I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People Timothy Braatz (bio) Stephen Hirst . I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People. 3rd ed. Grand Canyon, AZ: Grand Canyon Association, 2006. ISBN: 0-938216-86-5. 276 pp. This book has had a few names. It first appeared, in 1976, as Life in a Narrow Place: The Havasupai of the Grand Canyon. In 1985 the Havasupai tribe published Havsuw 'Baaja: People of the Blue Green Water. It was essentially the same book, only with fewer photographs, and concluding with an author's note briefly summarizing a few political developments from the intervening years. Now the tribe, in cooperation with the Grand Canyon Association, gives us a third edition. The bulk of the text is unchanged except for some light editing, including new subheadings, but it feels fresher. Hirst, who spent eleven years at Supai, beginning in 1967, has returned and gives the first chapter more of a present-tense feel. In chapter 2 he works recent scholarship into a discussion of Havasupai origins. The change is subtle, but in comparing the speculations of non-Indian anthropologists to Havasupai accounts, Hirst appears now to have increased respect for the latter's claim to cultural and regional continuity. Also in the new edition, color photographs taken in the 1970s and 2005 by Lois Hirst, the author's wife, will make it easier for the casual reader to imagine Havasupais as contemporaries rather than only as historical people, locked in the past, staring out from old black-and-white prints. Unchanged, though, are moments of what I call the ethnographic perfect. For [End Page 81] example, Hirst writes, "A child receiving a cookie will break it into as many pieces as the friends with him" (11). In the new preface, we learn that a Havasupai man "once referred to this book as 'our Bible'" (xii). Hyperbole and tribal interests aside, the analogy works so far as the book is a varied and sometimes scattered collection of texts. Some sections are ethnographic surveys, by an outside observer, of Havasupai lifeways. There is a review of the history of Havasupai encounters with non-Indians—"strange-looking aliens from another world" (42)—beginning with Garcés in 1776, but mostly emphasizing the U.S. assumption of sovereignty over Havasupai lands. Hirst includes stories—oral history—taken directly from Havasupai informants. He also invents a story. "A Season on the Plateau," he explains, "is a recreation of the final years of the old life, distilling the stories and remembrances of Havasupai people, many gone now, whom I was privileged to know during my years among them" (109). The tribe's repeated promotion of the book appears to validate this approach. All of this feels like background to Hirst's primary concern here: telling the story of the Havasupai land-claims struggle as seen from Supai, not from Washington. For centuries, Havasupai families tended summer gardens in canyon lands; then, as winter approached, they relocated to hunting camps on the high plateau. In 1882 an executive order pronounced Havasupai territory to be only the narrow bottomlands of Havasu Canyon. In the following decades, U.S. officials evicted Havasupais from other canyon regions and the surrounding plateaus. To regain access to their homelands, the impoverished tribe had to overcome opposition from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and environmental groups, most notably the Sierra Club. After years of persistent lobbying, the Havasupais won the support of Arizona's congressional delegation, including the powerful Sen. Barry Goldwater, and the Nixon administration. Still, the outcome was in doubt until President Gerald Ford, on January 3, 1975, signed a bill returning 160, 000 acres to the Havasupai tribe and guaranteeing tribal members the right to use 95, 000 additional acres of national park land. Hirst's account of this political [End Page 82] triumph is a lasting contribution to the literature of Native self-determination, resilience, and sovereignty. The new title is an improvement. The original title referred to the limitations of the imposed reservation boundaries. The second title seemed to legitimize those limitations. My understanding of Upland Yuman...