Sáttítla and Chuckwalla. It is an executive-branch legal position, not a court judgment or a proclamation abolishing either monument.[8] The campaign’s public website continued to describe Sáttítla as a national monument when checked for this essay.[9] This review found no executed rescission; it also did not establish a completed co-stewardship agreement.

For Stories We Carry, the point is to keep the work and the result visible together. Recognition can give families reason to celebrate. Careful reporting can honor that achievement while following what happens to access, cultural privacy, management decisions, and the authority of the people who defended the place. The next chapter will be written through those decisions, as well as through the continuing relationships that made protection necessary in the first place.

A place for community memory. If you took part in a public meeting, march, hearing, or protection effort, you may wish to offer a memory or a correction. Participation is voluntary. Share only what is yours to share and appropriate for public circulation; cultural knowledge and the locations of sensitive places do not need to be disclosed to make this history fuller.

Sources and notes

[1]Proclamation 10882, January 14, 2025, published January 17, 2025, 90 FR 6727. The essay uses the proclamation date. ↩

[2]Pit River Tribe, “Medicine Lake Hearing March 12th, 2015”, media advisory dated March 2, 2015. This is a primary record of the organizers’ purposes and concerns; predictions of environmental harm are attributed to the announcement. ↩

[3]U.S. Geological Survey, “Medicine Lake”, volcano overview. ↩

[4]Robert H. Mariner and Jacob B. Lowenstern, Medicine Lake water-geochemistry study, 1999. The essay uses the published research summary. ↩

[5]Pit River Tribe v. Bureau of Land Management, No. 17-15616, Ninth Circuit, September 19, 2019, especially opinion pages 4–7. ↩

[6]Pit River Nation, public monument campaign announcement, November 1, 2023. The resolution date is reported by this announcement; the resolution itself was not reviewed. ↩

[7]Jun Bando and Stu VanAirsdale, “Moving Mountains,” interview with Radley Davis, April 14, 2025. A published firsthand account of organizing, relationships, and the meaning of designation. ↩

[8]U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, “Revocation of Prior Monument Designations”, May 27, 2025, released June 10, 2025; full opinion, especially pages 1–2. Cited for the administration’s stated position, not as a judicial resolution of its validity. ↩

[9]Protect Sáttítla campaign website, checked September 24, 2026. Current-status research is bounded: this is not a certification that every administrative action or agreement has been located. ↩

Research checked September 24, 2026. This is an independent historical account for The Long Return. It is not a Tribal government statement.