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The Blue-Green Water People: The Havasupai of the Grand Canyon
| Article
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17846 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
4,510 Words |
| Author
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Ronald McCoy
Ronald McCoy is a professor of history at Emporia State
Univeristy in Emporia, Kansas. He has wrtten for The World &
I about such topics as Navajo sand painting, Hopi culture,
Plains Indian warrior art, and most recently on the sacred
clowns of the Puebloan Southwest. |
They call themselves Havsuw' Baaja, the Blue-Green Water people. Most members of the five-hundred-strong Havasupai tribe live at Supai village in northern Arizona. Supai, one of the most isolated settlements in the United States, lies nearly half a mile below the Coconino Plateau in remote Cataract Canyon, through which Havasu Creek seeks confluence with the turbulent Colorado in the vast netherworld of the Grand Canyon.
For a century, Havasupais have experienced tragedy assuaged by the promise of triumph and triumph tempered with impending tragedy because of threats posed by the Hay gu, the whites. Today, many Blue-Green Water people believe the time may soon come when they will simply cease to exist in a world that until recently consigned them to exile on a territorial dot less than a mile square.
The Grand Canyon system - including Cataract Canyon - is a labyrinth of towering escarpments, sweeping plateaus, and widely eroded side canyons nearly three hundred miles long, ten miles or more across, a mile deep, and over ten million years in the making. Down in Cataract Canyon - between layers of rocky strata tracing hundreds of millions of years of geological history - is Supai, nine miles by foot or horse from Hualapai Hilltop, which itself is reached only after driving seventy miles through the wilderness along a road cutting north from old Route 66.
At Supai, the Havasupais' tribal headquarters, one finds a lodge, café, general store, post office, school, clinic, and homes. The hamlet rambles across a more or less level, mile-long, half-mile-wide universe marked with stands of cottonwood, mesquite, and willow nourished by the waters of
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