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View of the Grand Canyon from the top floor of the Desert View Lookout Tower on the southeast edge. Eleven tribes have traditional links with the Grand Canyon.
Laurel Morales / KJZZ
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Laurel Morales / KJZZ
View of the Grand Canyon from the top floor of the Desert View Lookout Tower on the southeast edge. Eleven tribes have traditional links with the Grand Canyon.
Laurel Morales / KJZZ
Over the past century, the geological wonder of the Grand Canyon has inspired poets, painters, archaeologists and biologists. This week, Tuesday, February 26, the Grand Canyon celebrates 100 years as a national park. But long before it became a national park, the Grand Canyon was a home that many Native Americans called "home".
That's what Carletta Tilousi still calls this.
"Most Americans think the Amerindians are gone, but we're still here," Tilousi says. Tilousi is a board member of Havasupai and grew up in the Grand Canyon.
"This is the homeland of the Indians and our stories must be told," says Tilousi. "I think Havasupai has been ignored for a long time."
In the late 1800s, the federal government sequestered Havasupai in a side canyon. It was only in 1975 that the tribe was returned to some of their ancestral lands.
"The park forcibly removed my family – my great-aunts and my great-grandfather," says Tilousi. "And that really made me very angry personally as a child.That was a very long and bitter relationship with the park."
Today, the National Parks Service is required to consult the 11 tribes traditionally associated with the canyon when they make changes that could affect them.
But it is only in the last decade that tribal leaders have agreed to sit down with park staff. At these meetings, they asked the park to tell their story. They hope to do so on a new Desert View inter-tribal cultural heritage site being designed by the National Parks Service to mark the park's centennial.
Architect Mary Colter modeled the desert watchtower, a 15-meter high structure on the southeast edge of the Grand Canyon, according to a Puebloan Ancestor building.
Laurel Morales / KJZZ
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Laurel Morales / KJZZ
Architect Mary Colter modeled the desert watchtower, a 15-meter high structure on the southeast edge of the Grand Canyon, according to a Puebloan Ancestor building.
Laurel Morales / KJZZ
"This whole project is about trusting that we will do what we have promised," said Jenn O'Neill, Park Partnership and Planning Coordinator.
The park has also preserved some of the existing cultural heritage sites in the canyon, including the Desert View Lookout Tower on the southeast edge. This 70 foot tall stone building is inspired by an ancestral home of the Pueblo. Inside the building, the park is in the process of restoring the murals of the renown Hopi artist Fred Kabotie.
In 1933, architect Mary Colter commissioned the artist Hopi Fred Kabotie to paint murals like this one inside the desert watchtower. The volunteers are now working to restore them.
Laurel Morales / KJZZ
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Laurel Morales / KJZZ
"And they spent the last three years cleaning up with Q-tips and brushing every inch of murals," said O. Neill. She hopes that once this project is launched, the rest of the park will do the same by providing other places where tribes can share their story with visitors.
"We do not want to send anything that is native to the remotest corners of the park," said O. Neill. "We want to create a program that works, that is sustainable and that will then be transferred to the largest park."
This project is welcome, but there are still significant tensions between the park and the tribes. For example, the park currently allows Aboriginal artists to sell their works only under strict rules. They are limited to selling handicrafts to show visitors how to create cultural demonstrations.
Mable Franklin, who is Navajo, says the next step is economic empowerment.
"We would like to see our communities put their products [on display for sale in the park] and generate revenue from that because in our community we have a lot of people who sell and who are their way of life and who support them here, "said Franklin.
Until this rule changes, Franklin hopes the six million annual visitors to the Grand Canyon will consider a short parallel trip just 30 miles east of the park, bound for the Navajo nation. There, in the Cameron community, artists can make a living selling the entirety of their work.
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