This Earth Day, we celebrate a recent win for Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni (Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument), established through sustained advocacy by Tribal Nations including the Havasupai Tribe, Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, and others. The monument protects ancestral homelands, sacred sites, and cultural resources that were long impacted by exclusion from land management decisions and historic uranium mining. On April 1, 2026, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the Arizona Legislature’s challenge to the monument, leaving long-sought protections in place.
We honor the Tribal Nations who continue to protect their homelands and sacred places at the center of ongoing legal and policy threats. In 2026, renewed efforts to expand energy development on public lands, often framed as an “energy emergency,” continue to place protected areas at risk despite the fact that most public lands are already available for extraction. For Tribal Nations, these actions threaten sacred places, cultural lifeways, and responsibilities to future generations.
Earth Day underscores what is at stake: these lands are not interchangeable or expendable. They are living cultural landscapes that sustain Indigenous traditions and ecological balance. Tribal Nations continue to steward them as they have since time immemorial, despite legal and political pressures.
