Monumental Moment
2025 | Coast Film & Music Festival
Duration: 15 min
Synopisis
On August 8, 2023, Maya Tilousi-Lyttle — the shy and soft-spoken teenage daughter of Havasupai advocate Carletta Tilousi — spoke powerfully from a podium bearing the U.S. presidential seal. It was a day many had waited decades for.
At the conclusion of Maya’s introduction, President Joe Biden walked onto the stage in the foreground of Red Butte and minutes later, surrounded by leaders from 13 regional tribes, he signed the proclamation declaring Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.
The monument represented a form of long-sought permanent protection for a region that holds irreplaceable significance to Native American tribes who have called it home for millennia, from 600 uranium claims across the region, and for their sacred sites.
But that day, inside the monument, just two miles through the forest from where the president of the United States stood, loomed a threat that the newly designated monument, and its permanent mining ban, couldn’t touch: Canyon Mine (renamed Pinyon Plain Mine). In addition to this, in January 2025, the Arizona legislature and others filed lawsuits attempting to overturn the monument designation and attacking the Antiquities Act as unlawful. The fight continues, and it it up to those like Maya - and the next generation - to make their voices heard.
Featured at Coast Film & Music Festival 2025
Production Team
Native Coloradan Pete McBride has spent two decades documenting the world with his camera as an award-winning photographer, filmmaker, writer, and speaker. A Sony Artisan of Light, he has traveled to over 75 countries on assignment for National Geographic, Smithsonian, USAID, and more, and has spoken at TEDx, the World Economic Forum, Pixar, and Nat Geo Live. His deep passion for conservation led him to spend over two years chronicling the Colorado River, resulting in acclaimed books like The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim and Seeing Silence. His 2024 release, The Colorado River: Chasing Water, highlights the river’s beauty while warning against overuse and climate change. McBride has also created films about the Colorado, the Ganges, Martin Litton, and the Grand Canyon, and continues to use storytelling to inspire action for the natural world.