A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

by Kevin Fedarko

All of this means that every facet of the land is alive and responsive, like the strings of an instrument, to a set of harmonics that include—but also expand far beyond—human needs and hopes and longings. Without exception, each tribe regards the canyon as a place of reverence, a kind of open-air cathedral whose interior is consecrated by memory and stories and the weight of time. For all of these societies, the chasm is hallowed ground, an aboriginal holy land.

Regardless of who the prior occupants of the country might be, whatever language they might speak, or where their territory might lie, none was regarded as having a legitimate claim on the land. The only proper response was to push them aside.

By the early 1880s, most of the canyon’s other tribes were being stripped of their lands and resources in similar fashion: without legal warrant, and often at the behest of the federal government, which had adopted a strategy of attempting to break the tribes’ connection to their ancestral territories by confining them to reservations and by setting up a system of boarding schools, where their children were separated from their language and their culture in the hopes of turning them into white people. The Hopi and Zuni were assigned to reservations far from the canyon, cutting them off from some of their most sacred places, while the Havasupai were deprived of almost the entirety of their home ground.

All of this underscores an unsettling truth from the perspective of the Havasupai. In effect if not intent, the designation of Grand Canyon National Park was leveraged not only to prevent a natural wonder from being destroyed by private developers while establishing a stunning tourist destination, but also to wrench the landscape away from its original inhabitants—with particular emphasis given to the tribe that was considered the canyon’s stewards and protectors.