A Thousand Years of History Threatened at Chaco Culture National Historical Park

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Chaco Culture National Historical Park

Chaco Culture National Historical Park preserves five Chacoan “great houses” where people from various clans congregated to trade goods, share ideas and celebrate events a thousand years ago. The structures…

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Chaco Culture National Historical Park, often called Chaco Canyon, sits within a larger cultural landscape with dozens of ancient villages, roads and shrines built by ancestors of Puebloansblos and other Indigenous Nations dating back a thousand years.

Also designated as both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an International Dark Sky Park, visitors can walk among massive stone “great houses,” where people gathered to trade goods, celebrate and share ideas. At night, visitors can experience the world-renowned dark skies.

But this incredible place is surrounded by one of the most active oil and gas regions in the country. Tens of thousands of oil and gas wells, pipelines, and roads that carry trucks and heavy equipment already cut through the landscape. Industrial energy development brings noise, traffic and polluted air that impact the health of nearby communities.

In 2023, the federal government responded to decades of advocacy led by Tribal Nations by creating a 10-mile protection zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park to limit new oil and gas development on public lands next to the park for 20 years. The protection does not prevent any existing leases from being developed and does not include any private or Tribal-owned lands. 

With over 90% of nearby federal public land already leased for energy development, these protections were put in place to reduce the impacts of drilling on cultural and sacred sites, ecosystems, public health and traditional ways of life.

Attempts to roll back these protections would open the door to more drilling in one of the most culturally significant places in the country. NPCA is fighting to defend sacred lands, keep the mineral withdrawal in place and stand with Tribal communities to defend Chaco’s cultural and natural resources for future generations.

Spoiled Parks

Chaco Culture National Historical Park

The largest methane hot spot in the United States, attributable to oil and gas drilling, sits above one of the most important cultural sites in the National Park System.