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The Trump administration announced last week a fast-tracked plan to roll back a two-decade federal moratorium on mineral leasing around Chaco Canyon in nearby New Mexico.
The Biden-era ban includes drilling for oil and gas.
This new 140-page draft environmental assessment is published just three months after the Bureau of Land Management gathered roughly 70,000 comments during a weeklong "scoping" window in April.
Now, the public has another 14 days to weigh in. That deadline is Wednesday, July 29.
For more than a millennium, Chaco stood as an advanced civilization — where ancestral Puebloans gathered to trade and pray — reaching its pinnacle between 850 and 1250 A.D. It's most iconically known for its great kivas, which are round-shaped ceremonial chambers made of stone masonry.
Less than a year after Teddy Roosevelt inked the Antiquities Act into law, he turned a swath of Chaco Canyon into a national monument in 1907. Then, Calvin Coolidge went further by issuing a presidential proclamation to expand it even more.
And it would grow once again.
This time, by an act of Congress, in 1980. Federal lawmakers transformed the national monument. Now, it's called Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and tens of thousands of visitors travel there annually.
Today, this sacred spot and the surrounding Greater Chaco Landscape are seen as an irreplaceable cultural resource for some — and a possible cash grab for others.
'That's what the whole battle is'
Less than 30 miles away from U.S. Route 550, which cuts through the Four Corners from Colorado's Montrose to Bernalillo in New Mexico, Diné activist Mario Atencio suddenly pulled over during our long February ride to Chaco.
"Everywhere else — all the way up to Colorado — has already been leased," said Atencio, pointing to an ephemeral wash from the driver's seat. "This is the last few lands. That's what the whole battle is. No one lives on these roads, but I think right now we're sort of in the buffer."
This Biden-made buffer zone — bigger than the entire city of Phoenix — is something the Trump administration now wants to eliminate. It's part of his "Unleashing American Energy" agenda — even though 90% of this rugged terrain around the UNESCO World Heritage Site has been sold off.
What's left untouched is this very 10-mile area spanning 336,400 acres. The Tucson nonprofit Archeology Southwest estimates as many as 25,000 notable sites — including burials — could be here.
That extrapolated figure is based on a 2020 survey done by a team of archeologists led by Paul Reed, who lives in Taos. During that six-week review, only 15% of the total buffer zone was analyzed — cataloging 4,200 sites.
"There's pretty unbroken continuity," said Reed. "Really, if we look at Chaco in the context of pueblo history over several thousand years, many of the things that make pueblo people special today — the ceremonial lifestyles they still have — flow directly out of things that happened in Chaco Canyon."
By the Interior Department's own account, the BLM is aware of more than 7,500 known historic and 145 cultural properties sitting within the boundaries of the withdrawn area today.
But even the federal government's official counts are admittedly "minimum estimates," since much of the region hasn't been cataloged or inventoried, according to the latest environmental assessment.
Atencio has personally given a couple dozen of his so-called "toxic tours" of the area — guiding children to congressmen, including former Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland and the late U.S. Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva.
As he and I continue chugging along on our road trip, we scour the snow-coated horizon through the windshield of his black pickup truck. "It looks clear, but it's not really," Atencio observed.
"People don't realize just how impactful — hundreds of tons of cancer-causing chemicals being dumped in your airshed. Big old monstrosity that basically sounds like a jet engine all the time. Listen to that."
That loud noise from a churning turbine, energizing a well, is unmistakable. And they're all over the place. Even near our rendezvous: Red Mesa Express. It's a local gas station sitting just before you turn onto the winding route to Chaco.
This Sinclair Oil-branded pit stop features a fiberglass statue of a bright green-hued dinosaur. The American petroleum company's mascot, Dino, is a prehistoric symbol of the fossil fuel industry that isn't extinct.
In fact, the opposite is true: it is very much alive today.
"This is what immediately greets you when you enter this place," Atencio said. "You see a big facility across the way. This used to be a sort of ceremonial ground. There's wells over there."
An estimated 40,000 of them dot this vast checkerboarded landscape.
Some wells even belong to Navajos, including residents from the neighboring Nageezi Chapter, who hold royalty rights. These Diné allottees could find themselves going from living on fixed income to getting six-figure payouts seemingly overnight.
"I'm not really liked in this community. My family has lands all the way down within the buffer zone," added Atencio. "With the money, we've seen — if anything — it makes the people poorer, meaning that all they just all that money goes to Walmart."
'And that was still the position'
Then-candidate Trump made an Albuquerque campaign stop.
"If Kamala is reelected, New Mexico's economy will be reduced to rubble," said Trump back in October 2024. "You're not going to be drilling oil — you're not going to be. There's no more drilling. There's no more oil. You can forget it."
One of his signature catchphrases, "drill baby, drill," may soon mean more than merely a slogan here at Chaco. And that's exactly what the Navajo Nation government wants — no buffer whatsoever.
"And that was still the position," said Council Delegate Brenda Jesus, who chairs the tribe's Resource and Development Committee. Jesus felt like they were on the outs with Joe Biden and his administration leading up to the mineral leasing withdrawal that was done three years ago.
But she and other leaders met with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum specifically about Chaco in April 2025. That D.C. meeting meant a lot to Jesus, explaining, "so just by comparison — Secretary Burgum was very open and sat down to actually listen to Navajo Nation."
The same cannot be said for New Mexico's 19 pueblos and the Hopi Tribe of Arizona, according to Acoma Pueblo general legal counsel Aaron Sims. He claims "under this current administration, we have not had any visits that involved pueblo leadership there at Chaco Canyon, and I am not aware of any other visits generally."
When asked by KJZZ, the Interior Department would not deny that accusation — nor comment on it "out of respect for the significance and oftentimes confidentiality of these discussions."
'If we lose Chaco, who else are they going after?'
Burgum's predecessor, Haaland, who made history by becoming the first Indigenous Cabinet secretary, has been accused of playing politics by siding with the New Mexico pueblos when it comes to Chaco.
"When I was secretary of the Interior, that's not true," she told KJZZ. "I know what we did. This was a painstakingly steady drumbeat of conservation. Quite frankly, protecting Chaco is very popular around the entire state."
Haaland, who is from the Laguna Pueblo, is currently campaigning for her Democratic gubernatorial bid in New Mexico. Come Election Day, she has another chance to break barriers by becoming the nation's first Indigenous governor.
She touts the buffer among her biggest accomplishments.
Now, fellow New Mexican and BLM Director Steve Pearce is tasked with its pending downfall. "It seems like he would know and understand New Mexico and clearly does not," added Haaland.
Even more reason why New Mexico's congressional delegation — made up of two U.S. senators and three House representatives, all of whom are Democrats — is standing alongside the All Pueblo Council of Governors against the Trump plan.
Among them is Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, who is upset by the Chaco news that comes just days after Trump shrank two Utah national monuments — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — by 3 million acres.
"It's just incredibly frustrating to see that with this administration it's just development all the time," Heinrich told KJZZ. "And having spent so much time on the ground at both Chaco Canyon and Bears Ears, these are places that deeply matter to me."
And millions of more Americans, including Acoma Pueblo Gov. Charles Riley, who shared: "At some point, we as American citizens need to realize, you know, what have we done to this landscape — and we still haven't learned our lesson."
Earlier this year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Chaco among the 10 most endangered sites in the U.S. — after being targeted by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation as part of Project 2025. "If we lose Chaco, who else are they going after? And it's happening now," Riley said.
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