Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speaks at an event to celebrate the designation of the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, Friday, April 14, 2023, in Las Vegas.
Saturday, April 15, 2023 | 2 a.m.
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland met the sunrise Friday in southern Clark County at Avi Kwa Ame with sacred song and dance from the Mojave people who revere the mountain as the cradle of humanity and the surrounding desert as church.
“As I participated in the blessings and watched dancers grace the ground in unison with the songs, I was struck by the power and presence of the ancestors,” said Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.
President Joe Biden signed a proclamation in March capping off a nearly 25-year journey to legally protect what is now Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. The site is about 80 miles from Las Vegas, near Laughlin.
The titular mountain, known in English as Spirit Mountain, along with more than half a million acres of culturally and ecologically significant surrounding lands are now federally protected from development.
On Friday, the people who patiently ushered in the designation celebrated at another bright spot for Southern Nevada conservation, Springs Preserve in Las Vegas.
Haaland was joined there by leaders from the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe — one of about a dozen regional tribes to consider Avi Kwa Ame significant — along with Nevada Democratic U.S. Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, and Nevada Democratic U.S. Reps. Susie Lee, Dina Titus and Stephen Horsford.
Fort Mojave tribal leaders presented members of the congressional delegation with hunaak, a type of beaded necklace given to friends.
Tribal Administrator Ashley Hemmers explained that beadwork was hard to obtain. Mojave people believe that their spirit infuses their beadwork, and when they gift beadwork they also give pieces of themselves and their families.
At death, their regalia and belongings, including beadwork, are cremated in the desert, and all of the spirit within goes up to Avi Kwa Ame.
“When you feel that sunrise, you feel the spirit of all of those who left, and it’s the responsibility of all of our families to keep those memories, those traditions and those stories,” Hemmers said.
Avi Kwa Ame, then, is a source of life.
Professionally and culturally, as a member of the Pueblo of Laguna of New Mexico, Haaland knows she is obligated to protect and care for ancestral land. She was raised that way, she said.
“Everyone should feel a deep connection to the land because everything we need and everything we are comes from it,” Haaland said.
Rosen praised the physical landscape, a pristine and quiet place about an hour south of Las Vegas.
“This land is rich in plants, it’s rich in wildlife, it’s rich in love, it is rich in history and in spirit,” she said while wearing her hanaak. “Those Joshua tree forests, they tell a story too and we should all listen to the trees, our desert bighorn sheep, and of course, our very special desert tortoises.”
The Mojave people consider Avi Kwa Ame their holy site of creation; their reservation borders the new monument.
Fort Mojave Indian Tribe leaders traveled to Washington, D.C., to be there March 21 when Biden signed the proclamation. Tribal Chairman Timothy Williams introduced Biden at the White House Conservation in Action Summit, where the president signed the designation.
A tribally led campaign to legally protect Avi Kwa Ame dates to at least 1999, when Spirit Mountain — just the peak itself and its immediate base — was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property.
The monument designation allows recreation but blocks development, including mining and renewable energy projects.
“Protection of the Avi Kwa Ame area will preserve its diverse array of natural and scientific resources, ensuring that the cultural, prehistoric, historic and scientific values of this area endure for the benefit of all Americans,” reads a passage in Biden’s 14-page proclamation. “The living landscape holds sites of historical, traditional, cultural and spiritual significance; is the setting of the creation story of multiple Tribal Nations; and is inextricably intertwined with the sacred significance of Avi Kwa Ame.”
Hemmers taught the crowd a warm and joyful Mojave phrase Friday to express what she was feeling right then and what she hoped everyone else did, too.
“Iiwany ‘a’ahotk,” she said. Translated: “My heart feels good.”
