Sinagua or Hopi: The Name Dispute at Walnut Canyon

The cliff dwellings at Walnut Canyon were built approximately eight hundred years ago, carved into the limestone ledges of a canyon east of Flagstaff by people who farmed the canyon rim and stored food in the alcoves below. The National Park Service calls them Sinagua, a term coined by archaeologist Harold Colton in the nineteen thirties from the Spanish phrase meaning without water, to distinguish this cultural tradition from related groups on the Colorado Plateau.

The Hopi use a different framework.

The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office documents Hopi oral history and clan traditions identifying the builders of Walnut Canyon as ancestors of present-day Hopi clans. The Hopi do not call them Sinagua. From the Hopi perspective, Sinagua is an archaeologist's category applied to people whose living descendants have their own name for that relationship. The category was useful for organizing an academic literature. Whether it is the correct frame for understanding who built these dwellings is a different question.

A similar dispute surrounds the term Anasazi, a Navajo word sometimes translated as enemy ancestors, which was the standard archaeological designation for Ancestral Puebloan peoples until Native scholars and tribal nations objected. Ancestral Puebloan is now the preferred term in federal interpretive materials. Sinagua, specific to the Flagstaff region, has not been as broadly contested but sits in the same conceptual position: a name from outside the community, applied to people whose descendants are still here.

The canyon is beautiful regardless of what you call the people who built in it. But the name on the park signs reflects whose epistemological framework governs the public narrative, and that is not a trivial question when the people named are alive and present.